arully’s thought

From BBC NEWS report, Walid al-Houdaly, a husband who has a wive and an 18-month-old child in Israel’s prison, said:

“There is one soldier, but there have been hundreds of Palestinians kidnapped from their houses,” says the writer, referring in part to his wife who he says was dragged from their Ramallah home by Israeli soldiers early one morning.

“If the world protests about the kidnapping of one soldier, why don’t they protest about the Palestinians that have been kidnapped in the last 10 years,” Mr Houdaly adds, sitting in his Ramallah office with books scattered across his desk.

For most people, Justice is still a far far away …

Another report by BBC that

There were several sonic booms for example, which came at half hourly intervals, they were thunderingly loud, and scared a lot of people. So most families simply stayed indoors.

According to Wikipedia, the definition of terrorism is Terrorism refers to a strategy of using violence, social threats, or coordinated attacks, in order to generate fear, cause disruption, and ultimately, bring about compliance with specified political, religious, or ideological demands. The targets of terrorist attacks typically are not the individuals who are killed, injured, or taken hostage, but rather the societies to which these individuals belong

So, there is no doubt that what IDF did in Gaza now like sonic boom is a terrorism. But why the world especially the west is silence?

Soldiers was kidnaped by Palestinians freedom fighter, and they set a demand as reported by BBC

It said: “The Occupation [Israel] will not get any information about its missing soldier until it commits to the following:

“First, the immediate release of all women in prison. Second, the immediate release of all children in prison younger than 18.”

What a PR stunt.. comparing a soldier againts women and children in prison. Surely, the demand’s main goal is to humiliate Israel.

Pic from BBC:

BBC NEWS report:

“The quartet seems to have changed its policy from that of peace facilitator to policeman.”

Mr Dugard said the quartet was in danger of becoming so discredited that it might be better for the UN and the EU to withdraw from it altogether.

“The Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions, the first time that an occupied people have been so treated,” Mr Dugard said.

And, this is a quote from an Israeli citizen from Sderot:

“I think the only solution now is to send the tanks in and flatten as much of the Gaza Strip as we can,” she says. “I never thought I would say that but what can I do?”

What an occupier….
Even Indonesian didn’t have to undergo that kind of treatment from their Dutch Occupier…

A good article from LA Times’s Henry Siegman with his Israelis killing Palestinians, and vice versa – Los Angeles Times article.

His point is:

• Is there really much difference between Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s military retaliations?
• If Israeli airstrikes held out any prospect of ending, or even reducing, Palestinian terrorism, then the notion “the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective” might have had greater merit. In fact, they have the opposite effect.
• IDF now admit that in the early days of the Palestinian intifada, retaliatory strikes contributed to the continuation of the conflict and the great outbreak of terrorism starting in mid-2001.
• According to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces have killed about 3,400 Palestinians since the intifada started, and Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis.
• Not a single Israeli has been killed by a Kassam rocket since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza last year, although during this period Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli artillery and airstrikes virtually on a daily basis.
• It suggests that the killing of Palestinian civilians is, at the very least, more a matter of Israeli indifference than a mistake.
• More important, judgments about the morality of Israeli military strikes that kill innocents cannot be made without reference to the political context within which the violence occurs.
• The Jewish community in Palestine also resorted to terrorize civilians when they were engaged in their own struggle for national independence and statehood. The Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that morphed into the Likud, first targeted Arab civilians in October 1937 by, for the first time, had been placing massive bombs in crowded Arab centers
• No serious person can believe that Israel — with one of the world’s most powerful military establishments — is at risk of being undone and eliminated by Hamas or by any other terrorist group. With or without Hamas’ recognition, Israel’s existence is not in doubt. In a recent interview in Haaretz, Efraim Halevy, who served as head of the Mossad from 1998 to 2002 and as national security advisor to Sharon, ridiculed the notion that a terrorist group could endanger Israel’s existence.
• The overarching moral issue for Israel is whether the additional territory it seeks to hold is worth the inevitable cost in Palestinian and Israeli lives.

My conclusion is:

• The Israel government and all the people enjoy living in the occupied land, doesn’t want to have a really peace with Palestinian, until they can annex every single piece of Palestine land (to form The Greater Israel ?!?)

