Here is an excerpt from Ralph Nader's recent article in CounterPunch:

According to The Nation magazine, the great Israeli human rights  organization B’Tselem, reports that the primitive rockets from Gaza,  have taken thirteen Israeli lives in the past four years, while Israeli  forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied  territories in the past two years alone. Almost half of them were  civilians, including some 200 children.

The Israeli government is barring most of the trucks from entering Gaza  to feed the nearly one million Palestinians depending on international  relief, from groups such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency  (UNRWA). The loss of life from crumbling health care facilities,  disastrous electricity cutoffs, gross malnutrition and contaminated  drinking water from broken public water systems does not get totaled.  These are the children and their civilian adult relatives who expire in  a silent violence of suffering that 98 percent of Congress avoids  mentioning while extending billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel annually. UNRWA says “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their  growth is slowing.” Cancer patients are deprived of their chemotherapy,  kidney patients are cut off from dialysis treatments and premature  babies cannot receive blood-clotting medications.

The misery, mortality and morbidity worsens day by day. Here is how the  commissioner-general of UNRWA sums it up, “Gaza is on the threshold of  becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of  abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would  say-encouragement of the international community.”

According to a report filed by a coalition of eight British humanitarian and human rights groups, Gaza is suffering through its worst humanitarian crisis since 1967 as a result of Israeli restrictions on food, water, sewage treatment, and healthcare.

"The economy has collapsed, unemployment is expected to rise to 50%, hospitals are suffering 12-hour power cuts and schools are failing - all creating a "humanitarian implosion", according to a coalition of eight UK humanitarian and human rights groups.

The data was collated before the recent escalation in Hamas rocket fire and Israel's incursion, which saw 106 Palestinians, at least half of them civilians, killed in five days alone. One Israeli civilian and two soldiers were killed in the same period.

The situation in Gaza is "man-made, completely avoidable, and with the necessary political will can be reversed", say the groups, which include Oxfam, Amnesty and Save the Children." 

Israel says these actions are a response to Hamas seizing power in Gaza and firing kaytusha rockets into Israel--regardless, this policy is a clear act of collective punishment against an entire civilian population, carried out by a state that brags of its status as "the only democracy in the Middle East."

Democracies don't starve people to death.

You won't see this on CNN:

"A string of Israeli air raids targeted Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip on Thursday.

In the afternoon, four boys reportedly aged between eight and 15 were killed whilst playing football near the al-Salam mosque in Jabaliya. Three of them were members of the same family, according to the Palestinian news agency Maan.

The interior ministry building in Gaza City, run by Hamas, was hit on Wednesday evening. The building was empty. 

Nearby buildings were caught in the blast, killing a baby and wounding at about 30 other people, Palestinian medical officials said."

The raid was in "response" to the killing of an Israeli student by a Hamas rocket on Wednesday.  I use the word "response" reluctantly and with hesitation, because it has the effect of equalizing the military might of the two parties.  These raids on Gaza, which have killed at least 20 Palestinians (including at least 9 civilians) are no less morally unjust than the killing of the Israeli student in Sderot, yet Israel escapes condemnation by the international community by claiming the deaths were merely collateral damage.  Dead civilians are dead civilians--no matter their nationality, skin color, religion, or sex; whether they are Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi, Sudanese, Rwandan, or American. When will we begin to treat their deaths with an equal sense of moral outrage?

Bush commented yesterday on the resignation of Cuban president Fidel Castro, promising that "the United States will help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of democracy." The irony of his statement is brilliantly captured in Steve Bell's cartoon here.

If you've been to almost any major metropolitan area recently, you've undoubtedly noticed trendy young hippies sporting rockin' checkered scarves around their necks and thought, "I wish I were that cool!" Well now you CAN be--for the low, low price of trivializing and commercializing a vibrant cultural (and national) tradition. These scarves, which are sold at, among other places, Urban Outfitters, are reproductions of the traditional Palestinian male headdress (kaffiyeh) that became symbols of the Palestinian nationalist struggle.  But recently, this emblem of a distant culture has transformed into a chic badge of upper-middle-class fashion-forwardness. It's one thing to sport a gimicky trend to seemlessly blend in with the cool kids in midtown Manhattan; it's entirely different to cheapen the meaning and value of a cultural and political legacy that will, rest assured, outlive any cover of Vogue. 

At a recent event sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Jon Tester (D-MT) discussed the upcoming Supreme Court case that will decide whether DC’s ban on hand guns is, in fact, unconstitutional.  This case will undoubtedly fuel the debate once more about Second Amendment rights and the original intent of the framers when they declared, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” 

The New York Times recently ran a piece that spotlights an intriguing twist to this debate: punctuation.  The author argues that if we read the text of the Second Amendment without commas, the original meaning is clearly discerned: the purpose of the amendment is to protect militias, not the individual right to carry a gun.  Interesting.
 

The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism released a study today that shows Bush administration officials gave out hundreds of false statements relating to the threat posed by Iraq between 2001 and 2003:

“The study concluded that the statements ‘were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.’

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel did not comment on the merits of the study Tuesday night but reiterated the administration's position that the world community viewed Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, as a threat."

I don’t know about you, but I’m so glad that investigative journalists are asking the tough questions and getting to the truth behind Bush’s rhetoric about justification for war in Iraq…four years too late.