Apr 30, 2013 Time to End Western Support for Terrorists in Syria: “Opposition” is Entirely Run by Al Qaeda, by Tony Cartalucci | Global Research In an astounding admission, the New York Times confirms that the so-called “Syrian opposition” is entirely run by Al Qaeda and literally states: “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” From the beginning, it was clear to geopolitical analysts that the conflict in Syria was not “pro-democracy” protesters rising up, but rather the fruition of a well-documented conspiracy between the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to arm and direct sectarian extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda against the Syrian government... [Not kosher - somebody at the Times is losing it - heads will roll - Thank Dog I'm in Mexico, where it's relatively safe and peaceful] Exile (Trailer) by Ilan Ziv | NFB This feature documentary looks at new evidence that suggests the majority of the Jewish people may not have been exiled following the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Travelling from Galilee to Jerusalem and the catacombs of Rome, the film asks us to rethink our ideas about an event that has played a critical role in the Christian and Jewish traditions... [I long ago (starting in Hebrew school when I was 12) came to the conclusion that most if not all of Jewish “history” is mytho-history – not just the stories in Genesis et all, which were lifted from various cultures in and around the Fertile Crescent – from Uruk, Babylon, Assyria, Ninevah etc. mostly – but up to and including what just happened yesterday. I studied at Temple Emeth (Truth), an irony not entirely lost on me at the time.] Latest on Ilan Ziv's film plus an interesting note | Paul Eisen ...The Visigoths in Spain were later superseded by the Moors, with the help of local Jews, the same Jews became indispensable to the Christian conquerors, until their power and influence became intolerable in 1492. It was always about economic dominance and political power, with religious justification provided by the Old and New Testaments.. There are appalling modern correlations in the polities of the US and Britain... Israel gives up white phosphorus, because ‘it doesn’t photograph well,’ by Idan Landau | +972 Magazine A certain air of nostalgia dominated Maariv’s headline last Thursday: “Due to criticism in the world, IDF parts ways with white phosphorus”: just like the old Galil assault rifle and the old two-way radios that generations of soldiers grew familiar with. A couple of years ago we learned the IDF was giving up its cans of preserved meat (the kosher version of SPAM). Now, it’s white phosphorus that we say goodbye to. (Twilight. The IDF and white phosphorus exchange a final gaze. A sad violin tune is heard. Curtain down.) [Actually, the problem is that it photographs all too well, as do its victims.] Most Powerful Mercenary Armies | Business Insider Its been a banner decade for modern military fighting. In 2010 alone there were more than 70 armed conflicts across the globe from Sangin to Ingushetia. As different as each of them were, they all had one thing in common, at some point one side wanted more troops... [Interesting factoid: G4S divests Israel West Bank operations. Maybe shining the light of day on these characters will make them all shrivel up and die. Well, hope springs eternal.] FBI Terrorism Investigations, and more from CRS | Secrecy News “Intelligence activity in the past decades has, all too often, exceeded the restraints on the exercise of governmental power that are imposed by our country’s Constitution, laws, and traditions,” according to the Congressional Research Service. The CRS, which shuns polemical claims, presents that assertion as a simple statement of fact (although cautiously sourced to the 1976 Church Committee report) in a newly updated report on FBI terrorism investigations... Read more... America Goes to War, by Ralph Raico | Mises Daily ...in 1914 the British claimed the right to capture food as well as other previously "conditional contraband" destined not only for hostile but even for neutral ports, on the pretense that they would ultimately reach Germany and thus the German army. In reality, the aim was, as Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty candidly admitted, to "starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission." [Plus ca change, plus la meme chose] Washington’s «Civil Society» and CIA Financing of Chechen and Other Caucasus Regional Terrorists, by Wayne Madsen | Strategic Culture Foundation Through a myriad of «civil society» organizations, the United States has been financing Chechen groups inside the autonomous republic, in Russia, and abroad. However, large portions of U.S. assistance money has «bled» over to support Chechen and other North Caucasus terrorist groups, which the U.S. State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies insist on referring to as «separatist guerrillas», «nationalists», «insurgents», and «rebels», instead of terrorists... Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston, by Rep. Ron Paul | Antiwar Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down. These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose... [Maybe that was the dress rehearsal, and the real deal is coming down the pike, to your very own neighborhood] Israeli credibility on line over Iran nuclear challenge | Reuters Israel risks a loss of credibility over both its "red line" for Iran's nuclear program and its threat of military action, and its room for unilateral maneuver is shrinking. After years of veiled warnings that Israel might strike the Islamic Republic, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out an ultimatum at the United Nations last September. Iran, he said, must not amass enough uranium at 20 percent fissile purity to fuel one bomb if enriched further. To ram the point home, he drew a red line across a cartoon bomb, guaranteeing him front page headlines around the world... [Israeli credibility? You gotta be kidding me] Israel Intelligence Directorate Sends America to War | Roi Tov A long time ago, Israeli Prime Ministers discovered that their governments are dysfunctional. They are large and plagued with coalitional interests. The temptations to publish secret deliberations by ministers who know that they cannot be fired are significant. Thus, they created the "Cabinet" a small and informal body of ministers who meet regularly to take decisions delicate issues. Ministers wishing to keep their place in this exclusive body are forced to remain silent. On April 28, 2013, there was a 4-hour long meeting... PM Netanyahu Welcomes the Launch of Israel's Fifth Submarine | IMRA ..."according to foreign sources" the submarines have especially large diameter launch tubes for nuclear warhead armed Jericho missiles that provide Israel with 2nd strike capability... [There's something very consistent about German culture - they smoothly segued from supporting German fascism to supporting Jewish fascism. Heil Netanyahu!] Palestine truth fighter Alan Hart’s farewell, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis I join everyone else in saluting Alan Hart. He has given half a lifetime – and his considerable professional skills – to the Palestinian struggle. Now he’s calling it a day. I find the news indescribably sad, but at the same time it should serve as a wake-up call to Palestinians, and indeed Arabs everywhere, that the patience of their most devoted sympathizers is wearing thin... [Since as early as the 1920’s the Palestinians have never been in a position to do much about anything. It is up to the rest of us, we weary few, to keep on slogging through the slime and the muck, the ice and the hellfire, until the Great Eastern Sun reemerges from the darkness. There is really no other choice.] The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research In the course of the last three years, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. The Vienna based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reveals that poppy cultivation in 2012 extends over an area of more than 154,000 hectares, an increase of 18% over 2011. A UNODC spokesperson has confirmed that opium production is heading towards record levels. According to the 2012 Afghanistan Opium Survey released in November 2012 by the Ministry of Counter Narcotics (MCN) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). potential opium production in 2012 was of the order of 3,700 tons, according to UNODC data... Apr 29, 2013 Boston Terror, CIA’s Graham Fuller & NATO-CIA Operation Gladio B (Caucasus & Central Asia) | Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post A major break in the Boston Terror CIA Connection took place last night when I came across a post outing CIA Operative Graham Fuller as the father of the woman married to Boston terror suspect’s infamous uncle Ruslan Tsarni. Further confirmation of this bombshell was received via mainstream reporter Laura Rozen... Chemical Weapons Charade in Syria, by Sharmine Narwani | Al Akhbar Let us be clear. The United States can verify absolutely nothing about the use of chemical weapons (CWs) in Syria. Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false. Don’t take it from me – here is what US officials have to say about the subject:.. [The info came from Israel, which gives it about a 99+% probability of being false] Support the Israeli Occupation; It's Tax Deductible!: Friends of Israel Defense Forces Raises $27 Million Under NY Media’s Radar, by Jeff Blankfort | Counterpunch It isn’t every day or night that a tax-exempt non-profit American charity rakes in $27 million in the space of a few hours. When it happens in New York at such a well known landmark as the Waldorf-Astoria, arguably the city’s most famous hotel, it should be news, right? Wrong, apparently, since not a single TV station nor any New York newspaper, all of which are known for their attention to events in the city’s Jewish community as well as their devotion to Israel, saw fit to cover the annual dinner of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) this past March 12 which raised that enormous sum... Syria: This Intervention Threat Is Not Credible | Moon of Alabama ...The recent drone intrusion from Lebanon into Israel was a serious warning. If Syria is attacked Israel will get hit - no matter what. There is no way to avoid that. This fact alone is a serious impediment for any "western" move. There is also a Russian fleet underway which will reach the Mediterranean in mid May and will stay there permanently. It is a wild card in any air attack or submarine launched cruise missile raid on Syria. A ground attack is even less likely. Neither Britain nor any other country is willing to send ground troops. Aside from those military problems the public in all concerned countries seems to be against any intervention... Hypocrisy Of US War On Terrorism, by Dr. Paul J Balles | deLiberation Boston terrorism has been squelched: Tamarlan, dead in a police shoot-out left his younger brother Dzhokar wounded in the hospital. Commonly terrorism refers to violent acts intended to create fear (terror); are perpetrated for a religious, political or, ideological goal; and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians). However, where appropriate, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Reviewing the book Terrorism of the State, Ron Jacobs asks some penetrating questions:.. Susan Rice: Israel's 'Gladiator' at the UN | Wide Asleep in America Earlier this week, Glenn Greenwald posted an excellent article exploring the myriad reasons why U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice is awful. It's not just her "long record of cheering for US wars, including being an outspoken and aggressive advocate of the attack on Iraq,".. Or her apparent and well-documented "fondness for tyrants in Africa" and career-long destructive policies towards the continent. Or that she "holds significant investments in more than a dozen Canadian oil companies and banks that would stand to benefit from expansion of the North American tar sands industry and construction of the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline".. “The Project” in Kazakhstan | Craig Murray A week ago Wikileaks released the transcript of a meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, together with a number of other liberal establishment figures from the USA. This transcript is an important read. Assange has been portrayed in the media as a crazed pantomime villain. The reflective and thoughtful person who emerges from these transcripts is not perhaps what people accept. I also find it encouraging that a major CEO like Schmidt himself comes over as a genuine thinker, with liberal instincts... Boston and Venezuela: Terrorism There and Here, by Prof. James Petras | Global Research ... In Boston, two alleged Chechen terrorists set off bombs during the annual Boston Marathon killing three people and injuring 170; in Venezuela, terrorist-supporters of defeated presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles, assassinated 8 and injured 70 supporters of victorious Socialist Party candidate Nicolas Maduro, in the course of firebombing 8 health clinics and several Party offices and homes. In the case of Boston, the terrorist spree resulted in one further fatality – one of the perpetrators; in Venezuela, some of the terrorists are under arrest but their political mentors are still free and active – in fact they are now presented as ‘victims of repression’ by the US media... Ilan Ziv's account of what happened to his film | Paul Eisen As some of you know, my film Exile, A Myth Unearthed, which examines the myth of the Jewish Exile and its political impact on both Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East, was going to be shown on the BBC Thursday April 25th. It was pulled out of the schedule only a few days earlier.. Since than I was flooded by dozens of emails of angry and concerned viewers asking what happened.. based on my past experience, I was going to wait patiently until the BBC programming executives would solve the internal drama that apparently has begun to brew inside the BBC.. I naively believed and decided to wait quietly. But things have their own momentum... Steve B.I.K.O. "World On Fire" | YouTube Oil Wars—Nusra's Expanding Reach—Syrian Taliban, by Matthew Barber and the Syria Video team | Syria Comment ...disillusionment has prompted even some who have been engaged at the forefront of the struggle against the regime to abandon the revolution. The situation alluded to above (the selling off of Syrian assets to Turkey) is a real problem that ultimately drove the head of the Farouq Brigades in Deir Ezzor, Yussef ‘Alke, to resign as leader, leave the Brigades, and declare the revolution a corrupt sham... Radicalized: A New Hasbara Word, by Ariadna Theokopoulos | deLiberation A quickly accepted description of the Chechen brothers presented as the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing, according to the Boys with Backpacks Conspiracy theory (or BBC2, as I call it to distinguish it from the benchmark BBC1, the Boys with Boxcutters Conspiracy theory) is that they became “radicalized,” i.e., turned into Islamic terrorists. Obviously this is apt to cause anxiety in the American people. The non-Muslim Americans will feel that they have to keep a watchful eye on their Muslim neighbors who, no matter how peaceful they appear, are intrinsically unstable and volatile individuals apt to become “radicalized” at any time and turn on them... Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube, by Rosner and Markowitz | Tom Dispatch Just over three years ago, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig leased by BP killed 11 people, injured 17, and -- according to government estimates -- polluted the Gulf of Mexico with 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude. It turns out, however, that the casualty toll didn’t end with those 28 workers. The real number may reach into the thousands... Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, by Brenton Sanderson| The Occidental Observer ...For Wagner, Judaism was the embodiment of the bourgeois money-egoist spirit. As he later confessed to Liszt: “I felt a long-repressed hatred for this Jewish money-world, and this hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood. An opportunity arose when their damnable scribbling annoyed me most, and so I broke forth at last.” In Judaism in Music Wagner finds the plea for Jewish emancipation to be “more than commonly naïve, since we see ourselves rather in the position of fighting for emancipation from the Jews. The Jew is in fact, in the current state of the world, already more than emancipated. He rules.”.. [‘Plus ca change, plus la meme chose’ – See also Part 2] Apr 28, 2013 Newly-released UK documents speak of Zionist Nazis, terrorists and savages | Redress Information & Analysis It is 65 years since Israel was forced upon the Middle East through terrorism, murder, ethnic cleansing and theft but so little has changed. Then as now, Britain, the occupying power that handed Palestine to the European Jewish colonists on a plate, knew the truth about the Zionists yet chose to be the midwife of their offspring, the state of Israel, even as they murdered British soldiers. And now Britain, which is possibly better informed about the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than anyone other than the primary victims of Israel, remains the loyal international spokesman and facilitator of this terrorist state, working on its behalf from the United Nations to the European Union... The Racist JNF Tax Fraud, by Yves Engler | Dissident Voice In 2010 the Auditor General apparently called on the Canada Revenue Agency to “investigate or revoke” the Jewish National Fund’s charitable status. But this request seems to have been ignored in deference to a “charity” that has long participated in the erasure of Palestinians’ presence from their historic homeland... This Intervention Threat Is Not Credible | Moon of Alabama As I wrote a few days ago: “Due to considerable progress by the Syrian government against the foreign sponsored, jihadist insurgency new allegations have to be found to justify additional foreign intervention.” Mahir Zenalov, who writes for the Turkish paper Today Zaman, concludes the same. The "chemical weapons" scam is just an excuse to justify a wider use of force against the Syria... Zionists making presence felt at BBC? | Jews sans frontieres No sooner had I read an Electronic Intifada article about how Zionist have taken top posts at the BBC than I read that a programme questioning the story of the exile of Jews from Palestine has been pulled from BBC 4. The details of the programme are still up on the Radio Times website... Anomalies in the FBI's Account of the Boston Marathon Bombings, by John Spritzler | New Democracy World None of the following proves that what actually happened at the Boston Marathon was different from what the FBI says happened. But the fact that terrorist events make the public more obedient to the rulers (as indicated by the understandable willingness of everybody in Boston and surrounding towns to remain indoors when instructed to do so by the authorities, in the name of public safety) constitutes a cui bono (to whose benefit?) reason for at least being skeptical of the FBI's account of things. Specific reasons for sketicism are recounted here, and I will add postcripts if and when more become apparent. [Note, there are now very important postscripts.].. Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embraced, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian News reports yesterday indicated that Bradley Manning, widely known to be gay, had been selected to be one of the Grand Marshals of the annual San Francisco gay pride parade, named by the LGBT Pride Celebration Committee. When the predictable backlash instantly ensued, the president of the Board of SF Pride, Lisa L Williams, quickly capitulated, issuing a cowardly, imperious statement that has to be read to be believed... Syria: U.S. manipulating chemical weapons proof, like it did with Iraq | CNN Syria denies that it has used, or even possesses, chemical weapons, accusing the United States and Britain of lying in order to pressure the embattled Damascus government. Syrian Information Minister Omran Al-Zoubi talked to Russia TV on Friday, dismissing a claim by U.S. officials a day earlier that they had evidence the chemical weapon sarin had been used in Syria on a small scale... [CNN allowing a little bit of truthiness to get by their self-censorship protocols and Zionist agenda? Will wonders never cease.] Israel’s Proxy War in Guatemala, by Gabriel Schivone | North American Congress on Latin America You may not know it from reading or listening to the major U.S. media, but the rest of the world has been steeped in news coverage of a former Guatemalan head of state recently on trial in a national court (though proceedings are currently on hold) for genocide and crimes against humanity. The accused, General Efraín Ríos Montt, was one of the most vicious mass killers the United States—or Israel—ever produced... I, too, am responsible for sanctions on Iran, by Kusha Sefat | Al Jazeera ...Sometimes I wonder where the uproar is over "crippling sanctions" imposed on almost 80 million people? What has happened to all Iranian expatriates (activists, university professors, "experts", etc) who rushed to American and European television channels in the aftermath of the last, and disputed, Presidential election in Iran, vehemently objecting the Islamic Republic's brutal crushing of protesters, unleashing immense pressure on the Iranian state in the process? Why aren't they exerting the same kind of pressure on the US and European governments? Why aren't they pointing out that Western-led sanctions are crushing those very same "people" in Iran?.. Zionists and Gulf Monarchs Ponder: Pushing Al Qaeda to Take on Hezbollah, by Franklin Lamb | Counterpunch “This is one damn fine idea, what took us so long to see a simple solution that was right in front of our eyes for Christ’s sake”, Senator John McCain of “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” and “no-fly zones for Syria” notoriety, reportedly demanded to know from Dennis Ross during a recent Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) brain storming session in Washington DC. Ross, a founder of WINEP with Israeli government start up cash (presumably reimbursed unknowingly, one way or another by American taxpayers) and currently WINEPs “Counselor”, as in “consigliere” reportedly responded to the idea of facilitating Al Qeada to wage jihad against Hezbollah with the comment:.. Spirituality in the Land of the Noble: How Iran Shaped the World's Religions by Richard C. Foltz | Amazon Tells the story of Iran's shaping and transmitting of the world's religions, starting with the Iranian merchants and missionaries who brought, not only Islam but also Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism to China... Gingrich, Israel and the Palestinians, by Uri Avnery | The OtherSite ...Being very idealistic persons, the original Zionists found a way out of this moral dilemma: they simply denied its existence. The winning slogan was “A land without a people for a people without a land.” So who were these curious human beings they met when they came to the country? Oh, ah, well, they were just people who happened to be there, but not “a” people. Passers-by, so to speak. Later, the story goes, after we had made the desert bloom and turned an arid and neglected land into a paradise, Arabs from all over the region flocked to the country, and now they have the temerity – indeed the chutzpah – to claim that they constitute a Palestinian nation!.. Jüdische Allgemeine Exposed, by Evelyn Hecht-Galinski | Gilad Atzmon Yet again we have evidence of how the Jüdische Allgemeine deals with any criticism of Israel. In JA on April 4th, 2013 you can find a peculiar article titled “Self-hatred and Saxophone“, writhen by Jonathan Scheiner. Scheiner’s article consists of false accusations that indicate that not only has he failed to consider Gilad Atzmon`s writings on music, politics and philosophy but that he also has probably not read Gilad Atzmon`s book... [They never read the book – it’s against official hasbara guidelines. After all, it might engender doubt and confusion, thereby sullying the purity of ZioNazi dogma.] Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night: the text of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from the Amsterdam Jewish community on 27 July 1656 | Paul Eisen The Lords of the Ma’amad, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of the matter;.. they have decided.. that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel... [..and henceforth thou shalt be deprived of the greatest sacraments of the Khazarian Jewish faith, chopped liver and gefilte fish..] With an empty stomach, by Adam Keller | Before It's News One shouldn’t underestimate the Israeli government’s public relations headache caused by one young Palestinian who is tightly incarcerated behind bars and who confronts the entire might of the state, its government and army and security services, his only weapon being – an empty stomach... Cry, Beloved Afghanistan for Your Unborn Children, by Ehsan Azari Stanizai | Huffington Post As the new season of the world's longest-running current war, in Afghanistan, is warming up, the Afghan civilians and children are falling prey as easy victims. Early this month, a NATO airstrike killed 11 children, aged between two months and seven years in the Shigal district of Kunar province bordering Pakistan. At the same time, with the Western combat drawdown in advance of a scheduled withdrawal of the bulk of Western troops by the end of 2014, the violence would likely take a turn for the worse. The inability of local army and police to fight the insurgents alone and their increasing dependence on NATO's air support complicates the armed conflict within the country even further... Creating a Pretext for War on Syria, by Stephen Lendman | War Is A Crime What's ongoing now bears eerie resemblance to events preceding Bush's Iraq war. Obama's replicating a familiar scenario. Waging war requires a pretext to do so. When none exists, it's invented. It's easy. Lies substitute for truth. Claims about Syria using chemical weapons don't wash. Repetition gets people to believe them. We've seen it all before. Colin Power's infamous February 5, 2003 Security Council speech led to war. It was shameless deception. Later he admitted WMD claims were false. It was too late to matter... Apr 26-27, 2013 My Last Post: Final thoughts on Zionism’s success and Arab failure | Alan Hart I am withdrawing from the battlefield of the war for the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, and the following is an explanation of why... [It is sad to lose his authoritative and articulate voice. The price for clearly and insistently advocating truth and justice has always been high.] Within The National (In)Security State: Fear as a Constant Companion, by Phil Rockstroh | Common Dreams ...In a society beset with a lack of purpose and meaning, patriotism, empty self-promotion and jingoism are mistaken for strength and character, when, in fact, they are anathema. Weakness compensates by affecting a cretinous swagger. Those who lack a centering core crave power. Beneath it all, quakes one who fears risking intimacy… is terror stricken by the vulnerability attendant to risking love. Those who fear the uncertainty inherent to intimacy and freedom perceive a world fraught with ubiquitous danger. They terrorize themselves; therefore, they see terrorists everywhere... Like Israel, Palestinians must also learn the lessons of South Africa, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz If the Palestinians focus on demanding 'one person, one vote', Israel won't have a leg to stand on. What can it say - that the Palestinians aren't human?.. [The real question is whether or not the Israelis are human – and that’s not wholly hyperbole. Metaphorically, at least, they have torn up their identity cards as members of the human family, claiming rather to be something superior and ‘special,’ a Jewish Master Race.] Zionism and the United States Congress, by William James Martin, by William James Martin | Palestine Chronicle The ideology, or political project, of Zionism which underlies the creation of the State of Israel had, in fact, a Christian origin rather than a Jewish one, as writings can be found dating from the 1500’s, written by Christian clergymen in England advocating the migration of Jews to the Holy Land. The migration of Jews to Palestine was also advocated by Napoleon Bonaparte. The first Jewish presentations of Zionism were written by Moses Hess in 1862 and 20 years later by Leo Pinsker, both of the Russian Pale.. Twentieth century Zionism was initiated by Theodore Herzl who, likewise, advocated a separate state for Jews in his book, Der Judenstaat, written in 1896... UN Watch Better Watch Itself: The Demonization of Richard Falk, by Jeremy R. Hammond | Counterpunch The Zionist organization UN Watch has cited a commentary by Professor Richard Falk on the Boston bombings in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon demanding that that Prof. Falk be reprimanded for it. Prof. Falk, who serves as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, originally posted the commentary