Mar 30-31, 2013 Israeli Idiocracy, by Uri Avnery | Counterpunch So, finally our Prime Minister has apologized to Turkey for “operational mistakes” that “might have” led to the death of nine Turks during the attack on MV Mavi Marmara, the ship which tried to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza. It took him two years and ten months to do so. Hallelujah... Our Mothers, Our Fathers, Israel's Lies | Roi Tov "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" is a three-part series that follows the lives of five young men and women, two of them are Wehrmacht soldiers. It begins in 1941, on the eve of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, and shows how the young people are rapidly corrupted by the Third Reich. The screenplay is based on the experiences of the screenwriter Stefan Kolditz's father, who was a 19-year-old soldier on the eastern front. the series have been praised for examining the Third Reich at an individual level, by showing how the Nazi system reached every aspect of life... [Perhaps at least some Germans are finally beginning to summon the courage to try to get the Israeli boot off their necks and see themselves as human beings like everybody else. It’s about time.] Lawless: An Oddly Exceptional Empire, by Nebojsa Malic | Antiwar Many empires have risen and fallen over the course of recorded history. All were created by force. Yet all have tried to legitimize that force, by passing laws and seeking to establish some sort of order that would outlive their military supremacy. Some have been more successful at this than others; by way of example, the legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte’s legal code is still alive today, in much of Europe and its former colonies, though the little Corsican’s empire was decisively defeated nearly two centuries ago. The Atlantic Empire, on the other hand, is the only example in history of an imperial enterprise destroying its own laws, undermining its own legitimacy in pursuit of power... Tribunal slams academic for bringing anti-Semitism case | Times Higher Education A Jewish academic who claimed the University and College Union’s policy on Palestine constituted harassment has been rebuked by an employment tribunal for misusing the legal process. Ronnie Fraser, a further education lecturer and founding director of Academic Friends of Israel, argued that the UCU was institutionally anti-Semitic owing to motions passed in favour of a boycott of Israel... [Every once in a while we get a little good news. Dog is great!] The Saudi Model, by Archie Kennedy | MCW News The United States of America’s long term goal for the Middle East is to establish Saudi type dictatorships throughout the volatile oil rich region. One of the main objectives toward that goal is the destabilisation of unpredictable or disobedient regimes such as the current Assad regime in Syria. As outrageous a hypotheses this may seem, it has the power to explain America’s foreign policy in the Middle East for the past decade... Land Day Looting | Roi Tov Land Day 2013 was a bizarre one. March 30 commemorates the Land Day, when in 1976 a general strike and marches were organized in Palestinian towns from the Galilee to the Negev in response to Israel's announcement that it would expropriate Palestinian land for "security and settlement purposes." The 1976 protests are recognized as the starting point of the organized Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and abuse, and are commemorated annually; often these protests turn violent. This year, the day was marked by reports on IDF looting and arrests of children... Israeli doctors accused of collusion in torture, by Sharmila Devi | The Lancet Questions are being raised about the involvement of Israeli doctors in the suspected torture of a young Palestinian detainee who died in custody last month.. The death of a Palestinian prisoner in disputed circumstances in an Israeli prison has reignited a longstanding controversy over alleged physician complicity in torture as well as sparking renewed Palestinian anger over the estimated 4600 prisoners held by Israel... [With very few exceptions, all of Israeli society is complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, apartheid and genocide. Torture is to be expected.] How Obama Chose War Over Peace in Syria, by Shamus Cooke | Counterpunch With Syria on the brink of national genocide, outside nations have only two options: help reverse the catastrophe or plunge this torn nation deeper into the abyss. Countries can either work towards a peaceful political solution or they can continue to pour money, guns, and fighters into the country to ensure a steady gushing into the bloodbath. President Obama will have no talk of peace. He has chosen war since the very start and he’s sticking to it... The Limerick “pogrom”: Creating Jewish victimhood, by Andrew Joyce | The Occidental Observer A very curious article has appeared in the March 14th edition of the UK Daily Mail,, a comment on Greg Smith’s recent indictment of the Goldman Sachs’ culture of greed and client exploitation. The article in question was written by one Alex Brummer, a journalist who writes for both the Daily Mail and the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Brummer’s specialty, it seems, is economic matters and he has a number of strange points to make in relation to the recent revelations that Goldman Sachs has been referring to its clients as “muppets” for some time... A Curate’s Egg (Good in Parts), by by Peter Jenkins | LobeLog Last week, while visiting Israel and Jordan, President Barak Obama publicly emphasised that there is still time to resolve the nuclear dispute without resorting to force and that this is his preference. For peaceniks everywhere, those were encouraging words. But, advertently or not, the President’s words also revealed two of the most perplexing aspects of his administration’s Iran policy: their insistence on making unique demands of Iran, and their reluctance to give weight to US intelligence findings... BRICS go over the wall, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online Reports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Reality spells otherwise. The BRICS meet in Durban, South Africa, this Tuesday to, among other steps, create their own credit rating agency, sidelining the dictatorship - or at least "biased agendas", in New Delhi's diplomatic take - of the Moody's/Standard & Poor's variety... Look at the World from Behind the Wall, by William A. Cook | deLiberation ..Would that the President might take his own advice—“Put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes”—he need only open his eyes beyond the wall that imprisons the Palestinians he speaks about: see how the wall blinds the Jews to the plight of the people they drove from their land, see the barren landscape on the other side rubble strewn, savaged by bulldozers and missiles, see the people caught in a maelstrom of poverty and deprivation, listen to the mothers and wives weep for their husbands and sons jailed without charge in Israel’s Gulag where escape comes by self-starvation as the only defense against indefinite torture and lives lost to family and friends... Regime Change Begins at Home, by Stephen Lendman | MCW News ...Powerful interests run today's America. They take full advantage. Absolute power corrupts them absolutely. They're free to steal, plunder, exploit, accumulate wealth, and dominate. They do it at our expense. Inequality is unprecedented. America the beautiful never existed and doesn't now. Calling it a land of opportunity defies reality. Democratic freedoms are incompatible with predatory capitalism. Everyone's on their own sink or swim... Mar 29, 2013 "Iran is not the threat, we are," by Ken O'Keefe | deLiberation It is time to stop being Israel’s Bitch!. I renounced my US citizenship and the United States of Hypocrisy refused to acknowledge my right, our right, to self-determination. Alright then, I am thinking now that maybe I just needed to leave for 10 years or so and reflect on things, now that I have, I have made some important conclusions... [O’Keefe is the real deal, a warrior in the best sense – honest, fearless, forthright and clear seeing and driven by compassion and a burning desire for justice. We desperately need more such people.] Dangerous Crossroads: The Threat of a Pre-emptive Nuclear War directed against Iran, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research ..First formulated in the Bush administration’s 2002 ‘Nuclear Posture Review’, the pre-emptive nuclear war doctrine -integrated into the Global War on Terrorism – started to take shape in the immediate wake of the war on Iraq. A pre-emptive‘defensive’ nuclear attack on Iran using tactical nuclear weapons was envisaged to annihilate the Islamic Republic’s non-existent nuclear weapons program. So-called ‘mini nukes’ were identified as the ‘ideal weapon’ to conduct a pre-emptive nuclear attack. In 2003, the mini nukes, consisting of bunker-buster bombs with nuclear warheads, were re-categorized by the US Senate as bona fide conventional weapons... Tatra Tiger gets Silver Hand from Israel | Roi Tov ..About to become a full member of the European Union later this year, Croatia is highly susceptible to political pressure, to the extent that President Ivo Josipovic issued in February 2012 an apology for his country's role in the crimes committed against the Jews during the Second World War. Of course, the Republic of Croatia became independent only in 1991, many years after the WWII ended. Having judged this not being a good enough extortion, the West used Croatia to funnel weapons to the Syrian rebels. These were a reminder of Israel's intensive diplomatic activity in formerly Communist countries. In Passover 2013, arrived Slovakia's turn to become the recipient of Zionist attentions... Jesus' broken heart | Paul Eisen ...This year on the 9th April, Deir Yassin Day - the 56th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre - falls on Good Friday, the day on which Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus. Today Deir Yassin, the site of probably the most important event in modern Palestinian history, stands unnamed and unmarked in clear sight of the most famous Holocaust memorial in the world... Let my people go! by Adam Keller | Crazy Country Last night, the night of the Passover Seder, the streets of Israel's cities were empty and deserted, and from the windows could be heard the singing of ancient hymns and passages from well-accustomed texts.. Sitting down at armed enclaves surrounded by wire fences and walls and guarded by the soldiers of a mighty army, they told at length of slaves going out of bondage and into liberty. Did the echo of the singing reach the villages nearby whose land was confiscated and their springs clogged and their water taken away and their sons held behind bars and their roads blocked by military checkpoints?.. Unfree in Palestine, by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News The latest visit by U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama to Israel has demonstrated to the world on which side the Empire stands. Obama promised an occupying power absolute support and eternal loyalty. Behind this background, the reader of “Unfree in Palestine” is befallen with a kind of bitterness when hearing Obama’s unrestricted support for a heinous form of total control of a whole population under occupation... The proxy war destroying Syria, by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis Writing about Syria is emotionally draining and intellectually overwhelming. As evident by the level of destruction and killing, the mutual hatred between President Bashar Assad’s regime and the armed opposition surpasses their love of the country. More than 70,000 people have been killed and, not counting internally displaced Syrians, there are more than one million refugees in neighbouring countries... Goodbye Miliband. Don’t come back, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis The tears shed by assorted media at the news of David Miliband’s departure from British politics for a new life in New York had me reaching once again for the sick-bag. “British politics will be a poorer place without David,” said brother Ed, leader of the Labour Party. Will it?.. Why I’m Attending the Dedication of the Bush Lie Bury, by David Swanson | Counterpunch ...Bush himself is relevant only as his treatment can deter future crimes and abuses. No one should wish Bush or any other human being ill. In fact, we should strive to understand him, as it will help us understand others who behave as he has.n Bush, of course, knew what he was doing when he tried to launch a war while pretending a war would be his last resort, suggesting harebrained schemes to get the war going to Tony Blair. Bush knew the basic facts. He knew he was killing a lot of people for no good reason. He was not so much factually clueless as morally clueless... National Clandestine Service: Where Democracy Ends, Fascism Begins, by Norman Pollack | Counterpunch ...Not unusual for the Obama administration: Three layers of secretiveness, and that just for starters in this one realm. One would almost think here of children’s games, except that we are speaking of the core of lethality in the conduct of American foreign policy. Again, not surprising, the candidate is nameless, faceless, the record out of reach, just like the video records of torture she helped to destroy (without authorization from above, obviously, because CIA higher-ups will do everything to ensure deniability, especially where war crimes are concerned);.. Nixon has won Watergate, by Jonathan Turley | USA Today This month, I spoke at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal with some of its survivors at the National Press Club. While much of the discussion looked back at the historic clash with President Nixon, I was struck by a different question: Who actually won? From unilateral military actions to warrantless surveillance that were key parts of the basis for Nixon's impending impeachment, the painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be... ‘The Supreme Crime Against Humanity’ in Iraq, and Beyond, by Phillip Crawford | Antiwar Ten years ago this month, Operation Iraqi Freedom began. The invasion of Iraq occurred in spite of protests of millions of people around the world. Massive demonstrations took place in the months leading up to the war. On Feb. 15, 2003, there were protests in more than 1,000 cities and on every continent. Never before had such a huge antiwar movement sprung up before a war had even begun. At the time, The New York Times described this global peace movement as the world’s “second super-power.”.. 76 Senate Warmongers, by Michael S. Rozeff | Lew Rockwell On February 28, 2013, Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced Senate Resolution 65, which is currently referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where I hope it dies. If it passes, it becomes an important step on the road to war with Iran.. Co-sponsoring SR 65 identifies a senator clearly as making one of the most serious possible misjudgments that a legislator can make. Very few matters rise to the importance of launching an aggressive war against another nation without justification. Americans should remove these warmongers from office... Russian TV documentary: "The Syrian Diary" | The Vineyard of the Saker This is a documentary by Anastasia Popova, a correspondent for the Russian TV station "Rossia 24". Don't expect any kind of sympathy for the FSA from these reporters who are 100% behind the Syrian Army and who are absolutely outraged at what they strongly believe is the rape of a nation by a coalition of international terrorists and NATO special forces. It is precisely this strong identification with one side which makes this documentary so important: it shows the point of view of those whose voice and opinion is absolutely *never* heard in the western corporate media... Mar 28, 2013 What was Wrong with Obama’s Speech in Jerusalem | Richard Falk It was master-crafted as an ingratiating speech by the world’s most important leader and the government that has most consistently championed Israel’s cause over the decades. Enthusiastically received by the audience of Israeli youth, and especially by liberal Jews around the world... Predatory Dreams, by William Astore | Tom Dispatch Despite the murkiness of America’s drone program and the many disclaimers, disavowals, and outright lies in which it’s enwreathed, U.S. officials continue to tout robotic assassination as a cure-all for the country’s ills abroad - a precise, efficient, and above all clean brand of warfare.. Lieutenant Colonel William Astore takes on these modern myths by placing drones and the outsized claims made for them within the long, sordid history of air warfare. Since the dawn of air power early in the last century, supporters have advanced fantasies that, again and again, have failed to pan out (while civilians died in often staggering numbers)... “No I can’t” Obama says | Alan Hart ...The double standard and hypocrisy at the heart of American foreign policy was evident in what he said within minutes of his arrival in Israel. “Iran’s leaders have to realise they must meet their international obligations.” That’s on the one hand. On the other is that Israel’s leaders are NOT required to meet their international obligations... President Obama’s Second Term: Selling Death and Buying Assassins In the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia | James Petras As President Obama enters his second term with a new Cabinet, the foreign policy legacy of the past four years weighs heavily on their strategic decisions and their empire-building efforts. Central to the analysis of the next period is an evaluation of the past policies especially in regions where Washington expended its greatest financial and military resources, namely the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. We will proceed by examining the accomplishments and failures of the Obama-Clinton regime. We will then turn to the ongoing policy efforts to sustain the empire-building project... Myth and the Russian Pogroms Part 3: The Jewish Role, by Andrew Joyce | Paul Eisen We continue our series of essays examining the Russian Pogroms with this essay on the part played by Jews in provoking the disturbances. As stated in Part Two, one of the key problems with existing historiography on the pogroms (and ‘anti-Semitism’ generally) is that these narratives invariably argue that the plight of the Jews was the result of nothing more than irrational hatred... Militarism Wins the Day...Again: Obama Fails in the Mideast, by Sam Bahour | Counterpunch As I watched President Barack Obama’s helicopter pass above my home, just before landing at the Palestinian Presidential Compound next to Ramallah, I just shook my head in disappointment, first as an American, then as a Palestinian. I thought: “Another U.S. president, on another high fanfare visit, carrying the same, failed political messages.”.. The Militarization of American Life, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar ...Women, gays, transsexuals, and presumably dwarves afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome – all have an "equal right" to commit mass murder. Did the leftists who brought this Political Correctness down on our heads ever dream of the uses to which it would be put? And now that they’ve "grown up" and made their peace with the Empire, do they even care? Of course they don’t. All they care about is the great god Equality, on whose altar every value they every pretended to hold is being slaughtered... America’s Other Dark Legacy in Iraq, by Joy Gordon | Antiwar When the United States, the United Kingdom, and the “coalition of the willing” attacked Iraq in March 2003, millions protested around the world. But the war of “shock and awe” was just the beginning. The subsequent occupation of Iraq by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority bankrupted the country and left its infrastructure in shambles. It’s not just a question of security. Although the breathtaking violence that attended Iraq’s descent into sectarian nightmare has been well documented in many retrospectives on the 10-year-old war, what’s often overlooked is that by far more mundane standards, the United States did a spectacularly poor job of governing Iraq... Death, Misery And Debt: Iraq's Unintended Conquest Of America, by Doug Bandow | Forbes Secretary of State John Kerry made a surprise visit to Baghdad to ask the Iraqi government to stop helping Iran support Syria’s Bashar Assad. Kerry received an embarrassing rebuff—so much for the Bush administration’s celebrated victory over Saddam Hussein. This time ten years ago the grand Iraqi cakewalk had begun. American military forces were racing toward victory. The world was going to be transformed... America's absurd stab at systematising sock puppetry, by Jeff Jarvis | The Guardian The US government's plan to use technology to create and manage fake identities for social interaction with terrorists is as appalling as it is amusing. It's appalling that in this era of greater transparency and accountability brought on by the internet, the US of all countries would try to systematise sock puppetry. It's appallingly stupid, for there's little doubt that the fakes will be unmasked. The net result of that will be the diminution, not the enhancement, of American credibility... [It has become more and more obvious over time that the people who run America are blithering idiots. George Bush was hardly the only one.] Power, Illusion, and America’s Last Taboo, by John Pilger | Dissident Voice ..Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation; he called cigarettes “torches of freedom.” The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together the power of all media — PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. It was the power of form: of branding and image-making over substance and truth — and I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement: the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of the left... US to Up Military Aid to Israel to $4 Billion, by Richard Edmondson | Leftwing Christian ...The following was published today at the website DefenseNews.com. The story makes clear that Obama has “doubled down on U.S. security support” for Israel” and also informs us he intends taking steps to ensure there will be “no interruption” in US aid to Israel’s missile defense system, this in spite of the fact that we are facing sequestration-mandated budget cuts. In fact, it appears US assistance to the Jewish state is headed upwards—from the present level of $3.1 billion a year up to $4 billion... The Drums of War are Beating: Iran’s Nuclear Program, Pretext to Justify Further Military Intervention, by Anthony Mustacich | Global Research According to Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (N.P.T.), all signatory member nations possess the “inalienable right” to “develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.” As a signatory nation, the Islamic Republic of Iran is entitled to this most basic right, just like any other nation. However, the U.S. and its allies are seeking to infringe upon and limit Iran’s right to produce nuclear energy for civilian purposes, asserting that the Iranian government is using its civilian nuclear program as a smokescreen for an alleged covert nuclear weapons program. These assertions are backed by no credible evidence... World Social Forum opens in Tunisian capital | MCW News Thousands of people marking the opening of the World Social Forum in Tunis, an alternative to the elite annual event held in Davos, have marched through the streets chanting pro-democracy and womens rights slogans. Anarchists, ecologists, pacifists and trade unionists joined Sahrawi independence activists, veiled women and Arabs in traditional jellabas as they marched through the heart of the Tunisian capital at the start of the anti-globalisation event being held in an Arab country for the first time... Crushing defeat for Israel lobby as anti-boycott litigation fails in UK, by Asa Winstanley | The Electronic Intifada A British judge comprehensively dismissed a high-profile legal attack on the University and College Union, it emerged on Monday. The case was brought after democratic union bodies discussed boycotts of Israel. An Employment Tribunal ruled the claim of “institutional anti-Semitism,” brought by union member and Academic Friends of Israel director Ronnie Fraser, was dismissed on all counts. The ruling is a dramatic and comprehensive defeat for the Israeli “lawfare” strategy, and may even have backfired for its proponents who today descended into acrimonious internal back-biting... Peace, Love & Occupation: Time to Freeze Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Profits in Israel, by Mark Hage | Counterpunch Most people know that Ben & Jerry’s, headquartered in South Burlington, Vermont, makes premium ice cream and champions “Peace” and “Love.” What they don’t know is that this iconic leader of the socially responsible business community and supporter of Occupy Wall Street is commercially complicit in Israel’s occupation of Palestine... Mar 27, 2013 Turkey to Continue Nuremberg Trials against Israel | Roi Tov "A serious error," said Netanyahu's main political partner, Avigdor Lieberman, after learning that Israel had formally apologized to Turkey for the killing of nine of its citizens during the Gaza's Freedom Flotilla incident. One is tempted to acknowledge Lieberman's wisdom, but this is not the case. Lieberman being Lieberman, he spoke out of primitive nationalistic reflexes, without stopping to consider the issue rationally. He is right, but he doesn't know why... [Lieberman is hardly the sharpest knife in the kitchen, but he represents the majority of Israelis] Imagine a World Without Hate | YouTube Evil genius - George Orwell would’ve loved it... George Galloway and the topless feminist, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis What does British Member of Parliament George Galloway have in common with topless Tunisian feminist Amina? The answer is that both seem unable to differentiate between defiant gestures and winning the hearts and minds of the undecided... Why Me? The Rebel Jew Jesus, by Clancy Sigal | Counterpunch Some years ago I was stricken with an unforeseen religious fervor. Until then, I’d been your normal, rational secular Jew raised on the fusty ideas of those apostles of reason, “the great agnostic” Robert Ingersoll, and the free thinking criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. Suddenly, like an iron bar crashing on my head, I began to see – and “be” – Jesus Christ... Myth and the Russian Pogroms, Part 2: Inventing Atrocities, by Andrew Joyce | Paul Eisen Having grounded ourselves in the history of Russia’s Jewish Question, it is now time for us to turn our attention to the anti-Jewish riots of the 1880s. The following essay will first provide the reader with the standard narrative of these events advanced by Jewish contemporaries and the majority of Jewish historians — a narrative which has overwhelmingly prevailed in the public consciousness. The latter half of the essay will be devoted to dissecting one aspect of the Jewish narrative, and explaining how events really transpired... SPLC 2013: Still no minorities at the top | A Voice for Men Last week, Watching the Watchdogs examined the Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest “hate map” fundraising tool and broke the amazing, astounding, unprecedented news that for the first time in history the number of alleged “hate groups” designated by the SPLC’s Public Relations chief, Mark Potok, (something even the FBI cannot do…), actually DECLINED!! While this inconceivable turn of events left many investigators gasping in amazement, a quick head-count of the SPLC’s top executives reveals a caucus as Caucasian as it was the day Morris Dees opened the doors of the company in 1971... [The SPLC is not a member of The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, although they probably should be. They rake in $40 million a year, and that ain’t chopped liver.] I'm an Israeli Soldier | Gilad Atzmon Israel popular culture provides us with a perfect insight into Israeli collective morbidity. This is what Israeli consume culturally, this is how they interpret the meaning of their Jewish identity. This is the true reality of the Jewish state.. Israel Occupation Forces do not want you to see what the occupation looks like, why? | YouTube The incidents in this video shoot between 23.2.2013 and 9.3.2013 in South Hebron hills, west bank, by Ta'ayush activists... [Lots of people object when I and others refer to the Israelis as ZioNazis. I call this objection ignorance, a conditioned knee-jerk response.] Why the Awlakis Were Killed, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation While President Obama, the Pentagon, and the CIA have steadfastly refused to say why they assassinated American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, one thing remains beyond dispute: It wasn’t because Awlaki was trying to take away the freedom of the American people. It was instead because he was opposing the U.S. national-security state’s interventionism in the Middle East and neighboring regions... The racism that fuels the 'war on terror' by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian A new Gallup poll finds a majority of Americans oppose the drone-executions of US citizens on foreign soil. Then why do they support the Awlaki killing?.. Expanding Guantanamo, by Stephen Lendman | MCW News ..Obama exceeds the worst of Bush administration policies. Indefinite detentions without charge or trial continue. Illegitimate military commissions are used. They assure guilt by accusation. Guantanamo remains open. The Pentagon's Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) plans expanding it. It requested $49 million for new prison facilities. They're for "special" detainees. Other renovations will be made. Congress ordered Guantanamo kept open indefinitely. Pentagon officials requested an estimated $195.7 million overall. Expect overruns to increase costs substantially... Mar 26, 2013 "Next Year In Jerusalem" by Roy Bard | deLiberation Since 1967, over 14 000 Jerusalemites have been forced to adopt the same wish, as the State of Israel systematically stripped them of their rights to residency in their city of birth, where their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years. An estimated 10 000 children of Jerusalem have been robbed of their right to automatically obtain Jerusalem residency through their parents and remain unregistered. And the pressure that Jerusalemites face is relentless and ongoing... The Cost of Israel to US Taxpayers, by Richard H. Curtiss | If Americans Knew ...in fiscal 1997 alone, Israel received from a variety of other U.S. federal budgets at least $525.8 million above and beyond its $3 billion from the foreign aid budget, and yet another $2 billion in federal loan guarantees. So the complete total of U.S. grants and loan guarantees to Israel for fiscal 1997 was $5,525,800,000. One