US vetoes motion on Gaza attack

The US has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning an Israeli attack in Gaza that killed 18 civilians, including women and children.

The draft, which also condemned Israeli military operations in Gaza, followed Wednesday's attack in Beit Hanoun.

The US ambassador at the UN, John Bolton, described the text as unbalanced and politically motivated.

Ten of 15 Security Council members backed the resolution. Four abstained - Denmark, Japan, Slovakia and the UK.

This was the second time this year the US used its veto on a draft resolution on Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The US has a history of vetoing resolutions condemning Israel which it feels are biased against the country, says the BBC's Laura Trevelyan at the UN in New York.

'Not even-handed'

The draft resolution - backed by Arab, Islamic and non-aligned states and formally proposed by Qatar - called for a withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip.

It also asked the UN secretary general to set up a fact-finding mission into the deaths in Beit Hanoun.

The draft urged the Palestinian Authority to act to end violence - including rockets fired at southern Israel.

The US ambassador said he regretted the Palestinian loss of life, but disagreed with the language used in the resolution.

"This resolution does not display an even-handed characterisation of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace to which we aspire and for which we are working assiduously," he said.

'Green light'

An Israeli government spokesman described the veto as "very satisfactory".

"The draft resolution did not stipulate that what happened at Beit Hanun was a tragic error," Avi Pazner told AFP news agency.

But Palestinian cabinet spokesman Ghazi Hamad of Hamas told Reuters the veto was "a signal that the US had given legitimacy to the massacres and a green light to [Israel] to ... carry out more massacres".

Qatar's ambassador said the credibility of the Security Council had been called into question by the vote and the cycle of violence in the Middle East would continue.

Israel launched its operation in and around Beit Hanoun last month in an effort to root out militants firing rockets.

The deaths were caused when what witnesses described as a volley of tank shells hit a built-up civilian area. Many of the dead were from one extended family, and included several women and children.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apologised for the attack, describing it as a "technical failure".

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6139968.stm

Solidarity With Gaza

The International Action Center condemns the criminal U.S.-backed Israeli bombing massacre on Gaza, and the mass murder of 200 and serious wounding of another 300 Palestinians. We call upon the progressive, anti-war and workers’ movement in the United States to join the angry, growing worldwide protests of these latest Israeli war crimes with U.S. complicity. We refuse impunity to the Israeli state and its backers.

The rightist Zionist regime had the arrogance to announce in advance its intention to strike Gaza’s embattled civilians. Like every serious Israeli move, this latest assault was done with a U.S. green light using U.S. weapons and spy services.

Compounding this arrogance, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has already said, "The operation will go on and be intensified as long as necessary," (AFP, Dec. 27) exposing his genocidal intent. The Israeli attacks, targeting civilian population centers and coinciding with the end of the school day, reveal a malicious intent to inflict as many casualties as possible, including on children.

Under Israeli siege for over a year, the people of Gaza had been struggling to survive with insufficient food, power and a damaged and depleted medical-care system. The world has condemned this siege as an Israeli crime against humanity. The Israelis have carried out this murderous siege without protest from their powerful allies in Western Europe and the United States. And the Palestinian people in Gaza have faced down the siege over 18 months, providing once again an example for the world’s people that the criminal U.S.-Israeli alliance has grown desperate to tear down.

Like the bombing, the siege itself is a U.S.-Israeli war crime, with the billions in yearly U.S. aid used to bomb the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, cut off their electricity, and kick them out of their homes. Meanwhile, back home, the same U.S. government lets banks foreclose on workers’ homes and bosses lay off millions of workers and let tens of millions live in fear of an illness that will wipe out their savings—if the crisis hasn’t already.

We have no interest in allowing the U.S.-Israeli genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people of Gaza. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people against U.S. imperialism and Israel, Washington’s outpost in the Middle East.

We demand that U.S. aid to Israel be cut to zero, and that this money be used instead for reparations for the Palestinian people, to ensure their right to return, and for homes, jobs, health care and education for working people in the U.S.

Protest demonstrations have taken place already in Amman, Damascus, Cairo, in the cities of the West Bank and in mostly Arab towns within Israel’s 1967 boundaries. Organizations in Brussels, Madrid and other European centers have also called for protests. In the United States, the first action has been called for New York’s Rockefeller Center, at 50th Street and Fifth Avenues, for 2 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 28.

There demonstrators will say:

Defend Palestine!

Solidarity with heroic Gaza!

Stand in solidarity with Palestine!


ALL OUT TO PROTEST THE MASSACRES IN GAZA!

NO BLANKET COVERAGE WHEN THE TERROR IS AMERICAN

Couldn't have said it better myself. Well put, Billy Blum!--Pete

Bill Blum - The next time you encounter a defender of American foreign policy, someone insisting that something like Mumbai justifies Washington's rhetorical and military attacks against Islam, you might want to point out that the United States does the same on a regular basis. For seven years in Afghanistan, almost six in Iraq, to give only the two most obvious examples . . . breaking down doors and machine-gunning strangers, infidels, traumatizing children for life, firing missiles into occupied houses, exploding bombs all over the place, pausing to torture . . . every few days dropping bombs on Pakistan or Afghanistan. . . bombing wedding parties, one after another, 20 or 30 or 70 killed, all terrorists of course, often including top al-Qaeda leaders, the number one or number two man, so we're told; so not completely mindless, not totally random. . .

Does any of that depress you like Mumbai? . . . "The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials. . . The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States," the New York Times informs us. So it's all nice and legal, not an attack upon civilization by a bunch of escaped mental patients. Maybe the Mumbai terrorists also have a piece of paper, from some authority, saying that it's okay what they did.