The bigger picture to solve this should be concentrated on the Peace Truce instead of wasting money to carry out the investigation aftermath.
I condemned the act of war & the used of any weapon to destruct or destroy but the root of all this defensive or offensive attack is the conflict between those 2 states.
Solving that problem & you can spend your time doing something good for the planet.
Human rights watch accuses Israel of committing war crimes during war on Gaza
NEW YORK, (PIC)-- A report issued by the New York-based human rights watch (HRW) charged IOF troops with using deliberately and extensively white phosphorus bombs on densely populated areas during the war on the Gaza Strip which "might constitute" war crimes.
Link
The report documents Israel's extensive use of white phosphorus munitions during its 22-day military operations in Gaza, from December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009.
Based on in-depth investigations in Gaza, the report concludes that IOF troops repeatedly exploded white phosphorus munitions in the air over populated areas, killing and injuring civilians, and damaging civilian structures, including a school, a market, a humanitarian aid warehouse and a hospital.
"White phosphorus munitions did not kill most of the civilian casualties in Gaza; many more died from missiles, bombs, heavy artillery, tank shells, and small arms fire, but their use in densely populated neighborhoods, including downtown Gaza city, violated international humanitarian law (the laws of war), which requires taking all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm and prohibits indiscriminate attacks," the report underlined.
Human rights watch called on the UN and the US, which supplied Israel with white phosphorus munitions, to investigate in these war crimes and unnecessary deaths of civilians.
The report pointed out that Israel's desire to investigate its use of white phosphorus is welcome, but history suggests that the possibility of an objective examination is slim, adding that previous IOF investigations have failed to look objectively at alleged laws of war violations by Israeli soldiers and commanders.
In the case of the last military war on Gaza, the report said that Israeli military investigators had already suggested that soldiers and commanders did no wrong, even before the investigations were complete.
It also refuted Israeli allegations about legal use of such weapons during the war on Gaza, saying that if the aim was to create smokescreens, the IOF troops possess non-lethal alternatives to the highly incendiary white phosphorus manufactured in Israel.
The report underscored that the Israeli government tries to justify the high number of civilian casualties in Gaza through repeatedly blaming Hamas for using civilians as human shields, but human rights watch found no evidence of Hamas using civilians as human shields in the vicinity at the time of the attacks.
Read more...
Friday, March 27, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Why does the world media love to hate Israel? (Haaretz)
Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who’s to love? Who’s to hate? WHO TO JUDGE?
Why does the world media love to hate Israel? (Bradley Burston)
I was just in the States, speaking to members of Ameinu, an organization which, the times notwithstanding, remains outspoken both in its support for peace and its support for Israel.
Among the topics I was asked to address was the portrayal of the Jewish state in the news media. Phrased a little less delicately, the issue amounts to: "Why does the press love to hate Israel?"
Link
The question has taken on an unusual urgency of late, its pivot points Israel's war in Gaza, the debate over engaging a proto-nuclear Iran, the UN's upcoming Durban II World Conference against Racism, Avigdor Lieberman's Arab-baiting campaign for Knesset, and, not least, disclosures in Haaretz, Ma'ariv, and Israeli broadcast media quoting IDF troops describing moral failings during the Gaza offensive.
Allow me to begin with the underlying first question.
Are there journalists who truly dislike Jews, and allow their Jew-hate to color their coverage?
Yes. I've met and, in fact, worked with, a number of them. Some of them, it will come as no surprise to report, are themselves Jewish. But does this explain or account for a significant portion of negative coverage of Israel in the media? It does not. Not at all.
What does?
1. What Israel says, and what Israel does.
A. In all the world, there is no bait more tempting for a reporter than Israel's assertion that its military is the "most moral in the world." This is the socially clueless Goliath wearing a sign reading "Kick Me." It is the one irresistible soft target of sound bites.
