...As the United States cracks down on the freedom of the press at home it is increasing its propaganda efforts abroad. Such are the hallmarks of an empire, caught in its own death throes of rapidly fading global importance, which attempts to maintain its power and influence, regardless of its poor image or the costs. In what amounts to a new “Cold War” in the battle for minds and opinions, other world broadcasters should face the reality of a new and aggressive U.S. propaganda onslaught...

  ...Cardinal O'Connor was a graduate student at Georgetown University under Jeane Kirkpatrick, who remembered O'Connor as 'the most intelligent student she had ever known in her long years of teaching.' Jeane Kirkpatrick's best students are possessed of a certain rabid kind of philo-Judaic fanaticism. Cardinal O'Connor was no exception...

  The liberation of Buchenwald was an opportunity for an allied Psych Warfare Operation involving planting objects like shrunken heads. The operation was meant to denazify the German population. The person in charge reported directly to Eisenhower. President Barack Obama visiting in June 2009 showed that everyone is still misled...

What Are All Those Generals Doing at the Council on Foreign Relations? | Stephen M. Walt

...am I the only one who sees it as more evidence of the creeping militarization of U.S. foreign policy? The Pentagon already spends several billion taxpayer dollars each year on public relations; does CFR need to give it another platform from which to purvey its views? More importantly, will any well-known advocates of a more restrained and less militarized global posture be given a chance to lay out their views at the annual meeting? What about experts who think U.S. military leaders were at least partly responsible for the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan? ..

  Building on an already disastrous foreign policy towards Yemen the Obama administration has decided to make things worse by allowing "signature drone strikes" in Yemen. Anyone in Yemen that shits like a terrorist, thereby showing the same "signature behavior", is now in danger of being killed by a U.S. drone: “The policy shift, as described by senior U.S. officials, includes targeting fighters whose names aren't known but who are deemed to be high-value terrorism targets or threats to the U.S.”...

  ...What is it about Israeli leaders that causes them to be idiots while in office but savants after? Part of the issue is political: no Israeli leader can speak truthfully about national security issues unless they wish to destroy their political careers. Once they step down though, they have the luxury of hindsight and can speak candidly about everything they could and should’ve done while in power...

  The U.S. Air Force is quietly assembling the world’s most powerful air-to-air fighting team at bases near Iran. Stealthy F-22 Raptors on their first front-line deployment have joined a potent mix of active-duty and Air National Guard F-15 Eagles, including some fitted with the latest advanced radars. The Raptor-Eagle team has been honing special tactics for clearing the air of Iranian fighters in the event of war. The fighters join a growing naval armada that includes Navy carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers plus patrol boats and minesweepers enhanced with the latest close-in weaponry...

  President Obama has joined much of Official Washington in mistranslating a comment by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad into the provocative phrase, “wiping Israel off the map.” Obama’s falsehood recalls President George W. Bush’s bogus claim about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa...

  ...war hawk politicians in both the U S and Israel use misinterpreted intelligence and incredulous rationales to argue that Iran should be bombed because they are working toward developing nuclear power. It’s not enough that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons. According to Israeli hawks, Iran must not be allowed to work in the direction of developing nuclear weapons. That argument is currently too weak to garner enough support from the American public to go into another costly war, primarily because it doesn’t create enough fear...

  On the CBS program 60 Minutes on April 22, 2012, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, claimed Palestinian Christians were leaving the Israeli-occupied West Bank due to Muslim extremism and not Israel's occupation. We showed Palestinian Christians in the West Bank Oren's comments and asked for their response...

  This has not been a good year for the Jewish state. Anti-normalization movements have picked up steam in the Arab world while the global campaign for Boycott Divestments and Sanctions continues to present a serious challenge, with a long list of artists refusing to entertain apartheid. Israeli Apartheid Week continues to grow on university campuses around the world despite Israel’s failed effort to counter it and non-violent resistance in Palestine which is often met with Israeli brutality is no longer the hidden secret it once was with more international activists witnessing and at times experiencing the brutality first hand. The year ended with the a major announcement from the Methodist Church that they will divest from Israel...

  ..Palestine is Israeli occupied territory. Military orders govern all aspects of daily life. Democratic rights are denied. Freedom is a non-starter, persecution a way of life. Gaza is an open-air prison. The West Bank and East Jerusalem fare little better. Life in Occupied Palestine for about 4.2 million residents is hell. No one’s safe from Israel’s wrath. According to the Addameer Prisoner Support group, over 700,000 Palestinians were imprisoned since June 1967. Over 20% of the population was affected. For males, it’s 40%. For women, it’s about 10,000 and for children around 7,000 since 2000 alone...

  Despite conflicting statements from top Israeli officials on Iran’s nuclear program, the threat of war remains high. US Colonel Douglas McGregor told RT that after an Israeli strike, Tehran won’t need to build nuclear bombs - it will be given them...

  Christoph R. Hörstel is a regular contributor to Russia Today, it was an honour to have him appear and inform. The mercenaries funded by the west are going into Syria across most of its borders...

  When the Israeli universe was still young and full of hope, the cartoonist Dosh drew the iconic figure that reflected the collective self-perception: Srulik, a naive boy in a kova tembel (that sort of blue or khaki sailor cap with the brim turned down, sometimes still sighted on kibbutzim and in kindergartens ) whose intentions are pure and whose hands are clean. Were we called upon to update that icon today, possibly a great many Israelis would still cling to the self-image of an innocent child in a hostile world. However, in the spirit of the times - at least as it prevails in the government - the kova tembel has been replaced by a ghetto boy's peaked cap and the khaki shirt with a yellow star...
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  ...This video discusses the social and judicial persecution of individuals voicing dissident opinions on the historical event usually referred to as the Holocaust. It castigates that persecution and lays bare the illegality and amorality of such activities. In addition, a number of the most striking historical arguments why dissenting = revisionist views on the Holocaust are reasonable, are presented. A brief look into the political agenda of those furthering the orthodox Holocaust narrative rounds up this amazing movie...