on his blog and I republished it, as I often do his writings, with his kind permission, in Foreign Policy Journal, which version UN Watch links to in its letter... Political Opportunism: The Boston Marathon Tragedy Used as a Pretext To Extend the “Global War on Terrorism,” by Colin Todhunter | Global Research In a 2011 interview for an Australian TV channel, US Republican Senator John McCain talked about Islamic extremism ‘spreading’ if left unchecked by military intervention in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the same interview, he spoke of the US having held fast in Iraq and having ‘succeeded’ there. He stated that ‘we’ must do the same in Afghanistan because ‘we’ are succeeding there too. In the warped world of neo-con mouthpieces like McCain, the ongoing carnage and turmoil that US-led criminality has caused in the two countries in question equates with ‘success’.. Read more... In this nuclear standoff, it's the US that's the rogue state, by Jonathan Steele | The Guardian By coincidence two clashes over nuclear issues are hitting the headlines together. North Korea and Iran have both had sanctions imposed by foreign governments, and when they refuse to "behave properly" they are submitted to "isolation" and put in the corner until they are ready to say sorry and change their conduct. If not, corporal punishment will be administered, since they have been given fair warning by the enforcers that "all options are on the table". It's a bizarre way to run international relations, one we continue to follow at our peril... Boston Terror Updates & Developments: CIA MO Not the FBI, Contradictions from Dagestan, Recent Shooting Incident in Dagestan, Georgia-NATO-Russia & More | Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post I have been repeatedly emphasizing the importance of going outside the US mainstream and quasi-alternative media outlets for information and new developments on the Boston Terror event. Similarly, I have been urging people to place the bigger part of their attention on developments in the Caucasus during this period following the event. Let me exemplify what I mean by this with the following developments you won’t be seeing printed or talked-about in the US MSM and their little quasi-alternative siblings... The Official Tsarnaev Story Makes No Sense, by Craig Murray | Information Clearing House ...We are asked to believe that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was identified by the Russian government as an extremist Dagestani or Chechen Islamist terrorist, and they were so concerned about it that in late 2010 they asked the US government to take action. At that time, the US and Russia did not normally have a security cooperation relationship over the Caucasus, particularly following the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.. In early 2011 the FBI interviewed Tsarnaev and trawled his papers and computers but apparently – remarkably for somebody allegedly radicalised by internet – the habitually paranoid FBI found nothing of concern... The wrong kind of Caucasian, by Sarah Kendzior | Al Jazeera ...Knowing nothing of the Tsarnaevs' motives, and little about Chechens, the American media tore into Wikipedia and came back with stereotypes. The Tsarnaevs were stripped of their 21st century American life and became symbols of a distant land, forever frozen in time. Journalist Eliza Shapiro proclaimed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "named after a brutal warlord", despite the fact that Tamerlan, or Timur, is an ordinary first name in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her claim is equivalent to saying a child named Nicholas must be named in honour of ruthless Russian tsar Nicholas I... Israel: Morality and History, Arnold J. Toynbee | P U L S E In a public debate in Montreal, the famous historian Professor Arnold Toynbee defends his positions on Israel, from an Israeli diplomat, Dr. Yaacov Herzog, who unfortunately also chairs the meeting. The debate was held on January 31, 1961 at the Bnei Brith Hillel House at McGill University, before an audience of students, faculty and news reporters... The Normalization of Social Control: The Lockdown Society Goes Primetime, by Michael Schwalbe | Counterpunch ...I suspect that part of the appeal of “lockdown” to authorities who issue orders stems precisely from its semantic ties to the world of prison. In that world, the word is meant to imply not only We are now in control, but Never forget that we are always in control, you pathetic scum. Perhaps this is what makes the word so chilling. It reflects and affirms a dominator mentality that holds citizens in the same contempt as inmates... What Has Bibi Been Doing? by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar ...The new Israeli government will not be interested in compromise on any front, though it is somewhat divided on when and how to attack Iran (or how to get the United States to do the job for it). It will exhibit much of the racist extremism that has characterized Israeli politics of late. As Jeffrey Goldberg notes “The Jewish Home party advances an ideology that will bring about the destruction (the self-destruction) of Israel... [If they pull the plug themselves, it will save the world a lot of trouble and heartache.] The most honest three and a half minutes of television, EVER... | Safeshare TV Time for a Credible Narration of History, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle Nearly two weeks ago, Palestinians around the world commemorated the Deir Yassin Massacre which took place on April 9, 1948. In Palestinian consciousness, the massacre which claimed the lives of more than 100 innocent people, epitomised the ugly face of Zionism — the ideological foundation upon which the state of Israel was established. Over the years, the haunting memories associated with Deir Yassin morphed beyond its immediate representation as a deliberate criminal act aimed at achieving political ends and survived as a permanent scar in the centre of a collective memory that is heavy with many Deir Yassins... Israeli football, racism and politics: The ugly side of the beautiful game, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth Israel’s increasing integration into European competitions, despite its refusal to revive peace talks with the Palestinians, respect human rights and halt illegal settlement, is, according to critics, contrary to sporting values and should be met with international opposition of the kind faced by apartheid South Africa... Israeli Attorney General Endorses Airport Security Screening of Foreign Tourist E-Mails as Condition of Entry | Tikun Olam Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, in response to a complaint filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, gave legal approval for Ben Gurion airport security (operated by the Shabak) to demand access to the email accounts of foreign tourists as a condition for entry to Israel. In practice, this has mainly meant that as part of the security racial profiling protocol, such demands have been made mainly of travelers with dark-skin and/or Arabic names. In numerous cases, security has rifled through private email accounts and then, after hours of questioning, denied entry... [They could do instant DNA checks and deny entry to anyone who is demonstrably human. That would keep Israel safe and secure.] US Steps up Regime Change Bid on Iran, by Finian Cunningham | Dissident Voice American Secretary of Offense Chuck Hagel kicked off his Middle East tour this week with outrageous warmongering threats towards Iran, while at the same time giving a license for more state terrorism from Washington’s Israeli rogue regime. Hagel’s cozying up to Israeli partners-in-crime nails the lie that the Obama White House is somehow at odds with Tel Aviv over Middle East policy and Iran in particular. Nothing could be further from the truth. Washington is as wired for war as ever, and this belligerent impetus comes from Washington, not the rogue entity in Tel Aviv... Silvia Cattori With Gilad Atzmon ...The problem that we have with nationalism is that many times in the past it has been celebrated at others’ expense. Zionism was celebrated at the expense of the Palestinians. Nazism was celebrated at the expense of the rest of Europe. But at the moment this is not unique to nationalism. Because when we look at liberal democracies such as America and Britain we see a clear repetition of the same pattern. They are clearly celebrating their symptoms at the expense of the entire Arab world... Israel supporters use Boston bombing to call for firing of UN Rapporteur, by Phan Nguyen | Mondoweiss In recent days, news reports have accused Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, of blaming the Boston marathon attack on Israel and the US. Some reports even claim that he had said the victims deserved it. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon officially “reject[ed]” Falk’s alleged comments. The UK Mission to the UN “object[ed] strongly.” The Canadian foreign minister accused Falk of “mean-spirited, anti-Semitic rhetoric,” while the US Mission “completely reject[ed]” Falk’s “provocative and offensive commentary.”.. Yet Richard Falk never even made the comments he was being accused of making... The Ties That Bind Washington to Chechen Terrorist, by Wayne Madsen | Strategic Culture Foundation ...Evidence is mounting that the accused dead Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, allegedly killed during an April 19 shootout with police in Watertown, Massachusetts, became a «radicalized» Muslim while participating in a covert CIA program, run through the Republic of Georgia, to destabilize Russia's North Caucasus region… The ultimate goal of the CIA's campaign was for the Muslim inhabitants of the region to declare independence from Moscow and tilt toward the U.S. Wahhabi Muslim-run governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar... Chorus grows against Obama administration's sanctions-heavy Iran policy, by Scott Peterson | Christian Science Monitor America’s nuclear negotiators with Iran got it all wrong, according to a growing chorus of critics arguing that overreliance on pressure and sanctions may be jeopardizing a diplomatic deal... [So many well-intentioned but still befuddled commentators appear clueless about Imperial war aims – the last thing an American administration wants is a diplomatic deal.] Iran Remains Committed to NPT, Despite Bluster from MPs, While U.S. Ignores Treaty Obligations, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America ...the Iranian Foreign Ministry has again affirmed its continued commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and it safeguard agreement with the IAEA. In response to a recent statement by the five permanent, nuclear-armed members of the United Nations Security Council which claimed the Iranian nuclear program constituted a "serious challenge" to the treaty and called for the establishment of a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East, on Saturday April 20, 2013, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast reiterated Iran's role as a steadfast signatory of NPT... US Unveils Iraq WMD "Curveball-Style" Lies Vs. Syria, by Tony Cartalucci | Information Clearing House As NATO terror front collapses in Syria, US attempts to justify intervention by drumming up familiar WMD lies... Read more... America, the Beautiful Liar, Hits Syria | Roi Tov Trusting the articles that appeared on the Hebrew media on April 26, 2013, was impossible. Statements like "the USA finally accepts the IDF evaluation" created a feeling of severely biased news. Especially when the topic was the use of chemical weapons by Syria. It didn't make any sense; why would Bashar al-Assad give the West a reason to openly attack him on the ground? Doesn't he have enough troubles with the Western sponsored mercenaries?.. Why Russian Jews are right-wing racists, by Uri Avnery | Redress Information & Analysis When the huge immigration wave from the Soviet Union arrived in 1990, we [Israelis] were glad. First of all, because we believe that all immigration is a good thing for the country. This, I believe, is generally the case. Second, because we were convinced that this specific group of immigrants would push our country in the right direction... Apr 25, 2013 Obama In Jerusalem: Debunking Myth-Information | Legalienate Following are excerpt's from Obama's speech to young Israeli Jews, followed by Legalienate efforts to translate the ideological distortions into standard English. "It’s a story (Israel's) about finding freedom in your own land." Israel was founded mostly by Eastern European Jewry colonizing and displacing a large indigenous Arab majority. So Israel is really a story about eliminating freedom in someone else's land (the Palestinians')... Chuck Hagel Green Lights Israeli Attacks On Syria and Iran, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel did penance for his perceived sins against Israel. The former senator from Nebraska was criticized during his confirmation process by the likes of John McCain for not joining the march to war against Iran. Hagel’s opposition to sanctions against Iran were considered antisemitic.. All doubt was put to rest on Tuesday when Hagel met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. Hagel green lighted an attack on Iran, dispersing any remaining doubt about his past... [No big surprise – he’s just another obedient servant of the Elders of Zion] Syria: Shaving Cream As Chemical Weapon | Moon of Alabama Due to considerable progress by the Syrian government against the foreign sponsored, jihadist insurgency new allegations have to be found to justify additional foreign intervention. These now come in the form of alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government: "Shrunken pupils, foaming at the mouth and other signs indicate, in our view, that lethal chemical weapons were used.".. CIA Psychologist's Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush's Torture Program, by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye | Truthout Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on “war on terror” detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad. But the handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government’s top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence... Dance on Thatcher's Grave, but Remember, There Has Been a Coup in Britain, by John Pilger | Truthout In the wake of Thatcher's departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby's daughter, Marie, was one of them. Marie, age 5, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although her eligibility was not disputed, Marie was denied help by the Department of Social Security. Later, I obtained records of the case that showed Marie had been turned down because her father was "affected by a Trade dispute". The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders... The Backdoor-to-War Resolution, by Paul R. Pillar | The National Interest Members of Congress, as we all know, are fond of making political gestures to play to whatever audience they are trying to play to. In private conversation members can be quite candid about this and will exhibit a bifurcated approach to their jobs in which the world of gesture-making is divorced from the world of sound policy-making. Seeing their political careers dependent on playing to audiences, members tend to be quick to brush aside any costs or hazards entailed in the gestures. This is particularly true of sense-of-the-Congress resolutions, which, as proponents of any such resolution can always point out, do not entail any changes carrying the force of law... Former EU leaders slammed for 'anti-Israel' letter | Jerusalem Post Top United States experts on Israel’s security sharply criticized an open letter by former European Union politicians and diplomats to the EU’s top diplomat, Catherine Ashton, for its slanted attacks on the Jewish state’s role in the peace process with the Palestinians. A group of 19 composed of former EU presidents, prime ministers, ministers and senior officials wrote in a letter last week that “the Peace Process as conceived in the Oslo Agreements has nothing more to offer” and that Israel is responsible for “the bitterness generated by the harsh conditions of life under the Occupation.”.. [‘Oy Weh! Ze Holocaust! Ve are ze wictims!’ Yeah, you and my dog Putz] Why is Boston 'terrorism' but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian Two very disparate commentators, Ali Abunimah and Alan Dershowitz, both raised serious questions over the weekend about a claim that has been made over and over about the bombing of the Boston Marathon: namely, that this was an act of terrorism. Dershowitz was on BBC Radio on Saturday and, citing the lack of knowledge about motive, said (at the 3:15 mark): "It's not even clear under the federal terrorist statutes that it qualifies as an act of terrorism." Abunimah wrote a superb analysis of whether the bombing fits the US government's definition of "terrorism", noting that "absolutely no evidence has emerged that the Boston bombing suspects acted 'in furtherance of political or social objectives'".. UK bars Shell from paying Iran debt in food, medicine | Payvand While Shell has been trying for months to pay its debt to Iran without violating anti-Iranian sanctions, oil industry sources said the British government has blocked the payment under the pretext of a European Union embargo on Iran to prevent "a payment that helps Iran". Shell has reportedly consulted London on the possibility of paying British pharmaceuticals maker GSK to provide medicine to Iran in exchange for the debt but the proposal has been rejected... [War by any other name is still war, and the Empire implicitly declared war on Persia ages ago. After all, they resist becoming a vassal State. The only cessation of hostilities was during the reign of Shah Pahlevi, installed as the ruler by a CIA engineered coup, who was then dumped by the people of Iran in favor of the Ayatollah Khomeini and an Islamic State.] IDF Surrenders | Roi Tov On April 22, 2013, I published IDF Military Rabbinate rules "Gentile soldiers are not equal in rights to Jews." Against all odds, the article became highly polemic. Jeff Rense linked it; in another website it was published and then withdrawn within minutes. Yet, censoring the material was impossible, it has been already disseminated to subscribers around the globe, also media outlets beyond the reach of Israel... The Warsaw Ghetto 'Uprising': Jewish Insurrection or German Police Operation? by Robert Faurisson | Paul Eisen Here, Robert Faurisson debunks the Warsaw Ghetto story and in serving humankind he's spoiled one of my much-loved delusions. What a spoilsport!.. [See also The battle of Warsaw Ghetto and The 'Warsaw Ghetto Boy" and "A Jewish ghetto-fighter recalls her capture"] Do Racism, Conservatism, and Low I.Q. Go Hand in Hand? by Goal Auzeen Saedi | Democratic Underground Hodson and Busseri (2012) found in a correlational study that lower intelligence in childhood is predictive of greater racism in adulthood, with this effect being mediated.. through conservative ideology. They also found poor abstract reasoning skills were related to homophobic attitudes which was mediated through authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. What this study and those before it suggest is not necessarily that all liberals are geniuses and all conservatives are ignorant. Rather, it makes conclusions based off of averages of groups. The idea is that for those who lack a cognitive ability to grasp complexities of our world, strict-right wing ideologies may be more appealing... Freedom and high anxiety in the USA, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis Americans may assume that public insecurity is a condition you find under dictatorships, where the agents of the state can burst through your door and cart you away without a warrant. That can now happen in the USA too, but only to those the government calls “terrorists”. Perhaps naively, ordinary folks see themselves as immune from that sort of treatment. However, public insecurity has many roots. Americans actually experience, but almost never acknowledge, the fact that there is a correlation between US democracy’s relatively broad array of freedoms and public high anxiety... Who is Behind “Al Qaeda in Iran”? by Tony Cartalucci | Global Research As the FBI reels from what now appears to be revelations it was directly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings, a deluge of FBI “success” stories have been “serendipitously” splashed across Western headlines. Among them was an allegedly “foiled” terror attack in Canada, reported to be the work of terrorists supported by “Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran.” The Globe and Mail, in its report, “Canada joins U.S. in alleging al-Qaeda has operatives based in Iran,” states:.. Apr 23-24, 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings: Did You Know That.. by John Spritzler | New Democracy World The following summarizes key points discussed more fully and documented here... America’s Real Sources of Insecurity, by Lawrence Davidson | Consortium News The Boston Marathon bombings have dominated U.S. news for the past week, prompting fresh calls for ignoring constitutional protections in the face of “Islamic terrorism.” But the reality is that politically motivated violence has declined in America over recent years... [If the designated “terrorists” won’t do the job then the government is always happy to step in.] Targeting Iran | Stephen Lendman Hostile US/Israeli rhetoric is longstanding. Obama and Netanyahu consider Iran an existential threat. Claiming it turns truth on its head. AIPAC's no better. It calls Iran "the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and is racing toward a nuclear weapons capability.".. Fact check: America and Israel are the world's most egregious human rights abusers and sponsors of state-sponsored terrorism... Israel’s ‘Dove’ and Hawk in its War against Iran, by Muhammad Sahimi | Antiwar It has been abundantly clear to those who closely follow the political developments in the Middle East that, for at least two decades, Israeli politics has been moving continuously toward extreme, reactionary right. The left, and the center-left represented by the Labor Party, have been marginalized, and the relatively moderate elements of the old Likud Party have left it. As a result, Israeli politics are now dominated by the extreme groups and figures... Michael Klare: The Coming Global Explosion | TomDispatch ...Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced... Holding Carnegie to Account for War-Mongering Dressed Up as “Analysis” of Iran’s Nuclear Program | Going to Tehran Many (including us) have sought to push back against the rampant misinformation and analytic nonsense that passes for mainstream reporting and analysis on the Iranian nuclear issue. But the misinformation (disinformation?) and nonsense continues—as exemplified by the recent “study” by Karim Sadjadpour and Ali Vaez, Iran’s Nuclear Odyssey: Costs and Risks, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP). Late last week, our colleague at Iran Affairs, Cyrus Safdari, published a wonderfully sharp critique... What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? by Glenn Greenwal | The Guardian The Obama DOJ says it intends to question the Boston bombing suspect "extensively" without first Mirandizing him.. [Picky, picky. Soon, when the American Gestapo routinely comes knocking on the door, no one is even going to think about their so-called “rights.” Just run like hell.] I am so blessed, by Nahida | Poetry for Palestine The Truth Will Set Us Free? by Gabi Weber | The OtherSite I was brought up in a country that believed itself to be open and tolerant. Indeed after the Second World War Germany undertook to transform guilt into responsibility. For me, it was always clear that our commitment to those "inviolable and inalienable human rights(1)" as well as freedom of speech (2), were the most precious values and lessons to be drawn from our problematic past. This is why, three months ago, I was dismayed to discover that Freiburg University, one of our oldest German universities, banned an event hosting renowned Paris University Professor Christophe Oberlin who was scheduled to talk about plastic surgery in Gaza... Ain't Nothing Like Freedom by Cynthia McKinney | Clarity Press Elected six times to the House from the state of Georgia, Cynthia McKinney cut a trail through Congressional deceit like a hot ember through ash. She discovered legislators who passed laws without reading them. Party leaders who colluded across party lines against their constituents' interests. Black-skinned individuals shilling for the white status quo... The FBI Boston-Chechnya charade, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online The Boston bombing was major blowback. That much is certain. The question is, what level of blowback? It could have been a covert op gone real bad. It could have been blowback from former ''freedom fighters'' - in this case ethnic Chechens - reconverted into terra-rists. It could have been straight blowback for United States foreign policy targeting Muslims, whether dispatching them to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or Bagram, extraordinarily renditioning them, or target assassinating them... [If it was a setup, which I believe is the likeliest assumption, it wasn’t blowback at all - just another opportunity to advance the Imperial agenda.] FBI's Track Record On Creating Terrorism Destroys The Official Boston Marathon Bombing Narrative, by Lee Rogers | BlackListed News ...not only does the FBI have a track record of creating fake terror plots but they have a track record of allowing real terror plots to take place. With this in mind, the FBI has no credibility with their alleged on-going investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings... When Will We Ever Learn? by Franklin Lamb | Intifada Palestine ...U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Maura Connelly said the bombing opened a new chapter in America’s history in the Middle East. Connelly said the explosion taught Americans that “peaceful intentions were not enough to protect us from those who would use terror to achieve their aims in the Middle East.” What both officials avoid mentioning is the subject of who was committing the terrorism in Lebanon when these events, including the US Marine Barracks and the Embassy again in 1984, occurred... North Korean facts about the West | YouTube This is the North Korean viewpoint of the western societies. The funny thing about this film is that these things are true... [Following the absurd, over the top official intro, a pretty accurate picture is indeed presented.] Diaspora Jews must speak out against the Israeli Law of Return, by Sam Bahour | Mondoweiss ...world Jewry is silent about this reality of having an Israeli citizenship held in perpetuity for Jews only that awaits them their entire life. All they need to do to claim it is to visit Israel and request it. Partly because of this warped state of affairs, every Jew in the world is coaxed into thinking that they need to bear-hug Israel, regardless of whether Israel is engaged in war crimes or blatant racism... "The Tsar and the President" Film Presented at the Library of Congress | Royal Russia A little-known friendship between Russia’s Tsar Alexander II and US President Abraham Lincoln in the mid-1800s came to light in a documentary shown in the United States for the first time Monday evening at the Library of Congress in Washington, and organizers of the event hope it can serve as a model for US-Russian relations today. “This film ought to be in the schools. American children should know what a marvelous history we share with the Russians, and they don’t,” said former US Rep. James Symington, chairman of the nonprofit American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation(A-RCCF), which arranged the screening... Tony Blair's Tangled Web: The Quartet Representative and the Peace Process, by Jonathan Cook | Institute for Palestine Studies Tony Blair stepped down as British prime minister in 2007 and immediately assumed the position of representative to the Quartet, the international body overseeing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Against the background of mounting criticism at home over his role in the 2003 Iraq War, this profile examines the record of Blair’s activities in the Middle East over the past five years. The picture that emerges is one of rapid self-enrichment through murky consultancies and opaque business deals with Middle East dictators, and an official role.. whose main results appear to be an unhappy Palestinian Authority and the perpetuation of the status quo... Read more... A Eulogy for Akiva Orr, 1931-2013: Aki and Friends | The Bichler & Nitzan Archives ...For more than a century, the Palestinians have confronted a Zionist movement whose colonial policies have gradually deprived them of their life, land and autonomy. As often happens with occupiers, the Israelis have preferred to blame their victim.. The 'Arabs', they say, cannot be trusted. Like the boa constrictor and tarantula, it is 'their nature' to bite and strangle. Nowadays, these explanations have no traction. Most sensible observers around the world have come to accept Aki’s logic and reject the official Israeli line as self-serving, if not ludicrous. But that wasn’t always the case... European Football rewards Israeli racism, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis ..Given Israel’s unsporting record and sheer bloody-minded obstructiveness towards the Palestinians’ efforts to participate in national and international sport (examples are listed below in Elizabeth Morley’s email), it is quite outrageous for the British government to applaud and reward the Tel Aviv regime’s racist behaviour. After all, the toffs who run our Westminster government were brought up on the playing fields of Eton and, we presume, had proper sporting values well and truly beaten into them... Apr 22, 2013 Senate Resolution: U.S. Will Go to War With Iran if Israel Does, by MJ Rosenberg | Huffington Post ...the point of this resolution is to tell Israel that it can go to war with Iran, with the assurance that if it gets into trouble, the United States will step in and finish the job. Israeli hawks need that assurance because it is generally understood that Israel cannot take out Iran's nuclear facilities alone. It can only try if it knows that the United States is right there just in case. The intent of this resolution is to eliminate any Israeli hesitancy about getting into a war it cannot win. Israelis won't do that. Menendez, Graham and company are telling them not to worry. Just do it, and we are in too... [If these gentlemen were where they belong, in a courtroom being tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity and high treason, their attorneys could plead criminal insanity. If I were the Judge, I would come up with a creative solution – put them in the Primate House in the National Zoo with a label reading “failed experiment.”] Read more...