B. Anyone who has been in a war, as a participant, reporter, or civilian bystander, knows that any war, every war, spawns war crimes. The question, when examining the Cast Lead operation in Gaza, was whether there was something different, something exceptional and intentional and, especially, a matter of policy and command direction, that either trapped or targeted large numbers of civilians, resulting in a human tragedy far beyond the horrible reality of the very fact of warfare.
Was, in other words, this war different from all other wars? Or was this war the trigger for an outpouring of anti-Israel animus that was, for lack of a better term, disproportionate?
Although the jury is still out pending further independent inquiry, the likely answer to both is: Yes.
C. There is reason to believe that, at least in certain units, massive and, in retrospect, excessive firepower was employed, the apparent result of a miscalculation about how, and where, Hamas fighters were likely to engage in combat. In the main, Hamas, whose men had fought to the death in previous encounters, refrained from engaging the IDF at all.
There remains a need for intensive and impartial investigation to determine the extent and the cause of actions which led directly to the deaths of innocents.
D. The fact that may be most difficult to digest - either for haters of Israel or its most ardently positive supporters - is that Israel's armed forces have always been marked by an extraordinary degree of autonomy, down to the level of the individual grunt.
As a direct result, there were instances of Israeli soldiers who risked their own lives to save those of innocents, and there were Israeli soldiers who were predisposed to take the lives of innocents without just cause.
2. What Palestinians say that Israel does.
There are journalists who accept without reservation or corroboration the accounts of Palestinians regarding the actions of Israeli soldiers. There are television networks, some of them financed by Qatar, whose coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even during studio interviews, is accompanied by unending, obscenely graphic footage of infants and children wounded and killed in the war.
The first rule of covering the Holy Land is also in some ways the only rule:
3. Everyone lies to the press here. Everyone. All the time.
This is similar to, but not the same as:
4. Middle East news, like news in general, is marketing.
We are, all of us, in marketing. We are, all of us, in the business of selling a story. This includes the eyewitness, the victim, the military commander, the Hamas official, the Israeli spokesman, the betrayed, the bereaved, the film crew, the pundit.
Every news outlet has a lens through which it believes the story will best sell to an increasingly news-inured public. Every individual, Israeli or Palestinian, has an axe to grind, and a world full of good reasons to grind it.
5. Sometimes Israel looks bad because it is made to look bad. At other times, however, Israeli actions appear brutal because they, in fact, are.
Much has been made of what may be the least translatable word in the Hebrew language, Hasbara, literally, the act of explaining:
"It is true that the world media, generally speaking, doesn't like Israel very much, and stacks the deck against it, but good hasbara starts with not allowing soldiers to vandalize Palestinian homes and shoot Palestinian women," writes Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, a veteran of the IDF, of the disclosures over the past week in Haaretz.
"Public relations isn't a morally relevant category, in any case: The crucial question is, how should a civilized country behave when confronting barbarism? With barbarism? Or with respect for innocent life? Pardon me for saying so, but the Jewish people didn't struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks.
"Please don't get me wrong: I'm not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state. It risks making a just cause - Jewish nationhood - seem unjust, and it ultimately endangers what it is supposed to protect."
6. Israelis, as a people and individually, are execrable at public relations because they abhor and distrust the very concept.
There is a reason why Israelis are so breathtakingly inept at furthering their own cause.
It is not only becuse this war was a frank and literally misguided attempt to redress years of misguidance. Or because the war between the Jews and the Arabs, this war which has raged for more than a hundred years, has robbed both sides of its ability to see the humanity of the other.
It is also because Israelis hate the very idea of public relations. They live in a country which has been under effective world quarantine for nearly all if its history.They live in a society whose trait of unbridled openness has become something of a learning disability. They speak a language which is light years and thousands of literal years away from television English. They are bathed in a culture which insulates itself and armors itself and has had little reason to believe the world will give it a fair shake.They have a shared, largely unspoken truth which is based, in part, on the world's inability to fathom their behavior. And they believe that no matter what they do, much of the world is likely to condemn them. And in this,at least, they have seldom been proven wrong.
Read more...