  ...The timing of this latest round of sanctions, coming on top of a whole series of unilateral US and European Union measures aimed at crippling the Syrian and Iranian economies, strongly indicates that Washington is merely using negotiations with both countries as a cover for preparing war and regime change. Obama’s executive order calls for Washington to impose sanctions on Syrian and Iranian officials for using information technology, including software to track cellphones and monitor Internet use and to spy upon and repress dissidents...
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  Frank Barat caught up with Jeff Halper, long-time Israeli peace activist, author and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), while he was on a European speaking tour which will take him from the UK to Poland. Here is what he had to say about the situation in Israel and Palestine…

  This is a story of three Theatres. The Habima Theatre of Israel, The Globe Theatre of London UK, and the Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah, occupied Palestine. The Ashtar Theatre has recently received rave reviews, with an ‘Arab Spring’ version of Shakespeare’s classic tale – Richard 2nd, and are due to perform this May at the Globe theatre. Many were shocked in the UK, when the National Globe Theatre also invited Israel’s Habima National Theatre to perform in May. This then kicked of a storm of ‘disavowals and denouncements’ on the Guardian Letter’s pages. All terribly British...
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  Much has been made of the inept appearance of Michael Oren – American Jew turned Israeli ambassador to the United States - on 60 Minutes, in which he admitted that from time to time he calls up senior TV brass to make certain they censor the work of their writers and editors. This morning, Haaretz reported (Hebrew) that the Prime Minister’s Office was intimately in the loop. Why? Because Oren claimed the show was a “potential strategic terrorist attack” against Israel’s image in the US. Lo and behold: at the same time Oren was biting his nails, an American Hasbara organization, The Jewish Federations of North America, sent an APB to its activists, calling upon them to prepare for a blitz against CBS. It sent that message before the show was aired...
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  Good morning, Netiv Ha’avot. As early as last year, the state informed the High Court of Justice that it intended to legalize this outpost ‏(too‏). The land here is privately owned, formerly the property of the Mussa family from the village of El Khader. Whoever imagines the outposts in the West Bank as a handful of trailers perched atop a bald mountain, or a group of settlers with long sidelocks and piercing gazes, is invited to tour Outpost Country, version 2012. Out of a total of about 100 such outposts, there are a few that look like the height of bourgeois life...
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  ...In 1948, Christian Palestinians were not spared the devastation of the Nakba, when Israel destroyed hundreds of villages, and expelled up to 90 per cent of the Palestinians who would have been inside the new state. The hundreds of thousands prevented from returning home included35 per cent of all Christians in pre-1948 Mandate Palestine. Haifa's Christian population, for example, was reduced by 85 per cent. Some Christian Palestinians became citizens, but their land remains confiscated. Since 1967, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have been subject to Israel's military occupation, and on both sides of the Green Line, Christian Palestinians face the same conditions of systematic racial discrimination as Muslims - on the basis that they're not Jews...
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  A film featuring Tony Greenstein, David Aaronovitch and myself won the best documentary feature award at the Logan Film Festival 2012...

  The program was broadcast for the first time in March 2003 just a few hours before Britain launched a criminal war against Iraq. Seemingly, the BBC knew who possessed WMD in the region...

  ..."I think all this is because of the use by the Americans of phosphorous in the two big battles," he says. "I have heard of so many cases of congenital birth defects in children. There has to be a reason. When my child first went to the hospital, I saw families there with exactly the same problems." Studies since the 2004 Fallujah battles have recorded profound increases in infant mortality and cancer in Fallujah; the latest report, whose authors include a doctor at Fallujah General Hospital, says that congenital malformations account for 15 per cent of all births in Fallujah...
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  It hardly makes sense to have a global war on terror if there are not that many terrorists threatening to blow themselves up in Peoria. Terrorism can hardly be considered a growth industry, particularly if one assesses it based on the congressionally mandated State Department annual report on the subject. According to the report, every year terrorists become fewer and less capable. And one would be hard-pressed to find too many instances in the document of terrorists killing Americans or even trying to kill Americans, which may be attributable to fewer Americans being found these days in places like Iraq. It is becoming even more difficult to find groups and individuals scattered overseas that have the resources, the motivation, and the skills necessary to travel to the heart of the Great Satan and, once here, acquire explosives, evade the police, make their way to Penn Station, and blow themselves up...
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  ..The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism...

  The battle for justice in the Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is about living rather than dying. It is about communicating rather than killing. It is about love rather than hate. It is part of the great battle against the corporate forces of death that reign over us—the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the speculators on Wall Street, the oligarchic elites who assault our poor, our working men and women, our children, one in four of whom depend on food stamps to eat, the elites who are destroying our ecosystem with its trees, its air and its water and throwing into doubt our survival as a species...