‘False-flag’ meme goes mainstream on Boston Marathon bombings, by Dr. Kevin Barrett | PressTV ...after the Boston bombings of April 16th, 2013, even the corporate monopoly media could no longer ignore the possibility of a false-flag attack. Yahoo News asked “Who's behind the Boston Marathon bombings?” and offered 4 theories: (1) Islamic jihadists, (2) Right-wing militia types, (3) the government, and (4) a criminally-insane lone wolf. Numbers (1), (2), and (4), of course, are the usual suspects. But including (3) “the government” on the suspects list is unprecedented for a mainstream news story reporting on a domestic terror incident... Read more... The Cult of Killing and the Symbolic Order of Western Barbarism: How the Media Worships Violence and “Ritualized Atrocities” | Global Research ...The display of the lynching of Mouamar Gaddafi exposes our societies for what they are. It mesmerizes and dismantles our capacity to think and critically assess a historical process. By focusing public attention on what constitutes a “ritualized atrocity” these gruesome images confirm that the US Empire actually represents an unprecedented regression, a step backwards in the history of humanity... Read more... Watch Ron Paul's Farewell Address! | YouTube In a public career t hat included three stints in Congress.. and a run for president as the Libertarian Candidate (1988), no living elected official has done more to advance the ideals of limited government and a libertarian approach to federal government... [I’m no Libertarian, but Paul, Kucinich and a handful of others have been the only sane and decent members of Congress since Paul Wellstone - and the first two are now gone. That leaves the country almost exclusively in the hands of a pack of genocidal maniacs. Good luck, USA - good luck, world.] Security theater moves to Act Two following arrest of Boston marathon bombing suspect, by Mike Adams | Natural News ...In examining the events of the week, a rational person can't help but conclude that only a small part of what's being officially reported about the Boston marathon bombers has any basis in fact. And even after the announced arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the remaining survivor of the supposed terrorist bombing duo, we still have:.. Read more... Is Tom Friedman the Most Overrated and Disgraceful Journalist in America? by Robert Parry | Alternet When ranking which multi-millionaire American pundit is the most overrated, there are, without doubt, many worthy contenders, but one near the top of any list must be the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman – with his long record of disastrous policy pronouncements including his enthusiasm for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq... Read more... When Israeli denial of Palestinian existence becomes genocidal, by Ilan Pappe | Australians for Palestine In a regal interview he gave the Israeli press on the eve of the state’s ” Independence Day,” Shimon Peres, the current president of Israel, said the following: “I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world? This is a miracle: a land built by people”.. Israeli Airlines Struck by War on Terror | Roi Tov ...Western economies are based on constant war; their industries are war-oriented. As long as this continues there won't be peace. Yet, a ray of light has passed through the heavy clouds obscuring the minds of Western leaders. One of their own companies, a major client of their hallucinated wars is falling victim to their own violence. The only way they can stop what they call terror is by stopping the War on Terror... Read more... Iran: how the West missed a chance to make peace with Tehran, by Peter Oborne | The Telegraph ...The new US defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, is due to make his first visit to Israel on Sunday amid fresh warnings from the country’s leaders that time is running out to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat. Here, in a provocative article based on his controversial new book, Peter Oborne shows how the West turned down a precious opportunity to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis eight years ago, and argues that it is western rather than Iranian intransigence that prevents a deal being struck today... [To shamelessly quote myself, “the last thing the Empire wants is peace.”] BDS activism produces a significant result | Niqnaq One of the largest security companies operating in Israel said Sunday it would not renew a number of important contracts, in response to tension over its activities in the West Bank. Britain and Denmark-based G4S, which has come under heavy pressure from pro-Palestinian activists, said it would let expire contracts to provide screening equipment at the Ofer Military prison near Ramallah, at West Bank checkpoints and at a police station in the E-1 area east of Jerusalem... Read more... Apr 21, 2013 The Boston Massacre Here we go again- Déjà vu. Out of the blue we have a ‘terror event,’ a couple of pop-terrorists, and a new buzz-word nation - Chechnya. There they go again: USA Media tales made-in-government: Muslims, terrorists, fanatics, freedom-haters … this time from another exotic-sounding land-Chechnya. They are going to tell you about the new frontiers in the so-called Islamic Terror Cells: The Caucasus and Central Asia. They’ve been planning this for a long time. In fact, the plans were in motion as early as the mid-1990s... None of the following proves that what actually happened at the Boston Marathon was different from what the FBI says happened. But the fact that terrorist events make the public more obedient to the rulers (as indicated by the understandable willingness of everybody in Boston and surrounding towns to remain indoors when instructed to do so by the authorities, in the name of public safety) constitutes a cui bono (to whose benefit?) reason for at least being skeptical of the FBI's account of things... Mounting evidence suggests state-sponsored terrorism. Expect more later to confirm it. Cui bono matters most. Powerful interests benefit hugely. Ordinary people lose out. War on terror 2.0 looms. Innocent people will suffer. Expect more repressive laws. Military spending will increase. Homeland security will be boosted. Fundamental freedoms will die. Full-blown tyranny may follow. It's already a hair's breath away... The Boston Marathon bombing has provoked shock, grief and outrage from around the world. After decades of conditioning, the public automatically equates such terrorism with Muslim radicals. But the evidence shows that every major terror plot on American soil in the past 10 years has been fostered, funded and equipped by one organization: the FBI... Read more, watch video... What appear to be private contractors, wearing unmarked, matching uniforms and operating an unmarked SUV affixed with communication equipment near the finish line of the Boston Marathon shortly after the bomb blasts - can be seen beforehand, standing and waiting just meters away from where the first bomb was detonated. The contractor-types had moved away from the bomb's location before it detonated, and could be seen just across the street using communication equipment and waiting for similar dressed and equipped individuals to show up after the blasts... I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia. Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including former CIA Director James Woolsey... Agendas are hovering over the Boston bombings like hungry vultures desperate to rend a carcass. Exhibit A: In a post published at the Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker, a senior Department of Homeland Security official in the administration of George W. Bush, argues that the Boston Marathon bombings prove that surveillance cameras are awesome and Congress should pass CISPA — the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act... ...So you walk around the future crime scene with no attempt to disguise yourselves (with one brother appearing in public after the bombing). You've created an arsenal of homemade bombs in order to defend yourselves from the police afterward. But you have made no effort to secure a vehicle in which to escape - thus necessitating stealing a car after the bombing with simply bizarre bragging - and you have made no effort to have cash on hand in order to be able to flee, necessitating a very risky robbery of a 7-11. Does this make any sense at all?.. [Doesn’t have to make any sense – any more than processed food has to have any nutritional value. You know that, with your superb marketing apparatus in high gear, the sheeple will gobble it up.] The horrific bombings at the Boston Marathon have left us all stunned. We still don’t know the perpetrators’ motive, but there are some things we do know. The bombers chose the most closely monitored location in all of Boston. They could have chosen a different site, knowing that all eyes were on the marathon route. But no. They chose the finish line of the oldest marathon in America. Let that sink in... A satiated people’s advice, by Ilan Hammerman | Australians for Palestine The road to hell is truly paved with good, even if sometimes ridiculous, intentions. A whole line of Israeli writers have signed up to an open letter to Samer Issawi, the prisoner who has been on a hunger strike for many months. “We feel,”they wrote to him, “that the suicidal act you are about to commit will add another facet of tragedy and desperation to the conflict between the two peoples… don’t pile more despair on the despair already in existence…. “We urge you to stop your hunger strike and choose life.”.. [The Israeli “Left” is just like the American equivalent – comfortable, hypocritical, clueless and cowardly] Arrest Bush, Impeach Obama: The High Crime of Torture, by Rob Urie | Counterpunch Confirmation by the Constitution Project nearly a decade late that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military and ‘intelligence’ services committed acts of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere appears a Rorschach test for the ‘sentiments’ of the American people. However, sentiments aside, formal indictments of culpable officials on war crimes charges and the start of impeachment proceedings against current President Barack Obama are the only relevant responses to the report... The Locus of the Conflict in Palestine is in Washington DC: Zionism and the United States Congress, by William James Martin | Counterpunch The ideology, or political project, of Zionism which underlies the creation of the State of Israel had, in fact, a Christian origin rather than a Jewish one, as writings can be found dating from the 1500’s, written by Christian clergymen in England advocating the migration of Jews to the Holy Land. The migration of Jews to Palestine was also advocated by Napoleon Bonaparte. The first Jewish presentations of Zionism were written by Moses Hess in 1862 and 20 years later by Leo Pinsker, both of the Russian Pale, with each writer advocated a separate state for Jews... Re-turning rights, by Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera Since its inception, the Zionist project was clear in its goals and the strategy required to achieve them. In order for Jews to colonise the lands of the Palestinians and establish an exclusivist Jewish state, Zionist strategists insisted, the natives must be driven out of the country. For Zionism, colonisation and expulsion were to be simultaneous processes that could not be decoupled from one another.. At the same time, Zionism insisted, following Millenarian Protestant Restorationist claims, that European Jews, rather than being descendants of European converts to Judaism, were actually descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been allegedly exiled by the Romans in the 1st century AD... The Elusive 'Good War' by Ta-Nehisi Coates | The Atlantic I finished Antony Beevor's majestic The Second World War last night. I immediately poured myself a drink. Beevor's book is great look at how we think about "good" and "evil." I found it very easy to name "evil," and a lot harder to name "good.".. Sharp Shift in Israel's Strategy | Roi Tov Few foreign leaders participated in Margaret Thatcher's funeral. Most allies of the UK sent mid-range delegations; after all, few would like to be defined as Thatcherists. Even Prime Minister Cameron when asked for the justification for the expensive funeral, similar to the one awarded to Winston Churchill, said that she had been the first female Prime Minister, avoiding any mention of her monstrous actions. The sumptuous event was planned years ago by Thatcher herself and a crypto-Thatcherist, Prime Minister Tony Blair. Big Ben was silenced during the event, but the bestial bells of fanatic ultra-nationalism rang stronger than ever... In Praise of Emotion, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom Last Sunday, on the eve of Israel’s Remembrance Day for the fallen in our wars, I was invited to an event organized by the activist group Combatants for Peace and the Forum of Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Parents. The first surprise was that it took place at all. In the general atmosphere of discouragement of the Israeli peace camp after the recent elections, when almost no one dared even to mention the word peace, such an event was heartening. The second surprise was its size. It took place in one of the biggest halls in the country, Hangar 10 in Tel-Aviv’s fair grounds. It holds more than 2000 seats... Relatives of Flotilla Raid Victims Reject Israeli Compensation | NYT As Israeli and Turkish officials prepared for talks on Monday to restore relations, frozen since Israel’s deadly raid on a Turkish-led flotilla to Gaza, relatives of the nine people killed said Saturday that they would reject the compensation promised by Israel until it fully removes restrictions on the movement of goods and people in Gaza... Nuclear Orientalism, by Tarak Barkawi | Al Jazeera Once again, the Crazy Emperor of the Hermit Kingdom - North Korea - is threatening nuclear war. Or so the media would have us believe. The BBC and other news outlets have taken to publishing maps with concentric rings donating the speculative ranges of North Korea's creaky missile systems. One never tested missile might possibly reach Alaska and do for Sarah Palin and the polar bears. The basic idea purveyed by the media and by US spokespersons is that Oriental despotisms -as Iran and North Korea are regularly portrayed - cannot possibly be trusted with nuclear weapons... Apr 20, 2013 Clapper: Iran Still Not Building a Nuclear Weapon; Purpose of Sanctions is to Foster Unrest, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America ...reports that Iran has continued converting its stockpiled 19.75% enriched uranium into fuel plates for its cancer-treating medical research reactor gained absolutely no traction within the Committee or Clapper's comments. For Congress, Iran is a threat simply by virtue of having independent political considerations, inalienable national rights and refusing to accept American hegemony over its own security interests... Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing | Gilad Atzmon We went on "Israeli Independence Day," Rabin Square, Tel -Aviv to celebrate the "ethnic cleansing" along with the people of Israel. We distributed maps prepared by "Zochrot" documenting the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the beginning of Zionism to 67. Reactions?.. Boston Bombers: Role of CIA in Chechen Terror, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars ...Despite all the evidence the United States, Britain, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia orchestrated efforts to undermine the Soviet Union.. and spread radical Sunni conflict throughout the region, we will be expected to believe brothers Anzor and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are part of a renewed effort by an international al-Qaeda to attack America. The effort by the CIA to shepherd this fanatical movement will, of course, be omitted. This will be the narrative broadcast in the coming days by the establishment media. In response to this supposedly renewed effort by al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Chechnya, we will be expected to consent or at least passively acquiesce to the next phase of police state intrusion on our liberties... The Deadliest Israel Lobby Conspiracy Theories, by Grant Smith | Antiwar ...American media has proven uniquely susceptible to propagating harmful Israel lobby conspiracy theories without opposing views. Absent informed challenges or balanced debunking, conspiracy theories have now taken dangerous prominence—displacing verifiable facts—in the minds of many Americans. Unless remedied, such narratives could result in another costly and unnecessary war and billions in misallocated taxpayer dollars at a time Americans can least afford it... FBI Investigates AIPAC-Israel Embassy | IRMEP Declassified FBI files reveal a long running espionage and theft of government documents investigation targeting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Israeli embassy in Washington DC during the 1984 US-Israel Free Trade Area negotiations. The FBI uncovered allegations that an agent of the Israeli intelligence services worked undercover as a member of AIPAC's staff. A quarter century after the tainted negotiations led to passage of US-Israel preferential trade pact, it remains the most unfavorable of all US bilateral trade agreements, producing chronic deficits, lack of US market access to Israel and ongoing theft of US intellectual property... Was Israel's flotilla apology really a triumph for Turkey? by Murat Dagli | The Electronic Intifada ...the apology was brokered by Washington. For the long-term interests of the US in the region, the stability of Turkish-Israeli relations have always been crucial and the restoration of their diplomatic ties can be seen as one of the first foreign policy achievements of Obama’s second term. Whether the restoration of relations will be long-lasting or not is uncertain, but there is no doubt the US will benefit from the apology... Winston Churchill's Secret Poison Gas Memo | Information Clearing House ...Churchill was in no doubt that gas could be profitably employed against the Kurds and Iraqis (as well as against other peoples in the Empire): I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes. Henry Wilson shared Churchill's enthusiasm for gas as an instrument of colonial control but the British cabinet was reluctant to sanction the use of a weapon that had caused such misery and revulsion in the First World War... American-Palestinian Jailed by Israel: Does it Matter? | Roi Tov ...The jailing of children and other crimes committed by Israel and regularly condemned by the UN and other international organizations are crimes against humanity to the extent that Israel was defined as "terror-inflicting" by the UN Human Rights Council. Israel cannot judge itself. An international court, like the one that judged Nazis in Nuremberg, must be created for the task. While reading a few of the reports on the American-Palestinian arrested by Israel it was difficult to ignore that most reporters were distressed by the fact that an American-Palestinian had been arrested by Israel, with the stress on the American side of the story... Margaret Thatcher, and the man in the shadows, by Tony Gosling | RT ...The taboo not a single commentator has broached though is the shadowy 'advisory' role played throughout her premiership by European banking fraternity's Labour peer Lord Victor Rothschild. He was revealed in the book the Thatcher government tried to suppress, Peter Wright's Spycatcher, to be behind London's top secret service appointments. In 1986 Rothschild penned 'Paying for Local Government' the policy paper that led to the notorious Poll Tax that fell hardest on the poorest, and which brought Britons onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands in 1990, riots echoing London's Poll Tax revolt of 1381... Foreign Policy and Gun Control in Boston, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation ...Ever since the 9/11 attacks, many Americans simply have been unable to fathom that foreigners can get so angry over the U.S. government’s actions in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that they end up retaliating with terrorism against the United States. I have never been able to understand that mindset. The reaction to the Boston bombings provides a good way to analyze this phenomenon... Lebanon: Even Coffee is Political, by Jamal Kanj | Intifada Palestine ...In Beirut, each neighbourhood is guarded at night by vigilante groups stopping suspected interlopers and scrutinising their identification cards. Some are held or assaulted for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was not unusual to see army personnel carriers at street corners, demarking unofficial boundaries that divide neighbourhoods along sectarian and political lines... Apr 19, 2013 The Invention of the Land of Israel by Shlomo Sand: Review by Donald Sassoon | The Guardian In this second volume of his trilogy of Jewish studies, Sand explores how the 'Land of Israel' was invented, and debunks popular nationalist mythology... Zionists warm up to wage nuclear wars across Mideast, by Prof. Rodney Shakespeare | PressTV The Zionist attack dogs are at it again. These creatures, of peculiarly vicious disposition, come in two main types. There is the Zionist Israeli type, slavering and slobbering at the thought of killing somebody who is not capable of seriously fighting back. This type, for example, is very good at killing defenseless Palestinians and consists of Nazi fascists. Exactly like the German Nazis, the Zionist Israelis have a racial doctrine, a historical doctrine and a lebensraum doctrine... A Hundred Deir Yassins and Counting: Beit Daras and the Buried History of Massacres, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle ...The importance of the Deir Yassin massacre to historians often obscures important facts. One amongst them is that Deir Yassin was one of many massacres perpetrated by Zionist troops, including Haganah units. Another is that these militias had jointly formed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) following the official Israeli Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948 despite their supposed differences during the conquest of Palestine. David Ben-Gurion had made his decision on May 26 and hesitated little to include both the Irgun and Lehi, alongside the Haganah... [A day born in infamy] The Strategic and Moral Bankruptcy of U.S. Sanctions Policy Toward Iran: Flynt Leverett and Trita Parsi on HuffPost Live | Going to Tehran ...“We’re at war, and it’s not just an economic war. We’re engaged in cyber-attacks against high-value Iranian targets, we’re sponsoring covert operations by groups inside Iran that, in any other country in the world, we would call terrorist operations. We are definitely waging war against the Islamic Republic.”.. [Just how ignorant, stupid and counter-productive are American policies (driven by Zionist genocidal lunacy) in the Middle East, and how low will they go? Well, it appears to be a bottomless pit.] AIPAC Bill Runs Into Unusual Resistance In Congress, by Mitchell Plitnick | LobeLog In an article published in The Hill, Mike Coogan reports that some of the key legislation that emerged from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) 2013 annual policy conference is running into significant difficulties in Congress. The bills, which Lara Friedman only half-jokingly called the “Israel Best Ally With Benefits” bills, have not gained close to the overwhelming support that AIPAC has come to expect from Congress... Of Bombings and Tax Havens: Terrorizing the Economy, by Laura Flanders | Counterpunch Two acts of cruelty claimed lives this tax day. One was criminal, bloody and shocked a nation. The other was routine, legal and potentially way more deadly. They both rely on secrecy. The bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon were planted by we don’t know whom. The tax haven: a killer at the heart of our world economy, was planted by the planet’s richest people, businesses and banks with the complicity of their governments. Compare tax evasion to terrorism? That’s going a bit far, I hear some of you say. Possibly, but think about it:.. Press Release by National Iranian American Council (NIAC): Senate Brings US Closer to War With Iran | Payvand "This is a dangerous step towards a war of choice with Iran," said NIAC Policy Director Jamal Abdi. "This resolution sets the stage for Israeli strikes and for a Congressional vote to authorize military force against Iran." NIAC has opposed this measure as a backdoor to war since its introduction. By calling for the U.S. to unconditionally provide military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israel should the country attack Iran, the original draft would have effectively outsourced the decision to go to war to Prime Minister Netanyahu... The Orwellian Warfare State of Carnage and Doublethink, by Norman Solomon | Global Research In sync with media outlets across the country, the New York Times put a chilling headline on Wednesday’s front page: “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say.” The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, “rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast.” Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87/B warheads were in the category of “combined effects munitions” when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting. One Friday, at noontime, U.S.