Why does the world media love to hate Israel? (Bradley Burston)
I was just in the States, speaking to members of Ameinu, an organization which, the times notwithstanding, remains outspoken both in its support for peace and its support for Israel.
Among the topics I was asked to address was the portrayal of the Jewish state in the news media. Phrased a little less delicately, the issue amounts to: "Why does the press love to hate Israel?"
Link
The question has taken on an unusual urgency of late, its pivot points Israel's war in Gaza, the debate over engaging a proto-nuclear Iran, the UN's upcoming Durban II World Conference against Racism, Avigdor Lieberman's Arab-baiting campaign for Knesset, and, not least, disclosures in Haaretz, Ma'ariv, and Israeli broadcast media quoting IDF troops describing moral failings during the Gaza offensive.
Allow me to begin with the underlying first question.
Are there journalists who truly dislike Jews, and allow their Jew-hate to color their coverage?
Yes. I've met and, in fact, worked with, a number of them. Some of them, it will come as no surprise to report, are themselves Jewish. But does this explain or account for a significant portion of negative coverage of Israel in the media? It does not. Not at all.
What does?
1. What Israel says, and what Israel does.
A. In all the world, there is no bait more tempting for a reporter than Israel's assertion that its military is the "most moral in the world." This is the socially clueless Goliath wearing a sign reading "Kick Me." It is the one irresistible soft target of sound bites.
B. Anyone who has been in a war, as a participant, reporter, or civilian bystander, knows that any war, every war, spawns war crimes. The question, when examining the Cast Lead operation in Gaza, was whether there was something different, something exceptional and intentional and, especially, a matter of policy and command direction, that either trapped or targeted large numbers of civilians, resulting in a human tragedy far beyond the horrible reality of the very fact of warfare.
Was, in other words, this war different from all other wars? Or was this war the trigger for an outpouring of anti-Israel animus that was, for lack of a better term, disproportionate?
Although the jury is still out pending further independent inquiry, the likely answer to both is: Yes.
C. There is reason to believe that, at least in certain units, massive and, in retrospect, excessive firepower was employed, the apparent result of a miscalculation about how, and where, Hamas fighters were likely to engage in combat. In the main, Hamas, whose men had fought to the death in previous encounters, refrained from engaging the IDF at all.
There remains a need for intensive and impartial investigation to determine the extent and the cause of actions which led directly to the deaths of innocents.
D. The fact that may be most difficult to digest - either for haters of Israel or its most ardently positive supporters - is that Israel's armed forces have always been marked by an extraordinary degree of autonomy, down to the level of the individual grunt.
As a direct result, there were instances of Israeli soldiers who risked their own lives to save those of innocents, and there were Israeli soldiers who were predisposed to take the lives of innocents without just cause.
2. What Palestinians say that Israel does.
There are journalists who accept without reservation or corroboration the accounts of Palestinians regarding the actions of Israeli soldiers. There are television networks, some of them financed by Qatar, whose coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even during studio interviews, is accompanied by unending, obscenely graphic footage of infants and children wounded and killed in the war.
The first rule of covering the Holy Land is also in some ways the only rule:
3. Everyone lies to the press here. Everyone. All the time.
This is similar to, but not the same as:
4. Middle East news, like news in general, is marketing.
We are, all of us, in marketing. We are, all of us, in the business of selling a story. This includes the eyewitness, the victim, the military commander, the Hamas official, the Israeli spokesman, the betrayed, the bereaved, the film crew, the pundit.
Every news outlet has a lens through which it believes the story will best sell to an increasingly news-inured public. Every individual, Israeli or Palestinian, has an axe to grind, and a world full of good reasons to grind it.
5. Sometimes Israel looks bad because it is made to look bad. At other times, however, Israeli actions appear brutal because they, in fact, are.
Much has been made of what may be the least translatable word in the Hebrew language, Hasbara, literally, the act of explaining:
"It is true that the world media, generally speaking, doesn't like Israel very much, and stacks the deck against it, but good hasbara starts with not allowing soldiers to vandalize Palestinian homes and shoot Palestinian women," writes Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, a veteran of the IDF, of the disclosures over the past week in Haaretz.