  Adding to the hope that the constant threats of war are empty ones, Israeli military chief Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz today expressed confidence of a diplomatic solution with Iran, adding that he didn’t think Iran would attempt to develop nuclear weapons. The comments, made in a high profile interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz on the occasion of Israeli Independence Day, also include an admonishment to avoid “hysteria” about Iran’s program. This probably won’t sit well with the nation’s civilian leadership, which is constantly claiming Iran is “close” to nuclear weapons capability...
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  The world is in chaos, war is breaking out all over, there’s blood flowing in the streets of cities from the Middle East to Africa, but not to worry – we’ve got an “Atrocity Prevention Board”! Now doesn’t that make you feel much better? The board is chaired by the infamous Samantha Power – whose advocacy of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine is credited with the Obama administration’s support for Islamist rebels in Libya, and is currently energizing calls for a similar intervention in Syria. The announcement of this new bureaucratic instrument of war was made by Obama at a recent speech delivered at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, where professional warmonger and Israel Firster Elie Wiesel took the opportunity to call for war with Iran...
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  In a statement published last July, Amnesty International called on UN member states to control arm shipments to both Sudan and South Sudan. It accused the US, Russia and China of fuelling violations in the Sudan conflict through the arms trade. While China was reportedly supplying the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) with conventional weapons, Russia provided Antonov aircraft and Sukhoi SU-25 fighters.US support of South Sudan is already well-known. “The US reportedly provided $100 million a year in military assistance to the SPLA [Sudan People’s Liberation Army],” reported Russia Today on April 19, citing a December 2009 diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks.”..
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 ...Last month, a conference convened in Bethlehem by Palestinian activists and Christian clergy long at odds with the Jewish state managed to bring a number of leading lights from the evangelical community in North America and Europe to the Holy Land. Many of the speeches at the conference touched on themes that one would commonly hear at a BDS teach-in, like blaming the entire Middle East conflict on Israel’s occupation and the settlements. Indeed, the name of the conference, Christ at the Checkpoint, is indicative of the different direction this segment of the evangelical movement is heading toward...
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  Less than a year ago, Sudan was split in two after decades of U.S. support for the secessionist South. Newly independent and deeply impoverished South Sudan has now seized much of what remains of the North’s oil fields. The South refuses to return to its borders, despite widespread international denunciation – a boldness that is inconceivable without the connivance of the United States. The campaign to chop away more territory from the African nation of Sudan is in full swing. South Sudan, which comprised one-third of the country until becoming independent, last year, seized the oil town of Heglig on the northern Sudan side of the border and is refusing international calls to withdraw. The region around Heglig contains half of Sudan’s remaining oil fields...
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  It’s a sign of the times: Hollywood heart-throbs, pop divas and TV chat show celebrities are turning on the mood music for America’s never-ending global war. In a world of lawlessness, state terrorism, rank mendacity and war criminals masquerading as government leaders, what better than to engage the glamor of reassuring celebrities to add a certain “star appeal” to otherwise barbaric endeavours? George Clooney, Rihanna, Oprah Winfrey are just some of the big names lending their faces and voices to a script worthy of Hollywood – only the script is coming out of the Pentagon.’..
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  It is impossible to understand the present Palestinian/Israeli conflict without understanding the past, in particular, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, who are not Semitic people, but indigenous to Eastern Europe. By the 1930s, the ‘transfer’ of Arabs was the unanimous opinion of the founders of Israel. So-called transfer committees, headed by Joseph Weitz, Director of Land Management for the Jewish Agency, were set up explicitly for the purpose of studying ways of transferring Arabs out of Palestine. At the beginning of 1948, despite 50 years of land purchases, Jews only owned 6% of the land of Palestine. By the year’s end, the Israeli army controlled 78% of Palestine in a process of ethnic cleansing..
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  Despite proclaiming support for the six-point Syrian peace initiative proposed by joint United Nations-Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan, the N.A.T.O.-G.C.C. alliance continues its effort to unravel the plan at every turn. And in doing so, the lies and ultimate limits of this imperial alliance become further unmasked. As the first U.N. monitors began arriving in Damascus this past week to oversee the country’s fragile ceasefire, the Orwellian deemed “Friends of Syria” rendezvoused in Paris. Of course, the agenda for this consortium of international friends was not how best to uphold the ceasefire and secure peace, but rather how best to impose regime change...
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  As Israel and the Jewish-Zionist lobby in the US press for war against Iran, awareness is growing everywhere about the realities of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the harmful impact of Israel’s policies, and the crucial role of the Jewish lobby in setting US foreign policy. A bold statement by travel guru Rick Steves (“I’ve been duped”) about deceitful US media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a stern warning by German author Günter Grass about the danger to world peace posed by Israel, are just two recent signs that attitudes are changing, even in countries that have been subjected to decades of relentless pro-Zionist propaganda...