can truthfully blame the mainstream media for never digging out these figures for themselves, because none ever have... The Social Cost of Israeli Aid, by Paul Balles | Veterans Today J osh Reubner, Grassroots Advocacy Coordinator for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation says “Israel stands to lose approximately $250 million of its $3.1 billion military aid package from the United States under the terms of the sequestration.” As a result of sequestration budget cuts in America, many important programmes, especially for the poor, will be unfunded. No cuts for Israel?.. Important Syrian Update, by Daniel Mabsout | deLiberation ...Everyone has come to realize the fact that failing in achieving any progress or success in Syria means that Israel will be more exposed and threatened since the Resistance axis will be strengthened . The inviting of the head of the Syrian government in exile - Ghassan Hito - to fill in the Syrian chair in the Arab League means that the forces adverse to Syria have decided to resume their plan of partition of the country. This partition will take place by starting snatching bits of territories and putting them under the jurisdiction of the new government and working on enlarging them as much as much as possible to include the entire area of Aleppo and parts of Idlib as well... Netanyahu's Road to Damascus | Roi Tov On Friday, March 22, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and apologized for the Israeli attack on Gaza's Freedom Flotilla that caused the deaths of nine Turkish citizens. Afterwards, Netanyahu's bureau released a statement. A repentant Netanyahu is such an impossible thought that it is worth reproducing the core of his declaration:.. Zionism in practice: Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Property, by Leslie Bravery | deLiberation Obama lull ends / Israel re-imposes 3-nautical-mile Gaza fishing limit / Israeli Navy twice opens fire on Gaza fishing boats / One person wounded as Israeli forces open fire on residents in Beitunya / Israel terrorises Gaza Strip for hours with sonic booms and simulated air raids / Israeli Army steals village land for new settlement road / Israeli troops abduct boy (14) in Yatta / 1:50am: Israeli soldiers invade homes and take property / Hebron: Zionist militants, helped by Occupation troops, prevent Palestinians from farming... [On and on and on.. every day...for 60 years...while the world looks away] Author barred from Libya for being Jewish | The Independent The French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was banned from joining the former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Libya this week because he is Jewish. Mr Lévy was a vocal advocate of the French and British-led military intervention which helped to topple the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. He is credited with helping to persuade Mr Sarkozy to send French warplanes to protect rebels from Gaddafi’s forces... The Holy Land Gets Skunked, by Dr. Lawrence Davidson | My Catbird Seat It is said that the devil has about him the smell of fire and brimstone (sulphur). Evil deeds are often described as “most foul.” On the other hand, people who appear, accurately or not, as always innocent are described as “smelling like roses.” There seems, then, to be a long standing, if improbable, association between behavior and smells. The Israeli army has recently dedicated itself to demonstrating this association... Amerithology, the Middle East and Becoming Number Two, by Ben Tanosborn | MCW News Did anyone expect any positive peace-hopeful results from President Obama’s trip to Israel and his obligatory stops at the West Bank and Jordan? Perhaps some were, but only if demented, credulous simpletons, or trusting souls believing that there are people in Washington, elected or selected, with statesmanship and vision willing to risk their careers by promoting neutrality, rather than affection and solidarity for our congenital sister, Israel. Just how often must we be told that American foreign policy for the Middle East is for all intents and purposes drafted, approved or vetoed in Tel Aviv?.. Obama’s 'Listening' Trip to the Middle East, by Elias Akleh | MCW News President Obama has just concluded his visit to the Middle East that included Israel, occupied Ramallah, and Jordan. The declared purpose of the visit was to listen to the concerns of the heads of states in an attempt to devise some means to revive the peace process. The real undeclared purpose of the visit is to re-instate Israel’s international status that had suffered increased isolation and criticism... What Follows Turkish/Israeli Reconciliation | Stephen Lendman ...Whether warmth about "my friend Bibi" was expressed behind closed doors, who knows. Both men dislike each other. It's no secret. Realpolitik matters most. America's committed to Israel's security. It's dismissive about occupation harshness. It pays lip service settlement construction opposition. It lets Israel get away with murder. Palestinian rights don't matter. They never did. They don't now. Turkish/Israeli reconciliation bodes ill for peace. It suggests more regional conflict. It remains to be seen what follows... Revisiting the 19th-Century Russian Pogroms, Part 1: Russia’s Jewish Question, by Andrew Joyce | Paul Eisen ...This is the first of a three-part series about those pogroms - one of the great catastrophes of Jewish history. Jewish history is just studded with such disasters - Pharoah and bondage in Egypt, the Babylonian exile and wicked Haman's attempt at our extermination, the destruction of the temple and our exile by the Romans, the Rhineland massacres during the Crusades, the massacres by Chielmnecki and the Ukrainian Cossacks and then this one, the pogroms in Czarist Russia - every one just one more irrational hate-driven assault on God's chosen - and each and every one of them a vital part in every Jewish child's education... Mar 25, 2013 The Smiling Face of Betrayal: Obama, Israel, and the Politics of Catharsis, by Norman Pollack | Counterpunch Obama’s Middle East mission, given star treatment at every turn, demonstrates, like the famous Cairo speech in his first term, verbal subterfuge, a handy cover for insinuating US power in the region even more than sought by his predecessors. Oil is too simple a reason, though hardly negligible; rather, he appears to have a geopolitical strategy of global hegemony, political and ideological (from which the economic gains flow—instead of a more narrow-gauged imperialism), precisely to arrest America’s downward curve of influence and power in the increasingly multipolar context of world power-centers. Israel is an outpost firming up US presence on one front... The Myth of American Meritocracy | Ron Unz Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam. Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.” But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution?.. Sixty years after Deir Yassin, by Ronnie Kasrils | The Electronic Intifada As a 10-year-old growing up in Johannesburg, I celebrated Israel’s birth, 60 years ago. I unquestionably accepted the dramatic accounts of so-called self-defensive actions against Arab violence, to secure the Jewish state.. When I became involved in our liberation struggle, I became aware of the similarities with the Palestinian cause in the dispossession of land and birthright by expansionist settler occupation. I came to see that the racial and colonial character of the two conflicts provided greater comparisons than with any other struggle... While we babble and rave: Speaking the Truth about Zionism and Israel | Paul Eisen For a relatively small number of Jews, support for what is being done to the Palestinians is a relatively easy matter. God gave the land to the Jews, the Palestinians are Amalek, and if they will not submit to Jewish rule they must, and will, be destroyed. Just like those Germans who relinquished National Socialism only when the Russians were on the streets of Berlin, such Jews will abandon their militant, eliminationist Zionism only when the options finally close down. But for most Jews things are not so simple... Greater Israel Conquers the Seas | Roi Tov ...Singapore and Israel are close allies; I often had commented on the military links between the two island states. Israel may not be a physical island, but it is an isolated culture, with much in common with its Eastern Asian friend. The links don't end at the missiles level, both countries are water-thirsty. Singapore solved its problems with large desalination plants; Israel is working on that and on the verge of taking strategic decisions... Anonymous releases thousands of alleged records of Israeli officials | RT News Anonymous has struck again in its ongoing campaign against Israeli forces, this time by releasing thousands of names, ID numbers, email addresses and geographic data allegedly corresponding to Israeli politicians, IDF officers and even Mossad agents. Dubbed “#OpIsrael” on Twitter, various collectives of the amorphous Anonymous community are targeting official Israeli web domains, evidently causing intermittent disruption to the official website of spy agency Mossad via a self-described “sophisticated DDoS” attack... [Old revolutionaries never die – they just go online. You go, Anonymous! Venceremos!] The Whig Interpretation of History: The Self-Delusions of Empire, by Joseph Richardson | Counterpunch ...As the great historian Howard Zinn argued, it is impossible to be neutral on a moving train. We must eventually choose either to take up the cause of the oppressed or the oppressor. We can opt either to derive from history lessons of use in our continuing efforts to elaborate the contours of a future, more equitable society, or we can adopt the perspective of those contented with our current lot by hallowing the actions of the powerful... In Occupied Palestine: Zionism in practice – Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Property, by Leslie Bravery | NZ Israeli Army opens fire on home and farm / Israeli soldiers beat up and hospitalise 9-year-old boy / Settlers petrol-bomb house – 7-year-old child injured / Armed settler terrorists invade farmland and attack farmers / Settler militants invade Husan village farmland, uprooting and destroying 43 olive trees / Settler mob beats up and hospitalises elderly man / 17-year-old youth one of 9 injured in Israeli Army assault on protesters / Israeli soldiers abduct 2 minors aged 15 and 16 etc., etc... [Every day, for 60 years] Read more...Mar 24, 2013 The Sociocide of Iraq by Bush/Cheney, by Ralph Nader | Counterpunch Ten years ago George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as war criminals, launched the sociocide of the people of Iraq – replete with embedded television and newspaper reporters chronicling the invasion through the Bush lens. That illegal war of aggression was, of course, based on recognized lies, propaganda and cover-ups that duped or co-opted leading news institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Wars of aggression – this one blowing apart a country of 25 million people ruled by a weakened despot surrounded by far more powerful adversaries – Israel, Turkey and Iran – are major crimes under international law and the UN Charter... Syria: Could the White House Have Dreamt for More, by Franklin Lamb | Opinion Maker A Draft-Dodging, Zionist Friendly, Right-wing Texan Islamist to lead Syria? For the past year, a plan C or D, depending on how one numbers the failed US-Israel projects in Syria was badly needed for those presuming to topple the Assad government. And this week, according to Congressional staffers, both Tel Aviv and the White House are pinching themselves in disbelief over their good luck with installing republican leaning conservative Dixie businessman, the congenial, Ghassan Hitto, as Syria’s new interim Prime Minister... Ingrid Rimland on Doug Christie | Paul Eisen This is from Ingrid Rimland, wife of Ernst Zundel. It's about a video she's just made about Doug Christie who recently died, and his defense of her husband. The video is called "Ernst Zundel presents the Golden Eagle to Doug Christie" which refers to a 18 carat gold Imperial Eagle which, towards the end of the clip, Ernst gives to his barrister... Obama thank you for supporting our Apartheid state | YouTube President Obama thank you for supporting and protecting our Apartheid state. And a special thank to the American people for donating over the years more than 230 Billion Dollars of your tax money for enabling our military and Jewish superiority in the Holy Land. Yes We Can Not Do It Without You!.. Not only Deir Yassin, by Guy Erlich | Paul Eisen A lot of Deir Yassin writing begins with the words; "Deir Yassin was not the only massacre, nor was it the worst" and then goes on to explain why Deir Yassin is so important. Well, Deir Yassin wasn't the only massacre and it definitely wasn't the worst. This article will tell you more... U.S. accomplishes takeover of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Fields | Roi Tov ...After the first Eastern Mediterranean gas fields were found, Israel started a frantic search for partners owning the required technologies. In parallel, an aggressive attempt to secure its military control of the area took place. The main two problems were the disputed maritime border with Lebanon and the Palestinian claims on fields in front of Gaza. The first event deteriorated into a war of words that led to the formation of unexpected alliances. Turkey, Iran and Northern Cyprus joined Lebanon. Cyprus and Greece joined Israel while gas-thirsty Spain attempted to secure Israeli supply... President Obama’s Second Term: Selling Death and Buying Assassins in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, by James Petras | Dissident Voice As President Obama enters his second term with a new Cabinet, the foreign policy legacy of the past four years weighs heavily on their strategic decisions and their empire-building efforts. Central to the analysis of the next period is an evaluation of the past policies especially in regions where Washington expended its greatest financial and military resources, namely the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. We will proceed by examining the accomplishments and failures of the Obama-Clinton regime... Obama, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance I am a Palestinian from the Bethlehem area but who also happens to hold a US passport. The latter does not allow me to enter Jerusalem and the US government will not protect this or other rights I have (including family reunification). Meanwhile, any Jewish American can come and get automatic citizenship and live on stolen Palestinian land in our city. It is hard to describe the level of frustration that I had watching the theater of media frenzy (devoid of any real substance) about Obama’s visit. Obama gave a new lifeline to war and conflict by avoiding human rights and international law... America’s Willing Executioners, by Rob Urie | Counterpunch Ten years after the invasion, occupation and widespread destruction of Iraq was set into motion the revisionist apologetics are flying fast and furious. These include the denial of culpability for crimes committed, the systematic undercounting of the innocents slaughtered and displaced and the conveniently forgotten hubris of empire in the high theater of technocratic carnage... Mar 23, 2013 Barak Hussein Obama, President of the world’s Super Banana Republic Where are you, Harry Belafonte? One after another, American presidents run away from the challenge. And so it has been with Barack Obama. This week the world’s greatest peace fraud came to the Holy Land and flunked it. Frankly, if that’s the best he can do after four years in the job he has no business calling himself a world leader.. Any US president who fails to drain the stinking swamp in his backyard – i.e. the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) breeding ground – deserves to be consigned to the wastepaper basket of history as a political pansy... Shalom. It is an honor to be here with you in Jayloomia. Over the last two days, I have reaffirmed the ancient bonds between our two young countries. I have borne witness to the ancient history of the Jewish people at the Shrine of the Book, and I have seen Israel’s shining future in your glittering PR industry. This is a nation of copyrights and patents, bogus holy sites and ground-breaking new forms of commercial predation. Only in Israel could you see phony ancient artefacts and stolen US high-tech side by side. I know that in Israel’s vibrant gossip zone, every word and gesture is carefully scrutinized... Those who hoped that Barack Obama would be arriving in Israel to bang Israeli and Palestinian heads together, after four years of impasse in the peace process, will be sorely disappointed. The US president’s trip beginning today may be historic – the first of his presidency to Israel and the Palestinian territories – but he has been doing everything possible beforehand to lower expectations. At the weekend, Arab-American leaders revealed that Obama had made it clear he would not present a peace plan, because Israel has indicated it is not interested in an agreement with the Palestinians... ...Peace is a dead letter. Israel won't tolerate it. Neither does Washington. Both countries favor confrontation over diplomacy. Strength through militarism is prioritized. Naked aggression is commonplace. Expect no policy change now... Obama’s speech was a litany of lies of omission and lies of commission and reveal him to be a pathological liar and a genocidal racist Zionist as well as being currently the world’s number 1 operating anti-Arab anti-Semite, Islamophobe, state terrorist, warmonger, drug pusher, mass pedocide and war criminal as carefully analyzed below, taking his 35 sentences in order of delivery (they are numbered below for your convenience).. In the last hours of Israeli Operation "Unbreakable Alliance," its name has proven to be nothing but a sad joke. Israel did its best at public pleasantries while insulting and attacking in the background. Safe on its linguistic island, Hebrew media laughed at Obama, recycling old racist jokes published after President Obama won his first elections. The day after that, the ugly jokes were replaced by open threats in hidden inner-pages on the President who while visiting President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, said: "Palestinians deserve a state.. Palestinians deserve the end of the occupation,".. [So what do people expect from someone who was hand picked by the Chicago Jewish political mafia] Newsweek's Atzmon Special, by Cristian H. Savio | Gilad Atzmon There are those who believe that in nowadays Argentina, politics traverses art in an inevitable merge, and that artists, should abstract themselves of any ideological manifestation. Imagine being the most famous saxophonist of Israel, and for many, one of the most talented multi-instrumentalists in the world, and at the same time, a fervent advocate of the Palestinian cause, after having resigned his nationality... 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... Read more... The Day the Secret Service Almost Shot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady | The Atlantic One morning in September 2006, during the United Nations General Assembly, President George W. Bush’s daily intelligence brief contained a particularly chilling item. It was three sentences long, and it scared the hell out of the dozen or so White House officials cleared to read it. According to one official, it began, “A U.S. Secret Service agent, in an apparent accident, discharged his shotgun as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was loading his motorcade at the InterContinental Hotel yesterday.”.. Tell Me Again, Who Made The Desert Bloom? | Lawrence of Cyberia In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine.. One of the subjects investigated in the Survey of Palestine is land use; specifically, which crops were Palestine's leading agricultural products at the end of the British Mandate, and whose farms were producing them. So, according to the Survey of Palestine, who really made the barley fields of Beersheba bloom?.. Read more... On to Iran!: The Disasters that U.S. Intervention Created, by Sheldon Richman | Counterpunch ...The Iraq war, the pretext for which was nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, officially ended in 2011 with the withdrawal of virtually all of America’s combat troops. But the havoc wreaked by the U.S. invasion and regime change goes on. Over a hundred thousand Iraqis were killed in the war itself, but many more died in the aftermath from sectarian violence and the obliterated infrastructure. (Iraq had never recovered from the destruction inflicted by the U.S. government in the 1991 Gulf War and in the decade of sanctions related to it.) Millions fled their homes... Read more... Blocking Medicine to Iran, by Siamak Namazi | Information Clearing House Patients in Iran are dying of treatable diseases because of shortages in life-saving medicines. The past year has been nothing short of catastrophic for the Iranian health-care sector: Imports from American and European drug makers in 2012 were down by an estimated 30 percent since 2011, and they continue to fall.. After conducting extensive interviews in Tehran and Dubai with Iranian importers and manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment and their Western counterparts, we concluded that even though in theory the sanctions regime imposed on Iran by the United States and the European Union... Read more... The Last Letter: To George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From Tomas Young | Truthdig I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care... [One wonders if there is any punishment that would fit their crimes. Even the fertile imaginations of Dante and the Abrahamic scribes would be at a loss. I suggest a buddhist prescription for the special few - to spend eternity in solitary, in their own company - still without a clue.] Read more...Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Beyond Bantustans, Beyond Reservations, by Noura Erakat | The Nation ...Jewish Israelis and non-Jewish Palestinians, Israeli citizens and stateless civilians alike, are inextricably populated throughout a single territorial entity under Israeli control. The call for two states is really a call for the separation of two populations based on ethno-national homogeneity. The proposal has failed, not just because of a lack of accountability, but because it is fundamentally flawed. Like prescribing aspirin to deal with cancer, Oslo offered truncated self-rule as a prescription for Jewish-Israeli settler-colonialism and domination... Read more... How to Read Stories About Israel in the NY Times, by Peter Hart | FAIR Some days the Newspaper of Record says a lot–not always in ways you might expect. Today (3/21/13) a story by Mark Landler and Rick Gladstone about allegations of chemical weapons in Syria includes something you see often–anonymous government sources. That can often be a bad thing; but today it's pretty useful:.. A visit in prison with Ernst Zuendel, by Dan McGowan | Paul Eisen During the recent conference in Iran (Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision) I was in prison in Mannheim, Germany interviewing Ernst Zuendel. Labeled a "Holocaust denier," Ernst has been in jail for almost four years without being charged with a violent crime or without even being convicted of a non-violent one. He is 67 years old. As a six-year-old Ernst witnessed the Allied firebombing of Pforzheim in which ten to twenty thousand German civilians were killed... Read more... Put Olive on Seder Plate for Palestinians and All Oppressed Peoples, by Rebecca Vilkomerson | Jewish Daily Forward ...Bringing contemporary social and economic justice issues to the Seder is very much in keeping with one of the key messages of the Haggadah: In every generation, each person must view himself or herself as if personally liberated from Egypt. That is, we must remember what it is to be oppressed, to face injustice and to yearn to be free. But it goes a step further. If we personally remember that we were liberated from Egypt, doesn’t that empathy obligate us to work to make sure that every person enjoys that same freedom?.. Read more... Netanyahu 'apologises' for flotilla incident | MCW News Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said he "expressed apology" to Turkey for any error that led to the death of nine Turkish nationals in 2010 in the Gaza flotilla incident. Netanyahu also said on Friday that Israel has also agreed to compensate the families of the victims... [I have in the last few days singled out a few people “who deserve a red hot poker shoved up their ass.” Needless to say, Netanyahu belongs in this select group – I would gladly take his apology and shove it all the way up his rectum until it came back out of his mouth.] Deir Yassin Recalled, by Edward Said | Paul Eisen Edward Said sat on the Board of Advisers of Deir Yassin Remembered from the day the organisation was founded to the day he died. Some board members are extremely active, some just lend their names. Edward Said lent his name - but what a name! Seemingly cold and aloof, I think he was shy and, if you read his autobiography, you can see why... Read more... Obama makes fun of heckler asking "who killed Rachel Corrie?" by Linah Alsaafin | The Electronic Intifada US President Barack Obama arrived in Ramallah by helicopter yesterday and gave yet another insipid speech. The Palestinian Authority’s security forces, collaborating with US forces, designated a huge security perimeter with the PA compound — the Muqataa — in the middle. Some of the city’s busiest streets were closed off and inaccessible to those not living there. As helicopters filled the skies from the morning up until late afternoon, I was stuck at home working during the nine-hour lockdown, all too aware of the soldiers stationed on the rooftops around my building... Read more... Chemical Weapons Report a Ticket to Intervention? by Jason Ditz | Antiwar Yesterday’s report of a chemical weapons strike in Syria included both rebels and government accusing the other side of launch the strike, and international groups doubting that anything happened at all. Reluctant to let the truth get in the way of a good story, Britain and France have latched onto the claim however, and are insisting that the unconfirmed report is justification to start throwing weapons at the Syrian rebels en masse... Read more... Real liars go to Tehran, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online Uncle Marx never thought about this one: history repeating itself as double tragedy after already being a farce in the first place. Let's examine the case in hand. First of all, take a close look at this Wall Street Journal op-ed from September 2002, in the hysterical run-up towards the invasion of Iraq. Title: The Case for Toppling Saddam... Read more... Mar 22, 2013 The Visit ...Many Palestinians seem hostile to the visit. Posters of Obama have been torched and vandalised. Angry Palestinians threw shoes at a U.S. diplomatic vehicle in Bethlehem during an anti-Obama demonstration. More demonstrations are being planned during the visit. These developments came as the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) said that Israel’s “creeping annexation” of the West Bank had led to many human rights violations that could possibly be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC).. A must watch music video, on Obama’s visit... President Barack Obama’s visit to the Middle East has coincided with the 10th anniversary of the killing of American peace activist Rachel Corrie. She was murdered by an American-made and financed Israeli bulldozer on 16 March 2003. It is unlikely Obama or anyone in his entourage will remember the young American citizen but, according to the Israeli ambassador, the Israeli government plans to broach the subject of Jonathan Pollard, the US servicemen convicted of spying for Israel. As part of his “listening” tour, Obama must pay homage to the choreographed Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, honouring the victims of the Nazi holocaust... On the first day of his visit to Israel, President Barack Obama spent time with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying largely the same things in slightly different ways with respect to a potential war with Iran. Both agreed that Israel has a “right to self defense” that extends to unilaterally attacking Iran, with Netanyahu insisting that the “essence” of the state of Israel was its right to be masters of the Jewish people and to attack Iran in defense of that mastery... [Dat Obama, he doin the ‘please Massa, don’ hurt me' shuffle. Watch them feets move.] ...The day after Israel laughed at Obama, things got awry. Not on the formal level; American flags are larger than ever, Netanyahu's baritone is deeper than ever, and Palestinian despair is sadder than ever. Israel sends messages not through noisy headlines, those eternal decoys, but through sad songs reproduced in the inner pages. Don't listen to Netanyahu's formal speech, but look what his aide told another irrelevant person and was reproduced in an inconspicuous page of the newspaper... Pentagon Papers lawyer on Obama, secrecy and press freedoms: 'worse than Nixon,' by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian In 1971, when the New York Times decided to publish the Pentagon Papers leaked to it by Daniel Ellsberg, it knew it was triggering a major fight with the secrecy-obsessed Nixon administration. As expected, the Nixon administration sued the NYT in an attempt to ban it from publishing the documents, but the US Supreme Court, in a landmark decision for press freedom, ruled the prior restraint unconstitutional. The paper's general counsel at the time, James Goodale, said that he counseled the paper to publish despite "the more likely scenario that everyone feared was the fact that they could have gone to jail," and he subsequently became an outspoken defender of press freedoms... Deir Yassin: From Remembrance to Resistance | Paul Eisen This must have been written around 2007, in those dark days when [i]Deir Yassin Remembered came under pretty well universal attack.I say 'universal' but of course that's just what they want us to think. As ever, it was all done by a few Jews (anti-Zionist of course), even fewer non-Jewish hangers-on (I hate using the term 'shabbes goy' but it really does describe them well) and masses and masses of terrorised and terrified ordinary people. This piece is not strictly about Deir Yassin remembrance, but it is about freedom of speech and thought - a definite subtext of any half-decent solidarity discourse... Inside The Decider's Head: The Madness of King George Revisited, by Franklin “Chuck” Spinney | Counterpunch It is trite to say that madness occurs when the mind governing decisions and actions becomes systemically disconnected from the real world. But in the Versailles on the Potomac, where madness has risen to a high art form, reinforced by pseudo science, ideology, and greed, all neatly packaged in compelling powerpoint briefings, transformative visions, and amplified by an adoring mainstream media, it is difficult to know what the real world really is... Why the Anniversary of Iraq Means More Than We Were Told: The Retrospective We Deserve, by Anthony DiMaggio | Counterpunch ...Sadly, the youngest generation of American adults remembers little about this war in light of the failure to promote critical awareness in our K-12 educational system. University professors have hardly fared any better from what I’ve seen, as most seem preoccupied with esoteric research of limited practical utility. When it comes to teaching, most professors avoid controversy or engagement in real world politics like the plague... Bang the Drum Loudly: The Failed Journalism That Sent America to War in Iraq, by James Moore | Huffington Post The timing was a thing of pure political beauty. President George W. Bush was only a few days away from speaking to the United Nations' General Assembly about Iraq's renewed efforts to acquire banned weaponry. And, in a month, the president was going to Congress to seek a resolution approving of a war against Iraq. A Sunday morning story, September 8, 2002, in the New York Times made the U.N. speech and the congressional debate much easier for the White House... Sitzkrieg on the Potomac, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar In 1939 Germany blitzkrieged into Poland and France and Britain declared war. The Germans divided the conquered country with their ally, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the two belligerents mopped up Polish resistance, a process that subsequently included the slaughter of twenty-two thousand Polish officers and intelligentsia by the Russians at Katyn Forest. France missed the opportunity to hit the Germans in the west while they were busy in the east and what was described as a phony war or "sitzkrieg" ensued with both sides staring at each other across the Maginot Line. Washington’s current political gridlock is not unlike 1940 on the western front... The Price of Freedom?: Teach the Children War, by David Swanson | Counterpunch The National Museum of American History, and a billionaire who has funded a new exhibit there, would like you to know that we’re going to need more wars if we want to have freedom. Never mind that we seem to lose so many freedoms whenever we have wars. Never mind that so many nations have created more freedoms than we enjoy and done so without wars... Enemies failed to isolate Islamic Republic: Ayatollah Khamenei | PressTV/YouTube Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says enemies of Iran have failed to isolate the Islamic Republic despite their strenuous efforts to do so. In a message marking the beginning of the Persian New Year, which was designated by the Leader as the 'Year of Political and Economic Epic', Ayatollah Khamenei said the enemies were defeated in their attempts to paralyze Iran by imposing economic sanctions in the last Iranian calendar year which ended on Wednesday... Chomsky speech on 10th anniversary Iraq invasion to the Fletcher Forum, Fletcher School of Diplomacy | Media Lens In the early days of the Bush administration, Robert Jervis, then president of the American Political Science Association, observed that “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States,” reiterating a similar warning by Samuel Huntington shortly before. As if to prove the point, Bush and associates soon joined with Britain to invade Iraq, a textbook case of aggression, “the supreme international crime” in the familiar words of the Nuremberg Tribunal, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The conclusion would hold even if the fanciful pretexts had not quickly collapsed... US, NATO prepare Syria intervention, by Bill Van Auken | World Socialist Web Site The top US commander in Europe told a Senate hearing Tuesday that the US military and NATO are drawing up plans for direct military intervention in Syria. Adm. James Stavridis, head of the Pentagon’s European Command, speaking at a hearing by the Senate Armed Service Committee, said that the US military is “looking at a variety of options” and is “prepared if called upon to be engaged.”