"Public relations isn't a morally relevant category, in any case: The crucial question is, how should a civilized country behave when confronting barbarism? With barbarism? Or with respect for innocent life? Pardon me for saying so, but the Jewish people didn't struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks.
"Please don't get me wrong: I'm not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state. It risks making a just cause - Jewish nationhood - seem unjust, and it ultimately endangers what it is supposed to protect."
6. Israelis, as a people and individually, are execrable at public relations because they abhor and distrust the very concept.
There is a reason why Israelis are so breathtakingly inept at furthering their own cause.
It is not only becuse this war was a frank and literally misguided attempt to redress years of misguidance. Or because the war between the Jews and the Arabs, this war which has raged for more than a hundred years, has robbed both sides of its ability to see the humanity of the other.
It is also because Israelis hate the very idea of public relations. They live in a country which has been under effective world quarantine for nearly all if its history.They live in a society whose trait of unbridled openness has become something of a learning disability. They speak a language which is light years and thousands of literal years away from television English. They are bathed in a culture which insulates itself and armors itself and has had little reason to believe the world will give it a fair shake.They have a shared, largely unspoken truth which is based, in part, on the world's inability to fathom their behavior. And they believe that no matter what they do, much of the world is likely to condemn them. And in this,at least, they have seldom been proven wrong.
Read more...
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Broad Daylight Roberry (16 March 2009)
I got this youtube link in the forwarded email few days back & were surprised how this day-light robbers is so bold to carry out the crime.
From the email, the incident happened on 16th March of 2009 in Taman Maluri, Cheras (Kuala Lumpur). 3 motobikers followed the victim’s car at far till he reached the main gate. Then, with big machete on-hand, they chasing the victim rushing to gate while victim’s wife inside the car remained shock & stoned as I believed they have hold her husband hostaged.
For all of you out there, do be extra careful & be alerted even within the compound of your own home.
CCTV Recorded
Read more...
From the email, the incident happened on 16th March of 2009 in Taman Maluri, Cheras (Kuala Lumpur). 3 motobikers followed the victim’s car at far till he reached the main gate. Then, with big machete on-hand, they chasing the victim rushing to gate while victim’s wife inside the car remained shock & stoned as I believed they have hold her husband hostaged.
For all of you out there, do be extra careful & be alerted even within the compound of your own home.
CCTV Recorded
Read more...
Monday, March 23, 2009
English or Bahasa Malaysia in Science & Maths Teaching?
Following blog’s comments made by our premier in chedet & columnist with regards to the issue of using English as a medium to teach mathematics & science, I felt that this issues has been exaggerated to the highest level which involved various political parties. Setting the right educational path for future Malaysian generation has been shouldered to the selected leaders. It is an Expectation. Education minister should list out the pros & cons so people is aware & understand this is needed for the future of Malaysia. This is so obvious that even the 2nd/3rd world country is practicing it while we are aiming to become Developed Country in 2020 failed to see it. You can argue about nationalism but what good this can do if the nation is lagging behind & people are poor? I do not condemn the process of democracy but some decisions are meant to be made with sacrifices. So far, I only see some un-official members are commenting & supporting this decision like chedet & MalaysianInsider. While the Educational minister has kept a mum on this, what do you think?
MalaysianInsider
Chedet
Read more...
MalaysianInsider
Chedet
Read more...
Friday, March 20, 2009
Government spending good money on silly projects (The Malaysian Insider)
Malaysia Finance minister re-iterate again yesterday on its stand on no plan to reduce individual income tax rate from RM27bil subsidies allocated for various industry including corporation tax reliefs.
While some are claimed the money were not well spent. What is your say?
Government spending good money on silly projects- The Malaysian Insider
FEB 27 — Economic stimulus is all the rage it seems, both in the United States and back home in Malaysia. While I am sceptical of stimulus in general, our government’s spending plans are increasingly ridiculous and insensible day by day. Instead of leaving the era of white elephant megaprojects behind, we seem to be pursuing less obscenely grandiose but equally impractical infrastructure projects.