  Even in the era of unbridled campaign contributions, Irving Moskowitz's $1 million donation in February to American Crossroads, the Karl Rove-linked super PAC, is eye-catching. A retired physician who made a fortune purchasing hospitals and running bingo and casino operations in the economically depressed California town of Hawaiian Gardens, Moskowitz is well-known to those who follow the Israel-Palestine conflict. His contributions to far-right Jewish settler groups, questionable archaeological projects and widespread land purchases in East Jerusalem and the West Bank have routinely inflamed the region over the past four decades and, according to many familiar with the conflict, made him a key obstacle to peace in the Middle East...
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  Yesterday, after an absence of five years, Deir Yassin was once again remembered. Deir Yassin Remembered is an organisation which exists only to remember the massacre of Deir Yassin of April 9th 1948. I became familiar with DYR in the early 2000s. I performed at a few DYR commemorations and each and every time I was overwhelmed. It wasn’t only the emotional intensity of the commemorations but also only at DYR events could one see the true commitment and devotion of the Palestinian community...
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  ..His specialty was flipping companies—or what he often calls "creative destruction." It's the age-old theory that the new must constantly attack the old to bring efficiency to the economy, even if some companies are destroyed along the way. In other words, people like Romney are the wolves, culling the herd of the weak and infirm. His formula was simple: Bain would purchase a firm with little money down, then begin extracting huge management fees and paying Romney and his investors enormous dividends. The result was that previously profitable companies were now burdened with debt. But much like the Enron boys, Romney's battery of MBAs fancied themselves the smartest guys in the room...
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  By now the history of the neoconservative movement is a bit of a twice-told tale. There have been book-length academic treatments and substantial coverage in the media, especially as the influence of the neocons in the George W. Bush Administration and in promoting the war in Iraq came to be public knowledge. Those with some familiarity with this history will find that Heilbrunn’s treatment adds little to available accounts. But what it does better than other mainstream media accounts is to really get at the Jewish nexus of the movement...
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  This paper puts the view that the holocaust at Auschwitz, terrible as it was, is being cynically exploited by the Zionist movement both to motivate its members and to deflect criticism from itself; that it enables a defensive mask to be used as a cover for what is actually an offensive policy, both in the Middle East and abroad. Further that the Protocols of Zion - the most tabooed book in the world - is an authentic document which contains a blueprint for Bolshevik Russia, and explains the terrible Debt crisis in the capitalist countries. The paper locates the Protocols within the Western utopian-fundamentalist-millenial tradition, which is the author's concern proper, the Protocols being but a sub-theme...
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  ...The bankers’ choice really comes down to one option: “Obamney.” It’s not unlike Matrix movie viewers convinced they’re so smart by choosing “the red pill” over “the blue pill,” not even considering that they could opt for no pill, a purple pill, or something completely outside the pillbox! Opening your eyes to reality doesn’t need to look tragic, and there are far more diverse options in this world than “Zion.”..
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'Jesus is the son of a whore,' 'we will crucify you,' 'Jesus is dead' and
'death to Christianity' were among messages left behind by vandals

  Considering that this is a story that the Israeli government tried to suppress, it could have been more hard-hitting. In the end, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren made himself the highlight of the piece by parading the rampant paranoia and defensiveness that has come to shape all of Israel’s actions in the international arena. As for how much influence this report will have on the perceptions of those American Christians who need enlightening about the effects of the Israeli occupation, I fear that their judgements will be more strongly colored by the fact that the Christians interviewed here...

  In an exclusive interview, Abu Marzook discussed his own political future, relations with Israel, the Hamas Charter and the impact of the Arab Spring on his organization...

  Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet. Those who cannot love—and I have seen these deformed human beings in the wars and conflicts I covered—are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live...
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  Late last week Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece on his NY Times blog that history will view as the best evidence to appear in at least several decades of the utter irrelevance of mainstream economics. The piece purported to respond to a Wall Street Journal editorial by Mark Spitznagel in which Mr. Spitznagel argued broadly the Austrian economists’ line that all government spending favors one group over another and more specifically that the Fed’s Quantitative Easing (QE) programs of recent years favor banks and the rich...

  ...David Ignatius has intimated in a Washington Post column that a deal has already been negotiated behind the scenes. The deal would center on the recognition by the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany that Iran indeed has the right to enrich uranium, a right made very clear (and described as “inalienable”) in the Non-Proliferation Treaty but one that Israel (with its extensive, secret nuclear program) refuses to recognize, period...
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  ...Jewish Holocaust historians “who have long considered the photograph a sort of sacred document” were not pleased by Nussbaum's revelation, reported The New York Times, because they were “convinced that the symbolic power of the picture would be diminished were the boy shown to have survived.” Nussbaum himself was surprised by such concerns. “I never realized that everyone puts the entire weight of six million Jews on this photograph,” he said. “To me it looked like an incident in which I was involved, and that was it.”..

  Each year, around April 19, the media and politicians commemorate what they call the Warsaw ghetto 'uprising,' 'revolt' or 'insurrection.' In journalistic accounts the affair has taken on increasingly epic and symbolic proportions. At a Holocaust ceremony in New York in April 1993, American Vice President Al Gore declared: 'The story of the Warsaw ghetto is sacred text for our time.' In fact, this 'story' is a legend based only partially on historical reality. 'An insurrection never took place.' This remark is by Marek Edelman, who was a leader of one of the armed Jewish groups in the ghetto...

  What goals has the BDS movement achieved so far? Does it aim for a constructive solution to the conflict? How should Israel react to it? Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky agree that the goal of the movement is to destroy Israel - how valid is this judgment? Can the movement reinvent itself and win support from those who criticize it today? CrossTalking with Gilad Atzmon, Eric Walberg and Omar Baddar...