.. [Gotta test out them weapons, y’know, ‘n bring democracy to them heathens] Search and Destroy: The rape of Iraq, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online First thing we do, let's kill all mythographers (lawyerly or not): the rape of Iraq is the biggest, man-made humanitarian disaster of our times. It's essential to keep in mind this was a direct consequence of Washington smashing international law to pieces; after Iraq, any freak anywhere can unleash preemptive war, and quote Bush/Cheney 2003 as precedent. And yet, 10 years after Shock and Awe, even so-called "liberals" have been trying to legitimize something, anything, out of the "Iraq project". There was never a "project"; only a dizzying maze of lies - including a posteriori justifications of bombing the Greater Middle East into "democracy".. US maintains pressure on Iran, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online If this week's meeting of Iran and the world powers known as "P5 +1" in Istanbul is any indication, we should refrain from high expectations from next month's talks in Almaty. Despite US President Barack Obama's new year (Nowruz) message to Iran that US is "ready" to make a deal with Iran, the behavior of US representatives at the Istanbul "expert-level" meeting sends an entirely different signal; Washington's unwillingness to make serious concessions for the sake of ending the Iran nuclear crisis... The Return of Empires, by Dmitry Minin | Strategic Culture Foundation Historian Niall Ferguson states that the majority of modern-day academics see an entirely appropriate parallel between the “imperial rule” of the USA and the British Empire as it was 100 years ago.[1] Joseph Nye, meanwhile, believes that “not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others... Respected analysts on both the left and the right are beginning to refer to “American empire” approvingly as the dominant narrative of the twenty-first century.” The United States has been moving towards this position over the whole of the 20th century... Guerrilla research exposes sponsors of Israeli apartheid, by Therezia Cooper and Tom Anderson | The Electronic Intifada For the last three and a half years the UK-based research cooperative Corporate Watch has been running a project tracking corporate complicity in the occupation of Palestine. After a research visit to Palestine in 2010, we wrote a handbook for activists who want to take action in line with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In January and February this year, we returned to Palestine to find out what was new on the ground... Marvel at John Yoo Justifying the Iraq War as Only He Could, by Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic Here is the latest argument produced by the singular legal mind of John Yoo, B.A. Harvard University, J.D. Yale, law professor at UC Berkeley, former Department of Justice lawyer, and AEI scholar:.. [He’s another one on my list of people who deserve a red hot poker up the ass; there are so many of them] Israel’s Iron Dome System Is at Center of Debate, by William Broad | NYT ...a growing chorus of weapons experts in the United States and in Israel say their studies — based largely on analyses of hits and misses captured on video — suggest that Iron Dome destroyed no more than 40 percent of incoming warheads and perhaps far fewer.. “It’s very hard to see how it could be more than 5 or 10 percent,” Dr. Postol said. Mordechai Shefer, an Israeli rocket scientist formerly with Rafael, Iron Dome’s maker, studied nearly two dozen videos and, in a paper last month, concluded that the kill rate was zero... [It’s vintage Rube Goldberg, just like the State of Israel] Mar 21, 2013 Of Hope and Pain: Rachel Corrie’s Rafah Legacy, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle ...Immediately after her painful death, crushed beneath an Israeli army bulldozer, Rafah embraced her legacy as another ‘martyr’ for Palestine. It was a befitting tribute to Rachel, who was born to a progressive family in the town of Olympia, itself a hub for anti-war and social justice activism. But Olympia is also the capital of Washington State. Politicians here can be as callous, morally flexible and pro-Israel as any other seats of government in the US, where sharply dressed men and women jockey for power and influence. Ten years after Rachel’s death, the US government is yet to hold Israel to account. Neither is justice expected anytime soon... Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks at AIPAC | YouTube As the Zionists continue to sedulously cultivate the ‘antisemitism’ they bitterly complain about it. Einstein's definition of insanity comes to mind. Will they never learn... Jews and Deir Yassin | Paul Eisen "Tonight we have remembered the innocent victims of the massacre that occurred at Deir Yassin in 1948, the terror it caused, the flight it precipitated, the tragedy of dispossession and exile that has resulted from it; and those of us who are Jews confess our people’s share of responsibility for that tragedy." ~ Rabbi John Rayner Obama comes to bless Israel’s government of settlers, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth Those who hoped that Barack Obama would be arriving in Israel to bang Israeli and Palestinian heads together, after four years of impasse in the peace process, will be sorely disappointed. The US president’s trip beginning today may be historic – the first of his presidency to Israel and the Palestinian territories – but he has been doing everything possible beforehand to lower expectations. At the weekend, Arab-American leaders revealed that Obama had made it clear he would not present a peace plan, because Israel has indicated it is not interested in an agreement with the Palestinians... Israel Laughs at Obama | Roi Tov ...Near Latrun, along the way from the airport to Jerusalem, "Peace Now" placed a large sign on the ground for the President to see. Mocking signs appeared on the web, the best was this one. Obama and Netanyahu are on the helicopter in the way to Jerusalem. A large sign below them states "Bibi, you are unreliable/unworthy," in derogatory slang. "What is written there?" asks Obama. "Bibi, attack Iran!" Answers Netanyahu... 78 senators call on Obama to stand by Israel ahead of trip | The Hill More than three-fourths of the U.S. Senate have signed on to a letter urging President Obama to stand by Israel ahead of his first visit to that country as president. The letter, spearheaded by the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), asks the president to sternly warn the Palestinians against using their new status as a United Nations observer state to take action against Israel... [Only 78? Are there really that many of them who aren't totally whores, hypocrites, cowards and traitors? Things must be looking up.] How Iran can beat Israel, by Paul Bracken | National Post War games have been used for a long time to discover and test strategies. During the Cold War, analysts at the Rand Corporation used games to explore the strange new world of nuclear strategy. Such games need a scenario: hypothetical plot outlines of plausible future developments. As nuclear weapons have spread in recent years, basic questions needed to be asked about the difference a nuclear context makes. To discover these questions as they apply to the Middle East, games have been played in the United States and Israel. I have been involved in some of these exercises and find them insightful — and troubling... Walt: So what if Iran gets the bomb | Iran Affairs ...articles like this legitimate the the idea that Iran's nuclear program is really the cause of the current standoff b beteen the US and Iran, when it clearly isn't. The article implicitly buys into the framing that "the problem" is the nuclear program in Iran and not AIPAC-dictated policy of imposing regime change. The nuclear issue is and always has been a pretext, and we should not forget that fact, even for the sake of argument... Who Is a Liberal Zionist? by Jerry Haber | The Magnes Zionist When I appealed to liberal Zionists to support the global BDS movement, I assumed that the movement called for ending Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli discrimination against non-Jewish citizens, primarily Palestinians, within Israel. I also thought that liberal Zionists accepted these goals (see Mira Sucharov here), and that the central disagreement between liberal Zionists and the global BDS movement was over the third goal, the right of return of Palestinians to Palestine in accordance with U.N. Resolution 194. My assumptions appear to have been unwarranted... [“Liberal Zionists”? Is that like “liberal Nazis”?] Iraq, A War of Aggression: No WMDs, No Connection to Al Qaeda, by Marjorie Cohn | Global Research According to sources inside the administration, George W. Bush was planning to invade Iraq and remove its government well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Such an invasion violates the UN Charter, which the United States signed in 1945 after the bloodiest conflict in history. The Charter permits countries to use military force against another country only in self-defense or with Security Council permission. But the evidence indicates that the U.S.-led invasion satisfied neither condition and is therefore a war of aggression, which constitutes a Crime Against Peace - exactly the kind of war the Charter was meant to prevent... A Zionist Smear Campaign: Setting the Record Straight, by M. Shahid Alam | Palestine Chronicle In April 2012, Americans for Peace and Tolerance(sic) (APT), a Zionist organization headed by Charles Jacobs, began a smear campaign against Muslim students, the staff of Spiritual Life Center, and some faculty at Northeastern University. The APT posted three videos on the internet accusing Muslims students at Northeastern University (Boston, MA) of advocating ‘Islamic extremism’ and concocting charges of anti-Semitism against several members of the faculty and staff of the Spiritual Life Center at Northeastern University. I was one of the principal targets of these smears... Breakthrough: Major New York Times Piece Eviscerates the Occupation, by MJ Rosenberg | Huffington Post On Sunday, the New York Times ran an extraordinary magazine piece (it was the cover story) on West Bank Palestinians who are resisting the Israeli occupation through non-violence. For those who follow the issue closely, the extraordinary aspect of the piece was not so much anything author Ben Ehrenreich revealed as it was that the article appeared in the New York Times at all. You just don't expect to find this type of reporting on Israel in the Times which, ever conscious that it is the New York Times, is always cautious about its reportage on Israel... Hitler and the Third Reich, by Antony M. Ludovici | Paul Eisen This is from the excellent Institute of Historical Review. It was published in 1936 and describes National Socialist Germany in a depth and detail, and in a way never seen these days. How truthful is it? Well, like everything else it depends on what you're looking for, but I'd say it's got plenty of truth in it.. as much I enjoyed reading the piece, and as much as the ideas therein engage me, at the same time, I absolutely know I would have hated living there. Would I have had the courage to do anything about it? I doubt it... [I would say the same, which contrasts so starkly with the indomitable, though so far ineffectual resistance of the Palestinians to the ZioNazi colonization of Palestine] The Worldwide Offshore Banking System: Cyprus, Offshore Haven of the Russian Oligarchs, by Valentin Katasonov | Global Research The news about the Cyprus banks has been on the radar screen recently. Somehow, the most frequently asked question is what will Russian oligarchs do about it, because it’s them who have created an offshore world of their own there. Will they seek new offshore havens? Get the money back to Russia? Stay in Cyprus and adapt to the new realities of life on the island? In fact, the oligarchs and their money are an issue of minor importance. It all brings more serious things in focus, like, for instance, the future of world banking system that had became sick a long time ago. The Cyprus events produce evidence the system is at death’s door… Mar 20, 2013 Anniversary: Iraq War March 19 is the tenth anniversary of invasion of Iraq by the United States, Britain and their allies. George W. Bush declared that the goals of the invasion were "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people." Bush’s poodle, British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that Iraq was invaded due to its failure to take a “final opportunity” to disarm itself of its arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that it presented an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace. Both lied and deceived the public, and did so intentionally... Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction. Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was "active", "growing" and "up and running". A special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries... The Bush administration’s primary justification for launching the Iraq War is thought, probably correctly, to be an alleged WMD program that did not exist. The coterie of delusional neoconservatives surrounding Bush and Cheney contributed to a systematic process of cherry-picking dubious intelligence and outright manipulation of evidence in order to satisfy a political decision that had already been made to change the regime in Iraq through a war of aggression. The historical record pretty clearly demonstrates the distortions the administration employed to make the case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs... ‘It’s Not Your Homeland’: An Interview with Shlomo Sand by Lewis Turner | Palestine Chronicle Shlomo Sand shot to prominence and controversy with his 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People. His follow-up, The Invention of the Land of Israel, examines a nationalist mythology of land which forms a crucial part of the Zionist story of, and justification for, the Jewish State. In this interview Shlomo talks to Lewis Turner about his journey re-discovering his country’s history, his hopes for Israel’s future and the role of historians in social change... [Obviously, I don’t agree with him about One State – the French colons, the Pieds Noirs, who had lived in Algeria for generations were forced to leave, and I don’t see why the Jewish colonists should merit any special dispensation. However, I must say that I admire Sand greatly – he’s a courageous man and a righteous Jew.] UN demands halt to settlements as Israel vows expansion | Al Akhbar Israel must immediately begin withdrawing its settlers from the Palestinian territories, a UN expert told diplomats Monday, even as the new Israeli government appeared set to strengthen the hand of the Jewish settler lobby. Israel must "immediately and without preconditions cease the settlement activity and to initiate a process of withdrawal from the settlements," Christine Chanet, member of the UN Human Rights Committee, told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, lamenting a "rampant annexation" of Palestinian territories... [The US is boycotting the subsequent debate – big surprise] The Real Cuban Missile Crisis, by Benjamin Schwarz | The Atlantic ...Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested. Scholars, however, have long known a very different story... Trained Killers, from the Americas to Afghanistan, by Kelley B. Vlahos | Antiwar For most Americans the death squads and torture chambers that killed thousands in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua in the 1980’s are difficult to understand and easy to forget because, aside for an apology by President Bill Clinton in 1999 – the United States has never fully acknowledged nor taken responsibility for its role in them. So, aside from some outstanding reporting by American and foreign journalists to the contrary, the mainstream has treated this dark period of U.S foreign policy as a sidebar story, and continues to do so until this day... Going to Tehran: Review by Patricia DeGennaro | Huffington Post ...The American unintelligible decision, which flies in the face of all moral rhetoric, to overthrow Iran's democratic president, Mohammad Mosaddegh, has not been forgotten by Iranians. Basically the Iranian government doesn't trust the U.S. because of its past behavior. They are under the impression that America's current intention remains squarely in the path of another regime change, which will install an unpopular Western leaning leader like the former Shah, Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavī. All actions on our side support this assumption and the Obama Administration is doing nothing to change it... Zionism and the Third Reich, by Mark Weber | The Journal of Historical Review Early in 1935, a passenger ship bound for Haifa in Palestine left the German port of Bremerhaven. Its stern bore the Hebrew letters for its name, "Tel Aviv," while a swastika banner fluttered from the mast. And although the ship was Zionist-owned, its captain was a National Socialist Party member. Many years later a traveler aboard the ship recalled this symbolic combination as a "metaphysical absurdity." Absurd or not, this is but one vignette from a little-known chapter of history: The wide-ranging collaboration between Zionism and Hitler's Third Reich... [Hardly surprising – Zionism and Nazism were virtually indistinguishable, two peas in a pod] A Rape in Wartime, by Nick Turse | Tom Dispatch ...War is obscene. I mean that in every sense of the word. Some veterans will tell you that you can’t know war if you haven’t served in one, if you haven’t seen combat. These are often the same guys who won’t tell you the truths that they know about war and who never think to blame themselves in any way for our collective ignorance. The truth is, you actually can know a lot about war without fighting in one. It just isn’t the sort of knowledge that’s easy to come by... “May all Arabs die!” Israelis on Facebook express joy at Jordan bus crash that killed Palestinian pilgrims, by Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada Israelis, including at least one person identifying himself as a soldier, reacted with genocidal joy on Facebook to the horrifying news this morning that 17 Palestinians returning from a pilgrimage had been killed in a bus accident in Jordan and dozens more injured.. “I couldn’t ask for a better morning than this,” wrote Facebook user Kobi Yaacov Saroussi under an item about the accident on the Facebook page of Israel’s Channel 2, “Shame there isn’t another zero at the end [of the number of victims].”.. [Gee, I guess we’re backing the right horse, huh?] Galloway defends himself at US Senate, by Simon Jeffery | The Guardian George Galloway today accused US senators of manufacturing "the mother of all smokescreens" as he defended himself from charges that he profited from Iraqi oil sales. The anti-war Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, in east London, told the Senate subcommittee it had made a "schoolboy howler" in its investigation of illegal Iraqi oil sales. He said it was attempting to divert attention from the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq. In a defiant performance on Capitol Hill, Mr Galloway said senators had confused the dating of evidence against him and relied too much on the testimony of a former Iraqi vice president held prisoner in Abu Ghraib... [Galloway will go down as one of the great heroes of our time, unless the Evil Empire winds up prevailing. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that the traitorous whores who scurry around the Halls of the Senate and Congress represent the future, although they are indubitably and shamefully the present. Watch video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4LDQixpCa8 ] Jordan Announces Isratine | Roi Tov ...Both countries (and now also the emerging State of Palestine) have inherited British government structures, including parallels to the British MI5, a bastard offspring of earlier structures designed by Francis Walsingham; it is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. In Israel it is known as Shin Beth, Jordanians call it Mukhabarat. The latter is known for its effectiveness to such an extent that nobody can get a job in the kingdom without being approved by this paragon of democracy; its nickname is the Fingernail Factory. The Israeli Shin Beth is so scary that its most popular nickname is an indirect one... How many racist laws in Israel? Find out in new Discriminatory Laws Database | Adalah The Discriminatory Laws Database, the first of its kind, is an online resource that collects more than 60 Israeli laws enacted since 1948 that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life, including land and planning; education; budgets and access to state resources; prisoners and detainees; civil and political rights. Some of the laws also violate the rights of Palestinians living in the 1967 OPT and Palestinian refugees. The Discriminatory Laws Database is a comprehensive resource for researchers, journalists, lawyers, and citizens directly affected by these laws... Obama's dangerous Iran nuclear gambit, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online US President Barack Obama has engaged in a potentially dangerous gambit by stating categorically that in the US's view Iran is "over a year or so" from developing nuclear weapons. While it is bound to ingratiate his administration with the pro-Israel lobby, Obama's statement on the eve of his trip to Israeli may come to haunt him in the near future in the event the current diplomatic efforts to end the Iran nuclear standoff fail to reach a breakthrough... CrossTalk: Obama's Israel | RT/YouTube Obama is planning a visit to Israel. What does it mean for Palestine? Will it bring the Palestinians closer to peace? And is a two-state settlement still an option? CrossTalking with Norman Finkelstein and Mouin Rabbani... Remembering Rachel Corrie, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News Israel murdered her in cold blood. Rachel represented the best of courageous activism. She put her body on the line for justice. She did so because it matters. She's gone but not forgotten. Ten years ago on March 16, an Israeli bulldozer driver murdered her in cold blood. She tried stopping a Rafah refugee camp home demolition. Eye witnesses said she climbed atop a giant Caterpillar tractor. They designed to destroy homes. They're weapons of mass destruction. Caterpillar's complicit in Israeli crimes... Israel and the politics of boycott, by Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera ...In contrast with its uses to force the end of race, class and colonial injustice, boycott would also be deployed as a tactic to bring about colonial and racial injustice. Zionism would be a pioneer in this regard. Upon the formalisation of Zionist settler colonialism in the 1897 First Zionist Congress, Jewish colonists were incensed that earlier Russian Jewish agricultural colonists who had settled in Palestine since the 1880s would employ Palestinian labour in their colonies, on account of its availability and cheapness. It was in this context that Zionism would develop its racially separatist notion of "Hebrew labour", insisting and later imposing its regulations on all Jewish colonists in Palestine... Mar 19, 2013 And Not To Forget Iraq, America's Triumphal War in the Middle East: Brought to your TV screens by American/Jewish Fascists Inc. (not to mention our little cousins, the Brits) At 10 years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation (to use the original name with the appropriate acronym, OIL) and over 22 years since Operation Desert Storm, there is little evidence that any significant number of people in the United States have a realistic idea of what our government has done to the people of Iraq, or of how these actions compare to other horrors of world history. A majority of Americans believe the war since 2003 has hurt the United States but benefitted Iraq. A plurality of Americans believe, not only that Iraqis should be grateful, but that Iraqis are in fact grateful... Contamination from Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions and other military-related pollution is suspected of causing a sharp rises in congenital birth defects, cancer cases, and other illnesses throughout much of Iraq. Many prominent doctors and scientists contend that DU contamination is also connected to the recent emergence of diseases that were not previously seen in Iraq, such as new illnesses in the kidney, lungs, and liver, as well as total immune system collapse. DU contamination may also be connected to the steep rise in leukaemia, renal, and anaemia cases, especially among children, being reported throughout many Iraqi governorates... Ten years ago today, on March 18, 2003, Tony Blair delivered a speech to parliament prior to a vote that resulted in MPs authorising war on Iraq. The war began two days later.. a Guardian leader [editorial] described Blair's March 18 performance as 'an impassioned and impressive speech by the prime minister which may give future generations some inkling of how, when so many of his own party opposed his policy so vehemently, Tony Blair nevertheless managed to retain their respect and support...' ...chants are part of political rallies, and I’m part of political movements that rally. So, I try to use the slogans as a starting point to explore issues in more depth. One of the most important of those chants from anti-war rallies of the past couple of decades is “No blood for oil.” On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that slogan remains as important as ever. Sophisticated and/or respectable people tend to reject the underlying claim as crude and/or unpatriotic. How can anyone believe in such a simplistic explanation, that wars are fought for oil? How could anyone imagine the United States pursuing such a crass and greedy goal?.. John Bolton, senior fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, has produced a dispatch for the Guardian in honour of the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, titled "Overthrowing Saddam Hussein was the right move for the US and its allies". The purpose of the piece is to counteract the supposedly destructive machinations of persons who have come to the conclusion that the US should be "withdrawing around the world and reducing its military capacity". Bolton detects a "relentless hostility by the war's opponents [that] now threaten[s] to overwhelm, in the public mind, the clear merits of eliminating Iraq's Baathist dictatorship"... [If there’s anyone who deserves a red-hot poker shoved up his ass, this guy qualifies] The spectres of Kfar Shaul, by Udi Aloni | Paul Eisen This was spotted by my friend and DYR colleague, Gill Kaffash. It was written a couple of years ago but the arrival soon of Deir Yassin Day 2013 is a great opportunity to post it... Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start? by Ben Ehrenreich | NYT On the evening of Feb. 10, the living room of Bassem Tamimi’s house in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh was filled with friends and relatives smoking and sipping coffee, waiting for Bassem to return from prison. His oldest son, Waed, 16, was curled on the couch with his 6-year-old brother, Salam, playing video games on the iPhone that the prime minister of Turkey had given their sister, Ahed. She had been flown to Istanbul to receive an award after photos of her shaking her fist at an armed Israeli soldier won her, at 11, a brief but startling international celebrity. Their brother Abu Yazan, who is 9, was on a tear in the yard, wrestling with an Israeli activist friend of Bassem’s... Europe's odd policy in Palestine, by Ramzy Baroud | Asia Times Online More bad news emerged from Israel in recent weeks. It's not that good news has the habit of being associated with Israel, its military occupation, institutionalized discrimination and mistreatment of Palestinians, but the emerging consensus that Israel is heading to an irrevocably perilous course is now crossing from the realm of political analysts over to international organizations previously lenient in the face of Israel's dismissal of international law... Obama's Israeli visit will focus on highlighting Zionism symbols | PressTV During the visit that begin on Wednesday, Obama will spend “just a few hours” in the Palestinian Authority base of Ramallah, and the rest of his three-day stay in al-Quds (Jerusalem), where he plans to visit an “official” so-called Holocaust memorial, a partially US-built Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile site and Herzl’s grave.. Other press reports on Obama’s upcoming tour of the occupied Palestine have described it as a largely symbolic move merely to reiterate the American establishment’s unconditional commitment to the Zionist regime... To build a memorial to Deir Yassin | Paul Eisen Deir Yassin Remembered has long sought a memorial at the site of the village itself. In fact, the organisation has a long-standing international competition for the best design. Various forms have been proposed, from a simple sculpture, to a complete complex including a Truth and Reconciliation Centre. But a memorial at Deir Yassin is unlikely in the near or medium future. It would require both huge funding and Israeli permission, neither of which is, at present, available... Siemens Bribery Hits Israeli Corrupt Judge | Roi Tov Corruption in Israel is so widespread that it appears only in the newspapers' inner pages. Seldom has the State admitted that one of its former judges is corrupt. Even rarer are the cases in which the corruption leads to an international corporation. This latter link forced Israel to admit that Judge (ret) Dan Cohen accepted bribes from Siemens while serving as one of the directors of Israel Electric Corporation. On March 17, 2013, Mr. Cohen was jailed in Israel after being extradited from Peru... [What else could one possibly expect? The only oddity is that the case was prosecuted and the perp convicted.] Corruption, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance On the way back from the University of Bethlehem we noted a small bulldozer that has removed a stone monument with a map of historic Palestine (see above) and the olive tree at the entrance of the city (in Alkarkafa). This was not Israeli authorities but the “Palestinian authority” (PA) from higher up but via the Mayor of Bethlehem. Instead of the olive tree and the map, the idea is that Mr. Obama will see a new thing: a dove at the entrance of Bethlehem... The Silk Road Ensemble (with Yo-Yo Ma): Silent City | YouTube For "Silent City," the kamancheh (Persian spike fiddle), Western strings and percussion join in a meditation that is created anew with each performance. Composer and kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor wrote the piece to commemorate the Kurdish village of Halabjah in Iraqi Kurdistan. "I chose to base the piece on an altered A-minor scale using Kurdish themes to remember the Kurdish people.".. Jerusalem Politicians Exiled by Israeli Occupation, by Lauren Booth | deLiberation Since the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections in 2006, parliamentarians from Jerusalem (including a former minister) have suffered intimidation, imprisonment and forced deportation, by the Israeli authorities. A new report, released this week, by the Arab Organisation for Human Rights, UK(AOHR), catalogues the campaign by Israeli Authority agencies against PLC officials... AIPAC’s Anti-American Resolutions, by Elias Akleh | MCW News It is a well known fact to many that American Zionist Jewish groups especially AIPAC are the most influential political groups in the US. It members control the Federal Reserve and the majority of American banking and financial institutions, major American corporations especially the military industrial complex, and major media resources. AIPAC is so powerful that it greatly shapes the American foreign policy... Moshe Yaalon named as Israel defence minister | MCW News Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has chosen Moshe Yaalon, a right-wing former armed forces chief, to be Israel's defence minister, saying his experience was needed to tackle challenges in a turbulent Middle East. Yaalon, 62, belongs to Netanyahu's Likud party and spent the past four years in his inner circle of ministers, publicly backing his reluctance to give up the occupied West Bank and make way for a Palestinian state... Mar 18, 2013 New Study: Journalists, Experts are Massive Bullshitters | New Left Project ...Ha'aretz reports that separate studies by Ted Postol and two other scientists, formerly of Raytheon (which manufactured the Patriot missiles) and Rafael (which co-developed Iron Dome), have concluded that the official Israeli data on Iron Dome is almost certainly false. Whereas Israel claimed a successful intercept-rate of 84%, Postol, after examining video footage of Iron Dome in action, concludes that the real rate was "perhaps as low as 5%", and "could well be lower".. Coalition pact calls for bill making Israel Jewish first, democratic second, by Jonathan Lis | Haaretz ..The coalition agreement signed Friday between Habayit Hayehudi and Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu calls for a controversial bill for a Basic Law that would make the state's democratic character subservient to its Jewish character... [So much for the only shamocracy in the Middle East] Israel's Passover Waffles War | Roi Tov ...Super-Sal didn't care. In a daring disregard of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, they placed in their branches the waffles appearing in the picture above, which resemble the regular packages and feature a yellow "kasher lepesach" sign. After all, how can one place strictly rectangular waffles in a "different package?" Circular packages are useless in this case. The severe transgression was noticed by Jewish-religious media and published among cries of murder. The cryptic answer of the chain was that they "are working with the Chief Rabbinate." Rabbis, apparently too busy eating waffles, did not answer. The Waffles War is on... [Not to laugh – these are serious concerns of the Uebermenschen] PTSD Documentary | Kickstarter We are a documentary production team dedicated to helping those with PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder hurts everyone. We can help.. Our team consists of experienced documentary and news professionals, primarily former members of the U.S. military, with people representing each branch of the Armed Forces... Samir Abed-Rabbo on President Obama's Visit To Israel | Gilad Atzmon As a Palestinian-American, I want President Obama to know that by visiting and laying a wreath at the grave of Theodore Herzl is tantamount to laying a wreath on the grave of Jefferson Davis and a clear indication of his support for racism, apart-ness (Apartheid) and segregation of Palestinians and Israeli-Jews based on ethnicity and religion and the Zionist colonialism of historic Palestine. Also by visiting the Israeli museum where he is to view the Dead Sea Scrolls, President Obama legitimizes Israel’s theft of Palestinian heritage including the very manuscripts that he will be reviewing... Zion—the Promised Land—too Little, too Late, by William A Cook | Veterans News Now It occurred to me as I was rereading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unfinished novel, Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, that the good Doctor’s grim reflection on the human condition, delivered to his adopted child, Ned, knowing the child was too young to grasp his revelation, might well give us pause as the state of Israel seeks to tether itself by an umbilical cord of self-defense to the United States through a strategic ally agreement. “Then, Doctor Grim … tell me … where I came from…,” asked Ned... Where is Palestine? by Fidaa Abu Assi I seem to always do the same thing each time I have to register for something online though I know deep down my country is nowhere to be found. Each time, I open the drop down menu of countries and keep scrolling up and down past all the listed countries, hoping I can find it, up and down again, squinting my eyes at the screen, and then I pause to remind myself of the fact I don’t need to go up and down since countries are listed alphabetically. Disappointed, I scroll up to the letter “I” and choose, albeit reluctantly, “Israel” as “my” country. But, “Israel” is NOT –and will never be- my country. Palestine is... Obama’s visit will not promote peace | Free Haifa With the planned visit of the President of the United States, we do not turn to Obama – we do not expect him to change his policy. We turn to you, our sisters and brothers, inhabitants and refugees of this land, who are suffering from occupation, deportation and war, from racism and exploitation: Do not trust and do not expect anything from the dealers in occupation and war. We will bring the peace, we, the victims of the regime and its opponents, in our struggle for justice and freedom, despite their malice... Mar 17, 2013 RIP Rachel Ten years have now passed since we received the terrible phone call telling us our young friend Rachel Corrie was dead. We had gone to see her off the drizzly winter day she left Olympia to work in Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement. We couldn’t know that we were seeing her for the last time, nor foresee the legacy she would leave as she said goodbye to her hometown, and stepped into history... Rachel Corrie 2003-2013 | Australians for Palestine The Melbourne film screening of “Rachel” by Simone Bitton – shown for the first time in Australia on Friday – was a moving tribute to peace activist Rachel Corrie who was tragically killed by an Israeli bulldozer when she tried to stop the home of a Palestinian family from being demolished. Bitton’s sensitive presentation connected a hushed audience to Rachel through the letters and diaries she wrote to her mother from Gaza, never realising that her words would continue to resonate with so many other people around the world years after that fateful day... Corbett Video Report Gladio Series: Who’s at the Top of the Pyramid? | Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post In this sixth part of the ongoing Sibel Edmonds Gladio B conversation, we ask the question: Who is at the top of the pyramid. We look beyond the usual suspects and follow the money back to the industries and lobbies whose existence depends on the perpetuation of boogeymen enemies... Threats and Sanctions: The Achilles' Heel of a Potential Atom Accord, by Reza Nasri | Tehran Bureau ...world powers are again poised to "solve" an international crisis through an "agreement" that is essentially predicated on intimidation, illegal threats of military action, unilateral "crippling" sanctions, sabotage, and extrajudicial killings of Iran's brightest minds -- that is, in 19th-century style. But injustice and imprudence are not the only flaws of an agreement concluded through coercion. Its major defect is coercion's legal impact on its sustainability: As stated above, an agreement that is forced upon a sovereign state breaches the provision of Article 52 of the Vienna Convention and as such contains in itself the legal seeds of its own dissolution... Seeds of Destruction: The Diabolical World of Genetic Manipulation, by F. William Engdahl | Global Research ..This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms. The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is... Oregon Company to Sell Drone Defense Technology to Public | US News and World Report An Oregon company says that it has developed and will soon start selling technology that disables unmanned aircraft. The company, called Domestic Drone Countermeasures, was founded in late February because some of its engineers see unmanned aerial vehicles—which are already being flown by law enforcement in some areas and could see wider commercial integration into American airspace by 2015—as unwanted eyes in the sky... Chavez: the Man and His Dream, by José Pertierra | Counterpunch ...When Americans ask me why there is such an outpouring of emotion among Venezuelans over the death of this man, I point out that the ordinary people of Venezuela saw themselves in President Chávez. The President was a compendium of the very fabric of the country: part black, part indigenous and part white: a man who came from poverty and whose every decision as President was marked by his humble origins. President Chávez never forgot where he came from, and he always remembered who he was. He dedicated himself to giving a voice to the voiceless: to bringing dignity to a people who had been humiliated for centuries by those in power... A Strange Way to Build Trust, by Peter Jenkins | Lobe Log ...The US can say what it likes; it’s a Great Power. Yes, but a power that has the misfortune to be great in an age when greatness confers responsibility for nurturing a law-based international system. It doesn’t do much good to that system for US ambassadors to sound unreasonable, alarmist, bereft of a sense of proportion and perhaps a little inclined to double standards. Good leaders lead from the middle, not one of the extremities... Remembering Deir Yassin | Paul Eisen In twenty-four days, on April 9th, it will be Deir Yassin Day 2013 - the 65th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre of April 9th 1948. Deir Yassin was not the only massacre of the time, nor was it the worst but, for all kinds of reasons, Deir Yassin signalled the flight of the Palestinian people and their eventual dispossession and exile and as such it is probably the most critical moment in Palestinian history... Leibowitz was the Chomsky of israel, so to speak: his antiwar position was grounded on a nonsensical ideology no-one could take seriously | Niqnaq Rinat Klein and Uri Rosenwaks’ three-part documentary series “Leibowitz: Faith, Country and Man” could not have come at a more important time. Fewer and fewer people know who Yeshayahu Leibowitz was, or know only that he coined the term “Judeo-Nazis.".. [Being a Zionist, Leibowitz was himself a “Judeo-Nazi,” hoist on his own petard.] Robbing East Jerusalem | Roi Tov ...Following the 1967 War, Israel annexed East Jerusalem; this was formalized with the 1980 Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. The world opposed this law; the 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." Yet, in 2013, Israel speaks not only of annexing Eastern Jerusalem, but the entire West Bank... Why the Peace Movement Will Continue to Fail, by Rosemarie Jackowski| MCW News ...Too many writers and journalists, even the good ones, are reluctant to criticize the voter. They know that there are risks for anyone who does that. It is easy to criticize the government. Blaming the Pentagon is fun, but too few are willing to call it like it is and place the blame where it is deserved. The simple fact is that voters have the ultimate responsibility. Voters are the root of the problem. Voters have enabled the war machine. Some voters do this consciously, believing that war provides jobs. Some voters do it out of ignorance. But the bottom line is that voters are responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians. Somebody needs to say that out loud... Are We All Idiot Dolts? by Timothy V. Gatto | MCW News I just read the most blatant and insidious transformation of this “Progressive” President since he signed the NDAA. Not only does this man claim the right to execute Americans overseas and right here in the United States (under exceptional circumstances), now he’s agreeing with the GOP that this country needs to start cutting “entitlement” programs like Medicare... Americans' sympathy for Israel at 22-year high | The Times of Israel ...according to Gallup figures released on Friday, just five days ahead of Barack Obama’s first visit to Israel as president. In figures gleaned from the polling organization’s early February World Affairs poll, 64 percent of Americans say their sympathies “in the Middle East situation” – Gallup’s term for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace talks – lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians. Just 12% favor the Palestinians... [Well, you gotta hand it to the ZioNazi propaganda juggernaut. On the other hand, there’s still hope for some sanity - what goes up must come down. Americans are no more evil than anyone else; they've just been fed a steady stream of BS all of their lives while being constantly distracted by bread and circuses, leaving them almost totally ignorant.] Mar 16, 2013 Terror in Central Asia: NATO’s Great Game, with James Corbett, Rick Rozoff and Sibel Edmonds | Global Research TV In this age of manufactured terror, one of the most vital regions on the global chessboard is also an area that few in the West know anything about: Central Asia. This geostrategic and resource-rich area on the doorstep of China and Russia finds itself in the middle of an all out terror campaign. But, as key national intelligence whistleblowers are pointing out, these terrorists are working hand-in-glove with NATO... His Fight Was Our Fight Too: Chavez Succeeded Where Obama Failed, by Shamus Cooke | Counterpunch ...The late President Chavez.. steadily increased the crowds of people who came to hear him speak, year after year, election after election, rally after rally. The secret? Whereas President Obama could only speak about “hope” and “change,” President Chavez actually delivered. It was this delivery that earned Chavez the hatred of both Bush Jr. and Obama. Chavez humiliated Bush Jr. by surviving the U.S.-sponsored military coup against him and humiliated the entire U.S. media by winning election after election by large margins, elections that former President Jimmy Carter said were the fairest in the world... Iraq War Could Cost $6 Trillion, by John Glaser | Antiwar ..The study comes from the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. It not only estimates the staggering financial costs, but the human costs as well... Iron Dome: “Iron Dumb”? by Marsha Cohen | Lobe Log ..Last week, Reuven Pedatzur, a highly respected Israeli security analyst who has been a sharp critic of the Iron Dome project since 2008 when he pointed out that billions had been squandered on the program, cited studies by missile defense experts that suggest Iron Dome’s successful interception rate may well be 5% or less — far below the 84% success rate cited by the Israeli Defense Forces and other defenders of the program. Pedatzur cites research done by three rocket scientists:.. Anonymous Plots to "Erase Israel from the Internet" | Al Manar Hacktivist group Anonymous, along with numerous other hackers, is planning a massive cyber-attack on the Zionist entity, threatening to “erase” the country from Internet. The entity of occupation is apparently taking the threats seriously, with defensive preparations underway... American “Smoke and Mirrors”: The Politics of Imagined Opinion, by Prof. James Tracy | Global Research Where do you locate yourself on the political spectrum? Are you liberal or conservative? On “the left”, “the right”, or perhaps you’re a bit of both (“moderate”). It is no secret that American mass culture often blunts the capacity for civic engagement and political awareness. Yet those who pursue an identity in acceptable political dialogue are less aware of how the parameters of American politics have been carefully crafted to elicit vicarious and seemingly meaningful participation for the politically inclined... Israel's Fascist Government, by Stephen Lendman | Indybay On January 22, Israelis voted. Results hardened fascist rule. Dominant right-wing parties control 102 of 120 Knesset seats. Israelis have themselves to blame. They elected their most extremist government in history. Belligerence, state-sponsored terrorism, militarized occupation, racist persecution, settlement expansions, and neoliberal harshness reflect official policy... A 21st Century Renaissance Man, by Prof. James Petras | Global Research President Hugo Chavez was unique in multiple areas of political, social and economic life. He made significant contributions to the advancement of humanity. The depth, scope and popularity of his accomplishments mark President Chavez as the ‘Renaissance President of the 21st Century’. Many writers have noted one or another of his historic contributions highlighting his anti-poverty legislation, his success in winning popular elections with resounding majorities and his promotion of universal free public education and health coverage for all Venezuelans... A New Pope and "The Most Corrupt Vatican Since the Borgias" | Real News/YouTube Matthew Fox (former Catholic priest) discusses the Vatican's work with the CIA and it's alliance with far right political forces and Pope Francis' opposition to liberation theology in Latin America... “Washington’s Pope”? Who is Pope Francis I? Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Argentina’s “Dirty War,” by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research ...In 2005, human rights lawyer Myriam Bregman filed a criminal suit against Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, accusing him of conspiring with the military junta in the 1976 kidnapping of two Jesuit priests. Bergoglio, who at the time was “Provincial” for the Society of Jesus, had ordered two “Leftist” Jesuit priests “to leave their pastoral work” (i.e. they were fired) following divisions within the Society of Jesus regarding the role of the Catholic Church and its relations to the military Junta. Condemning the military dictatorship (including human rights violations) was a taboo within the Catholic Church... Twisting the Intel to Fit the Politics: The New Generation of Hypocrisy on Iran, by Ted Snider | Counterpunch Though the recent nuclear talks with Iran ended with an apparent whiff of progress, and though the two sides have agreed to meet for further technical negotiations this month and then for political level talks next month, the U.S. continues to approach Iran with a hostility that can barely contain its hypocrisy. The current generation of hypocrisy has three faces: Iran as a terror threat, Iran as a nuclear threat, and Iran’s need to be monitored... U.S. Intel Chief Says Iran Isn’t Building Nukes: Is Anybody Listening? by Nima Shirazi | Muftah In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday March 12, 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reaffirmed what the U.S. intelligence community has been saying for years: Iran has no nuclear weapons program, is not building a nuclear weapon and has not even made a decision to do so. The annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” which compiles the collective conclusions of all American intelligence agencies, has long held that Iran maintains defensive capabilities and has a military doctrine of deterrence and retaliation, but is not an aggressive state actor and has no intention of beginning a conflict, let alone triggering a nuclear apocalypse... Obama on Israeli TV: Would Take Iran ‘Over a Year Or So’ to Build a Nuclear Bomb, by John Glaser | Antiwar President Obama appeared on Israel’s Channel 2 TV and said Iran is about a year away from developing a nuclear weapon and that the US is keeping the military option on the table to stop it. Obama is scheduled to visit Israel next week in his first as president. Despite what he said to an overly fearful Israeli public, his own intelligence officials maintain that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and has demonstrated no intention of developing them... [He's such a slick liar. Either that, or he's even dumber than George Bush.] Why Israel Is Calling For Jonathan Pollard's Release Now, by J. J. Goldberg | The Daily Beast ..Pollard’s advocates are a sometimes-uneasy coalition of far-rightists who view him as a Jewish martyr, if not a hero, and moderates who see his severe sentence as unfair. Opponents of his release say that while only a handful of American spies have received life sentences, few have ever compromised so vast a trove of highly sensitive information... Lessons to be learnt from the Iraq War, by Richard Falk | Al Jazeera ...not only was the Iraq War a disaster from the perspective of American and British foreign policy and the peace and stability of the Middle East region, but it was also a serious setback for international law, the UN and world order. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the US was supposedly burdened by what policymakers came to call "the Vietnam Syndrome". This was a Washington shorthand for the psychological inhibitions to engage in military interventions in the non-Western world due to the negative attitudes toward such imperial undertakings that were supposed to exist among the American public and in the government, especially among the military... The Curse of Chutzpah, by Nahida Izzat | Poetry for Palestine Gilad Atzmon argues that in order to best support Palestine we must cease to view the Palestinian struggle as “just another apartheid” or “just another colonial project.” What makes the occupation of Palestine “unique” is not the “specialness” of the suffering of Palestinians, nor is it the “uniqueness” of their tragedy or the “importance” of their cause. What makes it “unique”is the fact that those Jewish Zionists who occupy Palestine, those Jewish Zionists who support them, and even many of those Jewish anti-Zionists who oppose them view themselves as “unique”.. The wrath of the bureaucracy and US public apathy, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis ...The bureaucrat is supposed to think of his or her assigned task and how best to accomplish it. That is what is meant by “staying with the programme”. The bureaucrat is not supposed to think why the task has been assigned or what its implementation might broadly mean. Like the task itself, thinking too becomes detached from any context but that generated by the bureaucracy. This attitude is reinforced by the fact that responsibility is also compartmentalized. As long as one pursues the task efficiently, according to prescribed procedure, one is acting responsibly... [Franz Kafka was riffing on bureaucracy in his stories and novels – he worked in a large insurance company.] Mar 14-15, 2013 Same Old Stuff from AIPAC, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual gala in Washington. A reported thirteen thousand AIPAC supporters reportedly cheered the latest efforts to make Israel America’s most favored nation. A small group of demonstrators was generally ignored though Scott McConnell reports that some protesters were spat upon by those filing in to celebrate Israel. It must be a habit they picked up in Jerusalem where spitting on Christian clergymen is considered de rigueur... ‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis, by Robert Parry | Consortium News ...it would appear from the early coverage of the election of Pope Francis I that U.S. journalists haven’t changed at all, even at “liberal” outlets like MSNBC. The first question that a real reporter should ask about an Argentine cleric who lived through the years of grotesque repression, known as the “dirty war,” is what did this person do, did he stand up to the murderers and torturers or did he go with the flow. If the likes of Chris Matthews and other commentators on MSNBC had done a simple Google search, they would have found out enough about Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to slow their bubbling enthusiasm... The new propaganda is liberal: The new slavery is digital | John Pilger What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; her 'Triumph of the Will' cast Hitler's spell. She told me that the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above," but on the "submissive void" of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? "Everyone," she said. Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void... The Saudi Oil War on Iran, by Reza Sanati | The National Interest When Prince Turki al-Faisal suggested last year that the House of Saud would join in the U.S.-led sanctions against Iranian oil, by seeking to displace Tehran’s oil exports from the global economy, he was not referring to a novel idea. Indeed, Saudi Arabia has led two prior oil wars against Iran.. the first Saudi oil war against Iran was intended to weaken the Shah’s modernization programs. The Saudis feared Iran’s rise as a regional power, and wanted to carve out space for independent decision-making in OPEC, which at the time was dominated by Iran... The One State Condition: Book Review by Eli Ungar-Sargon | Muftah For serious students of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the contested nature of everything about the conflict, including its very language, can often feel like searching for a signal in a sea of white noise. Words like “colonialism,” “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “ethnocracy” have become so rhetorically charged they seem to have lost their descriptive power. In their ambitious new book, The One State Condition, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir attempt to cut through the noise by describing the contours of the Israeli regime and articulating a phenomenology of its power... ‘Iran sanctions are immoral and illegal – and cowardly’: Kourosh Ziabari interviews Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich | Tehran Times ...It would be naive to believe that their goal of these sanctions is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. I believe that there should be no mistake about the reality that sanctions are warfare without the military involvement. They have a multitude of goals. One is to convince the war weary and war wary public that there is diplomacy in place to avoid a ‘military option’. Collective punishment is illegal under international law... Settlers Win Israeli Government | Roi Tov On March 14, 2013, Netanyahu announced in the Knesset to his party members that his coalitional negotiations ended. In the following days, Israel's new government will be voted by the Knesset. His face in the picture below tells the entire story. Netanyahu will be the next Prime Minister, but he lost the elections and the coalitional negotiations. The settlers became the principal winners. Even if his party shows restraint and doesn't carry out a putsch against him, this is probably the last government to be led by Bibi; he should never have chosen a nickname that means (also) "my-sewage." It became a self-fulfilling Pygmalion prophecy... Chief Rabbinate of Israel Statement on the Accession of Pope Francis | IMRA ...The dialogue between the Holy See and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel was welcomed and nurtured with personal involvement by the two previous Pontiffs. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel is confident that Pope Francis, whose good relations with the Jewish People are well known, will keep the same spirit, and strengthen and develop the Roman Catholic Church's connections with the State of Israel and the Jewish People.".. [The Catholic Church is toast; it is now just a subsidiary of the Israeli Rabbinate. Perhaps the human race can now wake up a little and begin to shed the barbaric Abrahamic tradition entirely.] Free speech hero passes | Paul Eisen Doug Christie, who defended Ernst Zundel in the great Holocaust denial trials in the eighties has died. Here is a video about his passing and a piece by Michael Hoffman.My view is that the world needs more Doug Christies and he'll be sorely missed... Hugo Chavez vs "The Network" | Greg Palast A tiny, dark and intense woman waited at the end of a lecture until I was alone, brought her face strangely close to mine and whispered, “President Chavez needs you. Right now. To Caracas. Right now. You must come to see him.” President Who? All I knew about this Hugo Chavez guy was that he was an Latin-American jefe, led a bungled coup and was filled with a lot of populist bullshit and a lot of oil. And I also knew that no one at BBC Newsnight was going to blow the budget for me to fly to South America to talk about a nation that 92 percent of our viewers couldn't find on a map and wouldn't want to. “Send me an email.” “There will be a coup. March 15.”.. What Obama Needs To Tell The Israelis, by M.J. Rosenberg | MCW News ...In essence, the Arab League Initiative was a golden offer to Israel by every single Arab state (the end of conflict and isolation in return for giving up the lands won in the 1967 war. The Palestinian Authority also signed it and Hamas said that if a deal was reached, it would not “contradict the Arab consensus.” But Israel refused to seriously consider it and, at Israel’s request, neither did the United States.. That pretty much killed it although the offer is still out there, ready for Israel to seize the opportunity at any time... [Obama isn’t going to tell the Israelis anything; on the contrary. He’ll just do the Israel firster shuffle and mumble “Yes, Massa, no Massa, whatever you wants, Massa.”] Gitmo Atrocities Continue | Stephen Lendman America's by far the world's leading human rights abuser. It commits horrific crimes globally. No other nation matches its record. It's longstanding. It's unconscionable. It's lawless. It violates fundamental international, constitutional, and US statute laws. It does so with impunity. It's official US policy. Straightaway as president, Obama pledged to close Guantanamo. He lied. He's a serial liar. It's still open. The worst of Bush administration practices continue... Iran 'steps up' military support for Assad | MCW News ..."The Iranians really are supporting massively the regime," a senior Western diplomat said this week. "They have been increasing their support for the last three, four months through Iraq's airspace and now trucks. And the Iraqis really are looking the other way." "They (Iran) are playing now a crucial role," the senior diplomat said, adding that Hezbollah was "hardly hiding the support it's giving to the (Syrian) regime.".. Russia also remained a key arms supplier for Assad, diplomats said. Unlike Iran, neither Syria nor Russia is subject to a UN ban on arms trade and are therefore not in violation of any UN rules when conducting weapons commerce... Israeli appetite for US welfare funds, by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis ...To the chagrin of Israeli firsters, sequestration stands to reduce Israel’s welfare cheque this year by more than 200m dollars. Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz expressed trepidation over the looming US budget constraints at the Israeli cabinet meeting on 3 March, declaring: “The economic difficulties in the United States worry us. I hope that we will not be hurt by them.” Steinitz’s message was heard by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Literally two days later, AIPAC massed thousands of Israeli firsters at its annual policy conference in Washington for this year’s mission... If You're an American you should see THIS! | YouTube [An oldie but goodie. Every once in a while someone in Congress tells the truth. Nobody in the Establishment even bothers to pay attention. But it’s nice to know there are a handful of decent, gutsy people among the Congress critters.] Mar 13, 2013 Hugo Chávez: Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, by William Blum | Axis of Logic ...There was no one in the entire universe that those who own and run “United States, Inc.” wanted to see dead more than Hugo Chávez. He was worse than Allende. Worse than Fidel Castro. Worse than any world leader not in the American camp because he spoke out in the most forceful terms about US imperialism and its cruelty. Repeatedly. Constantly. Saying things that heads of state are not supposed to say. At the United Nations, on a shockingly personal level about George W. Bush. All over Latin America, as he organized the region into anti-US-Empire blocs... CIA: Cancer Experiments with Presidents of Latin America, by Nil Nikandrov | Strategic Culture Foundation In a series of his public speeches Hugo Chaves called an “epidemic” of cancer among Latin American presidents a strange and alarming phenomenon. This hard to cure desease was identified in case of Chavez himself, Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo, Dilma Rouseff and Lula da Silva (Brazil), Crisitina Fernandez (Argentina). Al of them are known as left of the center politicians struggling to expedite Latin America’s integration process and to get rid of the US dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Chavez let drop words about empires that go to any length to achieve their goals... Israel going for one million Jews in the West Bank, by Aluf Benn | Haaretz Now the game has ended and real life will begin. The third Netanyahu government has one clear goal: enlarging the settlements and achieving the vision of "a million Jews living in Judea and Samaria." This magic number will thwart the division of the land and prevent once and for all the establishment of a Palestinian state... [In other words, the notion of a two-state solution is once again shown to be a dead letter. When the Palestinians eventually prevail, as is inevitable, they will hopefully have the good sense to expel the Jews. Otherwise, they will find themselves permanently consigned to the gutter.] 93-Year-Old Man Assaulted by Israel Police | Roi Tov ...Using the Israeli Police Commissioner's words to show that Israel is an unacceptable society is such an easy task.. Mr. Danino reported an increase in the number of charges placed by Israel Police in 2012. The number jumped from less than 43 thousands in 2011 to over 48 thousands in 2012, an increase of over 13%. Israelis are getting violent, and only super-hero Danino, the Israeli eugenic research result of fusing Superman with Batman, can save the world. Can this be true, or is it a Barbie-dream?.. Foul sewage flooding raises Palestinian ire, by Mohammed Omer | Gilad Atzmon Gazans are crying foul after Egypt stepped up its campaign to wipe out an underground network of transportation tunnels by blasting raw sewage down them, sometimes with deadly results for Palestinian workers. Some 2,000 men and boys work in the tunnel trade in the Gaza Strip. But over the past three months, more than 80 percent have lost the only work and benefits available in besieged Gaza, which remains stuck in an Israeli blockade... Worsening Income Inequality, by Al Gore | Huffington Post In my new book, I highlight the problem of increasing income inequality that is plaguing the societies of almost every industrialized country in the world. Despite being the richest country in the world, the United States also suffers from one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. In order to make the U.S. system of capitalism truly sustainable, we must tackle this unhealthy concentration of wealth. The wealthiest one percent of Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The gap continues to widen as the top one percent receives almost 25 percent of annual U.S. income, up from 12 percent just 25 years ago... Zionism in practice: Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Property, by Leslie Bravery | deLiberation 11 March 2013: 1:10am: Israeli Army shoots its way into 2 West Bank village homes, Israeli Navy opens fire on Gaza fishing boats, Israeli Army position behind Green Line opens fire on Gaza farmland, Hebron: Israeli Army theft of homes and land, Israeli soldiers abduct 15-year-old boy, Night peace disruption and/or home invasions in 2 refugee camps and 10 towns and villages, 3 attacks – 16 raids including home invasions, 3 acts of agricultural/economic sabotage, 20 taken prisoner – 8 detained – 115 restrictions of movement, etc.. Israel's American Propagandists, by Paul Balles | Salem News Israeli-first American pundits wield too much power. The leader of these journalist war hawks is William Kristol. American neoconservative political analyst and commentator, Kristol is the founder and editor of the political magazine the Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel. Kristol co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert Kagan. Past Vice President Dick Cheney was also a founding member of PNAC, along with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was the ideological father of the group... The Syria “Gun-Running Program”: US and Britain Channel Large Shipments of Weapons to Al Qaeda Terrorists, by Patrick Henningsen | Global Research It’s well known by now that NATO and the Gulf States initial plans to overturn the sovereign state of Syria has been running behind schedule since their operation was launched two years ago. They had hoped for the sort of slam dunk which they enjoyed in overturning the country of Libya in late 2011. This same formula could not be applied again however, so Plan B, a ground war using proxies has meant a longer drawn out conflict. It hasn’t been working fast enough in Syria, and western backed terrorist groups still sustaining heavy losses in their fight to topple the Assad government on behalf of the NATO and its Gulf allies... The Return of Empires (V), by Dmitry Minin | Strategic Culture Foundation ...Ankara is making considerable effort to establish the Cooperation Council of Turkic States with its headquarters in the former imperial capital, Istanbul. At one of the organisation's summits, Turkish president Abdullah Gül announced that «as Turkey is involved in G20 forums, it is able to represent the interests of the entire Turkish world». A common flag and coat of arms have been adopted for the Council. Of the former post-Soviet Turkish republics, only Uzbekistan is obstinately ignoring the activities of this organisation... Pakistan tests US will with Iran pipeline, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online Although the United Nations has never imposed sanctions on Iran's energy sector, the US government has opposed a decision by Pakistan to proceed with a much-delayed pipeline from Iran on the grounds that this would put Islamabad in "violation of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear program". [1] It seems the US has once again mistaken its own laws for that of the international community... Erdogan's rhetoric is Kerry's headache, by Egemen B Bezci and Geoffrey Levin | Asia Times Online In a previous opinion piece.. we argued that the US-Turkish relations are under pressure, with various domestic and geopolitical forces pushing the two traditional allies away from a shared vision for the Middle East. Despite US Secretary of State John Kerry's visit to Ankara on March 1, the political gulf between the two countries has only widened in the weeks since we wrote last. At the center of these heightened tensions lies not action, but rather rhetoric - lines that are no doubt popular with some at home, but at the same time, threaten to slowly erode the good relations once enjoyed between the two countries... Ashamed to be an American, by Timothy V. Gatto | MCW News What in the world is going on in the west? I’m talking about Europe and America and all the players in the Middle East and Africa. The entire scenario smells like rotten fish (more like decaying bodies). I’m tired of holding my tongue and reading the drivel and watching the charade on television. The truth is that everything you are hearing is a lie and lies of the greatest magnitude. First of all this “War on Terror” is completely fabricated to keep the American war machine going. The bluster about this “sequester” is designed to keep pumping your tax dollars into the American war machine... French town honours Israeli minister 'killer' | Al Jazeera Israel has strongly criticised a French town after it granted honourary citizenship to a Palestinian convicted in the killing of an Israeli government minister. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor on Monday called the honouring "humanly outrageous to honour a convicted murderer, no political view can justify it." The Paris suburb of Bezons last month honoured Majdi al-Rimawi, who was sentenced to life in prison in Israel for his role in the 2001 murder of tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi. Zeevi, who had founded the right-wing nationalist Moledet party, had advocated the ouster of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip... [Coming from the Israelis, where terrorist credentials are a virtual sine qua non for any candidate for Prime Minister, that’s a sketch. Only mass murderers need apply.] "Here a holocau$t, There a holocau$t, Everywhere a ..." | Goon Squad ...Google holocaust charities in the USA and you'll come up with nearly SIX million hits. 6 million, huh, where have I heard that number before? You can go to the 'godfather' of these scams, the United States holocau$t Museum and they'll try and shake you down for a $5,000 yearly minimum to keep alive lies.. see a PARTIAL listing of various holocau$t laws passed in the USA to protect fraudsters scamming the public. Over 26, but the list is only updated to 1999... German Machine, Russian Workers and Israel's Largest Nuclear Shelter | Roi Tov ...One of the problems is that TBM machines are unique; they are fit to ground conditions and tunnel dimensions. Thus, the German provider of this state-of-the-art monster arrived in Israel, and worked with a local engineering company. The latter had already told Globes that the machine would be dismantled after its use, "except if they find a buyer." Engineer Koznitzky promises that they will be able to build new ones. The technology has passed. Israel is becoming a nuclear shelter scared to death of its own weapons... More Jewish wailing | Paul Eisen This is some professional Jewish wailer going on about how, yet again, someone else let us poor Jews down... [As for why Roosevelt “did not forthrightly inform the American people of Hitler’s grisly ‘Final Solution’ or respond decisively to his crimes,” it's for the simple reason that no such project existed. Probably that's why there is no mention of the holocaust (six million killed, gas chambers or 'Final Solution,' etc.) in the voluminous histories of WWII written by Eisenhauer, Churchill or de Gaulle. Not a single word - as researched by Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus University of Ulster] Drug shortage to force closure of Iranian operating rooms | Radio Zamaneh The head of the Anesthesia and Special Care Association of Iran has warned that a number of operating rooms in various Iranian hospitals are facing closure due to a shortage of anesthesia. Mohammad Mehdi Ghiamat said: "With the approach of the New Year holidays, only emergency cases can be taken to operating rooms, and the situation for other patients will remain unclear." The Mehr News Agency reports that despite repeated warnings to officials about the serious dangers posed by the shortage of anesthesia in hospitals, no action has been taken... [How many more ‘sub-humans’ are the ZioNazis going to kill until we deal with them? Millions, as in Iraq – tens of millions in Iran if these sociopaths get their way?] Six actions, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance We salute and mourn lost comrades. We mourn the loss of our young friend Mahmoud Al-Teety shot dead by Israeli apartheid forces who invaded his village.* We mourn President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela who lifted millions out of poverty and showed that governments can serve people needs rather than corporate greed. We mourn Stephen Hessel, survivor of the genocides committed by the Nazis and a human rights defender who supported Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel and also helped spread ideas of universal human rights and rejected racist ideas of uniqueness and chosenness... Wanted: Arab Tom Friedmans, by Belen Fernandez | MCW News Among the salient functions of Orientalist pseudo-scholarship is the presentation of the Arab/Muslim world as a barbarian backwater in need of civilisation imported from the West. Integral to this function is the co-optation - whether consensual or not - of certain cohorts within the backwater that are deemed to be sufficiently "like us" so as to justify the civilising effort and endow it with a democratic tinge... [It's hard to believe there are any Arabs as stupefyingly naïve and reflexively supremacist as Friedman] Gaza allows 'Israel collaborators' to repent | MCW News Gaza's Hamas government has launched a month-long campaign urging alleged Palestinian "collaborators" with Israel to turn themselves in return for leniency. "We announce the opening of the door to repentance for remaining collaborators and for all those who have fallen into the traps set by the enemy's intelligence services," interior ministry spokesman Islam Shahwan told reporters on Tuesday. "We urge them to return to the bosom of their people and their families," he said, noting that the offer of clemency was open until April 11... Debunking Anti-Iran Propaganda: The Myth of the “New Holocaust,” by Benjamin Schett | Global Research In a pattern of propaganda now well-established in the mainstream media, fear-mongering against Iran is reaching an all-time peak. A case in point includes ongoing accusations that Iran is in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, despite statements to the contrary from U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta as well as a number of American intelligence officials. In addition, claims that Iran is involved in terrorist activities were released by the Obama administration, fabricating an Iranian conspiracy with the goal to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S.. Will Obama Let the Oppression of Palestinians Continue? by Rashid Khalidi | NYT What should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? First, he must abandon the stale conventional wisdom offered by the New York-Washington foreign-policy establishment, which clings to the crumbling remnants of a so-called peace process that, in the 34 years since the Camp David accords, has actually helped make peace less attainable than ever... Mar 12, 2013 Zionism’s diabolical blueprint, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis The Dalet Plan, or Plan D, was the Zionist terror mob’s diabolical blueprint for the violent and blood-spattered takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – written 65 years ago and based on three earlier schemes drafted between 1945 and 1948. It was drawn up by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency. Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed in advance of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood... OBEY: Video Documentary by Chris Hedges | The OtherSite ...It charts the rise of the Corporate State, and examines the future of obedience in a world of unfettered capitalism, globalisation, staggering inequality and environmental change. The film predominantly focuses on US corporate capitalism, but it is my hope that the viewer can recognise the relevance of what is being expressed with regards to domestic political and corporate activity. It was made completely of clips found on the web... The Fall of the House of Europe, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online We have, unfortunately, no post-modern version of Dante guided by Virgil to tell a startled world what is really happening in Europe in the wake of the recent Italian general election. On the surface, Italians voted an overwhelming "No" - against austerity (imposed the German way); against more taxes; against budget cuts in theory designed to save the euro. In the words of the center-left mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, "Our citizens have spoken loud and clear but maybe their message has not been fully grasped." In fact it was... Obama Administration Stonewalls Inquiry into Radioactive Weapon Use in Iraq | AllGov News Efforts to determine the health and environmental risks of depleted uranium (DU) weaponry in Iraq have been hampered by the Obama administration. DU, which makes shell and bullet casings harder and more capable of piercing armor, can contaminate the environment and contribute to health problems, including cancer and birth defects. The Dutch peace group IKV Pax Christi complained in a new report that “Coalition Forces” (read: the United States) have refused to provide information on when and where invading forces fired DU weaponry... A Brief History of Khazars in the 'Goldene Medin,' by John Churchilly | The People's Voice ..."The Khazars - or Ashkenazis (Hebrew for German) how they call themselves today - are actually the descendants of ethnic Turk tribes that entered Europe as part of Attila's hordes and their local Germanic rape victims. For speed and logistical reasons they couldn't bring their women along, all the way from Mongolia, and had to 'source' them locally, usually by killing everybody else in the tribe”.. Years ago Benjamin Freedman said, “They rule America as monarchs“. “They” are the reason Sharon could boast, “We control America and they know it.” But most Americans do not know it. Just who are “they” and where did “they” come from? That is the purpose of this article — revealing the Khazars... Israel to sue Palestinians for copyright infringement of "victim," by Barb Weir | deLiberation IMEMC News reports that the Middle East Forum, led by Daniel “Rusty” Pipes is seeking to remove the status of Palestinians as “victims.” “Only Jews have the right to be considered victims,” said Pipes. “As originators of the label, we are entitled to use it exclusively unless we license it to others, as we did after the Haitian earthquake, where Israel generously provided humanitarian aid. Would you like to see the pictures?”.. [OK, it's satire, but not far removed from the way it is. These creatures should be sent to some neighboring galaxy - as long as it's uninhabited - they can set up their Khazarian State there. They could take all their trillions of dollars with them, but no other provisions would be allowed. Dog has spoken.] Ed Miliband: 'I'm a Zionist and oppose boycotts of Israel' | The Jewish Chronicle Ed Miliband has pledged to protect Jewish customs including brit milah and shechita if he becomes Prime Minister. Speaking at a Board of Deputies event the Labour leader said he was opposed to boycotts of Israel and warned of the need to be “ever-vigilant”against antisemitism... [Which of the three major UK parties is most desperate to obtain the blessings of the Sanhedrin? Well, that's hard to tell. It's just like the Republicrats in the US. and the political elites in Canada and Australia, etc.. Why is that? For the simple reason that it was to the English speaking countries that the vast majority of The Tribe emigrated a little over a hundred years ago.] @netanyahu @whitehouse Why It Is Apartheid in Israel Palestine | Arabisto ...Referring to Americans, Tutu added, “People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful. Well, so what? The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.” An apartheid society is much more than just a ‘settler colony’. It involves specific forms of oppression that actively strip the original inhabitants of any rights at all, whereas civilian members of the invader caste are given all kinds of sumptuous privileges... Peres, Blair, and Carcasses in Caracas | Roi Tov ...Having never served in the IDF, Peres' basis of political power relied on his special relations with the political secret police, the Shin Beth. Rabin often accused the latter of "cooking data," of conspiring. Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995. Later on, it was proved in Israeli court that the Shin Beth was involved in the killing. Neither the Shin Beth nor the Mossad assassinate without approval of the political upper echelon. Since Rabin obviously didn't sign his own death sentence, the next candidate to sign it was his deputy, Shimon Peres... The Meaning of Shock and Awe, by David Bromwich | Huffington Post ...This column suggested that the purpose of the coming war was to be sought in its exhibition of overwhelming force, and not in any publicly declared moral intention or military necessity. Indifference to the mass suffering and the thousands of deaths inflicted on Iraqis by the unprovoked American attack of March 2003 has been an unaltered fact of American public discussion in the decade since the start of the war... Reboot the Left on Palestine, by Harry Clark | Dissident Voice ...Zionist “Jewish nationality” was not nationalism; it rejected the actually existing Yiddish nation in eastern Europe, including the Yiddish language, in anti-Semitic terms. Modern Israeli Hebrew was not “revived” but largely invented; modern Hebrew culture is inextricably Zionist, bound up with its conquest and dispossession. The alleged unitary history and historiography of the Jewish people have, unsurprisingly, been demolished by authors like Shlomo Sand, archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, linguist Paul Wexler, and others... The Assassination of Hugo Chavez: Video Documentary by Greg Palast | Information Clearing House On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nation's Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela – giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate takeover." U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed "President" and the leaders of the coup d'état... Jerusalem MPs demand Justice, by Lauren Booth | Gilad Atzmon ...As soon as the MP’s were successfully elected, the Israeli occupation authority began seeking measures with which to imprison or remove the MP’s permanently from their home city, Jerusalem. This was not legally possible. The ‘Entry into Israel Law 1952’, does not provide occupation authorities with the justification to deport MP›s, or any other Palestinians, from Jerusalem. However, the Israeli Interior Minister, Ronnie Bar, sought to enforce the MP’s deportation, under a new initiative. An illegal action, whereby the occupier expels Palestinians from Jerusalem, for «disloyalty» to the Israeli authority... Karzai accuses US of collusion to destabilize Afghanistan, by John Robles | Voice of Russia The President of Afghanistan has made several statements of late and has taken a stance against the American occupiers of his country that have many in Washington bristling, with the latest being his statements that the US is in collusion with the Taliban to further destabilize the country in order to justify a continuing US presence and the prolongation of their “Security Assistance Invasion” and occupation of the strategically important country... [Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. There should be a lottery based on Karzai's life expectancy] Mar 11, 2013 On Questioning the Jewish State, by Joseph Levine | NYT ...Over the years I came to question this consensus and to see that the general fealty to it has seriously constrained open debate on the issue, one of vital importance not just to the people directly involved — Israelis and Palestinians — but to the conduct of our own foreign policy and, more important, to the safety of the world at large. My view is that one really ought to question Israel’s right to exist and that doing so does not manifest anti-Semitism... [Well said, professor, well said. Now, prepare yourself for the assault of the Pharisees. They will demand your crucifixion , but they'll settle for your job.] Damascus University Resists US Civilian Targeting Sanctions, by Franklin Lamb | Salem News One learns from them about the many effects on the education system in Syria of the US-led sanctions. Some argue that the Obama administration actually fuels the current crisis with its sanctions and achieves the opposite result of what the White House and its allies claim they are seeking. These freewheeling discussions leave a foreigner with a reminder why this university and its student body ranks among the best in the World. More than 200,000 full-time and ‘open-learning’ students at Damascus University, the 6th largest in the World and founded in 1901, are feeling some effects of the harsh Obama Administration’s civilian targeting sanctions... From Iraq to Iran: Memories Ignored & Lessons Unlearned | Wide Asleep in America On October 12, 2002, one day after the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to authorize the Bush Administration’s use of military force against Iraq, the Iraqi government sent a letter to officials overseeing the U.N. weapons inspection programs. The Iraqis reiterated their pledge to allow inspectors to operate in the country “as soon as possible,” as long as the inspectors abided by the United Nations’ own terms of agreement. The letter did not address specific demands that Iraq provide unrestricted access to weapons sites. “This is more of the same games they have been playing for the past 10 years,” a senior White House official said. “They continue to play games of denial and deception.”