Link
The basic idea in the minds of stimulus and economic pump-priming proponents is that it is cheaper to borrow money in a recession. People and firms are not confident in the economy, and so they are reluctant to lend money out to any random person. Fortunately, the government can soak up these surplus funds and invest them in something useful for a low cost.
That is the theory anyway; the reality is that the government rarely seems to do much useful investing with our money. Yes, granted, they have brought a lot of “development” to our shores. The North-South Expressway, our various ports, our schools, our universities, so on and so forth — all good stuff. But for almost every good project, you can name an equal number which are just downright bad ideas.
To take one egregious example, the federal government is presently proposing to spend RM9 billion on the “Pahang-Selangor Raw Water Transfer Project”. The crux of the project is that it wants to build a gigantic pipeline to funnel water from Pahang to Selangor. Why? Because the federal government believes that by next year we will be facing severe water shortages in Selangor unless this pipeline is built.
The problem is that it has made similar projections before and been severely wide of the mark. Its original projections indicated a shortage would arise by 2005; no such shortage came about. The government is assuming we’ll be consuming 600 litres of water per person per day in Selangor, when the typical Singaporean consumes a bit over 300 litres per day, and the typical urban denizen in a developed country even less! At the moment the consumption in Selangor is 300 litres per person per day, but for no good reason whatsoever, the federal government insists we will somehow run short of water unless we build this RM9 billion white elephant.
And we can go on to name all sorts of similar projects. What about that harebrained idea of transporting electricity across the South China Sea from the Bakun Dam in Sarawak? Or the white elephant of a Customs outpost for the unused crooked bridge development? These are all projects that have been in the works for years and years — yes, even that ridiculous scheme to build a useless giant water pipe from Pahang to Selangor.
Now, if the government takes its own bloody sweet time and still comes up with these inane wastes of money, can we really expect anything better from the stimulus package? The government is going to be rushing itself like crazy to get the package out the door as soon as possible, and that means there will be hardly any checks on the projects that go into this package. Honestly, I would be shocked and happy if the ridiculous projects in the stimulus package we finally see are only equally pointless as the others I just listed.
Really, the biggest problem with our economy as far as government spending goes isn’t that the government does not spend enough. The problem is the government spends money on very silly and very pointless projects which don’t yield any real benefits for us. There are a lot of good things the government could be spending its money on.
Here’s an idea for a stimulus: raise the salaries of teachers and provide more and better training for them. Honestly, even if the government can’t really train teachers properly, RM9 billion would be much better off being spent on paying teachers better wages or training them better, as opposed to being spent on a stupid pipeline or building even more schools. Or another actual good idea: upgrading and expanding public transport in all major urban areas. We can argue about whether these are the best ways to spend our taxes, but there is no question that education and public transport deserve priority over harebrained schemes like building a dam to produce electricity which will just be lost in transit across the South China Sea.
As sympathetic as I am to some of the ideas behind economic stimulus, I honestly believe the government’s stimulus package is going to be a bad thing for our economy. Most of the spending will be just as redundant and as pointless as the government’s past track record on infrastructure-building and other such spending projects, if not much worse. The government has been unable to get its priorities right for years and years, and there is no sign at all that this will change.
If Pakatan Rakyat is smart, it will capitalise on its plans and manifestos to point the right way. Both the DAP and PKR especially have well-developed plans which will provide for the poorest income groups while removing severe restrictions on private enterprise. Pakatan’s plans, though far from perfect, are very much in line with basic economic principles, and could prove a deadly weapon against Barisan Nasional’s ridiculously poor track record of throwing money at whatever constituencies have by-elections, and building white elephant after white elephant. The upcoming stimulus package could very well be Barisan’s undoing, if Pakatan plays its cards right.
Read more...
While some are claimed the money were not well spent. What is your say?