-led NATO forces dropped cluster bombs on the city of Nis, in the vicinity of a vegetable market... Israel Renounces Imperial Monument | Roi Tov ...Distressed by his political weakening following the recent elections, Emperor Netanyahu is a bit confused. Time Magazine just published its 2013 Time 100, the list of most influential people; Netanyahu was replaced in the list by Yair Lapid, leader of the second largest party in Netanyahu's coalition. Shocked, King Bibi turned his attention back to Imperial Graves; after all this could become a pertinent topic earlier than expected... Open Letter to Roger Waters: Don’t Drop Your Boycott Call, by Tariq Shadid | Palestine Chronicle ...we must believe that the sum of the efforts of all brave individuals who have the courage to stand up against ongoing injustices, should be able to sort some effect that could have a positive influence on the outcome of this complex paradigm of violence and injustice. Without this belief, brave individuals like yourself would lose their drive to make a difference, and the issue would be left in the hands of those very same currents that have been causing the dire situation that we are facing today... Jew in a Bag | Gilad Atzmon Ynet reported yesterday on this interesting incident of a Haredi Jewish passenger photographed wrapped in large plastic bag during flight. The boy doesn't like to be in proximity to women or Goyim, let alone Goyim women i.e. Shiksas. He is religiously thrilled by this unique and original form of self imposed isolation. Ynet suggests that the man in the bag was an Israeli combat pilot at an earlier stage of his life. I assume that dropping bombs on innocent people leaves a deep scar in the chosen's soul... America: Running Out of Time, by Timothy V. Gatto | The People's Voice ...In America we are told that we have a choice of whom we vote for. That choice is an illusion. Here in America we have two corporately controlled political puppets for the military industrial complex and they are called Democrats and Republicans. We have other political parties here in America, but they are largely silenced by the laws and practices put in place by the two major political parties. We are led to believe that the voices of 350 million Americans can be heard through the narrative of only two men corruptively nominated by these two political parties... Anti-Zionism Not Anti-Terrorism | Stephen Lendman ...Israel considers civilians legitimate targets. Children are treated like adults. Racism is institutionalized. Land theft is policy. So are dispossessions, ruthless persecution, and denying non-Jews their fundamental rights. Peace is spurned. Conflict, violence and other human rights abuses persist. Palestinians endure cruel and unusual punishment. International laws don't matter. Israeli war crimes go unpunished. It gets away with murder with impunity. Doing so reflects the worst of Zionist extremism... Beware of G8 Statements on Iran, by Peter Jenkins | LobeLog The statement issued by G8 Foreign Ministers at the end of their meeting in London last week contains four paragraphs on Iran. They appear in a section devoted to Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, ahead of four paragraphs on North Korea (DPRK). The Iran section opens portentously with a ministerial expression of “deep concern”. The word “concern” appears twice more in the section, each time ascribed to “the international community”. I want to explore whether the drafters of this statement were justified in giving such emphasis to “concern”, and in assuming that all but a handful of the 192 members of the UN (the international community) still feel concern regarding Iran’s nuclear activities... Apr 17-18, 2013 The Boston Bombing ...As many people have already pointed out, the collective empathy that Americans feel for victims of similar attacks when they are carried out by our own government is virtually zero compared to what is being felt now for Bostonians. It was just indubitably confirmed through hard investigative journalism last week that large portions of the 3,000-4,000 people killed in the drone war have been unidentified individuals without any connection to any terrorist or insurgent groups in conflict with the US. For years, there have been indisputable reports of massive civilian casualties in drone bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, and beyond... ..While it’s still undetermined as to who committed the Boston Marathon bombings and why, at the top of the list of suspects has got to be people who are retaliating for what the U.S. national-security state has been doing and continues to do to people in foreign countries, including the drone assassinations, the 12-year occupation of Afghanistan, the sanctions against Iran, and the support of brutal Middle East dictatorships. Is it all worth it? That’s what Americans need to be asking themselves. In the process of reflecting on that question, Americans need to rid themselves of the propagandistic nonsense that the U.S. national-security state has been spouting ever since 9/11... ...There is negative energy implicit in such a violent event, and there is potential positive energy to be had from the way that we respond to it. To fight our contemporary pathologies, the tragedy has to be turned to empathy and universal compassion rather than to anger and racial profiling. Whatever sick mind dreamed up this act did not manifest the essence of any large group of people. Terrorists and supremacists represent only themselves, and always harm their own ethnic or religious group along with everyone else... One of the most searing and iconic images of Monday’s bomb blasts in Boston is a long-haired man wearing a cowboy hat, comforting a traumatized victim who appeared to have lost his legs in one of the explosions. The man in the hat is named Carlos Arredondo, and he is being heralded as a hero who, ironically has spent most of the last decade grieving over his own son’s death serving our country in the fight against terrorism... Maggie's Funeral The death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher on the day Britain’s Tory-led government introduced major changes to disability benefits which, according to charities, would eventually lead to as many as six hundred thousand disabled people losing state support may be dismissed as a mere coincidence. But they both signify a singular phenomenon of social transformation which has been extremely costly and painful, and which continues more than two decades after Thatcher was forced out of office in 1990. Her funeral with great pomp and ceremony, at an estimated cost of ten million pounds, is in sharp contrast to the effects of her policies to date... A nagging thought, as Thatcher Week reaches its peak with Wednesday's funeral: Never a supporter, and now observing from afar both the pomp of British ceremony and the swelling chorus of disapproval outside St Paul’s Cathedral, I am bothered by the role that Britain’s Jews might have played in Margaret Thatcher’s political successes... Following in the footsteps of his father, a Zionist hero, toward a free and democratic Palestine, by Hadani Ditmars | Haaretz It took the murder of his niece to galvanize Miko Peled, son of IDF General Matti Peled who later became a champion of Palestinian rights, to follow a journey that has led him to embrace a democratic one-state solution. If Miko Peled’s memoir "The General’s Son" were made into a movie, it would open with this scene: In his San Diego home in 1997, while casually watching CNN, he catches a glimpse of a young girl on a stretcher... Indisputable Torture of Prisoners | NYT A dozen years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an independent, nonpartisan panel’s examination of the interrogation and detention programs carried out in their aftermath by the Bush administration may seem to be musty old business. But the sweeping report issued on Tuesday by an 11-member task force convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, provides a valuable, even necessary reckoning... [Too little too late, but at least it’s something] What's Driving France's Surprising Anti-Gay Marriage Protest: The French Spring, by Israel Shamir | Counterpunch ...The newspapers speak of the French Spring, echoing the Arab one. The new President Francois Hollande is quite unpopular; his ratings are the lowest of any French president since presidential popularity began to be rated in 1981. For the simple reason: his socialist party continues with the same neoliberal policies, this time in agreement with the tame trade unions. The Wicked Witch of the West is dead, but her spirit is still with us... Two Obamas, Two Classes of Children, by Ralph Nader | Palestine Chronicle A photograph brought the horror of little children lying dead outside of their home to an American Audience. At least 10 Afghan children and some of their mothers were struck down by an airstrike on their extended family household by order of President Barack Obama. He probably decided on what his aides describe as the routine weekly “Terror Tuesday” at the White House. On that day, Mr. Obama typically receives the advice about which “militants” should live or die thousands of miles away from drones or aircraft. Even if households far from war zones are often destroyed in clear violation of the laws of war, the president is not deterred... France’s Media Admits that the Syrian “Opposition” is Al Qaida - Then Justifies French Government Support to the Terrorists, by Gearóid Ó Colmáin | Global Research In a report published on the 11th of April French daily Le Monde admits that rebels fighting the government of the Syrian Arab Republic are dominated by Japhat Al Nosra, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaida. The admission comes after two years of non-stop disinformation trumpeted from all French mainstream media outlets from the official right to the official left, disinformation that has attempted to convince the French public that democratic revolutionaries are fighting a war for human rights and freedom against a brutal, tyrannical dictator, who is ‘’ killing his own people’’.. Fraudulent ‘Peace Process’: Success Requires Consequence for Failure, by John Whitbeck | Uruknet For almost two decades, the seemingly perpetual Middle East "peace process" has been like a hamster-wheel for Palestinians and a merry-go-round for Israelis All the movement has been a form of running or turning in place. Nothing ever really changes. As Secretary of State John Kerry shuttles around the Middle East, ostensibly to "kick-start" a resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu insisting that any new negotiations must be "without preconditions" and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insisting, among other things, that any new negotiations must be time-limited, it is worth recalling a prior negotiations resumption ceremony... For Israel’s Birthday, Senate Committee Passes Another Iran War Resolution, by M.J. Rosenberg | MCW News It is customary for Congress to pass resolutions commending Israel on the anniversary of its founding in 1948. Once these resolutions were innocuous with references to “making the desert bloom” and “ingathering” Jewish refugees. Standard “pro-Israel” boilerplate. No more. In recent years Congress, with the Israel lobby’s eager assistance, has coupled salutations and congratulations with increasingly strident language about terrorism, Palestinians, and now, Iran... Neither Justice Nor Reconciliation, by Diana Johnstone | Counterpunch ...At one point, a Cuban delegate asked Canadian panelist General Lewis MacKenzie, who commanded UN peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo during the Bosnian phase of the wars: what was the real reason that NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999? General MacKenzie replied candidly that it was because NATO was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, the Soviet bloc had collapsed, and “NATO was looking for work”. The 1999 bombing of Kosovo was blatantly illegal – an act of aggression, without U.N. Security Council mandate, carried out with impunity against a country that posed no threat whatsoever to any NATO member... Eisenhower’s Reprieve and the Descent Into Fiscal Insanity, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar David Stockman’s The Great Deformation is an economic history of the United States as seen through the eyes of a devoted fiscal conservative whose number-crunching abilities have led him to the ineluctable conclusion that the Warfare State is one of the main drivers of that old devil the Welfare State. The result is that we get an analysis that in no way resembles the cookie-cutter Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise Institute "conservatism" that insists on austerity for the masses and tax cuts for the wealthy, while throwing money at the Pentagon hand over fist. Instead, we get praise for such an unlikely conservative hero as Harry Truman... Israeli Anti-Missiles Fail in Eilat Attack | Roi Tov ...most reports on Israeli media are about failed interceptions. Israel manipulates its antimissile systems interception data; this is the result of the systems being aimed for export, mainly to South Korea and Singapore, but also due to the generous American support of the development process. The manipulation is straightforward; the system is deployed exclusively where it has optimal interception conditions. Moreover, during Pillar of Cloud, Israel shot two anti-missiles against every missile. This leads to what in Measurement Theory is known as a bad sampling of data, which becomes unrepresentative of the overall population of the studied event... Apr 16, 2013 The Bombing in Boston There's not much to say about Monday's Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways:. [It’s odd that Greenwald doesn’t mention the all too obvious prime suspects – the USraeli power elite. This has the earmarks of yet another false-flag attack that serves their agenda. It's just speculation at this point, but Occam's Razor applies.] ...I mourn the death of any innocent. It's just that I have few tears left for my own poor killed and maimed fellow citizens. I have used up all my tears morning the hundreds of innocent men, women and children Obama has killed with his drones and for the ruination our country has visited upon the earth and its peoples. We are a terrorist nation. Is any Amerikan then worthy to be exempted from the deserved blowback our brutal policies have created all over the world?.. ...Though it is as possible as anything seems to be in a rapidly spiraling into anything-can-happen-to-anyone-anytime environment, the tragic Boston bombings need hardly be a foreign exercised plot given that even a barely competent US insecurity state should have known about it if that were the case. At its previously incompetent state it failed miserably on 9/11/01 but since then has had ample time to not only clean up its act but also become one of the world’s biggest eavesdroppers on and invaders of its own people’s privacy... ...while most western media had hours of continuous coverage of this bombing that killed three individuals, they rarely mention the daily bombings and killings of hundreds and thousands of innocent civilians especially by US drones in places like Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (where there are no first class medical facilities as exists in Boston). Nor do they care to mention killing by proxy of hundreds of civilians monthly by US puppet dictators from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia or by the US supported racist apartheid regime of Israel or of western funded Islamist groups in Syria... As I write this, we still don’t know who was responsible for the horrific bombing attack in Boston. Perhaps it will turn out to be the work of home grown rightwing nuts; perhaps it’s the act of foreign terrorists. But, whatever the source, what strikes me is the number of times the barbaric assault is being denounced as “cowardly,” as in Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis’s warning that “This cowardly act will not be taken in stride.”.. What Israel Means to Me, by David Shasha | Huffington Post ...For the traditional Jew, not just for Sephardim, the state of Israel represents a profound rejection of a millennia-old Jewish identity. The psychological impact of all this is formulated in the irrational American Jewish identification with Israel as the existential center of all Jewish life. Having rejected the traditions of the past, based on the religious values of Torah and Halakhah, contemporary Jews have recreated a religious culture based on the rituals and demands of the Jewish state and Zionism. In typical Ashkenazi fashion, this new Zionist religion is authoritarian and draconian in its demand for conformity... The Incredible Tale of Gwenyth Todd and The “Naïve” Neocons, by Maidhc Ó Cathail | WRMEA Given the proliferation of crimes, both foreign and domestic, known to have been committed by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, there is an understandable willingness among large swathes of the public to believe almost anything told them by someone claiming to be blowing the whistle on an increasingly rogue “world’s policeman.” And, as a rule, the more persecution the whistleblower appears to suffer for exposing the global cop’s transgressions, the greater the desire to believe her story—no matter how far-fetched it might be... Jewish Mayor: I've been called "Fascist, Thug, Racist" | Roi Tov It is truly stunning. I went with them to their schools. I know what they were taught. It even wasn't so far from Nazareth. Yet, I read their words and see them just repeating the manipulations our teachers told us were the bread and butter of the Nazi Regime. All the manipulative lies shown to us in the Nazi narrative are now the staples of modern Zionists... Israeli Massacre of Deir Yassin, by Elias Akleh | MCW News The state of Israel was established and is sustained on the continuous perpetration of genocides, destruction of whole towns, land theft, home demolition, ethnic cleansing, and terror against Palestinians. The massacre of the Palestinian small town of Deir Yassin in 9th of April 1948; 65 years ago of this week, is just one typical massacre story that details Zionist Jewish Israeli savagery prescribed in their holy book, the Talmud... Obama’s Betrayal of Social Security: Money for Militarism Not for People, by Dave Lindorff | Counterpunch What’s wrong with the Obama administration’s proposal to change the way Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation from using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to instead using something called a “chained” CPI? Let’s start with the fundamental problem: Social Security is not a cause of the federal budget deficit, and will not be for years, even if nothing is done to raise more revenue for the program... Open letter to Oz ABC, by Gideon Polya | MCW News ...Anti-Semitism means physical or verbal offence to Semites for being culturally and/or ethnically Semites per se and occurs in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against 15 million largely culturally Semitic Jews and anti-Arab anti-Semitism against 300 million culturally and ethnically Semitic Arabs and 1,500 million largely culturally Semitic Muslims (Islamophobia). 12 million Muslims have been killed through violence or violently-imposed deprivation in the post-1990 Zionist-backed US War on Muslims, including the ongoing, Western-imposed Palestinian Genocide, Iraqi Genocide, Afghan Genocide and Somali Genocide... Venezuela: Post-Election Sour Grapes | Stephen Lendman Throughout his tenure, America's scoundrel media vilified Chavez relentlessly. They did so straightaway. In death as in life, denunciation continued. Chavez was hemispheric villain number one. Independent leaders aren't tolerated. The threat of a good example concerns Washington and media scoundrels most. They go all-out against it... Embargoes, Military Exercises And Other Acts Of War: Why Peace-Mongering Is Un-American, by Ben Tanosborn | Eurasia Review ...America, in its imperial role, has become accustomed to get its way, whether acting alone or accompanied by its entourage of friends and lackeys, in pronouncing what actions by other nations affect the interests of the United States (economic or military); always acting to protect those interests, right or wrong. And that has resulted in illicit embargoes and other actions causing penury, untold deaths, and impoverishment in many parts of the world (Palestine, Cuba, Iraq are but a few in the list). In a world militarily out of balance only the top dog is allowed to do saber-rattling and not appear as a fool, never mind the reasons precipitating such dance... Sick man of Europe is calling Rothschild | Roi Tov ...When was the last time a law was approved unanimously in your country?.. The amendment allows descendants of Jews who were expelled in the 16th century to become citizens if they "belong to a Sephardic community of Portuguese origin with ties to Portugal," if they use "Sephardic names," and if at home they speak Portuguese or Ladino.. The amendment was an indirect call to rich Jews to invest in Portugal and save it from collapse. On April 16, Israeli newspaper Haaretz commented on the issue: "the law would attract investments by Jews seeking to settle in Portugal, one of the European Union’s most vulnerable economies." Can you spare a dime, Mr. Rothschild?.. A Strange Reverence for an Odious Legacy: Where are the Eulogies for Thatcher’s Victims? by Joseph Richardson | Counterpunch No sooner had the news broken of Margaret Thatcher’s death than the glorious tributes came flooding in, a veritable deluge of unreserved praise for the Britain’s first female Prime Minister. Cameron was so affected by the news of her passing that he cut short his trip to Europe to return home and extol Thatcher as a ‘great leader, a great prime minister, and a great Briton’ from the steps of 10 Downing Street. The media universally echoed this glowing assessment, combining to castigate as mean-spirited those who demurred from the propaganda being indulged in by political pundits... Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945 by John Mosier | Joseph Bishop ...John Mosier.. whose recent works The Myth of the Great War, The Blitzkrieg Myth, and Cross of Iron have consistently established the point that deeper and more objective research reveals a quite different reality to common presumptions about Germany's two major wars. But his latest work Deathride is bound to land him in serious hot water. The surprises are many. Instead of a mad dictator greedy to conquer the world and making endless blunders, Hitler is presented as a sane and rational man making sensible and very smart decisions, understanding strategy and global politics far better than his generals… Allied Plans for the Annihilation of the German People: Measures for the Devastation of the Heart of Europe | Dr. Claus Nordbruch ...Long before the outbreak of the Second World War, and certainly long before the outcome of this European slaughter of brothers was foreseeable, the victors-to-be and their hangers-on had made plans for the disposition of Germany that contained fundamental violations of the Law of Nations. In addition to demilitarization and de-nazification projects there were plans for the destruction or expulsion of Germans from territories they had inhabited for many centuries. For example, the expulsion of three and a half million of the Sudeten Germans was proposed in December 1938 by later Czechoslovakian president Edvard Benes... Apr 15, 2013 G8 and Abbas still block road to Middle East peace, by Stuart Littlewood | deLiberation ...The Palestinians’ success in securing upgraded status at the UN late last year is said to have angered Israel and the United States. So for another two months the Palestinian leadership will refrain from taking Israel to the International Criminal Court while Kerry tries to re-start the bogus peace negotiations. Since this ploy is in no-one’s interest except Israel’s, the question is, why?.. Read more... Government says PressTV and RussiaToday are the enemy | YouTube Very relevant since UK is going to shut down PressTV on SKY! The Broadcasting Board of Governors is a bipartisan board comprised of nine members. Eight are appointed by the U.S. President and confirmed by the Senate; the ninth is the Secretary of State who serves ex officio... [As yang morphs into yin the Stars and Stripes begin to dim] Watch video...Hatred of Thatcher – for Those who don’t Understand | deLiberation ...Absolutely decent, normal people declared their intention to dance on her grave. These are honest people, who I am certain would never say such a thing about anyone else. They are good people and KNOW it is a terrible thing to say really – but such is the enduring hatred that awful woman engendered. People need to vent their spleen. The reality of Thatcher was to destroy the social fabric of the UK, to tear down the post-war Social Contract that had worked so well to improve the quality of most people’s lives... Read more... Margaret Thatcher | Craig Murray By chance I knew Margaret Thatcher rather better than a junior civil servant might have been expected to, not least from giving her some maritime briefings during the First Gulf War. On another occasion Denis and I once got absolutely blind drunk in Lagos – I had been given him to look after for the day, and the itinerary started with the Guinness brewery and went on to the United Distillers bottling plant, before lunch at the golf club. I had to reunite him with his spouse for the State Banquet and quite literally fell out of the car. Happy days... Read more... Netanyahu Prolongs Law Banning Mixed Marriages | Roi Tov Most Israelis do not understand the concept of illegitimate laws. A law may pass through all the tedious process of legislation. It may be approved by the Knesset.., and afterwards by the Knesset's General Assembly. It may be published by "Reshumot".. and afterwards be brutally enforced by civil servants. Everything may look "kosher" on paper, and still the law can be illegitimate, demanding automatic disobedience by the public. No government can pass a law violating Human Rights, which are International Law since 1994. No government operating under the Criminal Law system can legislate laws claiming to prevent a future crime. Not even Netanyahu's Government can. Yet, he did just that... Read more... New York Times Anti-Palestinian Bias | Stephen Lendman ...According to New York TimesThink, Palestine isn't occupied. Gaza isn't besieged. The Nakba never happened. Israeli settlements are legitimate. Israel's more victim than aggressor. Palestinians choose conflict over peace. They're responsible for their own misery. They don't deserve self-determination and UN membership. NYT pro-Israeli bias is palpable... [That’s why we call it the Jew York Times (Lendman and I are called “self-hating Jews by the hasbarachiks, rather than what we really are: anti-fascists.] Read more...Betraying Americans for Israel | Redress Information & Analysis It is hard to muster sympathy for the US, its ignorant country bumpkins and vacuous city slickers, but one can’t resist a degree of pity at the sight of “the world’s only superpower” being humiliated by what one French diplomat described in a moment of honesty as “that shitty little country Israel”. As always, the humiliation is being administered by Israel’s stooges in the US Congress, this time the Democratic Party’s Senator Barbara Boxer and other Democrats and Republicans working on behalf of the USA’s leading Zionist lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)... Read more... Decay and Ruin in Mrs. Thatcher’s England, by Tariq Ali | Counterpunch ..Her legacy is clearly visible in the state of Britain today. It is essentially a story of decay and ruin: A small, post-imperial vassal state dependent on nostalgia and, more importantly, the United States to keep itself afloat. On the economy the Thatcherite model (astonishingly, still being praised by blind politicians in denial) was effectively the de-industrialization of the country, the purchase of working-class votes by squandering the monies that accrued from North sea oil and laying the foundations for a financialised economic model that exploded with the Wall Street crash of 2008... Read more... Thatcher’s War: an Argentine Perspective, by Daniel Edwards | Counterpunch ...we should not be surprised how the memory of 1982 has been appropriated by neo-liberal supporters as an example of their idol’s commitment to democracy and freedom. Ever since the horrors of the Second World War, the western world has deemed it necessary to seek, at least publicly, a higher calling for their aggression than simply expansion, power and wealth, the three pillars of warfare that have driven nations and tribes to arms since time immemorial... Read more... The Orwellian Paradigm, by Faisal Moghul | Antiwar Almost thirty years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television’s gradual replacement of the printing press has created a dumbed-down culture driven by mindless entertainment. In this context, Postman claimed that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World correctly foresaw our dystopian future, as opposed to George Orwell’s 1984. Contrary to Postman’s critique, however, the principles of Newspeak and doublethink dominate modern political discourse. Their widespread use is a testament to Orwell’s profound insight into how language can be manipulated to restrict human thought... The "war of the lists" is over, now the serious stuff begins | The Vineyard of the Saker So finally the US has published its "Magnitsky List". Russia instantly retaliated with its own list. Now what? Nothing. Let's recap what happened. The US Republicans, now completely controlled by Jewish Neocons, tried to play electoral politics by showing that, unlike the Democrats, they are "tough on Russia". First, this caters to the traditional Jewish hatred of everything Russia and, second, it also caters to the instincts of those Americans who want to see their country like some kind of cop of the universe. So the country which has legalized torture and the extra-judicial murder of "enemies" was now seriously expressing its outrage at the death of one man in disputed circumstances... Read more... The Plan to ‘Moderate’ Hamas, Control Gaza: Gaza’s Siege Intensifies, by Ramzy Baroud | Counterpunch ...Overwhelmed by the persisting attempts at its removal from power, the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi continue to approach matters concerning Palestinians with utmost caution. Their detractors have dedicated much energy and time to smear Palestinians, Hamas and Gaza in much of Egypt’s privately owned media. Bizarre propaganda of completely besieged Palestinians in Gaza smuggling weapons and drugs to the Sinai is creating a state of confusion among many Egyptians regarding Gaza and its role in Egyptian security chaos... Read more... Apr 14, 2013 From Goldstein to Soros and Beyond: Controlled Opposition, by Gilad Atzmon | Counterpunch In his new book, “The Invention of the Land of Israel”, Israeli academic Shlomo Sand, manages to present conclusive evidence of the far fetched nature of the Zionist historical narrative – that the Jewish Exile is a myth as is the Jewish people and even the Land of Israel. Yet, Sand and many others fails to address the most important question: If Zionism is based on myth, how do the Zionists manage to get a way with their lies, and for so long?.. In the Army Now: Gangs, Nazis & the Mentally