Tibetan exiles prayed as they took part in a candlelight vigil in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, said he was willing to meet Chinese leaders, including President Hu Jintao, as Chinese authorities acknowledged that the unrest in Tibet had spread to other provinces.
Photo: Gurinder Osan/Associated Press
Pictures of the Day, March 20 - The New York Times, Slide Show, Slide 2 of 16
Laurie Copans, Ex-Israeli generals denounce checkpoints, AP, USATODAY.com, Feb. 13, 2008
JERUSALEM — A group of retired Israeli generals has launched a campaign urging the army to remove West Bank roadblocks, warning on Wednesday that the travel restrictions sow Palestinian hatred of Israel and stymie the peace process.
The 12 top former commanders say the hundreds of checkpoints dotting the West Bank are excessive and other military means can be used to prevent suicide bombings in Israel.
The Palestinians have long demanded that Israel remove the roadblocks as a way to build faith in recently renewed peace talks.
The generals have written a letter to Defense Minister Ehud Barak in an effort to persuade him to gradually remove the checkpoints, which severely restrict movement of the some 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and have crippled their economy. Israel maintains the checkpoints are vital for its security.
“You have to understand that there is damage in having the Palestinian people with its back to the wall, not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, unable to improve their economy, unable to move from place to place,” Ilan Paz, a signatory of the letter and a former head of the army’s administration of Palestinian civilian affairs, told Israel Radio. “This creates a reality that creates terror, and we have to remember that.”
Understanding Checkpoints, Israel Policy Forum, March 19, 2008
One of the most onerous aspects of the situation in the West Bank is the system of checkpoints which block Palestinians from getting to work, school, hospital or even to visit friends a few miles (sometimes a few blocks) away without being stopped and delayed, often for hours. This is well-known here in the United States, especially because the Bush administration has made clear that it wants many of the checkpoints removed. Less understood is that very few checkpoints separate Israel from the Palestinian areas. The overwhelming majority of them are internal barriers which serve not to protect Israel from terrorists but simply to ease life for settlers and which, in the process, make Palestinian lives miserable. In fact, no one suggests taking down any checkpoint or border crossing that separates Israel from the West Bank or Gaza. The entire controversy is over the internal checkpoints and their harmful effects on Palestinians trying to go about their lives.
Terrible as the situation is, some people find humor in it, so ridiculous is the rationale for aspects of the checkpoint system.
Like this for instance: A “Hummous Hut” employee is stopped by a soldier who misunderstands “hummous” for “Hamas.” A woman driving with her dog is stopped at a checkpoint and explains that, while she does not have papers to enter Jerusalem, her dog does. These light-hearted vignettes—from the 2005 Oscar-winning short film A West Bank Story and Suad Amiry’s book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, respectively—use humor to explain the physical barriers scattered throughout the West Bank in simple, human terms.
For Israelis, the reason for instituting roadblocks and checkpoints since the beginning of the second intifada in which over a thousand Israelis were killed is also simple and human—to stop suicide bombers from entering Israel. “The method of roadblocks has proven itself,” Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak told a group of soldiers on January 29th. “There is no way to effectively fight terrorism without actual daily control of the area,” he said.
However, according to a group of twelve retired Israeli generals, some of whom were involved in setting up West Bank barriers, the system of over 560 roadblocks and checkpoints, which increased by 50 percent in two and a half years, needlessly harms Palestinians and ineffectively protects Israelis. (According to the Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, as of November 2007 there were 99 permanent checkpoints, 36 of which were on Israel’s border and 63 within the West Bank. The remaining 486 barriers [as of November 2007] are roadblocks, such as dirt mounds, concrete blocks, fences, trenches, and gates.)
At a Van Leer Institute conference on February 13th, these experts, informally called the “checkpoint team,” presented a position paper, which they also sent Barak. In it they assert that, while some barriers stop terror, others damage the Palestinian economy, breed resentment, and, in turn, create more terror. According to Shlomo Brom, one of the group’s members and former chief of the army’s planning committee, quoted in Laurie Copans’ February 13th Associated Press article, “The feeling of humiliation and the hate the roadblocks create increase the tendency of Palestinians to join militant groups. . . .”
New Bin Laden tape threatens EU, BBC, March 20, 2008
In a new audio message purportedly from Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader threatens the EU over the re-printing of a cartoon offensive to Muslims.
The voice on it says the cartoon, re-published recently in all major Danish newspapers, was part of a crusade involving Pope Benedict XVI.
The drawing, first published in 2005, depicts the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
The voice on the audio has not yet been verified as belonging to Bin Laden.
The message comes on the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq.
But the BBC’s Jonathan Beale in Washington says that the message was probably released to not to mark that anniversary, but rather the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Muhammad, which Sunni Muslims mark on Thursday.
It appeared on a Islamist website that has carried al-Qaeda messages in the past.
Over the audio is a graphic with a still image of Bin Laden holding an AK-47 and bearing the logo of al-Sahab, the media wing of al-Qaeda. There is a written translation of the message in English.
‘Crowd pleaser’
John Pike, director of the defence think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said bin Laden had chosen to talk about the cartoon in an effort to remain relevant and provide direction to followers.
“His judgement is that it’s a consistent crowd-pleaser, and that if he has any hope of getting people stirred up, this is probably a good way to try to do it.”
Last month, Denmark’s leading newspapers reprinted one of 12 cartoons that first angered many Muslims when they were originally published in September 2005.
Anger in the Muslim world peaked in 2006 as newspapers in other countries published the cartoons.