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Turkey barred an Israeli military plane from using its airspace after a deadly raid on Gaza-bound aid ships, a Turkish diplomat said Monday, with future flights to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Last month’s raid, in which Israeli commandos shot dead eight Turks and a dual US-Turkish citizen, delivered a huge blow to Turkey’s strained ties with the Jewish state, its estranged regional ally.

“Military planes are required to obtain overflight permission before each flight. One military plane was denied permission immediately after” the May 31 raid, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

The diplomat said that future requests for overflights would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, while civilian flights remain unaffected.

The Anatolia news agency Monday quoted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying that his country had closed its airspace to Israel after the raid on the aid flotilla.

Erdogan, who was speaking in Toronto after the G20 summit, gave no further details.

His remarks followed a report in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, carried by the Turkish press Monday, that an Israeli military plane taking an army delegation to Poland was denied permission to use Turkish airspace.

The Boeing 707 carrying more than 100 officers on their way to visit Auschwitz, had to follow an alternative route, the report said.

Ankara recalled its ambassador to Israel immediately after the raid, scrapped plans for three joint military exercises and said economic and defence links would be reduced to a “minimum level”.

Senior officials have said that Turkey expects Israel to apologise for the bloodshed, compensate the victims’ families, agree to an international inquiry and release three Turkish vessels seized in the operation.

Ankara also wants the crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip to be lifted.

Erdogan said ties with Israel would recover if the Jewish State met the demands.

“We have been very patient… and have said that meeting our demands would be an important step to turn this process into a positive one. But if they are not met, then we should not forget that our friendship has already been weakened,” Anatolia quoted Erdogan as saying.

“We have done whatever is necessary within national and international law, and we will continue to do so,” he added.

If Israel fails to meet the demands, Turkey will downgrade its diplomatic representation to the level of a charge d’affaires, a senior diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity earlier this month.

The diplomat also said Ankara would consider no new cooperation agreements with Israel, adding that existing deals were being reviewed.

Israel says its soldiers acted in self-defence when they came under attack from the activists during the raid, and has set up its commission with two foreign observers to investigate the operation.

Turkey and Israel built a strong alliance after a 1996 military cooperation deal, but the relationship has nosedived amid sharp criticism from Ankara over the Jewish state’s devastating war on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.
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Turkey bars Israeli plane from airspace: diplomat

Israel must recognize that the world will not put up with decades more of Israeli rule over the Palestinian people, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in unusually frank remarks Monday.

Barak’s comments came against the backdrop of severe friction between the U.S. and Israel’s hawkish government over an impasse in peacemaking.

“The world isn’t willing to accept – and we won’t change that in 2010 – the expectation that Israel will rule another people for decades more,” he said. “It’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”

“The alienation that is developing with the United States is not good for Israel,” Barak said during a Memorial Day radio interview. “We have strong ties with the United States, a bond, long-term friendship and strategic partnership. We receive three billion dollars from them each year; we get the best planes in the world from them.”

“For all these reasons we must act to change things,” Barak said, while voicing doubt that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would soon enjoy the same warm ties with the White House as his predecessors did when President George W. Bush was in office.

With Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama sharply at odds over settlement policy in territories which the Palestinians eye for a state, Barak held out the prospect of reshaping Israel’s government so that it could make bold land-for-peace moves.

“With a broad readiness to go for a [peace] agreement, Israeli governments have overcome many obstacles in the daily discourse with the Americans about building in this or that settlement or a Jerusalem neighborhood,” Barak said about long-standing differences with Washington over the issue.

Barak’s comments echoed a call last Thursday from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Israel to take “concrete steps toward peace” or risk empowering Islamist militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

The Obama administration responded angrily last month when Israel announced a project, during a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, to build a 1,600 more homes for Jews in a part of the West Bank that it annexed to Jerusalem.

The Palestinians subsequently cancelled plans to enter into U.S.-mediated, indirect talks with Israel and Netanyahu has yet to respond to a U.S. list of steps that Washington wants him to take to coax them back to the negotiating table.

Political sources in Israel said Washington proposed 11 such “confidence-building” measures, which have not been disclosed publicly but are thought to include freezing Israeli construction in East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of the state they intend to establish in the West Bank, and say settlements could deny them a viable state.

Sources said Netanyahu, who has pledged not to place curbs on building homes for Israelis in and around East Jerusalem, was unlikely to agree in full to all of the steps Washington seeks.

To do so, the sources said, could cause his coalition to disintegrate, and continued friction with Obama could be a price the Israeli leader would be willing to pay to remain at the helm.

Political commentators have raised the possibility of bringing in former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party to keep Netanyahu’s coalition in power if pro-settler factions decide to pull out.