  For some time now, I have been trying to get in touch with Ali Abunimah to ask him to explain his denunciation of Gilad Atzmon. I am used to Palestinian activists, Arab or non-Arab, attacking each other over this or that political or doctrinal difference, but this attack is worse than most. Abunimah has been in the forefront of the anti-Zionist movement for years.. his denunciation of Atzmon was guaranteed to be influential and reach a large audience, thereby maximizing the potential damage to Atzmon’s reputation and scholarship. The effect of the attack, though, has been suitably ironic...
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  Lawrence Davidson argues that the ethical standards of American liberals are more malleable than they would admit: In practice they "do not oppose the violation of civil or human rights, be they those of Americans, Iraqis or anybody else. What they do consider unacceptable are violations carried out in an 'uncouth' and 'vulgar' manner that … characterizes conservative practice."..
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  In the midst of the Taliban attacks in central Kabul on Sunday, a journalist called the British embassy for a comment. "I really don't know why they are doing this," said the exasperated diplomat who answered the phone. "We'll be out of here in two years' time. All they have to do is wait." The official line is that by two years from now, when U.S. and NATO forces leave Afghanistan, the regime they installed will be able to stay in power without foreign support. The British diplomat clearly didn't believe that, and neither do most other foreign observers...
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  ...At the time of the Church Committee, it was the FBI that conducted most domestic surveillance. Since its inception, the NSA was strictly barred from spying on American citizens or on American soil. That prohibition was centrally ingrained in the mindset of the agency. Church issued that above-quoted warning out of fear that, one day, the NSA’s massive, unparalleled surveillance capabilities would be directed inward, at the American people. Until the Church Committee’s investigation, most Americans, including its highest elected officials, knew almost nothing about the NSA (it was referred to as No Such Agency by its employees)...
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  On March 26, at the J Street conference in Washington, D.C., Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti described apartheid in Palestine to a largely-Jewish audience. As he spoke, you could have heard a pin drop in a room jammed with 500 people hearing about the one-state option. His comments have resonated in the weeks since. It is a marvel, and a tragedy, that this description of Palestinian conditions has not been published in America...
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  In a situation that stirred questions about academic freedom, a UCLA professor has been asked not to link his class online syllabus in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department to a website that called for a boycott of Israel, according to the head of the campus faculty Senate. The link from class materials last quarter to that boycott campaign stepped too far into political activities, according to Andrew Leuchter, chairman of UCLA’s faculty Senate. Leuchter said the professor, David Delgado Shorter, has agreed not to repeat the link in future courses. But Shorter said he made no such promise...

War crimes | The Unofficial Stanford Blog
 

  ...The CIA has a long history of successful collaboration with Nazis and other top war criminals. And it’s one of the hottest start-up incubators for terrorist groups; training, funding, and arming some of the most well-known terrorists and war criminals in the world. If you want an exciting career disrupting peace and prosperity around the world - and finance isn’t your thing - you can make a real impact at the CIA, literally!..
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  The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed. US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights...
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  A powerful presentation of the truth of the matter – hats off to Nasrallah and Hezbollah, and Julian Assange!...

 

  The National Transitional Council that is nominally in charge of what is left of Libya announced this week that they're beginning a probe of foreign oil contracts brokered during Gaddafi's reign by his son, Saif al-Islam. Libya is sitting on the largest oil reserves in Africa, and it is no coincidence that within weeks of the start of the NATO campaign last year the rebels had already secured the country's oil ports and refineries on the Gulf of Sidra and established their own national oil company for negotiating contracts with the invading forces...
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  At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don’t want to talk. "Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone," says hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi. "It’s all too shameful for them. We recorded 672 cases in January but we know there were many more," says Hadidi. He projects pictures on to a wall at his office: children born with no brain, no eyes, or with the intestines out of their body. Facing a frozen image of a child born without limbs, Hadidi says parents’ feelings usually range between shame and guilt. "They think it’s their fault, that there’s something wrong with them. And it doesn’t help at all when some elder tells them it’s been ‘god’s punishment’."..
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  Ben Gurion Airport was thrown into chaos for the third annual Flytilla on Sunday. As starry-eyed tourists arrived to visit the Holy sites and beady-eyed new Israelis arrived to kick more Palestinians off their land in the name of the Jewish State, thousands of Westerners with a sense of conscience presented their air tickets to suspicious officials in Europe and - if they were lucky - their passports in Tel Aviv, and held their breath. Their intent was quite innocent - to visit beleaguered Palestinians in the West Bank; in one case, to help locals build a school. But the fact that 2,000 such do-gooders were planning to do so en masse as part of the annual Flytilla was a red flag to the Israeli bull. The world might take notice, the Palestinians might take heart, and Israeli crimes might finally be stopped...
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  On 12 April, Tarek Mehanna was found guilty of conspiracy and of giving material support for terrorism and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. The prosecution accused Mehanna of translating statements for al-Qaida and of disseminating pro-jihadist material on the internet. Mehanna maintains that he does not support the world view of al-Qaida, though he is unapologetic for supporting the rights of Muslims to defend themselves against their oppressors – in this case, US and British soldiers...
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  Although it is too early to make a judgement, it looks as if Israel’s Iran policy has back-fired and may result in a very different outcome from the one Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has long sought. Israel’s thinking these past three years has been that punitive sanctions, cyber warfare and the assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists must eventually force a crippled Islamic Republic to agree to ‘zero enrichment’ of uranium – that is to say to dismantle its entire nuclear programme. This, it was hoped, would open the way for ‘regime change’ in Tehran...
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  As of late, Jewish Americans have been caught faking hate crimes against themselves and their neighbors in order to make it appear as if anti-Semitism is running rampant and needs to be addressed. One has to wonder how many of the "anti-Semitic" hate crimes every year are really fakes, and how many innocent gentiles are sitting in prison as a result. We have to keep in mind that the vast majority of these hate crime fakes are never exposed and are presumed to be credible hate crimes...

  It's odd to see an Israeli flag flying in rural Pennsylvania. Still, until very recently, the Israeli flag flew right alongside the American flag against the bucolic landscape of Jamestown, Pennsylvania. The nondescript warehouse-like buildings surrounding the two flags are not the factories of a local Pennsylvania Jewish-owned business, as one might guess. Rather, they are the headquarters of Combined Systems, Inc. - one of the largest manufacturers and international suppliers of teargas, stun grenades and other "non-lethal" crowd control devices in the world...

  A talk about Günter Grass, art of resistance, Israel, the Lobby, Iran, aesthetics and the prospect of peace...