Government spending good money on silly projects- The Malaysian Insider
FEB 27 — Economic stimulus is all the rage it seems, both in the United States and back home in Malaysia. While I am sceptical of stimulus in general, our government’s spending plans are increasingly ridiculous and insensible day by day. Instead of leaving the era of white elephant megaprojects behind, we seem to be pursuing less obscenely grandiose but equally impractical infrastructure projects.
Link
The basic idea in the minds of stimulus and economic pump-priming proponents is that it is cheaper to borrow money in a recession. People and firms are not confident in the economy, and so they are reluctant to lend money out to any random person. Fortunately, the government can soak up these surplus funds and invest them in something useful for a low cost.
That is the theory anyway; the reality is that the government rarely seems to do much useful investing with our money. Yes, granted, they have brought a lot of “development” to our shores. The North-South Expressway, our various ports, our schools, our universities, so on and so forth — all good stuff. But for almost every good project, you can name an equal number which are just downright bad ideas.
To take one egregious example, the federal government is presently proposing to spend RM9 billion on the “Pahang-Selangor Raw Water Transfer Project”. The crux of the project is that it wants to build a gigantic pipeline to funnel water from Pahang to Selangor. Why? Because the federal government believes that by next year we will be facing severe water shortages in Selangor unless this pipeline is built.
The problem is that it has made similar projections before and been severely wide of the mark. Its original projections indicated a shortage would arise by 2005; no such shortage came about. The government is assuming we’ll be consuming 600 litres of water per person per day in Selangor, when the typical Singaporean consumes a bit over 300 litres per day, and the typical urban denizen in a developed country even less! At the moment the consumption in Selangor is 300 litres per person per day, but for no good reason whatsoever, the federal government insists we will somehow run short of water unless we build this RM9 billion white elephant.
And we can go on to name all sorts of similar projects. What about that harebrained idea of transporting electricity across the South China Sea from the Bakun Dam in Sarawak? Or the white elephant of a Customs outpost for the unused crooked bridge development? These are all projects that have been in the works for years and years — yes, even that ridiculous scheme to build a useless giant water pipe from Pahang to Selangor.
Now, if the government takes its own bloody sweet time and still comes up with these inane wastes of money, can we really expect anything better from the stimulus package? The government is going to be rushing itself like crazy to get the package out the door as soon as possible, and that means there will be hardly any checks on the projects that go into this package. Honestly, I would be shocked and happy if the ridiculous projects in the stimulus package we finally see are only equally pointless as the others I just listed.
Really, the biggest problem with our economy as far as government spending goes isn’t that the government does not spend enough. The problem is the government spends money on very silly and very pointless projects which don’t yield any real benefits for us. There are a lot of good things the government could be spending its money on.
Here’s an idea for a stimulus: raise the salaries of teachers and provide more and better training for them. Honestly, even if the government can’t really train teachers properly, RM9 billion would be much better off being spent on paying teachers better wages or training them better, as opposed to being spent on a stupid pipeline or building even more schools. Or another actual good idea: upgrading and expanding public transport in all major urban areas. We can argue about whether these are the best ways to spend our taxes, but there is no question that education and public transport deserve priority over harebrained schemes like building a dam to produce electricity which will just be lost in transit across the South China Sea.
As sympathetic as I am to some of the ideas behind economic stimulus, I honestly believe the government’s stimulus package is going to be a bad thing for our economy. Most of the spending will be just as redundant and as pointless as the government’s past track record on infrastructure-building and other such spending projects, if not much worse. The government has been unable to get its priorities right for years and years, and there is no sign at all that this will change.
If Pakatan Rakyat is smart, it will capitalise on its plans and manifestos to point the right way. Both the DAP and PKR especially have well-developed plans which will provide for the poorest income groups while removing severe restrictions on private enterprise. Pakatan’s plans, though far from perfect, are very much in line with basic economic principles, and could prove a deadly weapon against Barisan Nasional’s ridiculously poor track record of throwing money at whatever constituencies have by-elections, and building white elephant after white elephant. The upcoming stimulus package could very well be Barisan’s undoing, if Pakatan plays its cards right.
Read more...
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