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Ehud Barak: Israel needs to recognize the occupation must end

Shahina Siddiqui

I have been reading in horror, sometimes with nervous laughter, the many tirades against the face veil that a tiny number of Canadian Muslim women wear in public.
The arguments against the niqab range all the way from the despicable to the ridiculous.

Read the blogs or comments in major national and local papers in Canada and you would think that we lived in the most bigoted, intolerant nation in the world.

Of course, that is not the case, and I am encouraged by the voices of reason, however few and far between they may be.

Now that the Quebec legislature has passed Bill 94, which essentially bars veiled women from public services, it almost seems as if war has been declared on Muslim women.

We must ask ourselves why a woman in Quebec, a mother of three, is being put through a public lynching for exercising her right to practise her religion as she sees fit, and being assailed for exercising her right to file a grievance through a government agency.

We should be ashamed of how we have bullied and demonized this woman.

Imagine what her children must feel as they see their mother denied the right to an education just because of the way she dresses.

The pain we have inflicted on this family is unforgivable.

As a Muslim woman and spiritual counsellor, I see the pain, the anguish, and the paralyzing fear that Muslim Canadian women feel.

We have been dismissed, stigmatized, and relegated to the position of second-class citizens. As one young woman stated to me: “I do not wear a veil, but this attack is very personal. Under the guise of ‘empowering’ us they have totally shredded our confidence.”

In Canada, all citizens have the right to personal freedom that does not infringe on others’ rights.

However, when it comes to Muslim women we have convinced ourselves that she is a victim of her husband’s dominance and so we do not believe her when she says “this is my choice.”

What a cunning circular web we weave.

We discredit her as an intellectual being, ridicule her as a free-thinking human being, demonize her for practicing her faith, and then smugly claim to be emancipating her.

I am sure that some women are forced by their male guardians to wear the niqab; however, banning the niqab amounts to banishing these women to house arrest.

Wilfully ignored in all of this is that Muslim women deserve to be treated with dignity regardless of whether we agree with their choices.

The claim that to teach a language the teacher needs to see a student’s mouth amounts to saying that blind people cannot teach or learn a language, and that on-line language classes are bogus.

If the issue is pronunciation, guess what—we all have an accent! Ask someone from France if they approve of Quebec French.

As for the veil being a security threat, how many niqab-wearing women have held up banks?

Notice should be taken of the fact that women who wear the niqab are also obligated to remove it for reasons of necessity, security or identification, and they do.

Whether a classroom setting represents such a necessity could be mediated with the help of Muslim community leaders and the student in question. Instead, the school and Quebec politicians chose to turn this into an us-vs.-them fight.

Unfortunately the frenzy around this issue has taken on Islamophobic undertones.

The holier-than-thou slogans of “our values are better then theirs” being chanted by so-called pure Canadians has serious social consequences.

What law gives Canadian society the right to impose our biases, transfer our ignorance, and impose our fears on these women?

Furthermore the argument based on comparisons between certain Muslim countries and Canada is also a red herring.

Do we really want to model Canada on the standards of human rights in Egypt or Afghanistan?

We claim to be better than the Taliban because we do not tell women what to wear, yet we have no problem telling them what not to wear. What hypocrisy!

This outrage is not over a piece of cloth on my face or head; it is about what I believe and the lifestyle I have chosen.

It’s about my refusal to be exploited because of my physiology, my refusal to be forced into a frame that society imposes on me, and my courage to demand my rights as a Canadian.

Unfortunately it is socially acceptable to belittle Muslim women, and make political gains at their expense.

This is not something to celebrate. Au contraire— it’s time to mourn the Canada we may be losing.

Shahina Siddiqui is President/Executive Director of Islamic Social Services Association Inc. Canada. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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Niqab ban – a tyranny of conformity

Suzanne Weiss

This speech was given on March 2, 2010, to a meeting of students at the University of Waterloo in Canada, held as part of the Israeli Apartheid Week. She, a holocaust survivor, is a member of Not in Our Name: Jewish Voices Against Zionism and of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto.

A year after a murderous Israel’s assault, the war on the people of Gaza continues. Gaza is still under siege – still surrounded by walls and checkpoints. Its people are denied the necessities of life and the right to rebuild and shape their future.

For me, as a survivor of the holocaust, the tragic situation in Gaza awakens memories of what I and my family experienced under Hitlerism – the ghetto walls, the killings, the systematic starvation and deprivation, the daily humiliations.

