CPT attacked by Israeli settlers

Kim Lamberty and Chris Brown, volunteering with Christian Peacemakers Team in Hebron, were accosted by five masked settlers dressed in black and wielding chains as they escorted a group of Palestinian children to school, something CPT has been doing for almost a decade.

"We were accompanying the children because they have to walk through a settler area. When we got to that area five men came out. They had chains and black masks. The children ran away and they came after Chris and me," said Kim, 44. "They threw me to the ground and beat me and the same with Chris and then they disappeared into the trees," Her arm and knee were broken in the incident while Chris, 39, sustained a punctured lung. Kim said she was certain the assailants were settlers as she said that Palestinians did not dare visit the area which is near an Israeli settlement. Chris told BBC news: "They threw a stone at my head which knocked me over and then whipped me with chains. They normally throw stones at us or fire their guns over our heads - but this is the most vicious assault so far." The incident has been almost completely unreported in the US press.

CPT was invited to work in Hebron ten years ago, to reduce violence in the tense city were 600 militant settlers living in an enclave in the heart of Hebron, supported by 1,200 soldiers. This seriously disrupts the life of the 120,000 Palestinians citizens. CPT is also working in Baghdad, currently being almost the only organisation remaining in Iraq with the threat of kidnappings.

Hostages freed!!

What wonderful news! The first ray of light in an awefully long time in Iraq. There was an amazing outpouring of support from around the world, ranging from a statement of support from Hizbollah in Lebanon, to a hunger strike by an exiled Algerian Islamicist. Over 10,000 people signed our petition and hundreds of groups registered their support. We struggled through three weeks of rumours and counter rumours but no solid evidence, and were beginning to lose hope... when suddenly there are the two smiling faces which have become so familiar around the world! It has not been consistently reported, but the Iraqis Ra'ad and Mahnoaz have also been freed. Alhamdulillah! I'm heading off to Washington this evening to try and lobby in support of Iraq at the IMF Autumn meetings, it's going to be a tough and frustrating couple of days I expect, but I'm feeling encouraged by this wonderful news.

Hunting for perspective

I was protesting in Parliament Square once again yestarday. This time the topic was not Iraq, at least not directly. In an attempt to divert public attention from the continuing abuses of the Occupation, Tony Blair announced our of the blue last week that he will rush through a bill to turn hundreds of thousands of ordinary British citizens into criminals through banning hunting, sometheing he feels doesn't fit into our civilised world of fast food and depleted uranium bullets.

Tony Blair doesn't seem to give a stuff about more than 13,000+ Iraqi civilians who have been killed by the Coalition (two days ago I met a couragous 11yr girl from Basra who lost 17 family members and one leg when Blair & Bush bombed her home in Basra), but apparently he cares a great deal about preventing foxes and hares from dying natural predatory deaths, in a chase as old as evolution.

In order to force this Bill through against the wishes of the public and the more sensible second chamber, Blair is taking two very unusual step. Firstly he will use the powerful Parliament Act, for only about the sixth time in a century, and secondly he wants to delay the implementation of the bill for two years in order to avoid nonviolent civil disobedience through people violating this law in the run up to the next general election.

There are plenty of moral grounds upon which one can judge hunting negatively, but very few of the opponents of hunting, and almost certainly none of the 339 MPs who voted for a ban yestarday, actually live by a system of ethics (such as Janism) consistent with such a view. Furthermore, irrespective of their personal ethics, by banning hunting they will be violating the civil liberties upon which our democracy is meant to be based.

I am a Green activist who has been largely vegetarian for 8 years, and I personally consider hunting to be an exteremely positive pursuit which is in tune with nature and nutures in most people a love and concern for our landscape and ecology. I followed hounds for a couple of years as a boy (though I haven't done so for almost a decade now), and that was one of main stimuli which impressed on me the importance of the environment (the primary stimulus was becoming a Christian and recognizing the intrinisic value of God's Creation).

For a closer scruitiny of hunting under the lense of a wide range of ethical systems, from utilitarianism to Islam to environmental ethics see my philosophy thesis: The Ethics of Hunting.

Acknowledgement at last...

It's a strange world! Last night I went to the launch of a friend's book on third world debt "IOU: The Debt Threat and How to Diffuse it"(Go out and buy it now! On page x you'll spot got my first ever book acknowledgement alongside Bono, Jeffrey Sachs and Ann Pettifor!... Okay, not exactly alongside, more like way down below in the small print, so my ego has been kept in check :-) but still I was really childishly excited by it). Anyhow, I had a couple of surprising and intriguing conversations at the launch party. One was with some investors in "distressed debt" (or debt vultures as some people call them) who had gate crashed the event to investigate the opposition and they even tried to lure me over to the dark side with the promise of a job with a fat pay check.

Another interesting discussion was with a friendly unassuming lady who turned out to be fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. She was a classic example of not judging people, as she didn't at all fit the mould one might expect. She was very well read and insightful (even when fairly drunk), and we had one of the most interesting conversations I've had in weeks, ranging from Bertrand Russel and moral relativist through climate change, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and eventually focusing in on the way the poor subsidise the rich through cost-externalisation in international trade and the related spiritual decay caused by consumerism (something she was extremely worried about, though we didn't get around to discussing whether the fashion world is one of the leading drivers of this). The parting line of our conversation was "anyone with religious beliefs is sick in the head", so possibly a good thing I hadn't mentioned that I'm a committed Christian.

Ghareeb

I'm overjoyed that a friend in Baghdad has just sent me a photo of Ghareeb, my friend who was killed on 20th August returning from delivering medicines to Najaf and protecting Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni. I gave Ghareeb my camera when I left on 10th August, and he was killed before he had a chance to email me the photos I'd taken, so I had nothing to remember him by until this photo arrived.

