Killing Yassin saved Sharon
By Akiva Eldar

Presumably, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon examined the intelligence assessments on Palestinian society when he asked the security cabinet to approve the execution of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, so Sharon knew that by doing so he was sealing the fate of a few dozen Israelis. No intelligence officer on the Palestinian desk who was following the mood in the streets of Gaza and Nablus was predicting that the day after the eradication of the Hamas leader, the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem will be safer. Government spokesman can say that getting rid of Yassin prevented a "mega attack." Do a thousand Israelis have to die in one day, for a terror attack to get the title "mega attack?" Are 1,000 fatalities over 40 months "mega terror?" If there's ever a commission of inquiry into the way the decisions were made, Sharon will find it difficult to present a single document that gave him reason to believe that killing the most admired man in the territories would save even one Israeli. On the assumption that investigators will find their way to the proper people among the Military Intelligence Research Department officers or veterans of the unit, they'll hear that the experts warned that Yassin's heir will be even more extreme than he was.

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UN 'stopping food aid to Gaza'
Food deliveries to the Gaza Strip will be halted this week because of Israeli restrictions, the United Nations said.

  thanks to Politics in the Zeros

Israel: Suicide Nation?
The Demented Logic of the Occupation

Politics, being the art of deception, must certainly recognize Israel as its Da Vinci. Its smug self-portrait as a 'civilized democracy', rendered with brushes dipped deeply in the oil paint of antipathy for Arabs, has won much admiration among impressionable Americans. Galvanizing and amplifying latent Western hatred of Muslim Arabs in order to rally the West under the banner of 'Judeo-Christian civilization', and intimidating doubters by abusing the memory of the Holocaust to claim special 'unique victim' status, Israel intones, 'Stand with us because we are white and bomb towel-heads in F-16s just as you do, and don't dare stand against us because you once persecuted our forefathers and should atone for your sins--by abetting ours.' The result of this most cynical ploy is that the Palestinians, dark-skinned victims of Israel's perpetual campaign of ethnic cleansing, torture, theft, and humiliation, are always grotesquely caricatured as mindless savages with a fetish for suicide attacks. There is, however, one major credibility problem with this racist rhetoric: Israel itself is in the process of committing suicide.

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