From the Independent
In Assad’s Syria, death notices litter the walls – and life goes on
Monday 3 November 2014
Driving along roads that cost many lives to capture, Robert Fisk sees hasty monuments to dead soldiers of a state that was once a pariah
Abdul Qadir al-Djezairi’s palace is on the right, noble in spirit as well as architecture. He is the one who brought the Christians and Jews of Damascus to his home when they feared the Muslims in the 19th century.
He refused to countenance a Sunni-only city here; he was an ancestral enemy, I suppose, of the Daesh, as he would have called Isis had they existed in his day, and as Arabs call it now. Below the walls at this moment are a row of minibuses at the local filling station. Their drivers queue for days for their diesel, ever more expensive, ever scarcer as an early winter burns up fuel for home heating.
In the coming days, I will see the alternative, truck after truck heading past me to Damascus, loaded with the chopped-up branches of great trees. The forests above Lattakia are being denuded, the hillsides turned naked to warm the people of Syria’s capital. Think Kabul. Or maybe Germany in the winter of 1944.
Of course there is no real comparison with that titanic tragedy. But drive north from Damascus and you cannot shrug off the Syrian war just because the first rains have washed the desert and the wind blows cold across the scrub. There to the west is Sidnaya. The Christians in their little towns here endured the taunts of those who said they “stood aside” in the war, hoping to escape the fury of the government’s enemies.
In Homs, they tried to step aside, and when the Free Syrian Army – which existed then outside the Obama imagination – asked them to get Syrian checkpoints off their streets, the Christians obliged, only to find the rebels in their streets the next day.
Well, in Sidnaya, the Christians caught members of the Nusra Front and decided to change the narrative. They chopped off the heads of the Nusra and pushed them onto sticks because they didn’t want the Christians to appear “soft” any more. Christians in Syria are traditionally very educated. They open restaurants, become doctors, engineers, make jewellery. A new picture now.
The road north is under repair – they are widening the dual carriageway to motorway proportions. Normality, you see. Just like it would have been four years and 200,000 lives ago. Nothing unusual. The government has confidence, does it not? So widen the roads! The industrial city of Adra glides by to the east, recaptured by the Syrian army last month, a place of horror for those who were massacred there and those few baked alive in the local bread ovens (courtesy of one Zahran Aloush of the Islamic Army).
Thousands were taken hostage, so many that they had to be freed and turned over to the Syrian army’s Third Division, which witnessed this Biblical exodus, a replay of Palestine 1948 according to some soldiers who feared gunmen were among them – but who eventually overturned trucks carrying tuna so that they could feed the refugees. Vehicles in road accidents, you have to understand, become the responsibility of the security forces.
From the Jewish Telegrapic Agency
White House: Rice and Dermer have met ‘multiple times’
WASHINGTON (JTA) — U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice has met multiple times with Israel’s U.S. ambassador Ron Dermer, the White House said.
“Ambassador Rice and Ambassador Dermer have met multiple times before last week,” Rice’s spokesman, Alistair Baskey, told JTA on Monday, responding to an article in Haaretz the same day that quoted Rice as telling an American Jewish leader that Dermer had never asked to meet with her.
“We will decline to provide details on those meetings, but would note that in her role as National Security Advisor, Ambassador Rice’s principal Israeli interlocutor is her counterpart National Security Advisor Yossi Cohen, with whom she engages very frequently,” Baskey said. “This is not unique to Israel; it’s the norm. Ambassador Dermer engages frequently with other White House officials.”
Click here for the full story
From the Jewish Telegrapic Agency
Israeli forces tear down two eastern Jerusalem buildings
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Jerusalem municipality demolished what it called two illegal buildings in an eastern Jerusalem neighborhood.
The buildings taken down early Tuesday were in Abu Tor, a mixed Arab and Jewish neighborhood.
Palestinian families were living on the first floors of both buildings, the Palestinian Maan news agency reported.
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From PressTV
Palestine to demand UN resolution to end Israel occupation
The Palestinians will submit a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council later this month, calling for an end date for the Israeli regime’s occupation.
The text, which has already been circulated to the 15 members of the Security Council, is widely expected to be vetoed by the United States, a close ally of the Zionist regime.
The draft reportedly sets 2016 as the date for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.
The Palestinians say if Washington does wield its veto, they will seek membership in the International Criminal Court, where they would be able to file charges against the Israeli officials over war crimes committed in the occupied territories.
Haaretz
The documented growth of anti-Semitism in Britain should serve as a wake-up call, British Labour leader Ed Miliband said Tuesday, urging a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism.
“…the recent spate of incidents should serve as a wake-up call for anyone who thought the scourge of anti-Semitism had been defeated and that the idea of Jewish families fearful of living here in Britain was unthinkable,” Miliband said in a Facebook post.
Miliband noted the uptick in anti-Semitic violence coincided with the summer conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip, saying the issue should be tackled “head on, because I am clear that this can never excuse anti-Semitism, just as conflicts elsewhere in the Middle East can never justify Islamophobia.”
Miliband, the son of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Britain, also mentioned the attacks against his party members Luciana Berger and Louise Ellman, referring to anti-Semitic Tweeter campaigns targeting the Jewish MPs. Miliband said social media sites should crack down on the perpetrators of anti-Semitic abuse.
“We need a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism in the UK and to reaffirm our revulsion to it in all its forms,” Miliband said, concluding his post by saying this approach will go hand-in-hand with his party’s foreign policy and its pursuit of peace in the Middle East.
In October, the Labour Party led a non-binding Parliament vote recognizing the Palestinian state, raising the ire of some pro-Israel Labour MPs.
In September, Miliband was named as Britain’s eighth most influential Jew by the Jewish Chronicle, which said the Labour leader could either top the list a year from now or disappear from it altogether, depending on his success next May in becoming Britain’s first Jewish prime minister since Disraeli.
According to the Jewish Chronicle, Miliband’s relationship with his religion, as well as with his community, has been “somewhat tortuous,” and noted that his criticism of Israel over the Gaza war has threatened to alienate him and his party from British Jews “for years to come.”
From the Jewish Daily Forward
How Iranian Jews Shaped Modern Los Angeles
A Tale of Culture Clashes And Revitalization
In no time at all, we went from being unknown to notorious. When I moved to Los Angeles in August 1977, perfectly intelligent, well-meaning Americans would ask me if we had roads and automobiles in Tehran, or if I had taken a camel to elementary school every day. The ones who did know Iran wanted to talk only about the ruins in Persepolis or Queen Farah’s jewels. Most people just couldn’t tell Iran from Iraq, Arab from Iranian, Shiite from Sunni. And they certainly couldn’t fathom such a thing as an Iranian Jew.
Oh, what a difference a year can make. By the summer of 1978, the high-rise condominium buildings in Westwood were filled to capacity with Iranians, and the kosher businesses in Pico-Robertson were tending to ever-increasing numbers of new customers. You would think this was a good thing.
Say what you will (and believe me, people do) about the way Iranian Jews have changed the social and economic landscape of Los Angeles; the place is a hell of a lot more interesting because of it. I know because I was here for the “before” pictures. My parents had a house in Trousdale since 1976; they had family in Pasadena and Beverly Hills. That’s how I learned about cream cheese, broccoli and “All in the Family” — we spent summers here, watched a lot of TV, and ate McDonalds a few times a week.