The photo shows Ghareeb with me and another friend (who's face has been blacked out for his own protection). It's hard to believe that this fun evening in Baghdad, discussing very serious things and yet also joking about, was only a month ago. A few days after this photo was taken Enzo Baldoni had arrived and we had another fun evening in the same splace. Today I'm going to be having another evening mixing the serious and the jovial - you need to hang onto both to stay human. I'm meeting two of Ghareeb's closest friends and we're going to think about ways of commemorating him and carrying on his humanitarian work through starting a charitable foundation in his honour.

The bloodshed continues

As American planes once again pound Fallujah, at Sheik Omar Clinic, a big book records 10,363 violent deaths in Baghdad province since the war began last year. This figures cover only one of Iraq's 18 provinces and do not include people who died in such flashpoint cities as Najaf, Karbala, Fallujah, Tikrit and Ramadi. The Iraqi Health Ministry began tabulating civilian deaths in April, when heavy fighting broke out in Fallujah and Najaf. The ministry's figures indicate 2,956 civilians, including 125 children, died across the country "as the result of a military act" between April 5 and Aug. 31. Of those, 829 were in Baghdad, the ministry figures say. Dr. Abdul-Razzak Abdul-Amir, head of the Baghdad coroner's office said "Our work here has multiplied by at least 10 times compared to prewar periods."

Ra'ad

The Iraqi man, Ra'ad Ali Abdul-Aziz, kidnapped along with the Italian girls is a longtime friend of many people from Voices in the Wilderness. Here is an article he wrote on star gazing. One benefit of blackouts and powercuts during the Iran-Iraq war was that Ra'ad as a boy was able to watch the stars without light polution! "I forgot the wars and the battles and I just thought about astronomy."

Ed Kinane from Voices writes: "My most vivid picture of Raad was at his office. A friend had brought him a large box of books from overseas and I watched as Raad unpacked that box. He removed each book slowly, as if doing so were a kind of sacrament. With each new book he examined, his face shone with delight. With each book he exclaimed which of his friends or which of his students – he taught at the University – he would share it with."

Sign Occupation Watch petition

Occupation Watch, of which Un Ponte Per is a member, has issued a petition for the release of Ra'ad, Mahnoaz and the two Simonas and the end of the occupation. I've put a version of it online which you can sign here: http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/freeourfriends. Also I'm started a weblog for news and developments: http://freeourfriends.blogspot.com which any friends of the kidnappees are welcome to write on.

Support from Falluja for Simonas

Italian newspaper Repubblica (which has a timeline here)reports that in a post on the site Islamic-Minbar.com a group calling itself Ansar El Zawahri claims responsibility for kidnapping the Simonas, however Mohammed Salah, editor of Al Hayat has expressed doubt about the claim. This kidnapping is even harder to understand than Enzo's. Un Ponte Per Baghdad is well known throughout Iraq for supporting the Iraqi people through the long years of sanctions, in opposition to the war and now demonstrating solidarity through these difficult years of occupation. The kidnapping was carefully targetted - the kidnappers knew their names, where there office was and when they would be there. (photo: Simona Pari on left, Simona Torretta on right)

A statement of support of them (in arabic) has been issued by the human rights organisation in Fallujah, where Bridges to Baghdad provided medical aid during the siege in April. Also Islamonline reports a plea issued by Mohammed Bachar Sharif Al-Faidhi from the Committee of Muslim Ulema, Iraqi's most senior organisation of Sunni Muslim scholars; brothers Mohammad and Jaouad Mahdi Al-Khalisi from the Iraqi reform council; and Shlemon Wardnuni, the Catholic bishop of Baghdad: “In the name of God the merciful... we urge the kidnappers to release immediately and without pre-conditions the two Italians -- who were working in the interest of Iraq and the Iraqi people -- and their Iraqi colleagues.”

More Italians kidnapped

A few hours ago (5pm Baghdad time) 20 armed men, claiming to be government agents, kidnapped two Italian aid workers from their Baghdad offices along with two Iraqi collegues (Raad Ali Aziz and Mahnaz Bassam). Simona Pari and Simona Torretta were working for the charity Un Ponte Per Baghdad (Bridges to Baghdad) which has beening working in Iraq since 1991, inititally against sanctions. These wonderful ladies were friends of Ghareeb and Enzo who were murdered a few weeks ago. I have not met either of them but know them to be good people who are supporting the Iraqi people. Please pray for their safety.

• English news search for "Simona Pari"
• Italian news search, translated into English

Controversy over Enzo's death

It's painful writing about this, but here is a quick update on developments with regard to Enzo: (1) The Italian media had been saying that the video submitted to Al-Jazera featured a violent execution, however the station has denied this and said that the 15 seconds of footage only had "one scene showing ... the body partly hidden in sand, with only the face, neck and part of the shoulder visible." (2) The fact that the video was taken in daylight implies that his death happened before the 48 hr deadline expired. (3) There have been commemoration in various parts of Italy but no news yet about whether Enzo's body can be obtained for decent burial. (4) There has been considable controversy over the first video announcing his captivity. His image was clearly pasted onto the background and this coupled with the fact that he appeared relaxed and uninjured from the explosion has lead to suggestions that he may already already dead at the time of the first video, which may have been created using old footage created by Enzo himself found on his computer or camera. The Italian Red Cross delegate in Iraq Giuseppe De Santis claims that he did not witness anything that may have looked like an assault.

Update from Palestine: Ghareeb's and my friend Ewa is still being held prisoner in an Israeli detention centre and may be deported after her appeal hearing today, here is a statement by her on Electronic Intifada. Another friend Keith, an English Jewish peace activist, has just arrived in the region and has a blog during his stay.