  At the start of The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini later adapted for film, a brave and selflessly loyal Afghan boy runs to help his much wealthier friend, singing out his love for him "For you, a thousand times over ..." They have been flying a fighting kite, (these are kites with edges sharp enough to cut the strings of another kite), and the singing boy has gone to fetch an enemy kite they have won. A dreadful betrayal ensues, its effects exacerbated horribly by the start of the U.S.-Soviet proxy war. Several decades pass before any small sort of atonement can be achieved by the book's protagonist...
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  And with what shall we frighten the Israeli public in advance of the seventh day of Passover? How will we provide the dose of fear to which it has long since become addicted? After a week of a quiet and safe vacation, we have to find something, after all. The Iranian threat has entered a negotiations freeze, terror is quiet, even the Grad missiles have diminished in number, there is no mass plague on the horizon and even the circumstances of the attack against the Jew in Kiev have not become sufficiently clear. But Israel has not been abandoned, and the Israeli mind finally hit on something: the pro-Palestinian fly-in "provocation," as it has already been called...
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  Over 1500 activists from 15 countries attempted to fly to Ben Gurion Airport to travel to Bethlehem in the occupied Palestinian territories. They were invited by Palestinian activists to help build a school and protest Israel's control of all access points to the occupied territories. Hundreds were prevented from even boarding their planes and instead staged protests at various airports. Dozens were deported upon arrival while dozens arrested and transferred to Givon prison in central Israel. Israeli activists attempted to hold signs welcoming them at the airport but were immediately arrested and given a 15 day distancing order from the airport...

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  It’s official according to the Vatican: Pope Benedict XVI will visit Lebanon from the 14th to the 16th September, in just five months’ time. By coincidence or design, the Pontiff's visit will coincide with the International commemoration of the 30th Anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre during which Christian militia, facilitated by nearby Israeli troops who had sealed the Palestinian refugee camp, slaughtered more than 3000 unarmed civilians on site—approximately 25% of whom were fellow Lebanese. If the Pontiff accepts the invitation of Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai and stays during his visit in Bkerki, the seat of the Patriarchy, he may or may not be informed that he will sleep close to one of the burial pits where bodies from the 1982 massacre were trucked from Shatila camp...

  Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us...
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  It is good news that over 1000 Palestinian political prisoners will be released in a prison swap deal. But there are still thousands of Palestinian political prisoners. This Saturday we will be discussing in our cultural group the new book by Marwan Barghouthi about his life behind bars. He will apparently not be part of this prisoner exchange deal neither will Ahmed Saadat of PFLP nor other key leaders. For English readers on this list, I translated my review of Barghouthi's book (originally in Arabic) and included it here. Below that I include some text on prisoners from my book "Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment."..
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  A major Israel TV station on Sunday night broadcast a detailed report on how Israel will go about attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities in the event that diplomacy and sanctions fail and Israel decides to carry out a military strike. The report, screened on the main evening news of Channel 10, was remarkable both in terms of the access granted to the reporter, who said he had spent weeks with the pilots and other personnel he interviewed, and in the fact that his assessments on a strike were cleared by the military censor...

  There is a fixation in elite foreign policy circles these days to speculate on the impending decline of America’s global economic and military hegemony and to lament that decline as the dangerous end to international order. Without global American dominance, goes the thinking, lawless competition and chaos will rule...
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  ..As Israel has become more deeply entrenched in the settlement enterprise, more dedicated to an increasingly violent and dehumanizing occupation, and indeed, increasingly less democratic toward even those with the good fortune to be Jewish, we’ve come to realize that we’re not likely to ever move back. I don’t know if our children are any physically safer here than there, but I do know this: They’re not being groomed for service in a military now devoted less to the defense of the state, than to the oppression of another people. They’re not caught in an educational system made small and narrow by lack of funds, even as the government pours funds into settlements built illegally on stolen land. They’re not being lied to daily by leaders who mouth platitudes about peace...
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  In one of the first official US reactions to the attacks against Kabul and cities across eastern Afghanistan last weekend, Ryan C Crocker, US ambassador to Afghanistan, said: "The Taliban are really good at issuing statements, Less good at actually fighting." And after accusing (or crediting) the Haqqani network based in the tribal area within the Afghan-Pakistan borders' region, the ambassador added: "Frankly I don't think the Taliban is good enough." These declarations have come after the insurgents targeted sensitive installations in the country's most important population centres - including at least three prominent targets in Kabul - in one of the most coordinated and pronounced assaults since the occupation began 11 years ago...
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  The person who symbolized "the other Germany" more than anyone in West Germany, the person who was Germany's conscience throughout his literary career, has made the Israeli establishment and its clones crazy. These people have responded pettily and violently. Gunter Grass' service in the Waffen SS when he was 17 has nothing to do with his positions. You need lots of chutzpah and maybe even ignorance to think the Germans don't know how many despicable Nazis Israel catered to, as long as they supported its policies...
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  The recent decision by the Taliban and one of its allies to withdraw from peace talks with Washington underlines the train wreck the U.S. is headed for in Afghanistan. Indeed, for an administration touted as sophisticated and intelligent, virtually every decision the White House has made vis-à-vis Afghanistan has been a disaster...
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  Stuart Littlewood views the “squawks and screeches” emanating from Israel in protest at German poet Guenter Grass’s poem on the threat Israel poses to the world, and reminds us of a couple of pertinent facts: that Israel is the only nuclear state in the Middle East and that it refuses to forgo the options of creating chemical and biological weapons...
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  A prominent German writer and Nobel Prize-winner Gunter Grass has been declared persona non grata by Israel - following harsh criticism for his new poem published last week. In his latest work Germany's most famous living author accused Israel of endangering world peace in its standoff with Iran - his work was condemned at home and in Israel. Joining us now from Tel Aviv to discuss the scandal is Gideon Levy - who's a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz...