There is a good article about strategic war from router Battle lines harden at the heart of old Hebron – Yahoo! News

(more…)

Indonesia sebagai negara berpenduduk muslim terbesar, harusnya tidak mempunyai organisasi PMI tapi BSMI, karena alasan dibawah:

Red Cross set to accept Mideast emblem – Yahoo! News But the symbol unintentionally reminded Muslims of the Christian Crusaders, and they insisted on their own red crescent in the 19th century.

An interesting article from Newsweek about How Long Will America Lead the World? by Zakaria, a Newsweek editor with background from Foreign Affairs Magazine’s Editor in his belly.

Some of the quote are:

• A Goldman Sachs study concludes that by 2045, China will be the largest economy in the world, replacing the United States.
• Much of the concern centers on the erosion of science and technology in the U.S., particularly in education.
• The national academies’ report points out that China and India combined graduate 950,000 engineers every year, compared with 70,000 in America; that for the cost of one chemist or engineer in the U.S. a company could hire five chemists in China or 11 engineers in India; that of the 120 $1 billion-plus chemical plants being built around the world one is in the United States and 50 are in China.
• The United States has a history of worrying that it is losing its edge. This is at least the fourth wave of such concerns since 1945. The first was in the late 1950s, produced by the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite. The second was during the early 1970s, when high oil prices and slow growth in the U.S. convinced Americans that Western Europe and Saudi Arabia were the powers of the future and President Nixon heralded the advent of a multipolar world. The most recent one was in the mid-1980s, when most experts believed that Japan would be the technologically and economically dominant superpower of the future. The concerns in each one these cases was well founded, the projections intelligent. But the reason that none of these scenarios came to pass is that the American system—flexible, resourceful and resilient—moved quickly to correct its mistakes and refocus its attention. Concerns about American decline ended up preventing it. As Andy Grove puts it, “Only the paranoid survive.”
• America’s problem right now is that it is not really that scared.
• But mainstream America is still unconcerned. Partly this is because these trends are operating at an early stage and somewhat under the surface. Americans do not really know how fast the rest of the world is catching up.
• It is not an exaggeration to say that over the past five years, because of bad American policies, London is replacing New York as the world’s financial capital.
• Our entitlement programs are set to bankrupt the country, the health-care system is an expensive time bomb, our savings rate is zero, we are borrowing 80 percent of the world’s savings and our national bill for litigation is now larger than for research and development
• Its people work hard, putting in longer hours than those in other rich countries. Much of this has do to with the history and culture of the society. A huge amount of it has to do with immigration, which keeps America constantly renewed by streams of hardworking people, desperate to succeed. Science laboratories in America are more than half filled with foreign students and immigrants.
• That is why America, alone among industrial nations, has been able to do the nearly impossible: renew its power and stay at the top of the game for a century now.
• No matter what we do, they will have more, and cheaper, labor. What we can do is take the best features of the America system—openness, innovation, immigration and flexibility—and enhance them, so that they can respond to new challenges by creating new industries, new technologies and new jobs, as we have in the past.

• Our greatest danger is that when the American public does begin to get scared, they will try to shut down the very features of the country that have made it so successful. They will want to shut out foreign companies, be less welcoming to immigrants and close themselves off from competition and collaboration. Over the past year there have already been growing paranoia on all these fronts. If we go down this path, we will remain a rich country and a stable one. We will be less troubled by the jarring changes that the new world is pushing forward. But like Britain after Queen Victoria’s reign, it will be a future of slow, steady national decline. History will happen to us after all.

  (more…)

Berikut ini adalah wawancara Presiden Republik Islam Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dengan Harian Der Spiegel Jerman (Diterjemahkan oleh Abdullah Beik dan diedit oleh Muhsin Labib dan Arif Mulyadi).

Menariknya, dalam artikel berjudul Finally, Germans can freely admit, ‘I love my country’ yg diturunkan oleh The Christian Science Monitor, ada komentar sebagai berikut:

“It’s a turning point,” says Micha Brumlik, a professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. “For the first time the public is showing that they don’t feel ashamed for crimes committed by others in the past,” though he adds that many still feel responsible.
“They’re far larger, and the outpouring of emotion is much greater,” says historian Erik Eggers. “There’s never been anything like this before since World War II.”

Mungkinkah komentar ini muncul sebagai akibat tidak langsung dari pernyataan Presiden Iran?