.. Italy kingmaker's anti-Jewish views under scrutiny | Ynet Comic Beppe Grillo's populist tirades were seen as a benign outlet for popular anger in the days his protest movement was a sideshow in Italian politics. Now that he's one of Italy's most powerful figures, his views are coming under greater scrutiny – and a history of anti-Semitic statements has started to raise concern outside the country. Grillo's 5-Star Movement captured a quarter of the votes in last month's national elections, making him the kingmaker in a ballot that left none of the mainstream parties in control of Parliament... [Go Beppe! See also Beppe Grillo Dissects the Financial System] Israel: A De Facto Member of NATO, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research ...in November 2004 in Brussels, NATO and Israel signed an important bilateral protocol which paved the way for the holding of joint NATO-Israel military exercises. A followup agreement was signed in March 2005 in Jerusalem between NATO’s Secretary General and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The 2005 bilateral military cooperation agreement was viewed by the Israeli military as a means to “enhance Israel’s deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria.” The ongoing premise underlying NATO-Israel military cooperation is that “Israel is under attack”.. Internal Document for Al-Nusra Front: How Turkey Recruits Fighters in Syria | Al-Manar The document is a ten page application form distributed by the Turkish authorities on Syrians inside Syria. Based on the information mentioned in the application, the individual is enlisted either in the ranks of a certain phalanx that fights in Syria, as an intelligence agent, or as a recruit for the intelligence agents that work inside Syria. The source of this document is an injured Syrian who was in the ranks of the militants. His family took him to Europe for treatment after he was injured in his spinal cord, so he passed on this document to us to publish it and comment on its articles and points... How MEMRI doctored Finkelstein's interview to portray him as a Holocaust denier | Norman G. Finkelstein ...There are many people unfortunately who, because Israel has misused the Nazi holocaust, exploited the Nazi holocaust, they have decided to deny the Nazi holocaust ever happened. Now, to me, that’s foolish. You can’t deny facts. It happened. It was horrific. What you should do, in my opinion, is to expose the wrong purposes, the evil purposes to which these facts are being put. That’s a separate question.”.. [A slight quibble, Norman. Do you mean Slurpy O’Brien’s version of what happened, perhaps Petunia LaSerration’s? Ah, you mean the dogma of the Holycause?] Arabic under fire, by Brian Whitaker | The Guardian MEMRI, the "research institute" which specialises in translating portions of the Arabic media into English, has issued a video clip from a children's programme on Hamas TV in which it claims that a Palestinian girl talked of becoming a suicide bomber and annihilating the Jews. MEMRI - described by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as "invaluable" - supplies translations free of charge to journalists, politicians and others, particularly in the US. Though Memri claims to be "independent" and maintains that it does not "advocate causes or take sides", it is run by Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence... Col James Steele, USA: Death Squads & Torture from El Salvador to Iraq, by Berto Jongman | Public Intelligence Blog A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services... NY Times agrees: Iran nuclear negotations doomed by Israeli-owned US Congress | Iran Affairs Imagine my surprise when I see an editorial in the NY Times that I can actually agree with! The NY Times editors typically have the most misleading and inaccurate claims about Iran, even repeatedly referring to a non-existent "Iranian nuclear weapons program" but today they have an editorial entitled "Congress gets in the way on Iran" in which they complain that fresh Congressional sanctions on Iran harm the nuclear negotiations. More significantly, it indirectly cites AIPAC, Israel and Netanyahu as the motivation behind the measures... Israelis flock to Berlin for better life | Al Jazeera ..."It's strange," says Avisar Lev, 35, nestling into the snug armchair near the window. "I immediately felt at home in Berlin, for the first time in my life." When he and his wife, Noa Golan, moved to the German capital three months ago, they only took their most important belongings: their cat Buja and their dog Lucy. All the restrictions and constraints of their Israeli life were left behind.. "Living became very much impossible in Israel," says Lev. The couple had saved money in order to buy a flat and start a life together. "But you can't start a life in Israel," explains his wife. "If they want, landlords in Tel Aviv can increase the prices for their properties by 200 percent.".. 'Tablet' publishes Vilkomerson saying lobby promotes Islamophobia, and 'power over justice,' by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss Tablet has a roundtable about the Israel lobby. All the voices are Jewish. The best commenter is Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace, though Noah Pollak of the Emergency Committee for Israel lets his guard down in a remarkable manner. It is remarkable that Tablet, a home to ultra-Zionists, is offering even this much truth about Israel to its readers... Haredi Draft: "Glad to go to prison" | Roi Tov ...Apparently the next Israeli government would be a rare one, without Haredim and Hasidim, the Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy is about to be abandoned by the Zionists, who seem to have forgotten the Unholy Alliance that allowed the creation of the State of Israel. This development led to protests that are a more powerful event than the negotiations... Israel: 65 years of war crimes, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis I find myself wondering how many of our present-day leaders, President Barack Obama in particular, are aware of what happened in Palestine that became Israel on 10 March 65 years ago today. On that day in 1948, two months before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism’s in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally adopt Plan Dalet, the blueprint with operational military orders for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorized as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was “transfer”.. US Plots Conquest of Venezuela in Wake of Chavez’ Death, by Tony Cartalucci | Global Research US corporate-financier funded think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), declared in its “post-Chávez checklist for US policymakers,” that the US must move quickly to reorganize Venezuela according to US interests. Upon its checklist were “key demands”:. In reality, AEI is talking about dismantling entirely the obstacles that have prevented the US and the corporate-financier interests that direct it, from installing a client regime and extracting entirely Venezuela’s wealth while obstructing, even dismantling the progress and geopolitical influence achieved by the late President Hugo Chavez throughout South America and beyond... The Death of Hugo Chavez: Executive Orders to “Assassinate Foreign Leaders” Emanate Directly from the US President, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research Was the president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez Frias the object of a targeted assassination by the Obama administration? When addressing this issue, it is worth recalling that in the immediate wake of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush restored the sordid practices of the CIA by revoking President Ford’s 1976 Executive Order 12333 which banned the CIA from conducting “targeted assassinations” of foreign leaders... Researcher uncovers hidden facts of Israeli-Palestinian water politics | University of Sussex The Israeli government has been forcing the Palestinian Authority into approving water infrastructure for illegal West Bank settlements for the past 15 years, according to research by a University of Sussex academic.. It presents the first known evidence of the Palestinian Authority lending its official consent to parts of Israel’s settlement expansion programme. Settlements and related infrastructure are illegal under international law, and are recognised as one of the major obstacles to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The research is based on minutes of the Joint Water Committee – an Israeli-Palestinian body often upheld as an example of good Israeli-Palestinian relations... Mar 10, 2013 Venezuelan Economic and Social Performance Under Hugo Chávez, in Graphs | The Americas Blog On Tuesday, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez passed away after 14 years in office. Below is a series of graphs that illustrate the economic and social changes that have taken place in Venezuela during this time period... A Blank Check for Israel? Bad Idea, by Matthew Duss | The American Prospect ...when speaking to the press, Jalili was not, as in the past, flanked by photos of assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists. While it’s a sign of how frustrating the 2012 rounds of talks in Istanbul, Baghdad, and Moscow were that we should find encouragement in such things, given what’s at stake—the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon or another Middle East war—there’s little question that continued, energetic diplomatic engagement toward a negotiated solution is the most responsible course... As world’s largest exporter of drones, Israel looks to transform battlefield | JTA An Israeli soldier sits in an office chair in an air-conditioned metal chamber staring at two screens side by side. One shows a map with a moving dot. The other displays a video feed. Next to the soldier are three more identical stations. The soldier isn't an air traffic controller but a pilot, and his aircraft is called an unmanned aerial system, more commonly known as a drone. Welcome to the next generation of the Israeli Air Force... Iron Dome System Failed Miserably | Tikun Olam ...After examining hundreds of videos of Iron Dome launchings during the military campaign, they came to the conclusion that the anti-missile weapon may’ve shot down 5% of its targets. They define a definite kill as a missile hitting the nose of the rocket, where the weapons payload is. The IDF’s claims of success, they explain, result from confusion about the explosion that often occurred as the missile approached its target. In the vast majority of cases, the explosion was that of the missile self-destructing when it detected it would not strike the Palestinian rocket. Postol also evaluated the success rate of Patriot missiles during the Gulf War and found that they didn’t hit any of their targets... Israel is seeking Security Zone in Syria | YouTube Syria is expecting Jihadi-Israeli terrorism in the occupied Golan... US-British Al Qaeda Airlift: 3,000 Tons of Weapons Fuel Syria's Destruction | Land Destroyer The primary reason, we are told, that the West must immediately begin wider operations to support the so-called Syrian rebels is to head off extremists - namely Al Qaeda, from overrunning Syria. This narrative has been sold for nearly a year now as it has become evidently clear that all major offensives in Syria against the Syrian people and their government have been led by Al Qaeda terrorist fronts, including most notoriously, Jabhat al-Nusra... The Big Chill | Nieman Reports ..The post-post-9/11 period finds the U.S. aggressively experimenting with two new highly disruptive forms of combat—drone strikes and cyberattacks—for which our leaders appear to be making up the rules, in secret, as they go along. Troubling legal and moral issues left behind by the previous administration remain unresolved. Far from reversing the Bush-Cheney executive power grab, President Barack Obama is taking it to new extremes by unilaterally approving indefinite detention of foreign prisoners and covert targeted killings of terror suspects, even when they are American citizens... How Petraeus Quietly Stoked the Fires of Sectarian War Without Getting Burned, by Gareth Porter | Truthout The discovery of his affair with Paula Broadwell has ended David Petraeus' career, but the mythology of Petraeus as the greatest US military leader since Eisenhower for having engineered turnarounds in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lives on. A closer examination of his role in those wars reveals a very different picture, however... Time To Sequester Austerity: For Good, by Frank Scott | Legalienate Many still swallow the preposterous notion that the 1% and their finances are too big to fail while the 99% and their lives are too small to succeed. That’s always been the rationale of class division, whether between royalty and serfs, masters and slaves or at present between corporate capital and the rest of humanity. In the way that royalty bought off some peasants and slavers bought off some house negroes, present wealth divisions rely on turning working people into renters, owners and eventually debt carrying consumers of just about everything except what they might really need... Israel Attacks Muslim-Jewish Kindergarten | Roi Tov ...on March 13, 2013 the trial of the century will open in Kiryat Bialik, a Zionist settlement by the Mediterranean Sea. During this event, the mighty State of Israel will throw all the hideous weight of its legal—but illegitimate—power against a kindergarten.. it is bilingual Hebrew-Arabic and follows an Anthroposophic philosophy. In other words, they preach humanist-scientific education.. More expensive than regular education, it has become fashionable for wealthy parents. However, this school sinned by teaching also Arabic... Is Palestinian Solidarity an Occupied Zone? | Gilad Atzmon Once involved with Palestinian Solidarity you have to accept that Jews are special and so is their suffering; Jews are like no other people, their Holocaust is like no other genocide and anti Semitism is the most vile form of racism the world has ever known and so on and so forth... Ugh! Senators Warren and Franken Vote to Confirm Brennan to Head CIA, by John Spritzler | New Democracy World If anyone doubts that liberal politicians in Congress with a reputation for being "for the little guy" are in fact the opposite, the fact that the darlings of the liberal left--Senators Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken--voted Yea to confirm John O. Brennan to head the CIA should remove any doubt. Brennan is famous for being President Obama's right-hand man and "spiritual" advisor behind Obama's use of drones to kill, with not even any judicial process, anybody he wants to kill, including the American citizen and American-born sixteen year old, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people... Oz-Israeli Ben Zygier scandal, by Gideon Polya | MCW News Ben Zygier, a dual Israeli and Australian citizen and Jewish Australian father of 2, was secretly imprisoned for 11 months in solitary confinement by the Israelis in 2010 until he was either killed by the Israelis or, as alleged by the Israelis, committed suicide in a suicide-proof cell. Solitary confinement for more than several weeks is regarded by experts as torture. Whether Australian citizen and father of 2 Ben Zygier was murdered by the Israelis or committed suicide in a suicide-proof cell, it is clear that he was secretly tortured to death by the Israelis over 11 months while the pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government did nothing... Serial Killer Heads CIA | Stephen Lendman Chalmers Johnson called the CIA the president's private army. Imperial Rome had its praetorian guard. It served and protected emperors. CIA rogues work the same way. They do lots more than that. Extrajudicial killing is prioritized. Much that goes on is secret. Unaccountability keeps Congress and ordinary people uninformed. Johnson said US presidents have "untrammeled control of the CIA." It's "probably (their) single most extraordinary power.".. Read more... The caudillo and the columnist: O'Grady on Chavez, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera For many years, Wall Street Journal columnist Mary O'Grady - a member of that special category of human being for whom anyone slightly less than fanatically right-wing qualifies as a raging leftist - has functioned as a caricature of herself. Case in point: In the same 2009 dispatch in which she determined that Hillary Clinton and Fidel Castro were ideological bedfellows, O'Grady argued that Honduras had "defend[ed] its democracy" by overthrowing its democratically-elected president in a military coup... [Shabbas goyim are a dime a dozen] Israel Shahak: The Laws Against Non-Jews In 2 Minutes | Video Rebel ...one of the two most important commentators on the Shulhan Arukh explains that when it comes to a Gentile, ‘one must not lift one’s hand to harm him, but one may harm him indirectly, for instance by removing a ladder after he had fallen into a crevice .., there is no prohibition here, because it was not done directly: He points out, however, that an act leading indirectly to a Gentile’s death is forbidden if it may cause the spread of hostility towards Jews. A Gentile murderer who happens to be under Jewish jurisdiction must be executed whether the victim was Jewish or not. However, if the victim was Gentile and the murderer converts to Judaism, he is not punished... [See video] Wall Street Banks, Money Laundering and the Drug Trade, by Tom Burghardt | Global Research In Reckless Endangerment, a lively exposé of the frauds at the heart of the subprime meltdown, journalists Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner wrote that if “mortgage originators like NovaStar or Countrywide were the equivalent of drug pushers hanging around a schoolyard and the ratings agencies were the narcotics cops looking the other way, brokerage firms providing capital to the anything-goes lenders were the overseers of the cartel.” Their observations are all the more relevant given the outrageous behavior by major banks which polluted an already terminally corrupt financial system with blood-spattered cash siphoned-off from the global drug trade... Mar 9, 2013 AP: Chavez Wasted His Money on Healthcare When He Could Have Built Gigantic Skyscrapers | FAIR ...Chavez squandered his nation's oil money on healthcare, education and nutrition when he could have been building the world's tallest building or his own branch of the Louvre. What kind of monster has priorities like that?.. [Answer: The kind of people who run the empire] Read more...Massimo Calabresi's 'Path To War,' by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America ...Calabresi, whose access to senior officials appears to rely on his fealty to government talking points and never questioning American benevolence, claims that Obama "has worked hard to avoid war" with Iran before praising the president's efforts "to slow or derail the Iranian program through a combination of diplomacy, sanctions and covert action." One wonders how the United States would classify having its economy deliberately targeted and being the victim of collective punishment, cyberattacks, industrial sabotage, surveillance, espionage, and lethal operations conducted by foreign-backed terrorist organizations. The word "war" certainly comes to mind... Read more... Iran and the United States: What Really Matters to Middle Eastern Publics? by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett | Huffington Post Addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual conference in Washington on Monday, Vice President Biden claimed that Iran is on the defensive in its own neighborhood: "When we came to office...Iran was on the ascendancy in the region. It is no longer on the ascendancy." In fact, the Obama administration has "left Iran more isolated than ever." And that matters, Biden said, because "God forbid, if we have to act, it's important that the rest of the world is with us." Biden's words reflect an all-too-familiar trope about Iran -- that the non-Arab and Shi'a Islamic Republic can be easily isolated in its regional environment, thereby facilitating its ultimate demise... Read more... The strategy in Syria has failed, by Sean Fenley | Asia Times Online While Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was questioning the former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel, during his secretary of defense nomination hearing, she mentioned chemical weapons and Syria. I think that the good Senator Gillibrand should be aware that the so-called Free Syrian Army is a real threat with their chemical weapons too. They have been backed by disreputable American allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar that are Wahhabi states... Read more... The Stranglers: Zionist Strategies of Conquest | Roi Tov ...On January 3, 2013, 5,000 dunam of Palestinian lands in the Jordan Valley were confiscated by the Civil Administration, which justified its crime on IDF Order 151, issued in 1967, shortly after the area was conquered by Israel. The order defines all the areas between the Jordan River and the nearby fence placed by Israel as "closed military area." In certain places, the distance between the fence and the river reaches over a mile. In this event, the area was formally confiscated and given to Jewish settlers. This is a clear proof that the confiscation had no military reasons; it will be dedicated to agriculture. The Israeli government, its army, its Courts and its settlers cooperate in these criminal schemes... Read more... Marxist, Atheist, Jewish, Zionist and Prime Minister (wannabe) | Gilad Atzmon Haaretz reported today that “Britain's next Jewish prime minister says he is a Zionist” - how surprising. His brother David, was listed by an Israeli official website as an ‘Israeli propaganda (Hasbarah) Author’. Reading Haaretz today confirms that 'Red Ed' changed his mind, he is now 'Blue & White'. a genuine Zionist Jew. I guess that the British Labour party is, once again, Israeli occupied territory... [It's instructive to notice how easily a Left Wing fascist can transition to a Right Wing fascist, and vice versa, like the former Marxists in West Germany became earnest capitalists and the former Nazis became ardent communists in East Germany. Or the former Trotzkyites now manifesting as neocons. It's like religious fundamentalists - they can all happily party together, no matter which version of monotheism they fervently believe in. Blind faith is like that.] Read more...They Were Promised the Sea | Indiegogo Filmmaker Kathy Wazana set out to discover why hundreds of thousands of Jews left Morocco in the 1960s, believing their Arab homeland had become enemy territory. What she found was a country still grieving the loss of its Jewish population. Her “enemy” welcomed her home and claimed her as one of their own. Wazana’s investigation reveals a dramatic series of events that put an end to 2,000 years of Jewish-Arab coexistence and exposes the calculationsand political maneuvers that led to the mass exodus of Jews from their ancestral homeland, and to the dispossession and exile of the Palestinian people... The great Ethiopian land giveaway, by Graham Peebles | Redress Information & Analysis ..The land giveaway, or agrarian reforms as the Ethiopian government prefers to say, began in 2008 when the government, under the brutal premiership of Meles Zenawi, invited foreign countries and corporation to take up highly attractive deals and turn large areas of land over to industrial farming for the export of crops. India, China and Saudi Arabia were all courted and, along with wealthy Ethiopians, they eagerly grabbed large pieces of land at basement prices, with rates varying from 1.10 to 6.05 US dollars per hectare (ha). Comparable land in India would set you back 600 dollars per hectare... Read more... Fact Sheet: 65th Anniversary of the Adoption of Plan Dalet | IMEU From the earliest days of modern political Zionism, its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population. For many, the solution became known as "transfer," a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. As far back as 1895, the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.".. Read more... 'Ich bin ein Bil’iner!' by Uri Avnery | Palestine Chronicle This does not happen every day: a Minister of Culture publicly rejoices because a film from her country has not been awarded an Oscar. And not just one film, but two. It happened this week. Limor Livnat, still Minister of Culture in the outgoing government, told Israeli TV she was happy that Israel’s two entries for Oscars in the category of documentary films, which made it to the final four, did lose in the end.Livnat, one of the most extreme Likud members, has little chance of being included in the diminishing number of Likud ministers in the next government. Perhaps her outburst was meant to improve her prospects... Read more... The Sunni-Shia division in Islam, by Nasir Khan | MCW News The division of Islam into Shia and Sunni branches from the mid-seventh century was more due to political factors than with the fundamentals of the faith because they were the same for all people and power elites.Obviously, two rivals engaged in a struggle to gain upper-hand in political race cannot win unless they strike some compromise and avoid the conflict. This was possible but did not happen in the early phase of the growing polarisation that was taking place in the Muslim community (the Ummah).. Read more... Chavez: A Personal Tribute, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News ...Obama may have ordered him killed. Very likely he did. Believe it. Chavez did. He had good reason to do so. He said it openly. Castro warned him. He explained how imperial Washington works. Its rap sheet makes serial killers look saintly by comparison. State-sponsored murder is official policy. So is ravaging humanity ruthlessly. Washington does it for wealth, power and dominance. It spurns rule of law principles, democratic values and popular needs... Read more... Free in the Prison of Gaza: A Film | deLiberation At the end of 2011, 1028 Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Prisoners like Salah Hamouri were allowed to go home, but more than 200 of these prisoners were deported to Gaza or to neighbouring countries, which is a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention. Some of the prisoners have spent 19, 24, 26 years or more in prison. They are unknown to the world, unlike the Israeli solidier. We wanted to give a face and a story to Amr, Obeid, Mohamed, Wafa, Bassim, Hamza, Louay, Samir, Ata et Tawfik... Bilderberg Group: The Secret Rulers of the World | deLiberation In 1954, the most powerful men in the world met for the first time under the auspices of the Dutch royal crown and the Rockefeller family at the luxurious Hotel Bilderberg in the small Dutch town of Oosterbeek. For an entire weekend, they debated the future of the world. ‘When it was over, they decided to meet once every year to exchange ideas and analyze international affairs. They named themselves the Bilderberg Group. Since then, they have gathered yearly in a luxurious hotel somewhere in the world to try to decide the future of humanity... Read more... Mar 8, 2013 Hugo Chavez, RIP (Cont'd) Venezuela's left-wing populist president Hugo Chávez died on Tuesday, March 5, after a two-year battle with cancer. If world leaders were judged by the sheer volume of corporate media vitriol and misinformation about their policies, Chávez would be in a class of his own... For BBC Television, Palast met several times with Hugo Chàvez, who passed away today. As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a FREE download. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television.. "It's a chess game, Mr. Palast," Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long, and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. "And I am," Chavez said, "a very good chess player.".. Once I asked whether he preferred enemies who hated him because they knew what he was doing or those who frothed and foamed out of ignorance. He laughed. The former was preferable, he explained, because they made him feel that he was on the right track. Hugo Chávez’s death did not come as a surprise, but that does not make it easier to accept... What this man meant, and means, to the global south and to all those striving for a better path for humanity, can not be overstated. I am saddened almost beyond words. Part of me wants to just curl up and be sad. But I also feel that it is critical to find the words, and to keep circulating them, saying them over and over. Viva Comandante Chavez! Viva la revolucion! Viva el socialismo boliviano!! Priceless Colbert on Israel | War in Context Why Is The US Spending Hundreds Of Millions On These Secret Israeli Bunkers? by Robert Johnson | Business Insider Last year it was announced the U.S. was looking to build a secret underground complex in Israel. On February 13 a contract was awarded to Conti Corp Federal Services in Edison, NJ to complete the project... Talking Turkey About Zionism, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in trouble again with Washington and Tel Aviv because he dared to equate Zionism with fascism and anti-Semitism as an ideology or political movement that has brought oppression. Erdogan was speaking at a United Nations sponsored Alliance of Civilizations conference in Vienna dealing with instilling tolerance. He spoke in Turkish, but his words as translated into English were "It is necessary that we must consider – just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism – Islamophobia is a crime against humanity." Erdogan was immediately pounced upon by the usual suspects and new American Secretary of State John Kerry... Kindergarten news: U.S. envoy walks out of nuclear meeting over Iran's Israel remark | Reuters The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations nuclear watchdog walked out of an agency meeting on Wednesday in protest when Iran's representative accused Washington's ally Israel of "genocide", diplomats said. Officials from Canada and Australia also left the closed-door meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation governing board when Iran's Ali Asghar Soltanieh made his statement during a debate on Syria... John Baird to Palestinians: You’ll face consequences if you take Israel to ICC | National Post Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has told a powerful pro-Israel lobby that Palestinians will feel “consequences” from Canada if they pursue the Jewish state at the International Criminal Court. Baird issued the warning just as the federal government considers whether to end hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian humanitarian aid to the Palestinians when it expires at the end of this month. Baird delivered his message to an approving audience Sunday in Washington at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee... [Isn’t it odd that the leaders of the English speaking countries seem to go out of their way to demonstrate why they failed kindergarten] Ignoring Genocide, by Ramzy Baroud | Counterpunch One fails to understand the unperturbed attitude with which regional and international leaders and organizations are treating the unrelenting onslaught against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, formally known as Burma. Numbers speak of atrocities where every violent act is prelude to greater violence and ethnic cleansing. Yet, western governments’ normalization with the Myanmar regime continues unabated, regional leaders are as gutless as ever and even human rights organizations seem compelled by habitual urges to issue statements lacking meaningful, decisive and coordinated calls for action... 