Baithak World apr 22: Hamas, Moore - Obama, Eckart Tolle, Aramaic, Syria-Israel, Carter, Witch-Hunt,

Hamas has said it is ready to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders but "will not recognise Israel". Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas political leader, reaffirmed Hamas's stance towards Israel and clarified his comments as relayed earlier by Jimmy Carter, the former US president. Meshaal said: "We accept a state on the June 4 line with Jerusalem as capital, real sovereignty and full right of return for refugees but without recognising Israel." Hamas ready to accept 1967 borders [Israel obviously cannot live in defined borders. Peace is an anthema for Israel.]


The outspoken film-maker Michael Moore endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary tomorrow, accusing Hillary Clinton of cynically trying to inject race into the contest. In an angry posting on his website, Moore said he had intended to stay neutral in the Democratic contest but was led to speak out after last week's debate in Philadelphia when Obama was questioned about his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Moore, who became famous for his cinematic rants against the gun industry, the Bush administration, and the US health care system, said he was disgusted when Clinton followed up on the moderators' line of questioning to Obama by mentioning Wright's contacts with the Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan. The remarks, said Moore, were the final straw. "I've watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name "Farrakhan" out of nowhere, well that's when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the "F" word to scare white people, pure and simple." He goes on to even stronger language against Clinton. "Yes, Senator Clinton, that's how you sounded. Like you were nuts. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity." The endorsement for Obama marks a turnaround for Moore who has been critical of the Democratic frontrunner on his website -- even while lauding the historic nature of his candidacy. Film-maker Moore endorses Obama

In A New Earth, spiritual teacher and author Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now) advocates present moment awareness and the dismantling of the ego as the path towards awakened living. A New Earth gets its title from a Bible verse referring to the rising of "a new heaven and a new earth." According to Tolle, "heaven" is the awakened state that will bring about "a new earth" in the outer world, the world of form. Tolle begins with an extensive description of our principle barrier to the awakened state: ego. He indicts the word "I" as being a terrible feat of reductionism, as it infinitely minimizes who we truly are by allowing us to identify ourselves with our mind, our gender, our accumulated possessions, our social roles, and so on. He then informs us that the only way to diminish ego is by seeking the fullness of life in the present moment, that by making friends with the Now, we can destroy our time-bound state of consciousness and therefore destroy ego. Focus on the Now is focus on Being q rather than Doing, on presence rather than form: "People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient becuse of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already here, that lies beyond what is happening or not happening, beyond form." A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle By Mark Flanagan [thanks NF]


MALULA, Syria — Elias Khoury can still remember the days when old people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by a long and bumpy bus ride over the mountains, was almost entirely Christian, a vestige of an older and more diverse Middle East that existed before the arrival of Islam. Now Mr. Khoury, 65, gray-haired and bedridden, admits ruefully that he has largely forgotten the language he spoke with his own mother. “It’s disappearing,” he said in Arabic, sitting with his wife on a bed in the mud-and-straw house where he grew up. “A lot of the Aramaic vocabulary I don’t use any more, and I’ve lost it.” Malula, along with two smaller neighboring villages where Aramaic is also spoken, is still celebrated in Syria as a unique linguistic island. In the Convent of St. Sergius and Bacchus, on a hill above town, young girls recite the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic to tourists, and booklets about the language are on sale at a gift shop in the town center. In Syrian Villages, the Language of Jesus Lives

When Sawyer asked why I agreed to speak with her, I said, "I don't know." But I do know. I did it because she asked. It was flattering, if a fucked form of flattery, but I was mostly interested because her perspective stands in diametric opposition to my own. She represents the view of middle America; she works for a family-friendly network with no tolerance for grey area in a subject as inflammatory as sex work. It was clear that there could be only one slant for her documentary, being the old Victorian trope of the broken, dysfunctional, fallen prostitute, incapable of forming her own opinions or making her own decisions (and I find it interesting when self-described feminists reinforce this). A network like ABC wanted Dickensian sex workers and that's precisely what they were going to show. But here I was being given a chance to offer my own take and experience, which runs counter to their thesis, and more specifically, I was being offered the opportunity to sit down and talk with this woman personally. Diane Sawyer Doesn't Like What I Do


Former U.S. president Carter clarified in a meeting last week with Syrian president Bashar Assad that the U.S. would not stand in the way of serious peace negotiations between Syria and Israel. Carter also said the U.S. would even support any agreement that is reached. He told Meretz chairman Yossi Beilin at a meeting in Jerusalem on Monday that he had made these statements to Assad. The former U.S. president approached Beilin in an effort to jumpstart a "Syrian Geneva Accord," which would put on the table a comprehensive plan for peace between Israel and Syria. Carter was referring to an unofficial peace proposal that included unprecedented compromises for both Israelis and Palestinians, which was first launched in late 2003. Carter: U.S. would not stand in way of Israel-Syria peace deal

Children carry a poster in a Qalqilia demonstration during Palestinian Prisoners' Day. (Khaleel Reash, Maan Images)

Two scenes from the Middle East this week offer an amazing study in contrast. They demonstrate how the region has dramatically changed over the past few years. And yet, the more the Middle East changes, the more it remains the same.