Untuk mengikuti transkripsi wawancara lengkap, silahkan klik (more…)

BBC made an interesting report about small arm ammunition. The fact is: * In Baghdad, bullets for an AK-47 assault rifle cost between 15 and 45 cents each (depending on the manufacturer and the age of the bullet) * the average cost of taking a human life in Baghdad at around $2.40 (Medic say that most died were hit by between 4 and 12 bullets) * At least 76 countries are known to manufacture small arms ammunition in a global market worth an estimated $2-$3bn (up to £1.6bn) per year, Oxfam says. The largest is USA (see the graph below) * Global output is estimated to be between 10 to 14 billion rounds per year, or an average of 33 million rounds per day.

Rangkuman dari berbagai sumber:

• Produktifitas: Bank di kota seperti di Brazil akan tutup lebih awal; Gairah kerja berkurang di Inggris karena menonton bola; WTO menghentikan pertemuan sebelum pembukaan PD2006
• Politik & hubungan antar negara: Jerman akan kedatangan 4,5 juta gibol dalam 1 bulan penyelenggaraan PD2006; Rencana kedatangan presiden Iran membuat heboh lengkap dengan demo dan anti-demo nya; Anggota FIFA lebih banyak daripada anggota PBB (207 anggota FIFA, 191 anggota PBB)
• Broadcasting: Even yang paling banyak ditonton penduduk bumi, diperkirakan 1 milyar orang akan menonton final PD 2006 Jerman; Antartika menjadi tempat terjauh yg menonton PD2006, karena para peneliti memasang feed TV satelit untuk menonton siaran langsung PD2006; 70% gibol di Cina akan menonton seluruh 63 pertandingan;
• Indonesia masuk putaran final PD pertama kali tahun 1938 (waktu itu namanya masih Dutch East Indies)
• ada yg mau nambahin?

Quote dari CSM:

Question: what quadrennial sporting extravaganza brings the world together for weeks on end, transcending war, poverty, class, and culture, and culminating in the most watched television event ever?
If you guessed the Olympics, odds are you’re an American. The rest of the world knows better.
at the grand finale on July 9, as many as a billion people – one-sixth of humanity – are expected to watch 22 men, adept at propelling a piece of leather around, compete for the ultimate victory in team sports.

Komentar gokil dari Bill Shankly:

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death,” he once remarked. “I’m very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

A soldier in the "most moral army" in the world chokes a nonviolent demonstrator
Originally uploaded by ISM-NC.

An irony, Israel PM said that “The IDF is the most moral army in THE WORLD“. Maybe he means: the most moral army in THEIR WORLD, as Zionist regard other human being beside Jews as second class.

Juliana Fredman and James Davis have said about this in their short article. Google also has it.

Another proof of this “the most moral army” fiasco:
Independent Online Edition > Middle East As the military investigation team insisted that artillery fire had stopped by the time the explosion occurred and suggested it had been caused by a bomb planted in the sand, Amir Peretz, the Defence Minister, declared: ” The accumulating evidence proves that this incident was not due to Israeli forces.”

But the official interpretation was strongly challenged by a former Pentagon battle damage expert who has surveyed the scene of the beach explosion. He said yesterday that “all the evidence points” to a 155mm Israeli land-based artillery shell as its cause.

Marc Garlasco, who worked in war zones including Iraq and Kosovo during his seven-year stint in the US Department of Defence, called for an independent investigation into the killings after concluding that shell fragments and shrapnel from the site, the size and distribution of the craters on the beach, and the type of injuries sustained by the victims made Israeli shelling easily the likeliest cause.

added Wed Jun 21, 2:51 AM ET :: Israeli strike clouds leaders’ meeting – Yahoo! News ::
Israeli aircraft fired a missile at a car in the crowded Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday afternoon, missing the militants in the car but killing a 5-year-old boy and his 7-year-old sister. A 16-year-old girl also died of her wounds, hospital officials said. Eight other people were injured in the blast, which Israel’s Channel 2 TV said was “another failed assassination attempt, and again innocent civilians were hit.”

added Wed Jun 21, 4:06 PM ET :: 2 killed in second botched Israeli strike – Yahoo! News ::
In the second botched Israeli airstrike in Gaza in two days, two people were killed and 13 were wounded when a missile hit a house Wednesday, just hours after grieving and angry Palestinians buried three children killed in a previous attack.