Ill, by Clark Stooksbury | The American Conservative ...The United States fares worse when our goals are more ambitious and the enemy doesn’t quickly fold. When a volunteer army becomes bogged down in an unpopular war, protesters don’t fill the streets the way they did in 1969, and soldiers don’t “frag” their officers—people simply stop joining the military. The quest to fill that enlistment gap is where the investigative work of English journalist Matt Kennard comes in... Israeli Property Theft is Nothing New, by Dr. Paul Larudee | Counterpunch ...when Israel created the Office of the Custodian of Absentee Property in July, 1948, to take charge of property belonging to refugees that fled or were expelled, was its intention for the custodian to be a steward and trustee for the property of these refugees while they were away? Certainly, the title of the office implicitly acknowledges that the property belongs to the absentees, not the Custodian, which land registry documents in fact confirm... AIPAC Lobbies Reagan, ISCAP reviews explosive NUMEC docs for release | IRmep What will Americans think if classified documents revealing Lyndon B. Johnson helped cover up Israel and its lobby's theft of U.S. weapons-grade uranium are suddenly publicly released after decades of denials? Or what if the National Archives highest review authority, with an admirable record of openness, refuses to declassify the explosive files, keeping Americans in the dark despite decades of Freedom of Information Act requests by historians and activists?.. Zionist lobby lies about Palestine solidarity activists "joining forces" with far right, by David Cronin | The Electronic Intifada A new study on anti-Semitism by Tel Aviv University contains a brazen lie. In an attempt to slander the international Palestine solidarity movement, the report alleges that “extreme right-wing and extreme-left wing activists joined forces” in a protest against a concert by the Israeli military band Tzahal in Antwerp, Belgium, last year. As well as teaming up, the activists were “shouting ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,’” the study alleges. I attended the protest in question and can say with certainty that the accusation is baseless... Arabia Rising: Understanding Transformations & Revolutions in the Middle East by Esam Al-Amin | Public Intelligence Blog [The book] is a collection of essays about the Arab uprisings and awakening movement, arguably the most important phenomenon that has taken place in the Middle East in the past century. I hope that the book provides thoughtful analysis and a keen understanding of this historical moment, as well as important aspects of US policy towards the Middle East and the Muslim World. For example, the book examines the main causes and effects of the Arab revolutions, especially in Egypt, and describes in details the role of each player in the political dynamics that has been taking place in the last two years across the Arab World, but particularly in Egypt... Leo Tolstoy: Letter on the Peace Conference, by Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO ...your opinion that at the Conference which is about to assemble at the Tsar’s invitation, the question should be debated whether men who refuse military service may not be employed on public works instead, appears to me quite mistaken – in the first place, because the Conference itself can be nothing but one of those hypocritical arrangements which aim not at peace, but, on the contrary, at hiding from men the one means of obtaining universal peace, which the most advanced men begin to discern... U.S. visa waiver bill stymied over Arab Americans entering Israel | Haaretz The legislative effort being pushed by AIPAC would allow visa-free entry for Israelis, but the government is unable or unwilling to reciprocate, insisting on the right to refuse entry to certain U.S. citizens due to security concerns... [This will hurt their delicate feelings – I reckon it must be antisemitism lurking behind the drapes] Knesset Legislation Committee Moves Naziwards | Roi Tov ...Israel lacks a constitution. A recent system of Basic Laws was designed by the Knesset to function as a quasi-constitution; however, it doesn’t assure human rights. Even worse – these laws can be exchanged as per the coalition needs by the parliament since they have never been approved directly by the people as constitutions are. The updating of these laws due to coalitional needs already occurred in the past; people couldn’t vote on that. The proposed law will drop Arabic (the main tongue of over 20% of the population) as an official language. It also defines that whenever the Israeli law doesn't define a topic, Jewish Halacha (the parallel of Muslim Sharia) would be automatically applied... Who is after Amira Hass? by Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini | Al Jazeera World renowned Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who has won numerous prizes for her courageous reporting on Israel's occupation of Palestine, is currently under attack. On April 4, two Israeli organisations requested that Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein launch an official investigation against Hass, accusing her of fomenting violence and terrorism in her article "The Inner Syntax of Palestinian Stone-Throwing", which had been published in Haaretz the day before... In defence of Israeli journalist Amira Hass, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis ...Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance. Persecution of stone-throwers, including eight-year-old children, is an inseparable part – though it is not always spelled out – of the job requirements of the foreign ruler, no less than shooting, torture, land theft, restrictions on movement and the unequal distribution of water sources. The violence of 19-year-old soldiers, their 45-year-old commanders and the bureaucrats, jurists and lawyers is dictated by reality. Their job is to protect the fruits of violence instilled in foreign occupation – resources, profits, power and privileges... Zionist intellectuals offer a Pizza to Samer Issawi | Free Haifa Israel’s Prime Minister’s wife, Mrs. Netanyahu, became a symbol of insensitivity, a local Marie Antoinette, when she famously offered pizzas to students activists on hunger strike against rising tuition fees. She didn’t express support for their just demands, nor did she show any admiration for their sacrifice or sympathy with their suffering. All she displayed was the light minded selfishness and hedonism of someone who is complete stranger to the notions of a just cause, struggle or sacrifice... Apr 13, 2013 BBC Won't Ban 'Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,' Adopted as Anti-Thatcher Anthem | NYT The BBC on Friday rejected loud calls to ban the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from its airwaves after the apparent success of a Facebook campaign to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher, the divisive former prime minister, by driving sales of the tune from “The Wizard of Oz” up the British singles chart... [They must be furious over at the Zionist controlled BBC. Brings a smile to one’s face, don’t it?] The BBC's Not Sure How to Deal with the Sudden Popularity of 'Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead' | The Atlantic Wire ...'The "witch" is not just Margaret Thatcher, but the entire plutocracy for whose benefit she acted. The people celebrating Thatcher's death are flexing their muscles and gaining confidence they are not alone in continuing their fight against that plutocracy. The British rulers are afraid of being exposed as the widely and justifiably hated tiny minority that they are.' ~ John Spritzler Carville: I Think Obama Likes Angering Liberals | TPM Democratic strategist James Carville said Friday that he doesn't think President Barack Obama is sweating the criticism he's taken from his liberal base over a budget proposal that includes cuts to Social Security. Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Carville said he thinks Obama relishes the commendation he's received from deficit hawks like New York Times columnist David Brooks and host Joe Scarborough. Asked by co-host Mike Barnicle how the President will respond to the outrage from the left-wing of the Democratic Party, Carville was blunt. "I think he likes that,".. [The Shabbas Goy is doing a bang up job] Israel's Day of Shame | Roi Tov The second weekend of April 2013 is a complicated one in Israel, the events related to Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day and the subsequent Independence Day are split due to the Sabbath. Commemorated shortly after the Holocaust Day, these two events end the Zionist midyear horror-festival. This year, Remembrance Day became the scene of an ugly event, when IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, decided to discriminate among dead soldiers according to their religion and ethnic background... G8 and Abbas still block road to Middle East peace, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis ...the massacre at the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. The slaughter set a pattern for the reign of terror that was to engulf hundreds of other Palestinian towns and villages in the Jews’ bid to grab as much territory at gunpoint as they could. The village had signed a non-aggression pact, yet the Jewish terror groups Lehi and Irgun, the latter headed by Israeli Prime Minister-to-be Menachem Begin, exterminated over 100 men, women and children, who were either stood against walls and shot or shredded by hand-grenades thrown into their homes, which were then looted... Russian Jews urge Israel to continue murdering, stealing and pillaging | Redress Information & Analysis If you thought that American or European Zionists were bad enough, then pause and take a look at their Russian counterparts. These exhibit the standard obnoxiousness of Zionists everywhere – supremacism, racism, exceptionalism – but with an added flavour that is characteristic of most Jews of the former Soviet Union: brutishness, crudeness and lack of human empathy. On 9 April, 100 Russian Jewish notables wrote to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, urging him to ignore a recent plea by US Jews to the Israeli government to pursue a peaceful solution to the conflict with the Palestinians... [It’s hardly surprising – Russian Jews formed the majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee; they were the instigators and managers of the Holodomor, which led to the deaths of some 40 million Ukrainians; they organized the Gulag system; the 'Oligarchs,' the ones who finagled billions in profits through insider trading during the the post-Glacnoct frenzy, are mostly Jews; it goes on and on. Just telling it like it is, 'antisemitic' or not] The Arab Islamists’ bargain with the West | Redress Information & Analysis Optimistic observers of the Arab world might like to believe that the Islamist wave sweeping across the region is but a temporary phase that must be traversed before the people regain control of the revolutions that began in Tunisia and were subsequently hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis, Wahhabis and their various strands and offshoots. Sadly for those who put life and limb on the line only to see the fruits of their struggle stolen by the Islamists who played no part in igniting the Arab Spring, this phase could last for generations... [Al Qaeda was created to be and continues to be the Empire’s proxy and mercenary force in the Middle East. And, needless to say, their small but crucial role in the 9/11 massacre was pivotal.] To Throw or Not to Throw a Stone, by William A. Cook | Dissident Voice A debate rages in Israel today on the truth of Amira Hass’s words “Throwing a stone is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.”.. Netanyahu to United States: Drop Dead, by MJ Rosenberg | Huffington Post ...the Israelis would decide which Palestinians were acceptable as negotiating partners based on their idea of merit (only pro-Israel Palestinians would do, apparently). Baker was fuming but held his tongue until he went before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss Middle East prospects. But then something happened and, for perhaps the last time ever, a top U.S. government official told the Israelis what he really thought... Racial Maddow vs. the Islamic Republic of Iran, by Shirin Sadeghi | Huffington Post ...The sheer prejudice and outright Saidian[sic?] orientalism that Maddow exhibited in this 4-minute segment is eerily reminiscent of the Jim Crow days of American broadcasting when "respectable" journalists and entertainers could get away with insulting an entire race of people, their traditions and their beliefs, without batting an eye. In this case, Maddow has not only insulted Iranians but every Muslim in the world, too. Just imagine the uproar if she took such liberties with any other of the world's major religions... [Well, she’s just another Zionist shill after all] What Christians Don’t Know About Israel, by Grace Halsell | Information Clearing House ...As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who started arriving in large numbers after the Second World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians. My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem. My journey not only was enlightening to me as regards Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and sadder, understanding of my own country... Apr 12, 2013 The Iron Lady's Epitaph (Day 2) ...it was little surprise that about one-third of the first 25,000 comments posted online after the death of Margaret Thatcher — the former British prime minister who inspired an intensity of feeling, in both her supporters and her opponents, rarely seen outside authoritarian states — were negative.. This was all in keeping with what one observer of social media predicted in a comic chart produced three months ago, as Mrs. Thatcher neared death... Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Her right wing politics saw Thatcher align herself with some of the most repressive and undemocratic regimes in the late 20th century – including apartheid South Africa and Chile’s Pinochet. Her description of the ANC and Mandela as terrorists was evidence of her ultra conservative view of the world... ...Thatcher’s death provides a moment for the residents of the United Kingdom to indulge in their favourite pastime, that being nostalgia with just a hint of self-analysis, and to truly decide if we want to allow her to define us. The pushback against David Cameron’s repulsive “Big Society” idea provides some hope, but the fight goes beyond a need to protest. This is, in its purest sense, a battle for hearts and minds - a fight that decides whether Thatcher’s “no such thing as society” adage is the prism through which we can choose to see society... [Meanwhile, when Reagan (Thatcher’s soul brother) died, he was promptly added to the pantheon of saints by the corporatocracy without a murmur of protest.] The President’s Privileged Right to Kill, by Judge Andrew Napolitano | Antiwar ...When lawyers for potential victims of presidential killings (how terrifying does that sound?) sought to ascertain the source of that power, the president dispatched Justice Department lawyers into court to persuade judges that the “legal argument supporting killings” is classified. That’s because, those Justice Department lawyers argued, the decisions to kill — just like Star Chamber’s decisions to kill — are made in secret; hence, the legal support for the killings must be kept secret. How could a legal argument be classified? How could a judge accept that sophistry? How could a president sworn to uphold the Constitution claim the power to kill people on his own?.. The Unmentionable Topic, by Russell Mokhiber | Counterpunch ...Just because mainstream news outlets and federal prosecutors rarely mention the phrase “corporate crime” and just because we don’t secure admissions and guilty pleas against the corporate criminals doesn’t mean corporate crime doesn’t exist in the United States. It just means that the powerful have flooded the public sphere and defined the terms of the debate... Take 2: Israel ‘rearrests’ former Palestinian hunger striker | RT News Former Palestinian prisoner Thaer Halahla, who was held without charge by Israel for nearly two years until last June, has been rearrested in Ramallah, an official in the Palestinian Authority's ministry for prisoners' affairs told AFP. Witnesses told Ma'an news agency that Israeli soldiers raided Halahla's home and a neighboring residence in Ramallah, damaging his belongings and confiscating his mobile phone. His wife fainted during the arrest, and was taken to hospital... Chinese Cinderella Reaches Israel | Roi Tov ...in 2012, only 20,000 Chinese reached Israel. The Ministry claims that in 2012, eight million Chinese chose their tourist destination according to what they had seen in movies. Israel's strong links with Hollywood have created a significant movie production infrastructure that eased the Ministry's decision. The Tourism Ministry's offices in China worked together with a Tel Aviv production company, and succeeded to convince director Lu Chuan and superstar Zhang Jingchu to partially shoot Old Cinderella in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. The cast will arrive on April 16, 2013, for a week of filming... [In Israel Cinderella is a Phillipina, or Ethiopian, etc. – no ballet slippers for her] Breeding mental illness in the US, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera Rampant over-prescribing of drugs contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than rectifying them... [Ah, Brave New World. 'Gimme my Soma or I kills you!' In America, drugs seem to have replaced food as the primary necessity. Big Mama Pharma wants to take care of all of her children.] Where have all the towers gone? by Dr Kevin Barrett | deLiberation ...Were the Twin Towers, and the thousands of people inside them, blown to bits by explosives? That is what many of the 9/11 victims’ family members believe. Robert McIlvaine, whose son Bobby was murdered in the Twin Towers on 9/11, has stated that roughly half the family members share his suspicion that the Towers were explosively demolished in a false-flag attack. William Rodriguez, the famous 9/11 hero who has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, is another representative of the 9/11 survivors who asserts that the evidence for “controlled demolition” is an open secret... Gilad Atzmon Who? by Ariadna Theokopoulos | Boldface News One of the best international jazz musicians of today, philosopher, humanist thinker and author, Gilad Atzmon has been challenging all of us (and primarily Jews) for several years now to examine what defines Jewish Identity Politics (JIP), its core supremacist beliefs, and the many issues that arise from it: its strategies, the various disguises of racism, concealment and suppression of free speech. The response has never been lukewarm... US belittles Iran's nuclear offer, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online In the aftermath of nuclear talks between Iran and international powers in Almaty, the US media has been replete with Iran-bashing commentaries that place the blame for the stalled process squarely on Iran's shoulders. Relying on information and input from various "anonymous US officials," the mainstream media's coverage has essentially boiled down to the argument that Iranian negotiators in Almaty did not behave as if they were interested in reaching a deal and therefore missed a great chance... [Well, that’s what the whores in the MSM are paid to write. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.] Seeing in the Dark with Victoria Brittain | Richard Falk As with the best of journalists, Victoria Brittain has spent a lifetime enabling us to see in the dark! Or more accurately, she has shined a bright light on those whose suffering has been hidden by being deliberately situated in one or another shadow land of governmental and societal abuse, whether local, national, or geopolitical in its animus. These patterns of abuse are hidden because whenever their visibility cannot be avoided, the liberal mythologizing of the decency of the modern democratic state suffers a staggering blow... Deplorable Bahraini Human Rights Abuses | Stephen Lendman In summer 2010, sporadic protests began. In mid-February 2011, major ones erupted. Bahrainis want democracy. They want King Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalif's repressive regime replaced. They rally courageously. They defy government diktats. They brave beatings, tear gas, rubber bullets, live fire, arrests, torture and disappearances. They persist. They refuse to back down. They want freedom replacing police state terror... US boycotts UN international justice meeting | MCW News The US and other nations are boycotting a meeting on the subject of international justice at the UN, which it says is being used by Serbia to divert attention from its role in the Balkan wars. Organised by former Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, who is serving as president of the 193-nation assembly, the two-day meeting is considered as inflammatory and intended merely to complain about the treatment of Serbs in war crimes tribunals.. Envoys say that if Jeremic does not get Serbia's presidency, he is likely to try to become the next UN secretary-general, a position that is expected to be filled by an Eastern European... Apr 11, 2013 Bye, bye, Maggie Banksters and other corporate criminals, not to mention the Zionazis, will mourn your passing The old saw that one shouldn’t speak ill of the recently dead cannot possibly apply to controversial figures in public life. It certainly didn’t apply to President Hugo Chavez who predeceased Margaret Thatcher amidst a blizzard of abuse. The main reason it must not preclude entering the lists amidst a wave of hagiographic sycophantic tosh of the kind that has engulfed Britain these last hours is that otherwise the hagiographers will have the field to themselves. Every controversial divisive deadly thing that Thatcher did will be placed in soft focus, bathed in a rose-coloured light, and provide a first draft of history that will be, simply, wrong... ...The Oscar-winning actress, loudly jeered by Tory MPs, said: “When I made my maiden speech a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place but Thatcherism was still wreaking, as it had wreaked for the previous decade - the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents... ...Thatcher turned Britain’s manufacturing heart, known as the Black Country, into an industrial wasteland. I was there, working for a major engineering group. I saw the devastation first-hand and felt the anguish and despair of the local people. Big organizations shed jobs by the hundreds and thousands. Many shut their doors for ever. Countless highly skilled small businesses – jobbing contractors to the large companies – were crippled by sky-high interest rates, the new “wisdom” dispensed by the inventors of “Thatcherism”.. Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone—and was sailing AWAY from the islands!.. Several hundred people gathered in south London on Monday evening to celebrate Margaret Thatcher's death with cans of beer, pints of milk and an impromptu street disco playing the soundtrack to her years in power. Young and old descended on Brixton, a suburb which weathered two outbreaks of rioting during the Thatcher years. Many expressed jubilation that the leader they loved to hate was no more; others spoke of frustration that her legacy lived on... The outspoken filmmaker explained in no uncertain terms his feelings on the subject of the former prime minister, who died yesterday following a stroke. “Margaret Thatcher was the most divisive and destructive Prime Minister of modern times,” he said. “Mass Unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed – this is her legacy. She was a fighter and her enemy was the British working class. “Her victories were aided by the politically corrupt leaders of the Labour Party and of many Trades Unions. It is because of policies begun by her that we are in this mess today... General Pinochet clearly murdered and tortured thousands of people, but the Blair government were afraid to even put him on trial in Britain. So Pinochet was sent home, and the issue forgotten. After all such atrocities 'don't happen here'. But they do: mass death is inseparable from the history of liberal democratic societies. And this moral issue belongs in Europe, where it originated. Almost certainly, the free market has caused more deaths than the historical mass murders appropriated by liberals as a historical justification for it. More than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, the unholy trinity used to frighten us into accepting liberalism... ...Thatcher was a staunch supporter of many of the world's most brutal regimes, propping up and arming war criminals and dictators in service to Western imperialism, anti-Communism and neoliberal hegemony. Throughout the 1980s, Thatcher's government backed Iraq during its war against Iran, funneling weapons and equipment to Saddam Hussein in contravention of both international law and British policy, all the way up until Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. She even sent Christmas cards to both Saddam and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 1981... Thatcherism represents Chicago School fundamentalism writ large. She’s gone. She won’t be missed. She launched a corporatist revolution. She headed Britain down a slippery slope toward unfettered predatory capitalism. She transferred public wealth to private hands. She privatized British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Steel and other state enterprises... Wikileaks Publishes US Plans to Destabilize Chavez Government, by William Blum | Dissident Voice Would you believe that the United States tried to do something that was not nice against Hugo Chávez? Wikileaks has done it again. I guess the US will really have to get tough now with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. In a secret US cable to the State Department, dated November 9, 2006, and recently published online by WikiLeaks, former US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, outlines a comprehensive plan to destabilize the government of the late President Hugo Chávez... In Multilateral Talks With Iran, Israel Is Increasingly Isolated, by Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation It’s no surprise that the latest round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 ended with no deal. That much was predicted by all, especially since Iran is getting ready for what promises to be a contentious and controversial presidential election in June. But it’s instructive to contrast the reactions from American officials and Israeli officials to the lack of a breakthrough in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the talks took place on Friday and Saturday... In landmark case on Israel and Jewish identity, British tribunal says anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism | Mondoweiss ...Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz says the ruling that such speech does not constitute anti-Semitism has produced "turmoil" in the ranks of British Jewry. I particularly like the bit at the end, where the judge told the plaintiff if he doesn't want to get his feelings hurt, he should avoid political debate:.. Israel Channel 2 program on Anti-Semitism | Gilad Atzmon Israel defines itself as the Jewish State, its tanks are decorated with Jewish symbols, it commits crimes against humanity in the name of the Jewish people, and yet, Israeli TV can't understand why people out there express some anger towards Israel. Zionism or Jews. I can't make up my mind whether this is tragic or just sad - time is overdue for Israel and Jews to self-reflect... Edward Said, 1986 | YouTube Edward Said (1935-2003). Palestinian-born intellectual and world-famous literary critic. Author of 'Orientalism' and 'The Question of Palestine'. Professor of English Literature at Columbia University, NYC until his death. From the BBC series 'Exiles'.. UN Arms Trade Treaty’s Deadly Loophole | Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post Foundation fellows and diplomats have lauded the overwhelming approval of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) by the General Assembly of the United Nations, with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon describing it as a means to obstruct the illicit arms flow to warlords, pirates, terrorists, criminals and the like. Many who have critically monitored the situation in Syria and the ramifications of foreign intervention in Libya may have difficulty swallowing Ban’s words, as some would argue that the UN has itself been complicit in these crises for turning a blind eye to arms and funding going to al-Qaeda-linked rebels in various countries... Education and Healthcare, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance In any society, Education and Healthcare are pillars of progress. In any society, war, suffering, and lack of progress are associated with ignorance, greed, and apathy. The biggest challenge for freedom and return in Palestine is the same. This past week and even as we commemorated the tragedy of the massacre at Deir Yassin, my wife and I had the honor to be invited to two openings in Palestine symbolizing sacrifice and progress:.. Podcast Discussion With Two of America's Leading Iran Experts: The Leveretts, by Glenn Greenwald Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett are two of the nation's preeminent experts on all matters relating to Iran. They have also become the nation's most unlikely yet compelling critics of US policy toward Tehran and particularly the misconceptions shaping political and media discourse in the west. What's most amazing is that they come directly from the belly of the National Security State beast: they both were Middle East officials in the National Security Council and State Department during the Bush years, while he also worked as a CIA analyst and she for the US mission to the UN... Misreading Xi On North Korea | Moon of Alabama There are dozens of recent reports which assert that China's new president has somehow rebuffed North Korea's stand up against the U.S. driven campaign against it. A close reading of Xi's speech shows that these reports are wrong. Xi was clearly talking about U.S. aggressiveness, not about North Korea's. The misreading of Xi's speech is characteristic for a U.S. centered media. They never seem able to understand that U.S. action in the world is perceived much different than what the selfish U.S. propaganda they distribute says... Google, Beyond the CIA: Insurgency and Espionage Factory, by Gordon Duff and Press TV | Veterans Today Intercepted emails expose Google as an intelligence contractor openly involved in aiding terror organizations throughout Africa, Asia and the world, working well outside any official oversight and authority, far beyond even the CIA’s wildest abuses... Apr 10, 2013 Rothschilds’ BCCI Shake Down of Arabs, by Dean Henderson | Veterans Today The Bank of Credit & Commerce International’s (BCCI) most notorious acts were hatched out of its Karachi branch, where the bank’s Black Network (BN) operated. BN was a global intelligence and enforcement unit that specialized in transporting arms, drugs and gold. BN operations overlapped with the operations of CIA, Israeli Mossad, the Pakistani ISI and Saudi intelligence, all of whom had accounts at BCCI. BN served as middleman for Saudi aid to both the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahadeen... [After reading this my head was spinning, but I wouldn’t rule it out. The financial elites are clearly doing this kind of stuff all the time. Why? Because they can, and they appear to have no moral, ethical or spiritual constraints - just like the Zionists. A plutocracy of psychopaths with the odd sociopath thrown in for flavor.] Israel's definition as a 'Jewish state,' by Ben White | Al Jazeera In recent years, there has been a growing, critical questioning of Israel's definition as a "Jewish state", and the system of privilege (and discrimination) that it entails. This has happened for a few different reasons, including: attention-grabbing efforts in Israel to implement cruder ethnocratic legislation, the political mobilisation of Palestinian citizens of Israel and their subsequent targeting by the state, the treatment of non-Jewish African migrants, Netanyahu's repeated demand that Palestinians "recognise" Israel as a Jewish state, the focus of the BDS call, and increasing anti-Zionist dissent within the Jewish community in the West... Violence and dignity: Reflections on the Middle East, by Noam Chomsky | Israeli Occupation Archive Swedish novelist Henning Mankell tells of an experience in Mozambique at the peak of the hideous atrocities of the apartheid era, when he saw a thin man walking towards him in ragged clothes. “In his deep misery,” Mankell relates, the wretched survivor had “painted shoes on his feet. In a way, to defend his dignity when everything was lost, he had found the colors from the earth and he had painted shoes on his feet.” Such scenes will evoke poignant memories among those who have witnessed cruelty and degradation, and also the steady resistance of the “samidin” — those who endure, to borrow the evocative term of Raja Shehadeh’s in his remarkable book on Palestinians under occupation, 20 years ago... Warsaw Ghetto fighter to Israeli youth: Rise up against the occupation, by Noa Yachot | +972 Magazine Statements challenging the national narrative aren’t exactly common in Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day. So it was particularly refreshing to read on the Walla news portal about a different sort of speech delivered in honor of the day. Havka Folman-Raban, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, said the following words in a ceremony attended by Israeli youth at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in northern Israel:.. How Much Longer Will the Iran "Game" Continue? by César Chelala | Common Dreams ...Steinitz, who is a close ally to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Army Radio that stronger action should be taken within a few weeks or a month to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment activity. One of the arguments trotted out in the debate over Iran's nuclear development is that it could initiate an arms race in the Middle East, but a realistic look at the overall picture in the region is sufficient: except for Israel, whose nuclear arsenal has been an open secret for decades, no other country in the region is in a position to launch a serious nuclear arms program... Obama Talks Peace to Iran, But Dishes Out Violence, by Jamasb Madani | Antiwar ...With each passing year, and with every Nowruz message, the level of both real and potential American violence against Iran and Iranians has escalated. As the targets of these threats, victims of collective punishment and the bearers of U.S.-imposed hardship, Iranians feel that Obama’s actions coupled with his recitation of the poetry of Sa’di or Hafez make for a disturbing juxtaposition... The 'Great Game' in the Levant, by Semih Idiz | Al Monitor With billions of cubic meters in estimated gas reserves, the Eastern Mediterranean, or the “Levant Basin” by another name, is turning into the stage for a contemporary version of the 19th Century “Great Game,” which has as much potential for catalyzing peace, as it does for contributing to new tensions in a region already rife with conflict... On Richard Dawkins and How Atheism has Become a Warmongering Religion | Empire Strikes Black ...Atheism has become a vehicle for the very thing it claims to oppose: dogma. Buoyed by a rising tidal wave of knee-jerk bigotry, atheism is instilling a rigid dogma in its followers. This army of self-professed ‘critical thinkers’ has now disposed of critical thought, and has instead taken up a campaign of hero worship, ultimately spreading a pernicious and baseless dogma in the form of the War on Terror... Painfully Following Iran in the U.S. Media, by Rami G. Khouri | Agence Global One of the most annoying aspects of spending time in the United States, as I have just done with a month’s working visit there, is to follow the news coverage of Iran in the mainstream American media. Well, calling it “news” coverage is a bit of a stretch, because the mainstream American media is not really reporting news about Iran, but rather repackaged ideological attacks and threats that emanate primarily from the American and Israeli governments... Netanyahu's Bread and Circuses | Roi Tov ...A foreigner landing in Israel and learning the language overnight, so that he doesn't get accustomed to the culture before comprehending its tongue, would be surprised by the amount of Communist lingo still being used in the days of ultra-Right Emperor Netanyahu. He wouldn't hear the Hebrew and Aramaic used by Jesus, but an ugly Hebrew full of Marxist-Jewish values. "Uniform Bread" is one of them and is the odd topic of Netanyahu's new government Bread and Circuses policy. "Let them eat pizza," Marx Antoinette would probably have said: "sheyochlu pitzot.".. Korea Brings to Mind the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Jacob Hornberger | MCW News ..U.S. officials have long maintained that Cuba and the Soviet Union were the ones responsible for bringing the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of nuclear war. The U.S. government is portrayed as the innocent party, one that was simply responding to the Soviet Union’s installation of nuclear weapons in Cuba. But nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, it was the U.S. national-security state, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA, that was primarily responsible for the crisis... An Injury to One Is an Injury to All: True or False? by John Spritzler | New Democracy World The slogan embraced by virtually all labor organizations of merit for hundreds of years--that "An injury to one is an injury to all"--is unfortunately, indeed tragically, thought to be false by many otherwise good people who do not have a personal connection to the old labor movement and the wisdom it gained, often through bitter experience. This unfortunate state of affairs came to my attention most recently when I attended an academic conference at Boston University, called the Right of Return Conference, organized by people who support the right of return of Palestinian refugees and who oppose the Israeli government's violent suppression of this right... Apr 9, 2013 Decell Inc Leaked Data #OpIsra | Quick Leak ...Now after all of this impressive introduction it is our pleasure to announce that we have managed to hack Decell servers, acquiring some highly sensitive information, including exact GPS coordinates of every City, Highway, Streets and of course every sensitive building located within Israel boarders!.. [You go, guys! Hit the beast where it hurts] Israel: US, West Must Threaten to Attack Iran Within Next Month, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar The latest round of talks between the P5+1 and Iran came screeching to a halt this weekend when Iran offered a proposal to settle the issue once and for all, a proposal which appears to have made Western nations, which were hoping to milk these do-nothing summits for many more years, exceedingly uncomfortable.. Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz is demanding that the US and other Western nations immediately issue an ultimatum to Iran to submit entirely or face invasion. Steinitz’s comments center on a long-standing divide between the US and Israel on whether the regular US threats to attack Iran are enough... The American Council for Judaism: 70 Years of Challenging Jewish Nationalism, by Allan C. Brownfeld | WRMEA Since 1943, the American Council for Judaism has advanced the philosophy of Judaism as a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and has maintained that Americans of Jewish faith are American by nationality and Jews by religion—just as other Americans are Protestants, Catholics or Muslims. It has challenged the Zionist philosophy which holds that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews, and that Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile.” In doing so, it has contended that this philosophy represents the thinking of the majority of American Jews, a largely silent majority not represented by the organizations which presume to speak in their name... Uncontained: 2012 Iran Stronger Than Ever | Safir Documentary Center "Uncontained" has documented the quest of a Pakistani student in Iran between 2010 and 2011. After the assassination of two nuclear scientists in November 2010, "Mohtashim" gets involved in Iran's nuclear case to investigate allegations that Iran is building nuclear weapons. He encounters different people such as the controversial Member of Parliament "Ahmad Shirzad", an expelled French author, Thierry Meyssan and Marzieh Hashemi (Milani Franklin) an African American journalist... Is Israel a democracy or an ethnocracy? by Ben White | New Statesman The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is one of the key Israel advocacy groups in the UK. In the last week BICOM has published a series of essays on 'Israel's democratic futures' (if that's a question, the answer is 'here's hoping'). BICOM's worry, as its chief Lorna Fitzsimons wrote in her introduction, is that "a notion is spreading in the West that Israel is fast becoming an illiberal ethno-democracy". One of the contributions is an interview by BICOM's Alan Johnson of the US political philosopher Michael Walzer. At first glance, Johnson appears to be unafraid of posing the difficult questions - but Walzer's unchallenged replies are revealing... Ethics on Film: Discussion of "Argo" | Carnegie Council Argo, a film about a creative and daring escape from Iran a few months after the 1979 revolution, was one of the most high-profile films of 2012. Directed and starred in by Ben Affleck, it won many awards, most notably the Oscar for Best Picture; earned over $227 million worldwide; and scored an over 90 percent approval rating, according to critics and the general public, on the always-reliable Rotten Tomatoes. Yet, this blockbuster has been the subject of some serious criticism... Obama's Big Surrender: How Democracy Works, by Noel Ignatiev | Counterpunch ...public opinion will make no difference in this case, just as it made no difference in 2008 when departing President Bush, with Obama’s agreement, gave away trillions to banks and insurance companies in spite of overwhelming opposition from the “public.” At that time one congressman reported that his mail was running nine-to-one against the giveaway, and urged Congress to hurry up and get it done before his constituents marched on Washington and burned it down... Court Rejects Jewish Land-Ownership in Seam-Zone | Roi Tov One of the few things I like about Zionists is their unmatched capability to shoot themselves in the foot from any angle and distance, regardless of the weapon used. While describing the 1967 War in his memoirs, Moshe Dayan explains how after the conquest of Qalqilya, its denizens were evicted and most buildings were razed for the sake of what he openly called a "punishment" designed to chase the inhabitants away. In other words, Moshe Dayan admitted to be a war criminal, having violated the rights of an occupied population and basic principles of law... A Militarized Society: America’s Death Wish, by Norman Pollack | Counterpunch ...from targeted assassination to streetcorner hold-ups, from the activities of POTUS to that of the gang member, must be related back to the originative framework, one characterized by militarism, the commission of war crimes, abrogation of the rule of law, policy-designs promotive of unemployment, deregulation, trickle-down wealth distribution accentuating and making worse class differentials of income and power, and inequality as the first principle of life. In sum, human worth has no intrinsic value or meaning. This profound alienation is not caused by, but is the precedent condition for, gun violence... Generation Palestine, by June Rugh | Palestine Chronicle I highly recommend the new collection of essays, Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.. With an impressive range of contributors–Palestinian author and journalist Ramzy Baroud, Israeli economist Shir Hever, UN Special Rapporteur Professor Richard Falk, Irish journalist/activist Eamonn McCann, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna, Israeli author/activist Ilan Pappe, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others–these richly varied voices make a powerful collective argument for the efficacy of BDS as the most powerful nonviolent action for mobilizing civil society against the occupation and other injustices by Israel... BDS movement and the Palestinian Principles, by Sameh Habeeb | Palestine Telegraph ...There should be a clear position from those who are leading the BDS movement. They should be explicit and unequivocal in their position regarding Palestinian refugees. On what basis has this change been made? More shockingly, the Arabic and Palestinian public are not aware of this dramatic shift. The change had been made on the English language and for Western audiences only. This raises a number of questions, why? Why now? Under what pressure has this change been made? And what mandate do you have to do so?.. A symbol of Palestinian prisoners' suffering, by Rania Zabaneh | MCW News ...In the street, Abu Hamdeya's death ignited anger in various places across the West Bank. A general strike halted life in the streets of East Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron on Wednesday. Abu Hamdeya's funeral on Thursday was followed by the funerals of the other Palestinians killed in Tulkarem. On the way to Hebron, masked Palestinians were asking store keepers in Bethlehem to shut down for mourning. A similar scene took place a day earlier in Ramallah. In the Palestinian Territories in 2013, there seems to be a need to impose solidarity... [The Israelis have them where they want them, for now, sort of. But payback will come in the fullness of time. My prediction, for the record, is that we will eventually experience the Mother of all Pogroms, all over the world. Will they never learn?] Kerry Suggests Palestinians Change Arab Peace Initiative to Suit Israelis, by Ira Glunts | Palestine Chronicle Various news sources report that the Obama administration has notified the Palestinian Authority that the new U.S. approach to peace negotiations will be based on the Arab Peace Initiative (API) of 2002. The plan, which was unanimously adopted by the Arab League, is sometimes referred to as the Saudi Peace Initiative since it was presented at the Beirut Arab summit by then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Sheera Frenkel, at McClatchy Newspapers, quotes an unnamed source who stated... Read more... Iran’s hate speech is an incitement to genocide, by Michael Gerson | The Washington Post Mr. Gerson is one of the favorite hasbarachiks at the WP – it’s the usual Zionist garbage. I wrote a comment, though, that you might enjoy reading – one of the newest and probably last ones posted, as Gerson’s piece was already four days old. You can find it by date and time - 5:31 AM CDT on 4/8. ..There’s been some followup since I wrote that, but my last comment didn’t make the cut – probably my use of the expression “ZioNazi trolls” tripped a red flag. WaPo is a Zionist rag, after all. ~ The Editor Turkey, Iraq, and Oil, by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi | The American Spectator Though the pace of growth of the Turkish economy has slowed significantly, one of Ankara’s priorities over the coming years is to meet the country’s growing energy demands. The clearest solution is to diversify suppliers of oil and gas, with the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan (KRG) area being one potential source for such fuels. Had you asked me a few months ago about the Turkish policy on acquiring energy resources from the KRG via an independent pipeline project and against the will of the Iraqi central government, I would have said that Ankara was still ambiguous on the matter, but now it seems clear that the Turkish government under Prime Minister Erdoğan intends to move forward with such plans... The Problem is Not the NRA, by Allen L. Jasson | MWC News ...Cultivating a society that is seasoned to the false idea that the world must be shaped by violence, imbued with a fear of violence at home and a distorted notion of the value of human life that declines exponentially from the self, becoming zero at the national border and celebrates as heroes young men who are willing to go to far-off and impoverished lands to kill people who are fighting for their own countries is a quite deliberate purpose that serves the interests of a privileged few. In particular, it serves those who own the oil companies and the pseudo-democratic governments they sustain... Apr 8, 2013 Al Nakba | YouTube The definitive documentary, deftly using old footage, on the Zionist colonization of Israel and the Nakba (The Catastrophe).. [See also Part II] Shadia Mansour: We Have to Change | The OtherSite The earth is moving counter clockwise; And the world is losing its balance; Tell me, where else is there for us to go; We have to change.. Corporate India vs indigenous peoples | Redress Information & Analysis ...Roy says, we “have to begin to formulate some kind of vision and that vision has to be the dismantling of this particular model, in which a few people can be allowed to have an unlimited amount of wealth and power, both political and corporate. That has to be dismantled” and “a new imagination” beyond the restricting ideologies of communism and capitalism explored. A system that grows out of and perpetuates injustice and suffering, as market totalitarianism does, is one for which an alternative is not only required but is essential for the health of the planet and the wellbeing and survival of humanity. What is required is a pragmatic alternative that is rooted in principles of sharing, justice and freedom... [in the meantime, as the cannery owners might put it, sardines have nothing to say about the process] Capital as power, by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan | Philosophers for Change ...Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labor, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor measured. They don’t exist. And since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital... An Israeli Apology Means Little, by Ann Wright | Counterpunch Representatives of IHH, the international humanitarian organization that organized the passengers on the Mavi Marmara in the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, have told the author that families of the nine murdered by Israeli Defense Forces.. consider the “apology” of the Israeli government to the Turkish government as meaning very little until the Israeli government lifts the blockade on Gaza. Their family members were killed on a non-violent mission to challenge the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and the families do not consider either an Israeli government apology or the offer of compensation for the death of their loved one as any form of fulfillment of their mission... The Globalization of NATO, by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | Clarity Press “Nazemroaya’s book is a must-read for any European or other NATO state citizen who wants to understand the danger the American driven Alliance presents to world harmony and peace. I would hope that having done so, the reader would accept appropriate responsibility for actively pursuing ways to terminate this war machine that seeks out opportunities for warfare for all the wrong reasons. Reading this book may be the first step to finding ourselves before it is too late." From the Foreword, by Denis J. Halliday, UN Ass’t Secretary-General (1994-98) [I find it curious that while in harness the best of them faithfully serve the Matrix, and then after they retire they let everyone know that it was all a big mistake. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to desperately try to clean up after them.] The Man the Media Loved to Hate, by Steve Rendall | Counterpunch ...Putting aside historical fantasies about a Latin America where “ruling elites”oppose autocracy, for the US media, Chávez was the clown caudillo from the very beginning, making outrageous declarations, trashing his economy, rigging elections, and rolling up a dismal human rights record. That Chávez was a dictator, a “strongman … profoundly anti-democratic”, was self-evident. Never mind that he routinely vanquished opponents in elections Jimmy Carter called “the best in the world”, or that autocracies don’t generally feature elections where the opposition wins 44% of the vote, as happened in Venezuela’s 2012 elections... Palestine and the ICC, by John V. Whitbeck | Palestine Chronicle ...If the Ha’aretz report is accurate, friends of Palestine may legitimately start to wonder why the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah bothered to go to the UN General Assembly on November 29 if it did not intend to follow up and build on its triumph in any useful way – most obviously by seeking to balance its huge disadvantages in the realms of power politics and brute force with its huge advantages under international law – and if it remains content to leave the fate of the Palestinian people and cause in the far from benevolent hands of the U.S. government... Ramzy Baroud on the Legacy of Rachel Corrie | Palestine Chronicle Cartoon of the Day: Military Justice | The OtherSite Apr 7, 2013 Israels Worldwide Role in Repression | IJAN This pamphlet focuses on the role of Israel's government, its military, and related corporations and organizations in a global industry of violence and repression. The states most involved with this industry profit from perpetual war and occupation across the globe while maintaining vastly unequal societies of their own. Israel exports weapons, technologies, training, and techniques of violence for use by governments and corporations against populations around the world... Arab funding for Jerusalem comes a decade too late, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth For Palestinian leaders, waiting anxiously in the hope that US Secretary of State John Kerry unveils a peace plan when he visits this week, the need to secure East Jerusalem’s future has come sharply into relief. The reason is simple: there can be no viable Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital. This was the background to a March 26 pledge by the Arab League to establish a $1 billion fund to protect East Jerusalem’s Arab and Islamic characters. Both have been rapidly eroded as Israel has intensified its hold on the occupied half of the city over the past decade. East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel, in violation of international law, following the 1967 war... A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, by Andrew J. Bacevich | Harper's Magazine ...You immediately saw the events of 9/11 as a second and more promising opening to assert U.S. supremacy. When riding high a decade earlier, many Americans had thought it either unseemly or unnecessary to lord it over others. Now, with the populace angry and frightened, the idea was likely to prove an easier sell. Although none of the hijackers were Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were promoting military action against Iraq. Critics have chalked this up to your supposed obsession with Saddam. The criticism is misplaced. The scale of your ambitions was vastly greater... Fourth estate agents? by Ian Sinclair | Peace News As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed, power cannot rule by force alone. Hegemony requires that a sufficient portion of the population view the status quo as fundamentally legitimate, or at least unalterable. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman described how the corporate media function in a way that manufactures this popular consent, by framing discourse, promoting certain perspectives and omitting inconvenient facts and voices. Of course, these principles apply the rest of the intellectual culture, including academia and publishing. For those of us who regard the status quo as inherently corrupt, exploitative, violent, undemocratic, and ecologically unsustainable... A history of whoredom: The CIA and the Media | Carl Bernstein In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA. Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years [this was written in 1977] have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters... Christopher Bollyn Interviews Roi Tov | Roi Tov ..The general ignorance about Israel is primarily due to the fact that most people are woefully misinformed about the Middle East having grown up consuming news and entertainment products provided by Hollywood and the Zionist-controlled media. This has resulted in a very significant part of the American population suffering from an extremely distorted point-of-view. Prior to 9/11 this may not have been a matter of great concern, but with the U.S. involved in at least two long-term wars in the Middle East, Americans can no longer afford to be blissfully ignorant about the Zionist state of Israel and its criminal network that are the root of the conflict in the region... How Israel Helped a Then-Rogue State Go Nuclear, by Derek Leebaert | The Globalist Tehran may or may not be building a bomb. Israel, for its part, is known to be a nuclear power. What is less well known is Israel's record of sharing its nuclear capability with a rogue state — while U.S. intelligence looked on. In this exclusive report, Derek Leebaert presents evidence of Israel's collaboration with South Africa's apartheid regime... P5+1 Irked as Iran Proposes Far-Reaching Peace Plan, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar The P5+1 proposal to remove a trivial amount of sanctions against Iran in return for the Iranian government mothballing much of its civilian nuclear program has been met by a counter-proposal today, with Iran pushing a broader, long-term deal.. P5+1 officials are reportedly “puzzled” by the proposal to actually settle the matter, as opposed to setting the stage for years of additional meetings and threats... Why I'm supporting a cultural boycott of Israel, by Iain Banks | The Guardian I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign because, especially in our instantly connected world, an injustice committed against one, or against one group of people, is an injustice against all, against every one of us; a collective injury. My particular reason for participating in the cultural boycott of Israel is that, first of all, I can; I'm a writer, a novelist, and I produce works that are, as a rule, presented to the international market. This gives me a small extra degree of power over that which I possess as a (UK) citizen and a consumer... Israeli Anthrax Developer Resigns | Roi Tov ...Shafferman has a different field of expertise: anthrax. How can a physical chemist become an expert on a biological weapon? The point is simple, the infection with anthrax is not a biological problem.. The problem in its transformation into a weapon belongs to a field known as "surface treatment;" physical chemistry is the relevant discipline. The terrorist-scientist task is to make the weapon safe enough to be transported while assuring its proper dispersion and activity. In other words, the 2001 anthrax attacks on the USA were unlikely to be prepared by terrorists. A government was behind them... Misandry: An Obstacle to Solidarity Between Men and Women, by John Spritzler | New Democracy World “Misandry" is a word with which I was not familiar until recently. It is a new word that made its debut around the 1970s, with a meaning analogous to "misogyny" (hatred or dislike of women or femaleness) but applied to men, thus meaning hatred or dislike of men or maleness. It is probably not a coincidence that the word "misandry" emerged when it did because it was 1971 when Gloria Steinem launched Ms Magazine to promote misandry among women in the name of feminism... [Those of us who endured the heyday of Radical Feminism in the ‘70s know exactly what John is talking about. Fortunately, the great majority of women were too sensible to buy into it and it started to dissipate in the 80’s, although there’s still a considerable hangover.] In Their Shoes: Obama’s Empathy Deficit in Palestine, by Uri Avnery | Counterpunch Obama in Israel: Every word right. Every gesture genuine. Every detail in its place. Perfect. Obama in Palestine: Every word wrong. Every gesture inappropriate. Every single detail misplaced. Perfect. It started from the first moment... [Obomba may not look like a nice Jewish boy, but he was hand-picked and groomed by the Chicago Jewish political mafia...] Apr 6, 2013 Fascism in Europe next? | The Vineyard of the Saker ...having acted in complete violation of national and international laws, having arrogantly disregarded banking regulations and laws, and having also condoned the illegal use of force, the EU is now showing its true face: a transnational Fascist cartel run by bankers and plutocrats which does not give a damn about what the European population thinks, or what the law says. The real motto of Europe has now clearly become "might makes right".. all of the West - USA and Europe - are done playing cute games about democracy, freedom and human rights. Now, finally, we can see beyond any doubt that the entire western political system is about one thing and one thing only: pure, unfettered, greed... Sectarian warfare through Zionification of Islam, by Shabana Syed | deLiberation The abuse at Abu Ghraib where Muslim detainees were raped, sodomised, forced to lie on one another naked, forced to masturbate, urinated on by US prison guards standing around with Alsatian dogs taking pictures were all part of Americas policy of ‘exporting democracy and western values’ to Iraq. The horrendous abuse that was carried out by soldiers following the orders of Zionist Neo-cons like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did not discriminate when it came to detainees being Shia or Sunni, a fact that should be noted by those Wahabi Salafi groups who see Shias and Iran as a threat to world peace and are working with Israel, on its Oded Yinon plan to divide the Middle East... Has the Arab League mortally wounded itself by declaring war on Syria? by Franklin Lamb | OpEd News Frankly, it never was much of a "League" of Arab states. And arguably it never really achieved a whole lot but two dozen lavish "summits' offering inflated rhetoric, often calculated to assuage the Arab people about their central cause, Palestine. This, despite high hopes across Arabia when its founders promulgated a Charter on March 22, 1945 and took a solemn oath to prevent the theft of Palestine by European colonists.. It is Syria, along with Palestine, out of all the 22 Arab League members, who most consistently and steadfastly have represented Arab Nationalism, Arab resistance to occupation, and the stated goals enunciated 66 years ago when the Arab League was established... Irish academics' union votes to "cease all cultural and academic collaboration with Israel," by Asa Winstanley | The Electronic Intifada At its annual congress today, an Irish lecturers’ union voted to for a comprehensive academic boycott of Israel, described by activists as the first such move of its kind in Europe. In a unanimous vote, the Teachers’ Union of Ireland called on members to “cease all cultural and academic collaboration with Israel, including the exchange of scientists, students and academic personalities, as well as all cooperation in research programmes.” The motion also called for the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to “step up its campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the apartheid state of Israel.”.. Obama and the Jewish State: The Political Ritual at Herzl’s Tomb, by Nicola Perugini | Counterpunch A visit to a grave is often part of the political rituals that presidents and other political representatives include in their schedules during their State visits. In spite of the apparent mechanicity and automatism behind these gestures, they still constitute valid spaces from which we can expose the crucial political intentions they embody. What is the meaning of Obama paying tribute to the founder of modern political Zionism in his last visit to Israel/Palestine? Which questions does this gesture raise on the latest US “broker of deceit”.. Anything's possible now, by Serge Halimi | Le Monde diplomatique Everything was becoming impossible. It was impossible to increase taxes because that would discourage “entrepreneurs”. It was impossible to protect a country against commercial dumping by low wage countries, as that would contravene free trade agreements. It was impossible to impose even the tiniest tax on financial transactions; most states would need to support it in advance. It was impossible to reduce VAT, as Brussels would have to agree to that. On 16 March, everything changed.. all citizens of the European Union must realise they are the target of a financial policy determined to rob them of the fruits of their labours on the pretext of balancing the books... Iran And The Danger of One's "Own Reality" | Moon of Alabama There is a concept of "strategic messaging" used to let the public know how it is supposed to think about this or that policy or country. There are problems with such messaging. It often exaggerates or even invents "facts" and thereby turns into propaganda lies. It also creates an echo chamber where the strategic messengers over time comes to believe their own bullshitting... Barak Reborn: Businesses and Corruption in Israel | Roi Tov ...After he became Minister of Defense, he gave the shares of his company Ehud Barak, Ltd. to his three daughters. The company received millions of dollars after that for unknown services performed in previous years. In his 2011 Report, then Israel State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss wrote "these activities of the minister do not meet proper norms.".. This is quite a harsh accusation towards a Minister of Defense; yet, Israel being (corrupt) Israel, nothing was done. Yitzhak Rabin having been his mentor, Barak enjoys superb links in Israel, including senior businessman who were former Mossad agents; he is untouchable by the State... Chris Hedges Resigns From Human Rights Organization PEN | Truthdig “I will not be participating as a speaker in the PEN World Voices Festival in May. I will not participate because of your decision to select Suzanne Nossel as Executive Director of the PEN American Center. This appointment makes a mockery of PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to defend.. Nossel’s relentless championing of preemptive war—which under international law is illegal—as a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organization... Critical Thinking Gone Missing, by Lawrence Davidson | OpEd News In 2008 Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears, and public relations babble... Popular Complacency In An Era Of Economic Exploitation And Perpetual War: Tyranny Of The Reasonable, by Phil Rockstroh | Counterpunch Throughout the course of human affairs, scheming elitists — let’s call them the Plundering Class — have devoted their days conceiving strategies and executing agendas that serve to enrich the fortunes of a ruthless few (namely themselves) by an exploitation of the harried and hapless multitudes. They scheme, hire silver tongued flacks and muster soldiers to do their biding, while, all too often, the rest of us squander the fleeting days of our finite lives in their service. They plot while we hope. They hoard the bounty of the world while we hoard resentments (generally misplaced upon those equally as power-bereft as we are)... Prosecute groups that support Israeli crimes, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis Jewish hasbara bodies aiding and abetting Israeli crimes must face the full force of the law.. The world of Jewish politics is so back to front and upside down that, when it comes to Israel, bad is good and wrong is right. That is the sad fact of which we need to remind Israel flag wavers, such as failed US politician Katrina Lantos Swett, who from time to time rear their heads to bleat “anti-Semitism” and decry the “deligitimization of Israel”, which they blame for allegedly rising anti-Jewish sentiment... [Incarcerate them and make them do hard labor for ten years - that way they might develop some empathy and respect for those they exploit - aka the goyim.] US aid: an opium for Palestinians, by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a 3.9-billion-US-dollar national budget for the 2013 fiscal year just one day before the 31 March deadline. The budget was approved without the required constitutional review and endorsement of the Palestine National Council. The state’s projected revenue for this year is 2.6bn dollars, leaving a deficit of 1.3bn dollars to be bridged by international benefactors... Syria: The Search for the Least Bad Option, by Anthony H. Cordesman | Center for Strategic and International Studies There are no good options in Syria. No matter what happens, the current civil war has triggered divisions between Sunni, Alawite, Kurd, and Syria’s smaller minorities that will take a decade or more to heal and leave lasting anger and hatred between Sunni and Alawite. The war has already spread to involve Lebanon and Iraq, unleashing a rebirth of sectarian tensions and conflict in each country. Worse, it has become linked to a religious war within Islam that increasingly pits Sunni against Shi’ite, and religious extremists against mainstream Islam, across the entire Islamic world... Apr 5, 2013 ‘Hacktivists’ prepare to ‘erase Israel from the internet’ | Al Arabiya ‘Hacktivist Anonymous,’ a group of international hackers, has promised to ‘erase Israel from the internet’ in a coordinated attack against the country on April 7. A hacker, who adopted the pseudonym ‘Anon Ghost,’ initiated the event and named it #OpIsrael, according to the Arabian Gazette on Wednesday. Many more known hacktivists, notorious for carrying out state-targeted attacks, are supporting the campaign. One hacking team told The Hackers Post website their reason for participation; “Israel isn't stopping human rights violations. It’s to show solidarity with newly recognized Palestinian state.”.. [Finally, the cavalry riding to the rescue. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. Some curious horses they’ve got, though.] Humanitarian Propaganda: Why Western Democracy is Mind Control and Invisible Government, by Nicolas Bonnal | Information Clearing House ...Let's go back to the twenties of last century: we are facing the fascinating confrontation of western propaganda, bolshevist propaganda, fascist, Ku Klux Klan or Nazi propaganda; and everywhere capitalism trying to sell its products and stuff. In 1928, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, publishes a famous book about modern propaganda and advertising, which synthesizes the advancements of modern mind control, after a terrible World War and a decennial of technical improvement and modern art of conditioning the masses through radio, movies and press... [Conspiracy theory? Yet how else do we explain the fact that most of the representatives of the American people have been committing high treason for decades – and keep getting re-elected?] Ghosts of Jerusalem | Roi Tov "When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said," wrote Karen Chance in Embrace the Night. She was wrong. 10,000 Americans bought houses in Jerusalem but are still living in the USA. About to see what he calls his capital becoming a ghost town, Netanyahu's new government is facing a crucial decision over Jerusalem. The status of Jerusalem was formalized with the 1980 Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. The world opposed this law; UN Security Council Resolution 478, adopted by fourteen votes to none, with the abstention of the United States of America, declared that the law was "null and void" and "must be rescinded." Israel ignored it... An Appeal to PEN: Exec. Director Suzanne Nossel Must Go, by John V. Walsh and Coleen Rowley | Antiwar ...Suzanne Nossel is a disturbing choice as the new executive director of PEN, an American branch of the worldwide association of writers and related professions devoted to free expression and "the ideal of one humanity living in peace in the world.".. Nossel’s career path, the masters she has served, the stances she has taken and the activities she has sponsored demonstrate profound differences with PEN. PEN cannot remain true to the ideals articulated by Arthur Miller with Nossel at the helm. She is an embodiment of the ongoing, and all too successful, cooption of the Human Rights movement by the U.S. government... Just another Israeli secret service interrogation, by Awad Abdel Fattah | Redress Information & Analysis ...I said: “It is you who should go to wherever you came from. You are a European colonizer, you came here as an invader.” His face grew red with indignation. “My grandfather was born here and he didn’t come from Europe.” “Well, if your grandfather was here before the invasion, so he must be a Palestinian like me, and like thousands of Palestinian Jews who were here all the time and lived peacefully with other Palestinians. But if he and his children participated in colonizing my country and killing my people, and continue to carry arms, then as far as I am concerned they are enemies – enemies of me, of justice and of human values.”.. Terror and the Israeli occupation | Alan Hart ...The only reason for hope that I can see is that a day will come when, because of the policies and actions of its self-righteous and deluded leaders, Israel will be a pariah state loathed, despised and perhaps even hated by just about the whole world. If that day comes, it’s reasonable to assume that whoever is occupying the White House would have to say to Zionism’s in-Israel leaders and their lobby in America, “Enough is enough”, and then back his (or her) words with action, globally coordinated, to cause Israel, in exchange for real peace, to end its occupation of the West Bank, lift its siege of the Gaza Strip and complete its withdrawal from all Arab territory grabbed in 1967... [Another excellent piece by Alan Hart, but regarding the strategy of settling merely for a return to the pre-1967 borders, I continue to argue that it makes no sense to settle for the silver or the bronze when you can still go for the gold. Otherwise, you’re likely to wind up with nothing.] Taner Akçam: The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity | YouTube Dr. Taner Akcam of Clark Univeristy presents some of the findings from his new book, The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Based on his research into WWI-era documents contained in the Ottoman Archives, Akcam demonstrates that the Armenian Genocide, in which well over one million Armenian and Assyrian Christians were massacred, was the result of a specific policy decision by the Ottoman government to pursue "ethno-religious homogenization" in Turkey as early as 1913. Because the empire could not reconcile calls for freedom.. with its Islamic legal system and culture, it opted to eradicate its Christian population... Ahmad al-Qabbanji, brave Islamic scholar, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis It is hard nowadays to find an ordinary practising Muslim who is able to exercise his critical faculties and willing to embrace the modern world, but you would have thought it is impossible to find a Muslim scholar with these qualities. If so, then meet Ahmad al-Qabbanji, an Iraqi Shi’i scholar with a difference. In contrast to the primitive Islamist charlatans permeating the Arab world these days – Salafis, Wahhabis, Muslim Brotherhood and the rest – Al-Qabbanji is against the notion of government by religious people – a theocracy – and also against an Islamic state ruled by shari’ah law... Reflections on Obama’s Nowruz Address as Hafez Rolls Over in His Grave, by Jamasb Madani | Muftah Four years ago, President Barack Obama quoted the beloved 13th century Persian poet Sa’di in his first Nowruz message to the Iranian people. The address, with its veneer of peace and diplomacy, was a well-received gesture to both civil society and the leadership in Tehran, recognizing the Islamic Republic and celebrating the country’s ancient culture and history. In this year’s Nowruz message, on March 18, 2013, President Obama recited more medieval Persian poetry, this time a famous 14th century poem from Hafez about friendship. An informal and casual survey of public opinion on the heels of this address suggest that Obama’s renewed efforts to tap the well of goodwill failed to resonate with many Iranians... [You can fool some of the people some of the time...] Top Swedish judge defends Wikileaks' Assange | MCW News A senior Swedish judge has said that the sex crime allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange are "a mess", and praised him for leaking classified US documents. Speaking on Tuesday, Stefan Lindskog, chairman of the Supreme Court of Sweden, also listed legal obstacles to extraditing the 41-year-old Australian to the United States to face prosecution for exposing thousands of classified documents. Lindskog was critical of the Swedish criminal investigation, and suggested that Sweden's extradition treaty with the United States would not apply to Assange... LIBOR Litigation to Recoup Damages After the Biggest Financial Fraud in World History has been Thrown Out: It’s a Banker’s World, by Darwin Bond-Graham | Counterpunch ...Strangely, the judge’s order acknowledged the massive global fraud that caused financial damages to the public in favor a few wealthy institutions. However, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald relied on technical legal arguments to throw out the core claims of the lawsuit. In other words, the ruling doesn’t deny that the crime occurred and that the Plaintiffs sustained serious damages, but still dismisses the claims.. even though the banks dishonestly rigged LIBOR, resulting in huge financial damages to countless counterparties and investors, under Buchwald’s reasoning the banks have not violated the letter of the Sherman Act and US anti-trust law... Turkey’s Unsustainable Politics in the Middle East: Israel vs. The Rest, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle ‘Confused’ may be an appropriate term to describe Turkey’s current foreign policy in the Middle East and Israel in particular. The source of that confusion – aside from the appalling violence in Syria and earlier in Libya – is Turkey’s own mistakes. The Turkish government’s inconsistency regarding Israel highlights earlier discrepancy in other political contexts. There was a time when Turkey’s top foreign policy priority included reaching out diplomatically to Arab and Muslim countries. Then, we spoke of a paradigm shift, whereby Istanbul was repositioning its political center, reflecting perhaps economic necessity, but also cultural shifts within its own society... Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian ...what I did say in my emails with Harris - and what I unequivocally affirm again now - is not that Harris is a "racist", but rather that he and others like him spout and promote Islamophobia under the guise of rational atheism. I've long believed this to be true and am glad it is finally being dragged out into open debate. These specific atheism advocates have come to acquire significant influence, often for the good. But it is past time that the darker aspects of their worldview receive attention... US war on terror has tortured history, by William A. Collins | Youngstown News ...look at the history behind the School of the Americas, where some of the most vicious leaders in Latin America learned terror techniques at our behest. That training beefed up our ability to defend friendly dictators in the West, and to oust leftist leaders who somehow managed to get elected. U.S. citizens understandably have trouble knowing what to believe. It just can’t be true that our own virtuous democracy has, now or ever, perpetuated torture. But then there is all the evidence. Guantanamo detainees have been subjected to everything from sensory deprivation to Chinese torture techniques... Vast Hidden Wealth Revealed in Leaked Records | NYT ...While confidential bank accounts and tax havens are not illegal, the collaboration’s pullback of a curtain on the vast amounts of wealth involved had the potential to create acute embarrassments and political reverberations in many countries, if for no other reason than for revealing in detail the sums of money. The Guardian’s report on the collaboration quoted a former chief economist for the McKinsey consulting group as saying wealthy individuals may have as much as $32 trillion in undisclosed wealth stashed in overseas havens... Apr 4, 2013 Predatory Capitalism and the Rise of the “Global Corporatocracy”: The Lifestyles of an “Economic Hit Man,” with John Perkins | Global Research ...What we have seen is that we are going through the throes of a failed global economy. I do not think that the depression or recession that we, and so many countries around the world are experiencing today, is temporary. It reflects a structural problem that we have around the world with the current form of capitalism. And I call this current form of capitalism predatory capitalism. I think it is a mutant viral form of capitalism that really took hold in the 1970s and has been spreading ever since. As expressed by famous economist Milton Friedman, it is based on a single premise, a single goal, and that goal is to maximize profits, without taking into account social and environmental cost... P5+1 Coalition Fraying on Eve of Second Almaty Talks with Iran, by Jim Lobe | Antiwar On the eve of its second round of talks with Iran on curbing its nuclear programme in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia plus Germany) is showing signs of growing disunity, according to the European Union’s former top foreign policy official. Speaking at a forum at the Brookings Institution here, Javier Solana, a former NATO secretary-general who was Iran’s chief European interlocutor from 2003 to 2009, suggested that Russia and China, in particular, are likely to oppose any additional sanctions or other pressure against Tehran if the Almaty talks, currently scheduled for Apr. 5-6, fail to yield much progress... [The Empire considers “progress” re Iran to mean its destruction as a major player in the Middle East and the installation of a puppet regime amenable to Israel and the corporatocracy.] Mr Obama, on what planet do you live? by Richard Falk | Al Jazeera ...Obama's injunction to see the conflict through the eyes of the other creates space for empathy and reconciliation. This is a necessary feature of according the weaker and oppressed side the sort of recognition that is a precondition to any genuine peace process. Obama also encouraged in a helpful way Israeli citizen activism on behalf of a just peace based on two states for two peoples, although accompanied by several disturbing qualifiers. Inappropriately, he urged that "for the moment, put aside the plans and process" by which this goal might be achieved, and "instead... build trust between people". Is this not an odd bit of advice?..
The Long History of Lies about Iran, by Muhammad Sahimi | Antiwar ...If the lies about Iraq have taught us anything, it is that we must pay due attention to the massive campaign of disinformation and lies that has been waged against Iran for over three decades, in order to “justify” a war with that nation. The campaign began with the hostage crisis after the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun by Islamic leftist students on November 4, 1979, and is still continuing. There are still disinformation and one-sided stories about the hostage crisis, the latest of which is the film Argo. The biggest lie about Iran, which has been perpetuated since at least 1984, is that Iran is only a few months or a year or two away from a nuclear bomb, which has not materialized after nearly 30 years...
Israel's Culture of Martyrdom, by Baruch Kimmerling | Not In My Name Nations like to imagine themselves as unique, but one belief they have in common is that it is noble to die in their name. Death and redemption are the themes of almost every form of patriotism. In the case of Israel, however, the connection between nationalism and death is especially visceral. For the Jewish state is a nation that emerged from the ashes of a project of extermination, and that sees itself as the best defense against the renewal of violent persecution. Zionism, the state's ruling ideology, is a triumphal creed shadowed by death... [On the other hand - and being Jewish I know this - Jews are the biggest physical cowards in the world. They run like hell when they meet any real opposition, like Hezbollah during Israel's latest attack on Lebanon. In Gaza they creep in with overwhelming force, terrified of the natives armed with slingshots, sticks and stones. Not to mention their massacre of unarmed Turks aboard the Mavi Marmara.]
The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”.. did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer...
Israel Ranks Low in OECD Quality of Life Survey | Tikun Olam ...Though the poll made a point of not offering overall rankings of individual countries in comparison to their peers, Haaretz’s report noted that Israel fell quite low on most of the major questions polled (though it polled relatively high on two indicators–see below). The newspaper report indicated that Israel overall polled 25th out of 36 nations included in the rankings... [One would not expect a high quality of life in the Devil’s playground] Empire: Diplomacy, Obama and the Middle East | YouTube What exactly was the point of President Obama's recent venture to the Middle East?..
A short open letter to Secretary of State Kerry | Alan Hart Dear Secretary of State, I have a question for you. Before you arrived in Turkey, its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told a United Nations forum in Vienna that the international community should consider Islamophobia as a crime against humanity “like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism.” When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned Erdogan for “comparing Zionism to fascism” and described the Turkish leader’s remark as “a dark and false statement”, I found myself wondering how you would respond to it when you arrived in Turkey...
US Senate warns Palestine against prosecuting Israel | Middle East Monitor ...The letter, signed by 77 senators, states that, "the Palestinian Authority must realise that its relations with the US will be endangered if it files a complaint against Israel at the International Criminal Court." It also stressed that "we cannot tolerate any attempt to delegitimize or isolate the state of Israel.".. [Tell you what, I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse] The Staggering Cost of Israel to Americans, by Pamela Olson | If Americans Knew ...now we are back to the question of why America continues to pour money into a state that commits daily human rights violations, defies US strategic interests, provokes rage and resentment among billions of people, competes with and crowds out US interests using technology subsidized by US taxpayers, and sells America's military secrets to its enemies. The answer is simple...
Israel Attacks Gaza and Golan | Roi Tov Telling prophecies in the Holy Land is so easy that it is unbearably deceptive; it is easy to outguess people stuck in "Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again" (Leviticus 24:20). Invariably, they strike. The only degree of freedom is in the timing of their violence; thus, an aspiring prophet should avoid mentioning accurate time-space coordinates. This unusual article demanded such an odd opening...