The tragedy of Palestine is, of course, different from the holocaust. Israel has no gas chambers. Its government does not strive to kill all the Palestinians. Israel’s intention is, instead, to take the Palestinians’ homeland and property and to deprive them of civil and human rights. Every case of oppression is unique, but the struggle for justice is indivisible. As we then fought for freedom for European Jews, we now call for freedom for the Palestinians.

The holocaust is linked to Palestine in another way. Many Jewish survivors of Hitler’s slaughter lost their families, homes and communities and sought a new life. There was a campaign to convince them that they needed a homeland – in Palestine. They were told lies that Palestine was an empty land, with few inhabitants. The Israeli government terrorised, brutalised and expelled Palestinians from their homelands. Palestine became a colonised settler state. Thus, the Palestinians were made to pay for Hitler’s crimes.

Like the Nazis, the Israel government enforces collective punishment. It aims to kill enough Palestinians, to punish them sufficiently, drive them out of their homeland, so they will disappear as a people. Israel seeks to remove Palestine from the world’s family of nations. That too is a form of genocide.

Israel was founded as a militarised state, and a partner of British and US imperialism, of the apartheid regime in South Africa and of murderous dictatorships in Latin America.

The crimes against the Palestinians inspire guilt in the Jewish settlers and breed fear that the Palestinians might carry out a supposed new “holocaust” against them. Once again, holocaust memories are being mobilised to justify maintaining Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.

As a child in France, I survived the holocaust because a strong resistance was organised. Thousands of people – Christians, Jews and Moslems – joined the fight for freedom against the French fascist Vichy government. They struck powerful blows against racism, whose impact endures in France today. They organised a network to save Jewish people. That’s why I am here today.

For me, as for many Jews today, the memory of the holocaust inspires us not to support war and oppression but to work for solidarity and freedom – in this case, freedom for the Palestinians. The Israel government claims its wars are waged on our behalf. That’s a lie. We say, “Not in our name”. And in increasing numbers, Jewish people join with our Palestinian brothers and sisters to demand justice for Palestine.

Israel – an apartheid state

We raise a simple demand, in the interests of all the peoples of the region: end Israeli apartheid.
The United Nations has defined the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”. The word apartheid, which means “separation”, was coined by the racist regime of South Africa, which denied civil and human rights to non-Europeans.

We know apartheid in our colonised country of Canada: the process through which Indigenous peoples were robbed of their lands and deprived of their livelihood, while every attempt was made to destroy their culture. The architects of South African apartheid studied Canada and took it as a model. The founders of Israel studied it too.

Today we see an apartheid state in the land of Palestine/Israel. It is symbolised by the so-called “separation wall” that confines Palestinians to segregated ghettos, by the checkpoints, the arbitrary killing and arrests, the systematic material deprivation.

How to fight Israel’s apartheid

Nelson Mandela, who led the campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against South African apartheid, has said that justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age”. He also has stated, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

On July 9, 2005, a unified call of Palestinian civil society organisations proposed a campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions as a central focus for efforts to end Israeli apartheid. Boycotts, divestment and sanctions was crucial in the victory over apartheid in South Africa. Now is the time to apply this method to the catastrophic situation in Palestine.

The Palestinian resistance and freedom struggle has three demands to gain justice: (1) their right to return to their land; (2) their right to equality as citizens in Israel; (3) an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Only an end to Israeli apartheid will permit Jews and Palestinians to forge new relations and to resolve the issue of state structures on the basis of equality.
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Israel’s apartheid: Making Palestinians pay for Hitler’s crimes

Washington (CNN) — President Obama on Tuesday signed into law a sweeping health care reform bill, the nation’s most substantial social legislation in four decades, achieving a top priority of his administration.

Greeted by applause from enthusiastic supporters, he said, “Today after almost a century of trying; today, after over a year of debate; today, after all the votes have been tallied, health insurance reform becomes law in the United States of America.”

The president said he is confident the Senate will improve the health care reform law swiftly. He said some health care reforms will take some time to phase in, but others will “take effect right away.”

Obama introduced the widow of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who championed health care reform. “It’s fitting that Ted’s widow Vicki is here, and his niece, Caroline, his son, Patrick, whose vote helped make this health care reform a reality.” Patrick Kennedy is a congressman from Rhode Island.
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President Obama signs health care reform into law

Congress passes Historic Health Care Bill! Congratulation to all American and to our President.
President Obama has shown his strong conviction by fulfilling his election promise. He  proved that he is a strong and persistent President and his determination is unwavering even in the face of strong opposition.

Congress passes Historic Health Care Bill!
Congratulation to all American and to our President.

President Obama has shown his strong conviction by fulfilling his election promise. He  proved that he is a strong and persistent President and his determination is unwavering even in the face of strong opposition.