 

  The controversy over Gunter Grass’s poem about Israel and Iran only confirms what Grass was saying: That it’s impossible to criticize Israel without being lambasted. Grass, the Nobel-Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum, among many other works, dared to question Israel’s first strike policy against Iran, dared to underscore “the West’s hypocrisy” that permits Israel to have an arsenal of uninspected nuclear weapons and then permits Israel to threaten to annihilate the Iranian people if Iran tries to get one of its own. For this, Grass has been roundly condemned...
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  ..The anti-war poem published by Günter Grass is a subtle but straightforward example of a tendency in Germany that the historian Dan Diner has called "exonerating projection": the relativisation of the Holocaust through the implicit equation of Israel with Nazi Germany. In the poem, What Must Be Said, the 84 year-old Nobel prize-winner who was a member of the Waffen SS as a teenager imagines himself as a "survivor" of an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran. What must be said, according to Grass, is that "the nuclear power Israel" – rather than Iran – "endangers an already fragile world peace". Grass says he had not spoken out previously because his nationality "forbade" it: any German breaking the silence on the Israel nuclear programme may be accused of antisemitism...

  ...Did 84-year-old Grass break a taboo in the way Germans allow themselves to publicly criticize Israel? Is Germany finally shaking off its sense of commitment toward the Jewish people, 67 years after War World II? Or was this taboo broken many years ago? Two former ambassadors to Germany are in disagreement over this question...
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  ...Wagner attempted in his essay to account for the “popular dislike of the Jewish nature,” and “the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews.” He concludes that Germans instinctively disliked Jews due to their alien appearance, speech and behavior, noting that “with all our speaking and writing in favor of the Jews’ emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.” Wagner here simply stated an obvious fact: that Germans were ethnocentric like all other racial and ethnic groups, and this colored their interactions with a fiercely competitive, deeply ethnocentric, and hostile outgroup residing among them...
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  ...There is a profound difference between “two-states” and “one-state.” The former contemplates two nations with citizens living side by side in peace under terms to be negotiated between leaders of the two principal parties. Other world leaders have almost universally acknowledged that strong help and influence of the United States will be necessary, and all the Arab nations have offered to support such an agreement. In the case of the “one-state” outcome, if granted the full rights of citizenship, Palestinians would play a major role in the new nation with a possible majority in the future. If deprived of these rights as inferior and second-class dwellers on the land, this will be a system of apartheid that will not be accepted by the international community...

  ...TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, who runs the always invaluable Informed Comment website, does a remarkable job of offering us a full-scale picture of the complex economic underpinnings of the present Iran-U.S.-Israeli crisis and the unnerving dangers involved. But for the full, grim story of Washington’s campaign against Tehran, we are reliant either on the next Bradley Manning, a future WikiLeaks, or declassification of the necessary documents in time for our grandchildren to grasp something of the folly of our moment...
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  Any "success" in new nuclear talks between Iran and world powers will depend on bridging a trust gap that has widened since the last round of talks failed 15 months ago.

In that time, Iran has advanced its uranium enrichment expertise and material stockpiles, and not resolved questions about possible past nuclear weapons-related efforts. Though Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declares that having nuclear weapons is a "sin," and vows that the Islamic Republic will never pursue them, the US and some other nations demand incontrovertible proof...
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  ...Pfeiffer writes that his grandparents were infected by the same "moral insanity" that afflicted many Germans during and after World War I: "A state of emotional coldness, a lack of self-criticism and absolute egotism combined with a strong deficit of moral judgment as well as the support, acceptance and justification of cruelty when the enemy was affected by it."..

  I wish I could say “My father taught me never to trust the government.” It would make the perfect opening for this article. Sadly, I grew up in a kibbutz that practiced communal sleeping and didn’t believe in reactionary terms like “family.” In the “Emek”—the “Valley”—at the very center of Israeli establishment, I was forced to reach that conclusion by myself. It was unavoidable, considering that the government had named the 1982 war with the incredible name of “War-Peace-Galilee.”..
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  ...today’s statement by the White House spokesman who reiterated the same old demand (left over from the Bush administration) that Iran must give up all enrichment, doesn't make it sound at all as if the Obama administration is willing to really engage Iran in the upcoming negotiations. No, this sounds like more of the same old same old; of deliberately imposing impossible demands so as to undermine the likelihood of any successful negotiations, so as to maintain the pretext of the "Iranian nuclear threat" to justify a policy of conflict and regime-change. And that's perhaps why, as Pepe Escobar pointed out, the Israelis expressed satisfaction with the US position in the negotiations...
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  I've been duped. Do you know the frustration you feel when you believed in something strongly and then you realize that the information that made you believe was from a source with an agenda to deceive? I just watched a powerful and courageous documentary called Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land. It certainly has its own agenda and doesn't present balanced coverage. Still, it showed me how my understanding of the struggles in the Middle East has been skewed by most of our mainstream media. I saw how coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian problem is brilliantly controlled and shaped. I pride myself in understanding how the media works... and I find I've been bamboozled...
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  How Israel manipulates and distorts American public perceptions Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied territories appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one...
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  ...Here's a question for you: what do actor Charlton Heston, DreamWorks animation studios and Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin all have in common? Well, they've all, at one time or another, perpetuated the myth that the Jews built the pyramids. And it is a myth, make no mistake. Even if we take the earliest possible date for Jewish slavery that the Bible suggests, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt a good three hundred years after the 1750 B.C. completion date of the pyramids. That is, of course, if they were ever slaves in Egypt at all...