U.S. “Human Rights” Wars: Arms Control as a Weapon, by Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report ..In a stroke of supreme cynicism, America and its allies argued that non-state actors – like their jihadist proxies waging a war of terror against Syria – should not be subject to the treaty, because “national liberation movements” should be able to protect themselves. What shameless hypocrisy! The U.S. and Europe now sing the praises of national liberation movements, after having killed tens of millions to stifle the national aspirations of most of the world’s people. But, that is no more insane than Washington posing as a force for peace. Not only is the U.S. the top arms exporter in the world, but 8 of the top 10 war-profiteering corporations on the planet are American... Read transcript, listen to podcast...
The PLO's dangerous land swaps rhetoric, by Samah Sabawi | Al Jazeera Hailed as one of the best spokespersons for Palestine, veteran diplomat Afif Safieh impressed many during his four-city tour in Canada, earlier this year. Safieh - the author of The Peace Process: From Breakthrough to Breakdown - is also the Palestinian Authority's roving ambassador for special missions. But while the messenger was admirable, the message was disturbing. Safieh's high degree of eloquence and refined diplomatic skills were not enough to conceal the current pathetic state of political stagnation and bankrupt strategic thinking that inflict the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Authority (PA)... [In order for the Vichy PA to survive, Israel must survive – and control all of Palestine]
Playing the Venezuelan Anti-Semitism Card | Stephen Lendman Throughout his tenure, Washington officials vilified Chavez unjustifiably. So did media scoundrels. He was America top hemispheric enemy. Donald Rumsfeld once likened him to Hitler. Pat Robertson called for his assassination. Anti-semitism accusations surfaced often.. He said: "The world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendants of the same ones that kicked Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia."..
After Iraq, Climbing Out of the Moral Abyss, by Adil E. Shamoo | FPIF ...Rarely do pundits apologize for the horrendous Iraqi losses inflicted by the war: more than a million deaths and millions more wounded with varying lifelong disabilities, including thousands of tortured prisoners, with an estimated 16,000 of them still unaccounted for. Twenty-eight percent of Iraqi children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and 2.8 million people are still internally displaced or living as refugees outside the country. Add to that the complete upheaval of the Iraqi economy, as well as its transportation, education, and medical institutions...
Reports of Turkish-Israeli rapprochement may be premature, by Richard Lightbown | Mondoweiss ..Although Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu said on 25 March that Turkey’s main demands had been met,more recent reports tell of growing Turkish dissatisfaction with the deal. On 28 March Memo was reporting a huge discrepancy in the amount of compensation that Turkey expected ($1million per murdered victim) over what Israel considered it could get away with paying ($100,000 pro rata). Some reporters also need to sober up on this story...
1963: The year the Israel Lobby Transcended US Law, by Grant Smith | Antiwar Fifty years ago this May, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened a series of unprecedented hearings investigating the clandestine activities of foreign agents active in the United States. The investigation focused most intensively on the operatives and financing of key Israel lobbying organizations such as the American Zionist Council, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the American Section of the quasi-governmental Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency. Thanks to a secret memo only declassified in 2010, the public may now know what fears motivated the hearings...
Israel Lobby Archive: Herman M. "Hank" Greenspun FBI file | IRMEP Hank Greenspun (1909-1989) worked as a publicity agent for gangster "Bugsy" Siegel until Siegel's murder in 1947. Greenspun illegally shipped 50 caliber machine guns stolen from the U.S. Navy in Hawaii via Mexico to Jewish fighters in Palestine. Greenspun was apprehended attempting to illegally ship surplus combat airplane engines to Haganah fighters in Palestine and was convicted of violating the Neutrality Act and fined $10,000 in 1950.. In 1952 the FBI investigated Greenspun's attempt to pay a General Services Administration official "or anyone else" $25,000 to "quash" a second Neutrality Act indictment for smuggling arms to Jewish fighters in Palestine... Apr 3, 2013 Two-state solutions are Zionist solutions, by Blake Alcott | Redress Information & Analysis Many people who support equal rights for the Palestinian people also support some version of a two-state solution in historic Palestine, or are at least open to the idea of two states side by side. The simple point of this article is that all two-state solutions are Zionist solutions and should therefore be rejected: if one of the states is Palestine, the other is the existing, ethnocratic Jewish state in Palestine – a Zionist state with everything that entails... [Bingo, Mr. Alcott!] Israel: Manipulating the World to Destruction, by Dan Lieberman | Brave New World The Middle East crisis has reached a decisive point. From the entry of a relatively few Zionists to Palestine, the trajectory of the crisis has monotonically pursued a direction toward complete Zionist control of former Palestinian lands and complete disruption of Palestinian life. A startled world wonders how this happened, while neglecting the social and psychological manipulations that preceded each stage of the Zionists’ forward movement. Unaware of this strategy of conditioning, the world fails to apply necessary countermeasures and halt a more far reaching conflagration... Hamas re-elects Khaled Meshaal as leader | MCW News Hamas has re-elected its veteran leader, Khaled Meshaal, in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, two Hamas officials said. "The leaders of Hamas chose Meshaal," a high-ranking official told the AFP news agency by telephone from Cairo on Monday, requesting anonymity. The officials said the majority of the group's Shura council members voted for Meshaal. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the secret procedure... America’s “Imperial Temptation” in the Middle East—and the Looming Hangover from Obama’s Intoxicating Rhetoric | Going to Tehran Following President Obama’s address to an audience of Israeli students in Jerusalem last week, progressive commentators in the United States hailed the speech as “a passionate appeal for peace” that “placed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict squarely back on his agenda.” But those intoxicated by Obama’s rhetoric will soon experience a painful hangover. For the President’s Israel speech and the rest of his Middle East trip were focused, first and foremost, on domestic politics here in the United States. And Obama’s Middle East strategy is marked by a growing discrepancy between the arrogance of America’s regional agenda and its declining capacity to realize this agenda... Dodging sanctions in Iran | The Economist “It’s all about the documents,” says Sajad, a manager of an Iranian shipping firm. “Iran is in the printing business now.” He is referring to the lengths to which Iranian companies go to circumvent sanctions. In this case, the documents are faked to make Iranian oil look as if it came from Iraq. Iraq exports a lot of oil through Iran by lorry. Iranians who handle Iraqi documents can easily copy and reuse them... [The Cubans have survived US economic warfare for 50 years – the Iranians will manage OK] How the Pentagon Corrupted Afghanistan, by Dilip Hiro | TomDispatch America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and various oil companies, as well as a set of mercenary rent-a-gun outfits like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy that came into their own in this period. It took the plunge into Iraq in March 2003, sweeping those corporations and an increasingly privatized military in with it... Ben Zygier and Israeli’s Abuse of Australian Passports, by Brenton Sanderson | The Occidental Observer A fascinating article recently appeared in the Fairfax newspapers in Australia concerning the late Melbourne-born Mossad agent Ben Zygier. The result of a joint investigation by Fairfax in Australia and Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, the article, entitled “The life and death of Prisoner X,” outlines the sequence of events which led to Zygier’s arrest, imprisonment, and ultimate suicide in an Israeli prison. In the words of the author, Jason Koutsoukis, Ben Zygier “was responsible for one of the most serious security breaches in Israeli history, a breach that led directly to the imprisonment of two of Israel’s most prized Lebanese informants.”.. Israel Bedouin War Intensifies | Roi Tov ...In 2013, Land Day was characterized by Bedouin protests in the Negev. Despite their significant timing, the events were not exclusively related to the commemoration of the 1976 protests which mark the starting point of organized Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and abuse. In recent years, Bedouins are becoming increasingly active in their protests due to what Israel defines as plans to regularize land ownership in the Negev Desert... [Eventually, Israel will be at war with virtually the entire world. I’m taking bets on the outcome. Odds are currently running 10:1 that the Jewish State will go up in flames.] Medals for Murder, by Brian Cloughley | Counterpunch ...One of the most bizarre pieces of news to hit the media recently concerned the decision by the Administration in Washington to award a bravery decoration to government workers who from armchairs direct drones to kill supposed enemies and in the process slaughter totally guiltless people from time to time. I have to say that when I first read the report I thought it might be an amusing if somewhat sick spoof dreamed up by London’s Private Eye magazine or the satirical online site, The Onion. Alas: not so... The Koch Bros., ALEC and the Power of the State, by Kevin Carson | Counterpunch The corporate Pharisees of our day strain at a gnat using “free market” rhetoric to attack welfare for the poor, but swallow a camel when it comes to welfare for corporations. They claim to favor “economic freedom” and “free trade,” while putting the entire world under the totalitarian lockdown of draconian “intellectual property” law to guarantee their enormous monopoly rents. They complain that “taxation is theft,” while their mining and agribusiness corporations act in collusion with governments to kick the peoples of the world off their land. It’s time to scourge the money-changers from the temple... Camp Nama: New Details of the US-Run Torture Prison in Iraq, by John Glaser | Antiwar ...The full extent of the torture and abuse that took place in US-run facilities in Iraq will never be known. Most Americans think the scandal went no farther than a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib, where leaked photographs revealed blood-streaked floors, detainees on dog collars, sadistic sexual abuse, evidence of homicide and more. But the true scandal was bigger. Much bigger... The Real Reason for the Iraq War, by Greg Palast | VICE Because it was marked "confidential" on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn't believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq. Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies. I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did. Bingo! I'd just beaten the Military-Petroleum Complex in a lying contest... The USA - in bed with the worst of the worst | The Vineyard of the Saker Please take a look at this article.. I think that it is extremely interesting as it shows the true face of the Saudi Kingdom, not one of modernism and progress, but one of crass pre-medieval barbarity. Let me point of a few things here: a) Crucifixion as a method of executing is legal in Saudi Arabia. Yup, that's right. What the pagan Romans did 2000 year ago, the Saudi Wahabi still do today, and its all legal. b) The Saudis practice dismemberment. Now that practice has far more recent precedents, in particular in the European Middle-Ages. c) The person they want to crucify is a Shia cleric. Yes, you read that right... [Uncle Sam is also in bed with Israel, another country renowned for pre-medieval barbarity. It makes an interesting threesome.] Amber Lyon Reveals CNN Lies And War Propaganda | RT on YouTube Our Actions are driven by the Beliefs and Fears tha [See also The Amber Lyon Story on the Alex Jones Channel] Interfaith Peace-Builders Interfaith Peace-Builders fosters a network of informed and active individuals who understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United States’ political, military, and economic role in it. To build and nurture such a network, we lead delegations of people from diverse backgrounds to Israel/Palestine. These delegations emphasize listening to and learning from those immersed in the reality of the conflict, and advancing the work of Israelis and Palestinians committed to nonviolent struggle and peace with justice... Apr 2, 2013 Turkey Cracks the Whip, by Philip Giraldi | The American Conservative One of the surprise results of President Barack Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East was the last-minute phone call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey that took place from a hastily set-up trailer near the Tel Aviv airport as Obama was about to leave... The Victory of the “Noble Lie,” by Gary Leupp | Dissident Voice Reading an assortment of commentaries (“retrospectives”) on the tenth anniversary of the U.S. war on Iraq, and onset of the horrific occupation, I find most center their discussion on the now almost universally conceded fact that the war was based on false pretexts. The division is between those who buy the official line (that “intelligence flaws” caused honest leaders to accuse Saddam of having WMDs when he didn’t, and ties with al-Qaeda that didn’t exist), and those who recognize that the leaders themselves engaged in a campaign of misinformation to frighten people into supporting war... Obama's Divided Self: Papa Obama and President Drone, by Andrew Levine | Counterpunch When Barack Obama first appeared on the national scene, he was a Rorschach inkblot upon whom gullible liberals projected their hopes and anxious “conservatives” their fears. The scare quotes are justified because then, as now, there was not much that is genuinely conservative about those conservatives. They were just the latest in a long line of useful idiots, recruited from the ranks of socially dislocated and immiserated social strata, mobilized against their own material interests... [One wonders what Dostoyevski, the literary analyst of the split personality, would have made of him] Sanctions may be speeding Iran's nuclear advancement | Christian Science Monitor ...Sanctions now include a European oil embargo, exclusion from the SWIFT international banking system that enables Iranian banks to transfer money, and US measures that target Iran’s central bank. These measures have begun to bite, causing economic isolation and a precipitous fall in both oil revenues and the value of the Iranian currency. But Iran has still added thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium, and deployed a more efficient, second-generation centrifuge model; stepped up uranium enrichment levels from 5 percent to 20 percent, which is technically not too far from weapons-grade; and moved its most sensitive work to a deeply buried site impregnable to air attack... Rabbis: Zionism Is Racism | Moon of Alabama ...A bunch of east Europeans steal Arab land based on old fairytales and pure racism. They even acknowledge it. This should not be supported in any way. Yes, people differ and differing cultures may live in different ways. But racism used as justification for crimes is a crime in itself and should be punished.These Rabbis are public employees of the state of Israel. Their opinions are official policy. Fortunately history tells us that such fascism seldom survives. Racist people tend to devour their own... [Or as PM Erdogan put it succinctly, Zionism is a crime against humanity] His lies about brutal “Arab” attack in France exposed, Israeli director Yariv Horowitz concocts new ones, by Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada Following the exposure as false of his claims that he was knocked unconscious in a brutal beating by Arab youths in France, Israeli film director Yariv Horowitz is now concocting new lies perhaps to cover up his earlier fabrications... BRICS: New Geopolitical Model and Russia’s Foreign Policy Priority, by Alexander Mezyaev } Strategic Culture Foundation ..The core function of the BRICS model is the intent to reform the obsolete international economic and financial structure of contemporary world. The main thing to mention here is that the prospects for BRICS development are determined by a number of fundamental factors of long-term character facilitating the rapprochement of the participating states, which includes a common desire of the partners to reform the obsolete international financial and economic architecture which does not take into account the increased economic power of emerging market economies and developing countries. The main goal is to create a new system of reserve currencies... Israel Caught Spying on Russia | Roi Tov In the last month, a nasty rumor circulated through the world's media. It started with a Syria TV report on IDF spy devices found on Ant Island, Tartus Port, which was broadcast in the first week of March 2013; it is reproduced below. Israel didn't react at all. On the last day of March, the UK's Sunday Times newspaper repeated the Syrian report adding a few details. This opened the path for Israeli media to comment on the issue. Israeli news outlets can circumvent the military censor only by reporting sensitive stories as "quoted from foreign news sources,".. Viva Tierra Colorada! by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar [I live in Mexico, an interesting place to be these days] “Conspiracy Theories” and Media Coverage of the Sandy Hook School Massacre: In Search of the Last Liberal Intellectual, by James F. Tracy | Global Research In the wake of the Sandy Hook School shooting public incredulity with the official version of events led to numerous speculations on what really happened. In short order corporate media marshaled pundits to disparage such alternative interpretations as “conspiracy theories” and the work of deranged and even malevolent Sandy Hook “truthers.” The now-prevalent phenomenon where only the narratives authorized by law enforcement and government authorities are worthy of serious consideration suggests the unmistakable extent to which public discourse has declined... Palestinian Land Day, by Elias Akleh | MCW News Saturday March 30th was the 37th commemoration of Palestinian Land Day. Palestinians walked the streets of every major Palestinian town denouncing the Israeli occupation, the confiscation of Palestinian land, the building of illegal Israeli colonies, the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes and demanding freedom, liberation of all occupied Palestine and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state... A Laughable Excuse for Invading Iraq, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation Among the most laughable excuses for invading Iraq was the one that said that the U.S. government invaded the country to help free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. That was the big excuse that was trotted out after the WMD excuse proved to be unfounded. For one thing, there was never any concern for the well-being of the Iraqi people prior to the invasion. Recall, for example, the 11 years of brutal sanctions that preceded the invasion. Year after year, the Iraqi people were suffering economic devastation from the sanctions. Even worse, Iraqi children were dying by the thousands every year... [Is Iran going to be Iraq Redux?] The Legend of 9/11 — 10 Years On, from Anthony Lawson | Vimeo This video concentrates on the two major 9/11 issues: The Unidentified Planes and The Controlled Demolitions. Nothing else. It does not mention the NORAD stand–down; the don't-fly and don't-go-to-work warnings or the Dancing Israelis or any of the other anomalies and suspicious happenings. The alleged amateur suicide pilots are not mentioned, either, for obvious reasons, and I do not know what happened to the allegedly hijacked planes or their alleged passengers and crews... Visible Origami | A Place Called Gratitude. [Also, check out Snordster and Les Visible’s Smoking Mirrors] Apr 1, 2013 Sundown in America, by David Stockman | NYT The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid... [One of the Founding Fathers (I don’t remember which one) expressed the hope that the American Experiment might last at least 50 years. Well, it lasted a little longer than that, but was dead as a doornail after Imperial ambitions created a whole new scenario. RIP, America the Beautiful] The 12th Anniversary of American Cowardice, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad -- the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre -- were at least noted in passing in our world. In my hometown paper, the New York Times, the Iraq anniversary was memorialized with a lead op-ed by a former advisor to General David Petraeus who, amid the rubble, went in search of all-American “silver linings.” Still, in our post-9/11 world, there are so many other anniversaries from hell whose silver linings don’t get noticed... Nazi Shrunken Heads: A Video About Lies Which Justify War | YouTube Toward the end or World War II, U.S. armed forces entered the German wartime concentration camp at Buchenwald. The first Americans to become active there were officers of the Psychological Warfare Division. They had a plan: to plant "evidence" in the camp that suggests the German SS had committed atrocious war crimes against the Buchenwald inmates, shrunken prisoner heads, lampshades made of the skin of murdered inmates, etc. Much of this "evidence" was later used during the Nuremberg trials and other similar legal mockeries as evidence against German defendants. From there this atrocity propaganda entered the history books of the world, and the world believed it, and it still does... Tasteless montage: Pro-Israel group puts IDF soldiers in line with Nazi camp inmates, by Ami Kaufman | +972 Magazine ..How does one give therapy to a whole nation? This is the question I asked myself after seeing this photo montage made by the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, celebrating that Israel is now the largest center of Jews in the world. That’s the only way I can explain a photo like this. The Jewish nation goes through one of the most traumatic events in history, and the result is some sort of disorder, a PTSD on national levels. How does one treat that?.. Israel to define itself as 'national state of Jewish people' - despite Arab population, by Robert Tait | Telegraph Israel's new government plans to pass a controversial new law defining the country as a "national state of the Jewish people" despite the presence of 1.5 million Arabs within its borders. The move is likely to be denounced as weakening Israel's democratic principles while triggering accusations of official discrimination against Arabs, who form around 20 per cent of the population... [Maybe next they'll admit to having a very large nuclear weapons stockpile - anything's possible.] Easter Resurrection of Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance ...just yesterday we commemorated Land Day and our commemorations were marred by Israeli violence. Even trying to cling to memory of our lands stolen from us is a crime in the Apartheid state of Israel. A law in the Knesset tried to stop commemorations of the Nakba (the catastrophe of ethnic cleansing of 530 villages and towns between January 1948 and December 1949). But this is just one of hundreds of racist, discriminatory laws that make Israel the quintessential apartheid state... Free speech on campus | Paul Eisen ...my personal experience of being silenced has come far more from anti-Zionist Jews than from Zionist Jews (who, surprisingly, I've often found quite open to debate). Still, it gives me an excuse to repost "Mario Savio and the Palestinian people" from a year or so back, which includes that legendary and unforgettable clip of Mario Savio at Berkeley campus in 1964... [Yeah, I was there. The last time I saw Mario he was tending bar on San Pablo Avenue. Heard he later went to Law School. I wonder what that led to.] Hollywood Goes Jewish | Roi Tov "Roi Tov is a fool! Hollywood has always been a Jewish stronghold!" Some will say after taking a quick look at this page. Yet, this article doesn't analyze who runs Hollywood, but a perceived increase in the conversions to Judaism among Hollywood stars. Before ADL lawyers send me a polite, but nasty, letter, let me state explicitly the origin of the claims about Hollywood quoted here. Yediot Ahronot ("Latest News") is the largest paid Hebrew newspaper... Reading Palestinian Prison Diaries | Richard Falk There are many moving passages that can be found in these excerpts from prison diaries and recollections of 22 Palestinians. What is most compelling is how much the material expresses the shared concerns of these prisoners despite great variations in writing style and background. A few keywords dominate the texts: pain, God or Allah, love, dream, homeland, steadfastness, tears, freedom, dream, prayer... Easter, Jesus, Betrayal & Palestinian Genocide, by Gideon Polya | MCW News Coinciding with the pre-Christian celebration of New Life, at Easter time the Christian world pauses to consider the Passion of Christ and the story of His crucifixion and resurrection. Mainstream Media will cover this major annual religious event but will largely ignore a crucial message of the Passion story - our critical obligation to bear witness and speak out against evil... How to write about Muslims, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera The Western press and social media often seem to exercise two options for dealing with the Muslim population of the world: overt, unabashed Islamophobia or slightly subtler Islamophobia. As Georgetown University's John L Esposito writes in the foreword to Nathan Lean's The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, 9/11 and other terror attacks "have exacerbated the growth of Islamophobia exponentially" and resulted in a situation in which "Islam and the Middle East often dominate the negative headlines", thanks in part to the calculated machinations of "a number of journalists and scholars".. The Losers’ Narrative: Expatriates with Agendas and America’s Dangerously Distorted Iran Debate—And A Challenge to Abbas Milani | Going to Tehran When we published Going to Tehran, we expected that its critique of America’s prevailing Iran mythology would spark sharply negative reactions from individuals and constituencies whose identities are bound to this mythology. The sharpest so far came in mid-March, when The New Republic published Abbas Milani’s “The American Voices of the Islamist Regime in Iran: Two Former U.S. Officials Make the Case for Accommodation.” The New Republic and Milani (among other affiliations, a TNR contributing editor) have had us in their sights for some time. With our book out, TNR and Milani are after us with renewed vigor... Obama's Risky Middle East Fantasy, by Ira Chernus | TomDispatch ...By now, we’re so used to such a world of headlines - about Iran’s threatening nuclear weapons and its urge to “wipe out” Israel - that we simply don’t see how strange it is. At the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia (theoretically because of sequester budget cuts), the U.S. continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest-sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever-tightening sanctions, its skies filled with U.S. spy drones, its offshore waters with U.S. warships... [Yep, stranger than fiction – the ravings of psychopaths and sociopaths are what drive the foreign policy of the greatest Empire ever known. No wonder I drink a lot of tequila.] Martin Webster invites you to remember Deir Yassin | Paul Eisen ...One of the many reasons why we are subjected continuously to “Holocaust” presentations from the largely Jewish-controlled mass media is because this material is designed to distract us from, or feel guilty about, recollecting the atrocities perpetrated in 1946/1948 by the Zionists in Palestine against its indigenous people and also, let us not forget, against British servicemen acting on a League of Nations/United Nations mandate to try and preserve order in the area... |
Archives >