Quite simply, history is not on the side of colonizers, let alone those whose aims have centered around ethnic cleansing.

Outlets are just beginning to reveal the extent of the wide-scale crackdown on the country's Shia population following the high-profile arrest of leading Shia cleric Hassan Shehata at the beginning of this month.

I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza's children could color and paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

For a change, let us remember the more than 11,000 Palestinian prisoners currently being held in Israeli captivity. If collectively, they had as much news coverage as Gilad Shalit, maybe they would have been released by now, or the numbers would be significantly smaller, as the pressure to release them would be equivalent to the campaigns to release Gilad Shalit.

To characterize the struggle in Iran as a battle between democratic forces and a "dictator" is to exhibit total ignorance of Iran's internal dynamics or to deliberately distort them. There is no doubt that there is a significant segment of Iranian society, concentrated around major metropolitan areas and comprising many young people, that passionately yearns for social freedoms.

In this election moreover, there were two separate governmental election monitors in addition to observers from each camp to prevent mass voter fraud. The sentimental implausibility of Ahmedinejad's victory that Mousavi's supporters set forth as the evidence of state corruption must be met by the equal implausibility that such widespread corruption could take place under clear daylight.

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records pertaining to the number of people currently detained at Bagram and their names, citizenship, place of capture, and length of detention. The ACLU is also seeking records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as "enemy combatants."

In the latter circumstance, Lebanon is certainly the exception. And on June 7, it has the ability to divorce itself from the US-Israel-Egypt-Jordan-Saudi axis and send a powerful message to the rest of the Arab world: if little Lebanon can do it, so can you.

Tensions began in April 2007, when a procession of Shias came under fire from fanatical Wahhabis, who view Shia Muslims as heretics.