  The German writer Günter Grass had already predicted the response to his poem in SdZ. There is no reason to be surprised, but there is every reason to be disgusted. Within Germany both the elite and a layer of the population by their words and actions appear to have accepted the disgraceful Goldhagen thesis whereby all German were guilty for the crimes of the Third Reich. This thesis has now been developed further: all Germans are guilty for eternity for the crimes of the Third Reich...
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  ..I actually believe that Jews and Goyim alike must ask themselves, how is it possible that just 70 years after the Holocaust the Jewish State and its lobbies are marching our planet into another colossal catastrophe?..

  By asserting that Iran is a threat to Israel’s existence (a ludicrous assertion) and beating the drums for war with it, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has succeeded in getting Palestine off the political and mainstream media agenda and winning more time for Zionism to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank. (As Barak Ravid noted in an article for Ha’aretz, “The Presidential election season in the United States is obviously an especially good time to enlarge settlements in the West Bank and strike new roots in the Jewish neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.”)..
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  ...Overnight (literally) Iraq changed from a land where, broadly, the streets of towns and cities could be walked alone, safely, late at night, to a country which awoke to find whole families in morgues bearing wounds indicating unimaginable torture. It woke to beheaded bodies chucked on rubbish dumps – and beheaded fathers and sons dumped on door steps or in front gardens. Iraq also woke to ransom kidnappings, extortion, destruction of homes, premises, businesses – or their takeover by force...
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  The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran released a short video and accompanying letter-writing campaign featuring the viewpoints of prominent Iranians on the domestic consequences of a potential attack on Iran. These views are drawn from a 38-page report, Raising Their Voices: Iranian Civil Society Reflections on the Military Option, based on interviews with 35 leading and influential Iranian civil society activists, lawyers, intellectuals, and artistic and cultural figures, all of whom live in Iran...

  The Civil Administration, part of the Defense Ministry, released its maps only in response to a request from anti-settlement activist Dror Etkes under the Freedom of Information Law. In some places the boundaries of the parcels outlined in the maps coincide with the route of the West Bank separation barrier. The state has argued before the Supreme Court and the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the route of the separation barrier was based on Israel’s security needs. But Civil Administration’s maps and figures, disclosed here for the first time, suggest the barrier route was planned in accordance with the available land in the West Bank, intended to increase the area and population of the settlements...
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  This week the United Nations held an international meeting in Geneva on the question of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. Professor John Dugard presented on the status of Palestinians who engage in resistance against Israeli oppression. Former Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Professor Dugard draws a parallel with the treatment of militant political opponents by South Africa’s apartheid regime and highlights the similarities between the two regimes...
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  The Zionist-dominated media professes to be shocked – SHOCKED – that Connecticut Senate Candidate Lee Whitnum called US Rep. Chris Murphy “a whore for AIPAC.” I’m shocked too. Calling Congress-critters rolling in Zionist dough “whores” is an insult to prostitutes everywhere. I understand that the International Union of Sex Workers will be lodging a complaint against Whitnum...

  The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO, and the European Union — or an approved segment thereof, can usually get what they want. They wanted Saddam Hussein out, and soon he was swinging from a rope. They wanted the Taliban ousted from power, and, using overwhelming force, that was achieved rather quickly. They wanted Moammar Gaddafi's rule to come to an end, and before very long he suffered a horrible death. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected, but this black man who didn't know his place was sent into distant exile by the United States and France in 2004...
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  ...in what country does the law allow foreign governments to fund and train opposition groups with a stated goal of regime change? It is common sense to assume that if China or Cuba were funding similar oppositionist groups in the US, those involved would be facing far harsher sentences than the 43 now standing trial in Egypt. Yet they continue to hide behind the tattered guise of being “NGO” employees, claiming independence because their US government funding is channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy...
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Hiroshima, Tel Aviv | Roy Tov

  On the first week of April 2012, Jaakko Laajava, Finland’s Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs informally visited Jerusalem to discuss Israel’s participation in the upcoming Nonproliferation Treaty Conference, to be held this December in Helsinki. He met with an Israeli team headed by Foreign Ministry Deputy Director General Jeremy Issacharoff, and that included representatives from Israel’s National Security Council and the Atomic Energy Commission. In January, Laajava met with Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, and dealt with the same issue...
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  VT correspondent and former member of the Soviet 12 Nuclear Directorate, Dimitri Khalezov has confirmed his meetings with Mike Harari of the Mossad. He was with Harari and his son at a celebration of the 9/11 attack on September 12, 2001 in Bangkok. Harari took full credit for planning the attack and spoke openly of it during the celebration, a breakfast in Bangkok. Our VT correspondent took down every word and, in 2007, made a full and detailed report of this and the Bali bombing to FBI agents. The agents admitted they were aware that 9/11 was an “inside job” and knew Harari was involved...
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  Today, the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) revealed that the FBI required employees to sign employment contracts that are illegal under Federal law. The NWC launched the investigation in response to a nearly yearlong campaign by the FBI to prevent the publication of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ new book, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story...
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  Those who lend their pen to the Palestinian cause know about Wikipedia Jews, a term that was coined a few years ago. It refers to a bunch of rabid crypto Zionists who constantly vandalize encyclopedia entries to do with Palestine, Palestinian activists and Israeli atrocities...

  After the success of "The Doudouk", Lévon Minassian and Armand Amar meet to revisit the Armenian traditional directory in their way.. A music of a rare beauty, for an imaginary movie...