Just look at the warm reception Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni got in Doha, Qatar. The tiny emirate, home to Al Jazeera, rolled out red carpet for the visitor, who had ostensibly turned up to attend a regional forum on democracy and development.

Qatar Amir Sheikh Hamad Al-Thani himself took the lead in enthusiastically welcoming the guest. Later, Arab officials queued up to shake hands with Ms. Livni.

Around the same time, as Ms. Livni was enjoying the traditional Arab hospitality in Doha, a frail, 83-year old peacemaker who happens to be a former US president was being given a taste of Israeli hospitality in Jerusalem.

Jimmy Carter, the original architect of Arab-Israel peace process and the Egypt-Israel accord in 1979, was made to feel as welcome as Bin Laden would be at the Bush White House. Carter's peace mission


NEW YORK, Apr 21 (IPS) - The U.S. government's anti-terrorist financing programmes are based on the "guilt by association" tactics of the McCarthy era and have had a widespread negative impact on U.S. charities, critics say. That is the view of Kay Guinane, director of the Nonprofit Speech Rights Programme for OMB (Office of Management and Budget) Watch, an independent not-for-profit government watchdog group. Guinane told IPS that government actions have resulted in programme cutbacks and increased fear of speaking out on important public issues. The organisation accused Congress of continuing "an unfortunate pattern of insufficient congressional oversight of anti-terrorist financing programmes, neglecting to address the unnecessarily harsh impacts the programmes have on U.S. charities and philanthropy." As an example of insufficient congressional oversight of charities' alleged support of terrorist organisations, OMB Watch cited a recent hearing before the Senate Finance Committee in which the only witness was a government official. The witness was the under-secretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, Stuart Levey, who plays a lead role in identifying charities that the Treasury Department claims are supporting terrorist causes. RIGHTS-US: Trials of Muslim Charities Likened to a Witch-hunt By William Fisher


Medieval physicians believed that they could diagnose disease by holding up a flask of the patient’s urine to the light and squinting at it. According to scientists at Imperial College London, they could have been on to something. A team there has completed the first worldwide study of the metabolites (breakdown products) that are found in urine, reflecting the diet, inheritance and the lifestyle of the people from whom it came. They call such studies “metabolomics” by analogy with genomics, which looks at all the genes that make up the human species, and proteomics, which does the same for proteins. The study used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to compare racial and national groups by the composition of their urine. From Japan, Beijing, Corpus Christi, Belfast and West Bromwich, urine differs in subtle ways that could provide a powerful new way of linking diet and health.The metabolites they found come from microbes in the gut, from diet and from the metabolism of the host. Scientists discover drops of truth in medieval belief in urine

The New York Times’s 7,600-word piece on the secret Pentagon campaign to get retired military officers onto the leading television news channels as analysts to defend the Bush administration’s Iraq policy—“an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse”—is the result of painstaking research and a great deal of tenacity. As its author, David Barstow, notes in a “Talk to the Newsroom” Q&A published this morning,

This article would have come sooner, but it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department that described its interactions with network military analysts. We pushed as hard as we could, but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act. We ultimately sued in federal court, yet even then the Pentagon failed to meet several court-ordered deadlines for producing documents. Last week, the judge overseeing our lawsuit threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continues to defy his deadlines for producing additional records.

Mind Games: CJR on the Military’s Media Manipulation

Sleeping on the job? This heading from DNA:

Pakistan conducts back-to-back nuclear tests

IANS

Monday, April 21, 2008 20:18 IST

(EI illustration)

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged. A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), provided to The Electronic Intifada (EI), indicate the group is engaged in what one activist termed a "war" on Wikipedia. A 13 March action alert signed by Gilead Ini, a "Senior Research Analyst" at CAMERA, calls for "volunteers who can work as 'editors' to ensure" that Israel-related articles on Wikipedia are "free of bias and error, and include necessary facts and context." However, subsequent communications indicate that the group not only wanted to keep the effort secret from the media, the public, and Wikipedia administrators, but that the material they intended to introduce included discredited claims that could smear Palestinians and Muslims and conceal Israel's true history. With over two million articles in English on every topic imaginable, Wikipedia has become a primary reference source for Internet users around the world and a model for collaboratively produced projects. Openness and good faith are among Wikipedia's core principles. Any person in the world can write or edit articles, but Wikipedia has strict guidelines and procedures for accountability intended to ensure quality control and prevent vandalism, plagiarism or distortion. It is because of these safeguards that articles on key elements of the Palestine-Israel conflict have generally remained well-referenced, useful and objective. The CAMERA plan detailed in the e-mails obtained by EI appears intended to circumvent these controls. EI exclusive: a pro-Israel group's plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia
Report, The Electronic Intifada, 21 April 2008

Paul Jay presents RealNews
Paraguay elects left wing former Bishop

Former Catholic clergyman inflicts crushing victory on ruling right wing party in power since 1947 15 hours ago view

Muqtada al-Sadr issues final warning

Shiite cleric warns Iraqi government to halt crackdown on his followers or he will declare open war 13 hours ago view

In Sadr City's new wall, shadows of Gaza, Vietnam
Aijaz Ahmad: Wall meant to partition Sadr City's residents is population control ahead of elections