11 Years Later, Senate Wakes Up to War on Terror's 'Battlefield America,' by Spencer Ackerman | Wired Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster will inevitably fail at its immediate objective: derailing John Brennan’s nomination to run the CIA. But as it stretches into its sixth hour, it’s already accomplished something far more significant: raising political alarm over the extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year “war on terrorism.”.. Eritreans Tortured by Israel | Roi Tov ...In recent years, Israel has been experiencing a migration of African workers into its territory. Israel loves them, they are excellent workers and accept slave-salaries. Many of them are political-asylum seekers. They can be extradited at any moment; thus they don't complain. When their number became too large for the taste of the administration, Israel started to expell them using illegal ways... Neuroscience, Special Forces and Yale, by Roy Eidelson | Counterpunch Last month, a proposal to establish a U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Center for Excellence in Operational Neuroscience at Yale University died a not-so-quiet death. The broad goal of “operational neuroscience” is to use research on the human brain and nervous system to protect and give tactical advantage to U.S. warfighters in the field. Crucial questions remain unanswered about the proposed center’s mission and the unusual circumstances surrounding its demise. But just as importantly, this episode brings much needed attention to the morally fraught and murky terrain where partnerships between university researchers and national security agencies lie... EU-funded Israeli theft, by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis A leaked report commissioned by the European Union has concluded that Israeli settlement construction “remains the single biggest threat” to peace in the Middle East. The confidential, 15-page report outlines 10 recommendations for the 27 EU states to consider regarding Israel’s wanton activities in occupied Palestine. It describes proposals by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to build more “Jews-only colonies as “systematic, deliberate and provocative”.. Chomsky Acknowledges the Neocons as the Dominant Force in Pushing for Iraq War, by Stephen Sniegoski | The Passionate Attachment Thanks to the efforts of the indefatigable James Morris, a seeming transformation of the view of the illustrious Noam Chomsky was revealed, which, if not equivalent to the change that Saul of Tarsus underwent while on the road to Damascus, was significant nonetheless.. While Chomsky is a strong and very knowledgeable critic of Israel, he also has been (at least, was before this program) a stringent critic of the idea that the neocons have any significant impact on American Middle East policy. Rather, he presents a somewhat nebulous, quasi-monolithic, corporate elite, which includes the oil interests, as determining American policy in that region... How Obama Beat the Israel Lobby, by M.J. Rosenberg | MCW News I am not one for admitting I am wrong but sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming that I have to say it. I was wrong. I have been repeatedly wrong when I said that the Israel lobby could not be defeated unless and until the President of the United States confronted it directly. In that situation, I always knew the United States would prevail. But I did not understand that a deft president could beat the lobby through indirect means – by quietly using his authority to prevail... Mar 7, 2013 Hugo Chavez (1954-2013), RIP Reactions to the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez have been as mixed, polemical and outsized as the leader was in life, with some saying his passing was a tragic loss and others calling it an opportunity for Venezuela to escape his long shadow. Leaders from Latin America, many of them his staunch allies, lined up to salute Chavez, with Cuba leading the plaudits to a man hailed as a "true son" to the communist nation's revolutionary icon Fidel Castro... ..How enlightening to watch world leaders' reactions to the death of Venezuela's El Comandante Hugo Chavez. Uruguay's President Jose Mujica - a man who actually shuns 90% of his salary because he insists he covers his basic necessities with much less - once again reminded everyone how he qualified Chavez as "the most generous leader I ever met", while praising the "fortress of democracy" of which Chavez was a great builder. Compare it with US President Barack Obama - in what sounds like a dormant cut and paste by some White House intern - reaffirming US support for "the Venezuelan people".. Back in 2010, the Venezuelan anti-government opposition underwent a typical bout of hysteria in response to President Hugo Chavez's proposed plan to import Ramiro Valdes, Cuba's Minister of Information Technology and Communications, to help rectify the Venezuelan electrical crisis.. The mayor of Caracas was quoted in the opposition daily El Nacional confirming that Valdes, "far from knowing anything about electrical matters.. is more of a specialist in electrocuting people whose opinions differ from those of the regime". Of course, this assessment failed to jibe with other anti-Valdes arguments in the opposition arsenal such as those concerning the non-existence of electricity in Cuba... ...I am in awe of the life of Hugo Chavez and I make no apologies for respecting that life. Instead of vilifying him, Americans should be aware that it was Chavez and the people of Venezuela that first offered aid after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and it was Chavez that offered heating oil to the poor of the American Northeast. Obama could learn what leadership really could be by studying the life of Chavez... Venezuelans mourn. Chavismo lives! Bolivarianism is institutionalized. Venezuelans expect no less. They want no part of their ugly past. They'll put their bodies on the line to prevent it. They did before. They'll do it again. Bolivarianism is policy. It's vital to preserve. It's polar opposite neoliberal harshness. America and Venezuela are constitutional worlds apart... Bertrand Russell once wrote about the American revolutionary Thomas Paine, "He had faults, like other men; but it was for his virtues that he was hated and successfully calumniated." This was certainly true of Hugo Chavez Frias, who was probably more demonised than any democratically elected president in world history. But he was repeatedly re-elected by wide margins, and will be mourned not only by Venezuelans, but also by many Latin Americans who appreciate what he did for the region. Chavez survived a military coup backed by Washington and oil strikes that crippled the economy. But once he got control of the oil industry, his government reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70 percent... ...It doesn't matter how long one spends studying the State of Israel; it is impossible to understand the beast without spending at least one IDF Memorial Day locked in at home listening to the radio. The infinite sadness of the songs is archetypal of the culture. Most Israelis consider it the most sacred day of the year; during it, the Israeli inner side is exposed. Israel sends messages not through noisy headlines, those eternal decoys, but through sad songs reproduced in the inner pages. Don't listen to Netanyahu's formal speech, but look what his aide told another irrelevant person and was reproduced in an inconspicuous page of the newspaper... Betrayal in Baghdad: How the World Forgot About Iraq, by Patrick Cockburn | Counterpunch It is 10 years since the start of the war in Iraq which led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein. The diplomatic map of the world has been redrawn as a consequence. Inquiry after inquiry has studied the legality of the conflict. Political reputations have been made and lost. But what of the country itself?.. From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads | The Guardian In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America's dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage... Kairos Palestine: Apartheid Israeli Style| Desert Peace ...While officially the new lines are considered “general bus lines,” Ynet learned Saturday that their existence has been made public only in Palestinian villages in the West Bank, via flyers in Arabic urging Palestinians to arrive at Eyal crossing and use the designated lines. The Transportation Ministry defended the plan, saying it was the result of reports and complaints saying that the buses traveling in the area were overcrowded and rife with tensions between the Jewish and Arab passengers... Fighting a Global War of Terror, by Victoria Brittain | TomDispatch The Global War on Terror has had many victims since it was launched by President George W. Bush soon after September 11, 2001. In his “crusade,” a word he used publicly before he thought better of it ("This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism”), the history of kidnappings and renditions, torture and abuse, imprisonment without charges or trial, drone assassinations and the killing of civilians is by now well known (for those who care to know). But there are other less noted kinds of “collateral damage” from more than a decade of such conflict, including damage to women on both sides - or perhaps ends - of the war... Israel flag wavers plan to “re-educate” MP David Ward, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis If reports are true, UK Liberal Democrats have appointed the pro-Israel lobby as ‘probation officers and educators’. They will judge if David Ward is ‘salvageable’ and lay down precise language rules. British MP David Ward, champion of the oppressed, is to be put on probation and “re-educated” after ruffling Jewish feathers with his controversial “use of language”.. To Those Wondering, "What's Wrong With the F*%$#@! American People?" by John Spritzler | New Democracy World If you are angry at what the rulers of the United States are doing, and if you want a more equal and democratic society instead of the increasingly unequal one our rulers are foisting on us, then I am addressing this article to you. Many of you are extremely frustrated with the American people because they are not rising up against the plutocracy that runs our country. They don't wage general strikes, or do the kinds of things one would expect people to do when their rulers attack them and unjustifiably attack foreign people in their name as well. "What's wrong with the f*%$#@! American people?" is what some of you are wondering... [John is a very good fellow. I’ve pleaded with him to drop the class warfare language – people just aren’t buying it anymore. What we need most to understand is that we’re all in this together, including the “plutocrats,” the “oligarchy,” the “owner class,” the Zionists, etc. It is our common humanity, rather than our economic (or religious, or ethnic, or national, et al) identity, that must be pointed out. It’s still worthwhile reading what John has written. Most of it is true.] Kerry: Iran Moving Closer to Nuclear Weapons, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar Speaking today in Qatar, Secretary of State John Kerry accused Iran of moving ever closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon, insisting that they are “pushing the limits” of America’s patience and that “confrontation” is increasingly possible. The comments follow what have been virtually daily screeds from the State Department since the end of the most recent P5+1 talks with Iran, which everyone involved other than the United States seems to agree marked significant progress... [Kerry reverted to type after his partial awakening in Vietnam – an experience that in the end didn’t appear to teach him anything. It’s not easy to leave the Borg collective, particularly if you’re one of leader drones.] Centcom Chief Rejects Diplomacy, Says Iran Must Be ‘Brought to Its Knees,’ by Jason Ditz | Antiwar Speaking to Congress today, Central Command leader Gen. James Mattis insisted sanctions are not successful against Iran, and suggested that diplomacy had been all but useless, insisting that Iran’s “history of deceit” meant they could never be trusted at any rate. Mattis conceded that he is “paid to take a rather dim view of the Iranians,” which is putting it mildly... Dennis Ross: Netanyahu’s attorney in Washington, by Noam Sheizaf | +972 Magazine Dennis Ross presents a framework for renewing the peace process, which he apparently lifted directly from the Israeli PM’s hard disk – including de facto recognition of permanent Israeli control over eight percent of the West Bank... What Has US Militarism Wrought? by Robert Parry | Consortium News Most Americans get the gist of President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the influence of the “military-industrial complex,” how money and jobs would tie congressmen to the interests of arms manufacturers in their districts. But there are other less obvious, though equally insidious, ways militarism has distorted the Republic. Since World War II, even institutions that were supposed to provide some check on this power of military spending have been corrupted – from the U.S. press corps to academic scholars to analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency. The money from militarism has seeped far downstream from actual arms manufacturing... What If a Drone Attacked in the US? by Camillo Mac Bica | Information Clearing House "..Iran has utilized its newly developed drone capability to execute three members of the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), a terrorist organization responsible for killing and injuring many hundreds of Iranians, including Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan and four other civilian university professors and scientists. The strike took place early Tuesday morning in a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio. The Iranian intelligence agency reports that the three targeted individuals killed in the attack were senior MEK operational leaders. Sources on the ground report that in addition to three adult males, 10 American civilians, four women and six children were also killed... This is the great David Cole | Paul Eisen The clip is from a longer piece "Ernst Zundel interviews David Cole". If you haven't ever seen it, now's your chance... Is the Anti-Occupation Movement Driven by Defenders of Genocide? by Dr. Paul Larudee | Counterpunch If there is one message that unifies critics of Israel and advocates for Palestinian rights, it is “End the Occupation.” As with many unifying messages, however, it is successful partly because of its ambiguity. What land and which people are occupied? And what are the terms under which the “occupation” will be ended. The ambiguity allows groups as disparate as Hamas and J Street to chant the phrase with very different images in mind. Hamas and other anti-Zionists argue that all of the land defined by the British Mandate of Palestine is occupied territory, while J Streeters and other “soft” Zionists commonly refer only to Israel’s 1967 territorial conquests as “occupied.”.. The historical context of the Israeli land and planning law regime, by Gerry Liston | Mondoweiss The origins of the modern Israeli land and planning law regimes can be traced back to 1901, the year in which the Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established. The JNF, which, as will be seen, still plays a dominant role in the Israeli land law regime, was originally founded for the purpose of acquiring land in Palestine. According to the memorandum of association of the English company into which the Fund was first incorporated, its object is to acquire land in Palestine “for the purpose of settling Jews on such lands.”.. Mar 5-6, 2013 Israel-Palestine: the question Jews must answer, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis There is one absolute precondition for ending the Israel-Palestine conflict by diplomacy and negotiations on the basis, as it would have to be, of justice for the Palestinians and peace with security for all. It is that the Jews acknowledge (1) that a terrible wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism in the name of all Jews everywhere – the terrible wrong being the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a process that continues to this day slowly and by stealth on the occupied West Bank; and (2) that this wrong must be addressed. The question arising is this: why are most Jews unable and/or unwilling to acknowledge the wrong done to the Palestinians?.. [As Gideon Levy put it, "The only recognition that is needed now is Israel's recognition of the Palestinians as human beings. If this is obtained, all the rest will be relatively easy."] A Reckless Apartheid Fighter, by Israel Shamir | deLiberation Andre Pshenichnikov (24) is a most unusual kid. So unusual that he is languishing in Egyptian jail for crossing the border without proper papers. But his story begins earlier. I first heard of him when this young programmer from a Tel Aviv suburb stayed in Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. He did not go there to explore Palestinian way of life, or to write for a newspaper; he was not looking for publicity, he did not hide nor emphasize his Israeli identity. He did not act as an activist, marching at demos and enjoying popularity. He just rented a room, worked at a building site or waited tables in a tourist restaurant just like any Palestinian youth of his age... Leaked FBI papers reveal Israeli Agents smuggled NUKE Secrets from U.S. | Extreme Prejudice Reconfirmation of old news... Advertising campaigns target AIPAC and US aid to Israel across Washington DC, by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss As the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) gathered for its annual policy conference in Washington, D.C. today, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and Visualizing Palestine launched an advertising campaign calling on the United States to end $30 billion of military aid to Israel. A three-day mobile truck ad highlighting the devastating impact U.S. weapons have on Palestinians will follow AIPAC attendees during their conference and as they lobby Members of Congress for more weapons for Israel... Saying "Peace;" Meaning "War" | Roi Tov ..."While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said,..." This text appears several times in the first chapter of the Book of Job, and had become a central Hebrew idiom while describing repeated disasters. Several messengers reach Job and tell him that everything in his life is dead and destroyed; sons, daughters, animals, everything is gone. I felt the same. I was still shocked by the item above, when an ever more distressing one reached me. Distressing to the extent that reading the pictureless text was difficult; distressing on the verge of vomiting during the event... Israel and America: The “Special Relationship” That Isn’t, by Dr. Alan Sabrosky | My Catbird Seat Whenever Israel's supporters today speak of a "special relationship" with the US that is supposedly graven in stone, it is useful to remember that something very different existed when Israel came into existence in 1948 on the gutted carcass of Palestine. The US recognized Israel, but that was about it. Hollywood was (and remains) largely a Jewish preserve, but their level of influence elsewhere.. was limited. Prominent American Jews felt no obligation to endorse Israel or Israeli leaders, no matter what happened. Dozens (including Albert Einstein) signed a letter published in the New York Times in 1948 protesting the arrival of Menachem Begin and condemning his actions... Israel and Palestine: Two states, two peoples, by Ben White | Al Jazeera English The slogan "two states for two peoples" has long been used by those who support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Ironically, however, such a framework risks cementing Israeli apartheid and Jewish privilege, evoking the same sorts of arguments put forward by defenders of South Africa's historical regime of systematic discrimination. There are three problems with the "two states for two peoples" formulation... Why we must resist Netanyahu and the hawks' reckless push for war on Iran, by Murtaza Hussain | The Guardian ...the past several weeks would seem to indicate the most positive developments towards a peaceful resolution to the standoff in recent memory. The immediate response to this outcome, which would ordinarily be viewed by any rational actor as good news, is revealing for how it identifies the parties such as Netanyahu for whom the primary objective in shaping policy towards Iran is not to find a mutually acceptable resolution, but to engineer a war. For them, the nuclear issue simply provides a useful pretext. The prospect, therefore, of a negotiated settlement is an obstacle to be avoided and undermined at every opportunity... Announcement on the establishment of “The Jaffa Group for One Democratic State” | Free Haifa During recent months a series of meetings were held in the city of Jaffa where activists discussed possible routes of action to promote the solution of one democratic state in historic Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Participants in these meetings were both Arab and Jewish, both female and male – activists from various movements and parties, involved in political, social, cultural and ideological activities. The program for One Democratic State is not a utopia but a practical plan to solve the pressing problems of this country’s inhabitants... Argo: Hollywood’s Anti-Iranian Argot, by Ben Tanosborn | Middle East Online ...Argo is a timely movie in deception and propaganda preparing the American people for possible military events which could take place in the not-too-distant future as Iran nears entry into a nuclear future that Israel has vowed to bring to a halt, something that the American government (and its military) is uneasy about, even when acknowledging total support for Israel... As We Near the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War, by James Fallows | The Atlantic Here is something other than The Sequester to think about at the beginning of March: This month marks ten years since the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq. In my view this was the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II and perhaps over a much longer period. Vietnam was costlier and more damaging, but also more understandable. As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a "war of choice" whose costs we are still paying... Skull and Bones blueblood John Kerry seeks destruction of Syria, by Dr. Webster G. Tarpley | PressTV ..Kerry has already signaled that he will be more aggressive and ruthless than his predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, when it comes to implementing the US program of destroying the sovereign and independent nation states of the world, and replacing them with micro states, mini states, rump states, failed states, warlords, and chaos. Accordingly, Kerry wants to increase aid to the Syrian rebels, whom his own department has branded as terrorists... Exhuming Vietnam: An interview with Nick Turse, the author of 'Kill Anything That Moves,' by Kelley B. Vlahos | Antiwar ...For Nick Turse, an investigative journalist and managing editor of TomDispatch, his accidental discovery 10 years ago of what he describes as a trove of never-before-seen documents buried in the annals of the National Archives, could have been viewed as an impossible burden. These documents do everything suggested in the preceding two paragraphs and more. His formidable personal choice a decade ago: leave history in its uneasy, half-told entombment, or re-open a wound that nearly bled the country dry a generation ago, at a time before he was even born... Erdogan is Correct: Zionism is a Crime Against Humanity, by Khalid Amayreh | Palestine News Network ...To the people who are familiar with Israel, especially Palestinians, Lebanese and other Arabs who have been on the receiving end of Zionist criminality; Erdogan's remarks are a statement of the obvious. After all, Zionism is about the dispossession and usurpation of Palestine from its rightful native people, the Palestinians. It is the biggest act of theft and falsification since Adam and Eve. It was a crime against humanity then, it will always be a crime against humanity, no matter how many Congressmen and women praise the Jewish Golem... President Al-Assad’s Interview with The Sunday Times (full transcription) | CounterPsyOps ...when I announced the plan, I said that it was for those who interested in dialogue, because you cannot make a plan that is based on dialogue with somebody who does not believe in dialogue. So, I was very clear regarding this. Secondly, this open dialogue should not be between exclusive groups but between all Syrians of every level. The dialogue is about the future of Syria. We are twenty three million Syrians and all of us have the right to participate in shaping the country’s future... Why The Democrats Are So Much Worse on Israel Than The GOP, by MJ Rosenberg | Tikkun Daily Blog It’s hard to watch the AIPAC conference for more than a few minutes at a time. For me, the worst part is the pandering (and lying) by Democratic politicians eager to raise money for their next campaign. So far, Joe Biden has been the worst. He is heavily funded by the Adler family of Miami Beach (he even brought President Obama to their home for a fundraiser), one of the big AIPAC families. Here is Biden talking about how the head of the Adler klan and another AIPAC mogul gave him his “formal education” on the Middle East. (Not to mention all that money).. Ten years on, what happened to the woman who revealed dirty tricks on Iraq war vote? by Martin Bright | The Observer Ten years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government's surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. Katharine Gun, a shy and studious 28-year-old who spent her days listening in to obscure Chinese intercepts, decided to tell the world about a secret plan by the US government to spy on the United Nations. She had received an email in her inbox asking her and her colleagues to help in a vast intelligence "surge" designed to secure a UN resolution to send troops into Iraq. She was horrified and leaked the email to the Observer. As a result of the story the paper published 10 years ago this weekend, she was arrested, lost her job and faced trial... Rethinking South Africa, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance ...At the Apartheid Museum we were painfully reminded of all the suffering and indignity of the era. The killings, economic injustice, and human rights violations were then rampant as they are today in Palestine (the apartheid state of Israel). But we are also reminded of the struggling human spirit that seeks justice and freedom. The compromises that Mandela made with the white leadership and his attempts to be inclusive and forgiving is prominently displayed. But his earlier statements are also visible as at the entrance “For to be free is not merey to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”.. AIPAC Conference Promotes War | Stephen Lendman On March 3, AIPAC's 2013 conference began. It "Celebrates 65 Years of Friendship." It's nothing to be admired. It supports war, occupation, exploitation and dominance. It deplores peace, equity and justice. It's contemptuous of fundamental human rights. It believes Jews are God's chosen people. It thinks Arabs are subhumans. It favors eliminating them altogether. War is its instrument of choice... There Is No Business Like Shoa Business | Gilad Atzmon Yesterday, the Independent reported “Astonishing new research shows Nazi camp network targeting Jews was twice as big as previously thought.” But The Independent was quick and kind enough to give us an insight into the implications of this new Shoa affair.. Legendary (and very perceptive) Israeli diplomat Abba Eban had already sussed it out in the 1950s when he told us that: “There’s no business like Shoa business”.. Purim and Genocidal Phantasies, by Ran HaCohen | Antiwar Purim. One of the most popular Jewish holidays among Orthodox, traditional and so-called secular Jewish Israelis alike. The streets are packed with children and adults wearing costumes, make-up and all sorts of masquerading, on their way from one joyous Purim party to the next. Happy days. But behind the carnivalesque masks, ominous demons are lurking... Mar 4, 2013 A short open letter to Secretary of State Kerry, by Alan Hart | Veterans Today 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.. In answer to a question at a press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, you said “we” obviously disagreed with Erdogan’s comment and found it “objectionable”. (Davutoglu insisted that Turkey was not hostile to Israel.. “If Israel expects to hear positive comments from Turkey, I believe it needs to revise its attitudes not only toward us but also toward the settlements in the West Bank and the people of the region... [See my piece on the subject, Zionism and Nazism: Is there a difference that makes a difference?] Israelites Sue God For Breach Of Covenant | The Onion Attorneys representing the Tribe of Abraham filed suit against God in New York's Southern District Court Monday, citing 117 specific instances of breach of covenant. The Israelites are seeking $4.2 trillion in punitive and compensatory damages... [Actually, this not as silly as it was meant to be. The Talmud is basically a system of sophistry designed to circumvent the commands of God. It’s a kind of elaborate kosher get-out-of-jail-free card.] Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street, by Chris Arnade | Scientific American Blog As we know Wall Street firms have turned our financial system into a massive casino operation. The most egregious and best-known violators of the public trust, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase are posting record profits. The government bailouts and free money from the Federal Reserve along with a favorable climate of deregulation and a refusal by the Obama administration to aggressively prosecute the crimes of this industry has led to a booming cash bonanza. Firms are pocketing skyrocketing fees that accompany each and every financial transaction... Yale Flap Highlights Militarization of Academia: Boots on Campus, by Kelley B. Vlahos | Antiwar Have American university campuses become so inured to the militarization of policy, culture – our thought – that they can’t see the Trojan horse sitting in the quad, its occupants pouring out and passing out sweets and credits to all the Ivy Leaguers passing by with goggled eyes and open arms? A caricature for sure, but is it so off base? How else does one explain the muted response to news that the Department of Defense may have been funding the "U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience," at the Yale Medical School in New Haven?.. Israel Segregates Buses for Palestinians | Roi Tov ...Israelis may not know whom Rosa Parks was, but the Israeli Transportation Ministry is clearly aware of that it is dealing with pure TNT, not even degraded into dynamite. The news was published in Hebrew media with a lot of defusing clausules. Officially, the new lines are defined as "general bus lines;" yet, they are meant to transport Palestinian workers from the Eyal Crossing, near the West Bank city of Qalqilya, in the West Bank, to the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area. Jewish settlers will continue to use existing lines... Jewish Voice for Weizmann | Gilad Atzmon ...if I understand it correctly, 82% of Jewish Americans support a solution that dismisses the most essential and elementary Palestinian right to return to their land, in effect supporting the existence of a Jewish State in historic Palestine, at the expense of the Palestinians and their rights. In other words, the so-called ‘good peace-seeking Jews’ ,who are the vast majority of Jewish Americans (according to JVP), support an utterly non-ethical solution... Israeli researchers: Group of Colorado Indians have genetic Jewish roots | Haaretz ...the mutation found in the Colorado Indians was found to be identical to that of Ashkenazi Jews, and dates to a period more than 600 years ago. Researchers say this offers incontrovertible genetic proof that some of the Jews expelled from Spain who reached the New World intermarried with local Indians whose descendants later migrated to the United States... [Note: the Jews in Spain were Sephardic, not Ashkenazi. You’d think Haaretz would know the difference. But I sure am looking forward to the next Purim Pow Wow.] Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II by Ruth Gay, reviewed by Ezra MacVie | Inconvenient History ...The photograph is of some dozen or more smiling young mothers pushing perambulators down a sunny lane in the Landsberg DP Camp, each carriage occupied by a cherub born in the camp. The accompanying text notes that the fertility rates in the camps ranked among the highest in the world and in history at 50.2 babies per year per thousand population, even while poignantly noting that the rate outside the camps in Germany was a pitiful 7.6 per thousand. It would seem that among the spoils that accrue to the victors of wars are also included baby booms like the one that at the same time was gathering steam in the United States. And these same spoils, it is equally clear, are denied the losers... In the Shadow of the Holocaust, by Yosef Grodzinsky: Interview by Chris Spannos | ZNet ...The American military government quite generously let the DPs run their camps as almost fully autonomous localities; Zionist survivors, together with envoys from Palestine, organized and took control of these camps early on, as I detail in the book. When the time came, they could exercise this control, sending holocaust survivors to fight in a land they had never seen, whose language they did not speak, and most importantly, for a cause they did not necessarily support.. violent methods were used when necessary. I was shocked to find eviction orders issues to draft deserters, fines, other punishments, and in some instances, even physical beating... Hawkish Senators Want War on Iran | Stephen Lendman Permanent war is official US policy. Bipartisan complicity supports it. Doing so violates international, constitutional and US statute laws. America is a lawless rogue state. It's been so for decades. It's by far the world's worst. It wages war on humanity. It does it at home and abroad. Innocent victims are murdered in cold blood. It's official policy. So are other high crimes... AIPAC aims to play ‘major strategic ally’ card to save aid for Israel from US cuts?: Interview with Robert Naiman | RT US aid to Israel may be saved from sequestration and moved into Pentagon budget. That might be the result if the Israeli lobby in Washington gets its way and the American people aren’t paying attention..The annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is reportedly focused on the congressional designation of Israel as a “major strategic ally” of the US, a unique status that would be enjoyed only by the Jewish state. The move is seen as facilitating Israel’s military action against Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which also appears on the conference agenda... Russian Arms Trade Czar Says "War" Declared on Weapon Supplies to Syria | RIA Novosti Russia is facing a ‘real war’ aimed at hampering the country’s legal deliveries of weapons to Syria, the head of the Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation has said. “A real war has been declared against us,” Alexander Fomin told Ekho Moskvy radio on Friday without specifying who has declared the war. “The [Russian] ships are lured into ports and arrested there under various devised pretexts. When the ships are at sea, any insurance is canceled,” Fomin said adding that any attempts to deliver the contracted goods are being thwarted... [I guess the Russians don’t get that only the US and its satellites are allowed to supply arms to their clients. Such ignorant people.] The Return of Empires (IV), by Dmitry Minin | Strategic Culture Foundation ...In many ways, the North Atlantic Alliance bore the features of imperial ambition from its very beginnings. NATO is like a quasi-empire safeguarding its own expansion and aiming for «immortality», which was particularly obvious following the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation in 1991. The imperial sense of the alliance is also revealed by the fact that its European component is based on the tradition of the Charlemagne Empire... The Destruction of Conscience in the National Academy of Sciences: An Interview With Marshall Sahlins, by David Price | Counterpunch Last Friday, esteemed University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the United States’ most prestigious scientific society. Sahlins states that he resigned because of his “objections to the election of [Napoleon] Chagnon, and to the military research projects of the Academy.” Sahlins was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He issued the below statement explaining his resignation:.. Drugs, War, and Occupation, by Ron Jacobs | Dissident Voice The United States invaded Afghanistan over eleven years ago. Men and women who were seven and eight years old are now enlisting in the military. Some of them will end up walking the streets and trails of that faraway land before their enlistments are up. Even if the Obama administration keeps its pledge to withdraw 34,000 US troops in the next year or so, there will still be rotations and special forces in and out of Afghanistan for years if Washington’s plans are not derailed. Likewise, the Afghan opium trade will continue... Iran Is Not Our Enemy | YouTube Despite what all the media are yammering at you, despite all the fear mongering about Iran's "nuclear threat" (Iran has been fully verified by the IAEA and ALL the U.S. intelligence community agree and are on record that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons), despite talk that Iran is intolerant, despite the daily barrage of bad press and unpleasant innuendo, Iran is a great country, friendly, cultured, fun and spiritually-minded!.. [See also 'War is a Racket'] John Kerry talks of 'imploding' Iran in another overseas gaffe | YouTube John Kerry, the new US Secretary of State, made France part of his first overseas voyage, and it's a nation he's comfortable with both personally and politically. But in the latest in a series of diplomatic mistakes, Kerry accidentally said that the goal of US-led sanctions was "to implode" Iran, before quickly trying to correct himself... Mar 3, 2013 Can Washington and Her Allies Stop Syria’s Reconciliation Efforts?: The Oft-Predicted Fickle Syrian ‘Tipping Point’ Has Tipped, by Franklin Lamb | Counterpunch I have concluded over the past few months that the long elusive “tipping point” in Syria has indeed been reached and the momentum has shifted decisively in this embattled. But not the tipping point that the rebel promoters were hoping for, including the NATO countries. But rather the momentum here has tipped in favor of the current regime due to its capacity to maintain a slowly rising level of popular support, and good relations with key foreign supporters during the current run up to next year’s Presidential election. Then, it will be up to the Syrian voters to decide who stays, goes, and/or joins in their next government... Why Americans are turning away from Israel and its U.S. lobby | Sabbah Report Grant F. Smith, research director of IRmep, briefs several hundred Houston area non-profit and business leaders about why Americans are turning away from Israel and challenging Israel’s U.S. lobby. Review of major espionage, propaganda and wealth transfer initiatives. Presentation of new polling data on how the growing chasm between public opinion and policy may be driving a higher U.S. position on Transparency International’s corruption index... After Babel | Roi Tov Hebrew speakers who do not command other languages at a reading level (and this holds for most speakers of Hebrew as their main language) totally depend on translated material for getting information. This reality has created a powerful tool for population control; the State of Israel is taking full advantage of this.. More often than not, these reactions are the result of manipulations. Denizens are fed with institutional disinformation, creating modern parallels to a horned Moses. Israelis fear their oppressing government more than anything else. Recently, an awesome example of censorship was provided by the censors themselves... Postcards from Auschwitz | Paul Eisen I just came across this and immediately asked my friend Francis Clark-Lowes to provide a rough translation. Of course, in itself, it doesn't prove a thing. After all, some inmates could have been happily receiving letters from home while other prisoners were marching into gas-chambers. But (assuming it's genuine), it does help to put this ridiculously demonised and distorted subject of Auschwitz into a humanised, and therefore, believable, context. And isn't that just what we need?.. [The stories that I remember from reading as a kid about the concentration camps were mostly about the inmates complaining that their Red Cross packages were arriving late. They were quite incensed about this, as I recall.] Palestinians wounded by Israeli gunfire | MCW News At least seven Palestinians were injured by Israeli soldiers on Friday, most of them in Gaza, according to medical sources. Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for the health ministry in Gaza, said three men were moderately wounded by Israeli gunfire east of Jabalia, in northern Gaza. Earlier in the day, three farmers were hurt by tank fire, he said. Israeli military sources said that "Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip fired and damaged a military vehicle"; they dismissed the report of tank fire, saying the farmers were probably hurt in a "work accident," not as a result of Israeli fire... [Everyday life in the Holyland] A carnival parade, a funeral and the revolving door of media interest, by Adam Keller | MCW News Last Sunday there were huge crowds of people in the street near my home in the city of Holon. Many times more than on any other day of the year. Thousands and tens of thousands poured in from all neighborhoods in the city and from far and wide, to see the famous Holon Adloyada.. This Monday there were huge crowds of people in the streets of Sa’ir village near Hebron. Many times more than on any other day of the year. Thousands and tens of thousands poured in from all over the West Bank to the funeral of Arafat Jaradat, the gas station attendant who was suspected of stone-throwing and who died in questionable circumstances after five days in Israeli detention... Bradley Manning: Profile in Courage Above and Beyond the Call of Duty, by Stephen Lendman | Indybay He's one of America's best. He risked great personal harm. He did so to expose vital truths. He's a true American hero. He deserves praise, not prosecution. In February 2012, Movement of the Icelandic Parliament (MIP) members nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. They felt compelled to recognize his important contribution to world peace. They called nominating him a "great honor." They're indebted for what he did. He deserves Washington's Presidential Medal of Freedom. It's awarded "for especially meritorious contributions to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.".. [The LGBT community, now mainstream and flush with tribute, is studiously ignoring Manning’s plight] Holocaust Shocker: 6 Million Equals Number of Nazi Death Camps, not Dead Jews, by Michael K. Smith | Legalienate Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded that the fabled six million statistic from World War II refers not to Jews exterminated by the Nazi regime, but to the number of individual death camps run by Hitler. This has forced researchers to revise the Jewish death count upwards to a "Jew-Zillion," a quantity that The Institute of Objective Zionist Science claims is a six followed by 40,000 zeros... [The NYT (aka the JNY, the kosher version of the Vatican newsletter), is working overtime at producing holocaust-themed stories and other jewcy items. Methinks they’re getting a little nervous about the increasing awareness of the work of the historical revisionists, those who have punctured large holes in the fabric of the Holycause dogma.] Israel breaches truce 820 times in three months | Middle East Monitor Human rights organisations have revealed that Israel has breached its ceasefire agreement with the Palestinians on more than 800 occasions since it was signed last November. In stark contrast, the Palestinians have broken the truce just twice. Data based on reports produced by the United Nations, the Israeli Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement (GISHA) and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, as well as Israeli and Palestinian media outlets, found that the three months old ceasefire is not being taken seriously by the Israeli occupation authorities... Africa and AFRICOM: Neo-Imperialism and the Arrogance of Ignorance, by Franklin “Chuck” Spinney | Counterpunch Most Americans do not realize the extent to which the U.S. is becoming involved militarily in the welter of conflicts throughout Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. Although recent reports have tended to focus on the French effort to kick Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) out of Mali — an effort that may now be devolving into a far more complex guerrilla war, that French operation is just one operation in what may be shaping up to be a 21st Century version of the 19th Century Scramble for the resources of Africa... Know Your Terrorists: Ayman Al-Zawahiri | The Corbett Report We are told a certain tale about the story of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man and the inheritor of the Al Qaeda operation…but we are not told everything. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we go in search of the real Ayman Al-Zawahiri and uncover some surprising connections. Sibel Edmonds is the heart of this interview, she starts at Minute 25. She makes a compelling case for why many terrorists are not captured alive, and suggests that a number of US whistle-blowers are beginning to emerge from retired ranks... Finding "A Place at the Table" | Public News Service A Colorado teacher and her student play a key role in a new film highlighting the problem of hunger in America. The film, "A Place at the Table," cites a sobering statistic: 50 million children in the United States don't know where their next meal is coming from... Mar 2, 2013 A Voice and Presence Passes: Remembering Stéphane Hessel (1917-2013), by Jeff Halper | Mondoweiss Knowing that many American Jews like to think of themselves as liberals whose Judaism is somehow suffused with a commitment to human and civil rights, I have developed a more effective strategy for engaging them than jumping immediately into issues of the Israeli Occupation. I challenge them by suggesting that there are two genuine Jewish heroes of the 20th century that they have never hear of. Their curiosity piqued, I introduce them to two towering but virtually unknown figures who played key roles in bringing human rights to our world: Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide”.. and Rene Cassin, a French-Jewish jurist... Ex-French Resistance Fighter Hessel: 'It Is Good for Us to Feel Outrage' | YouTube French holocaust survivor, helped draft the UN Declaration of Human Rights. While lots of media outlets reported his death, hardly any mainstream media dared to tell about his stance against Zionist occupation/colonization of Palestine. He once said: "In fact, the word that applies—that should be applied—is 'war crime' and even 'crime against humanity'. But this word must be used carefully, especially when one is in Geneva, the seat of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who may have an important opinion on that issue.. having visited Gaza, having seen the refugee camps with thousands of children, the manner in which they are bombed appears as a veritable crime against humanity." .. Has Obama Broken the Israel Lobby? | Stephen M. Walt ...it would be a huge mistake to conclude that the lobby's clout has been broken and that Obama will now be free to chart a new course. For starters, the behavior of several senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee shows that they are still mightily beholden to groups like AIPAC and extremist Christian Zionists, not to mention some unrepentant neoconservatives. Chuck Hagel was about as bulletproof a candidate as one could ask for (decorated war hero, defense and intelligence expert, successful businessman, respected ex-senator, etc.) and that didn't stop these zealots from unloading the SIOP against him... The Syrian Back Door to War With Iran, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar Secretary of State John Kerry has long urged increased US support for Syria’s Islamist rebels, and now he has his wish: shortly after being confirmed, he announced the US would now directly aid rebel groups, rather than "indirectly," as we’ve supposedly been doing. Not only that, but the definition of "non-lethal" aid is being stretched to include armored vehicles and body armor: in addition, US "advisors" will be sent to the region – an ominous development that historians of the Vietnam war will observe with a high degree of skepticism. That’s another war that started with sending American "advisors," you’ll recall... AIPAC Lobbyists to Congress: Despite Sequester, Don’t Touch Israel Aid, by John Glaser | Antiwar 13,000 lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will descend upon Capitol Hill this weekend for their annual conference to order members of Congress not to cut $3 billion-plus in aid to Israel, even as automatic budget cuts are set to take place in a matter of days.. cuts to the military budget “will mean delays for veteran funerals at Arlington National Cemetery.” So grieving American families may have to wait longer to bury their loved ones who died fighting in Afghanistan, but Israel won’t suffer one bit. Nothing could be more important than contributing money to the apartheid state... Iran nuclear talks reach a turning point, by Kaveh Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online ...the Almaty meeting was a mini-victory for Iran's long battle to defend its nuclear rights, the US and its allies opted to ease their onerous demands on Iran and concentrated their efforts to getting Tehran's compliance with a number of "confidence-building" steps such as with respect to Iran's 20% uranium enrichment. Describing the talks as "constructive," "upbeat" and "useful," the representatives of "5 + 1" nations also confirmed Iran's assessment of a positive meeting that by all accounts was a major improvement over the last rounds in Baghdad and Moscow. The mere fact that an early date for the next meeting, in Almaty in early April, was set is considered a big plus... Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett | The Scott Horton Show [The] authors of Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, discuss the obstacles to successful P5+1 talks; why the US still refuses to accept the Iranian government’s legitimacy – even after 33+ years; why the Obama administration’s Iran “containment” policy isn’t sustainable; how Iran’s “participatory Islamist” style of government and defiant foreign policy are inspiring people across the Middle East – and scaring the US and Israel; the US’s support for radical Sunni Salafists in Libya and Syria, in an effort to counter Iran’s influence... TV3 ordered to say sorry for Browne's anti-Israeli remarks, by Laura Butler | Independent.ie TV3 will be forced to issue an apology on air after presenter Vincent Browne described Israel as a "cancer in foreign affairs" on his weeknight programme. The complaint has been upheld by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI), which has stated that an item on 'Tonight with Vincent Browne' that featured the host's remarks "failed to meet the requirement for fair, objective and impartial treatment of news and current affairs".. [How sad – the ZioNazis appear to have replaced the Brits as overlords in the Emerald Isle] Holocaust row Lib Dem MP who condemned 'the Jews' to escape punishment while he has TRAINING in how not to be anti-Semitic | Mail Online A Lib Dem MP who sparked a row on the eve of a Holocaust memorial with comments about 'the Jews' is to escape censure while he receives training in how not to be offensive... [Political correctness is a largely Jewish inspired form of leftwing fascism, as should be clear from this and a slew of similar cases. See more on this subject] Ahead of March Iran Talks, U.S. Urged to Back Possible Israeli Strike, by Jasmin Ramsey | Inter Press Service If the Senate moves forward with this, they risk sending the signal to the Iranians that, no matter what was said at Almaty, the U.S. does not have its own house in order to make a deal and is not serious about resolving the nuclear dispute peacefully... EU Sanctions on Iranian Businesses Adjudged Illegal, by Dan Joyner | Arms Control Law ...the EU General Court has ruled that sanctions imposed on Iranian businesses unilaterally by the EU – i.e. unauthorized by the U.N. Security Council - are unlawful. These are very significant cases, and as I understand it the illegality of these sanctions has become so well settled that the affected parties are now moving on to actions against the EU seeking compensation for the harm caused by these illegal acts of the EU... Israel Buys Croatian Path to Syrian Rebels | Roi Tov .."This is Skinny Smith reporting for Radio NYC from the scene of the last incredible event. Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic announced that his country will withdraw its troops from the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, which separates between the Israeli and Syrian armies in the Golan Heights. He denies that this is the result of Croatia selling weapons to anti-government fighters in Syria.”.. The European Union has recommended its 27 member states imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements | European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine The annual mission report, which is written by all the heads of diplomatic missions of EU member states in the Palestinian Authority is strongly worded and very critical of Israel’s policies in and around Jerusalem. It echoes the position on settlements in the EU Council Conclusions of December 2012, which stated: “The European Union is deeply dismayed by and strongly opposes Israeli plans to expand settlements in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and in particular plans to develop the E1 area.” The EU Heads of Mission Report 2012 on Jerusalem illustrates the EU’s concerns and opposition to Israel’s policies in and around East Jerusalem... Preliminary Arafat Jaradat autopsy report, by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss ..Here is an unofficial English translation of the preliminary autopsy report on Arafat Jaradat prepared by Dr Saber Al Aloul, a specialist in Forensic Medicine and Director of the Palestinian Medico-Legal Institute.. 'Reason of Death: nervous shock as a result of extreme pain from the intensity of the injuries described above, which resulted from multiple direct and extensive acts of torture'.. The Uncommon Courage of Bradley Manning, by Marjorie Cohn | MCW News Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to 10 charges including possessing and willfully communicating to an unauthorized person all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure. The charges carry a total of 20 years in prison. For the first time, Bradley spoke publicly about what he did and why. His actions, now confirmed by his own words, reveal Bradley to be a very brave young man... Will AIPAC Dare Get Israel Aid Exempted From Sequestration? by M.J. Rosenberg | MCW News New York Times features an important piece that will serve to alert progressives and Democrats to the latest brand of right-wing provocateur: young zealots who are not “movement” conservatives but who move from pro-Israel activism to the right at large. Although they ally themselves with more traditional right-wingers, their central concern is Israel, and not so much Israel per se as supporting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right. Although they stridently adopt traditional right-wing stands on the usual litmus issues, those are just window dressing. Their driving issue is Israel... Is a third Palestinian uprising in sight? by Uri Avnery | Redress Information & Analysis ...one can be certain that even if it starts as a non-violent mass protest, it will not stay so for long. Two weeks ago, the Israeli Channel 10 showed a documentary about Ariel Sharon’s manipulation of the second Intifada. It started when Prime Minister Ehud Barak allowed opposition chief Sharon to visit the Temple Mount, accompanied by hundreds of policemen. Since Sharon was a pork-eating atheist, there was no religious motive for the visit. It was a provocation, pure and simple. When Sharon approached the Muslim shrines, he was greeted with stones. The police killed the stone-throwers with live ammunition. And lo and behold, the second Intifada was on the way... Mar 1, 2013 Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression | International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network From South America to South Africa, and all over the world, Israel, often acting together with the United States, has undermined popular movements by supplying weapons, technology and training to repressive governments. This website seeks to gather testimony and expose Israel’s historic and ongoing role in transforming its colonization of Palestine into profit through exporting repression around the world... How Reagan Promoted Genocide, by Robert Parry | Consortium News A newly discovered document reveals that President Reagan and his national security team in 1981 approved Guatemala’s extermination of both leftist guerrillas and their “civilian support mechanisms,” a green light that opened a path to genocide against hundreds of Mayan villages... Alan Dershowitz: Virulent anti-Semite on short list to become next pope | Paul Eisen It seems that if this Cardinal Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras is elected Pope, then he will be subjected to the same process of beastification by Jewry as was the now retiring Pope Benedict (until he collapsed into a philo-semitic, Israel-adoring, ‘Holocaust’ guilt-riven heap of nervous twitches)... [The Jewish banks bought the Vatican a long time ago. Although the value of this asset has been plummeting ever since, they probably think it was worth it politically] U.N.'s Richard Falk Demands Probe Into Death of Detainee in Israeli Custody | Sabbah Report A U.N. human rights investigator called on Wednesday for an international inquiry into the weekend death of a Palestinian prisoner in disputed circumstances in an Israeli jail. The death of Arafat Jaradat has led to the widespread rioting in the occupied West Bank leading to fears of a new Palestinian uprising against Israel. “The death of a prisoner during interrogation is always a cause for concern, but in this case, when Israel has shown a pattern and practice of prisoner abuse, the need for outside, credible investigation is more urgent than ever,” Richard Falk, U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a statement... Israel Police Joins Underworld | Roi Tov If I were to start this article in any different fashion, I would get angry emails claiming "but in our country is the same!" It doesn't matter, a crime is a crime, and cannot be sanctioned by its taking place elsewhere or by its being perpetrated by government officials. A policeman must respect the law; he cannot break it in order to enforce it. Veteran readers of this website could claim, "You already reported on the rape of Jewish girls by Israel Police, what can be worse?" This claim is legitimate; yet, incredibly, this paragon of state-crimes didn't stop there... EU diplomats to Brussels: Put your money where your mouth is, by Michael Omer-Man | +972 Magazine At face value, the European Union heads of mission report on the Israeli settlement enterprise is a scathing indictment and call to action against Israel’s illegal settlement activities. In between the lines, however, the report reflects a frustration by European diplomats and bureaucrats at their own governments’ inaction. They are not implementing the existing legislation, decisions and declarations they themselves regularly make against Israel and its settlements. The EU’s rhetoric against Israel’s settlement policies has always been damning, but its actions have never lived up to its words... Spielberg’s Lincoln: Plenty of Negroes, But Why No Jews? | NOI Research Group ...why then is Spielberg so dreadfully senile in his representation of a time so important to Black Americans? Why, for instance, does he feel free to promote a fairy tale of the history of the Civil War and Black slavery, but suspiciously ignores the critical role played by his own Jewish people in the War Between the States, a war in which Jews were extremely prominent and consequential?.. Cruelty as policy: the Israeli army's culture of revenge, by Stuart Rees | The Drum Publicity surrounding the mystery of Australian Ben Zygier - Prisoner X - and the death on Sunday of the allegedly tortured prisoner Arafat Jaradat has provoked Palestinians to protest the treatment of thousands of other prisoners in Israeli jails, including men on a hunger strike who are near to death. Although the treatment of prisoners by Israel denies them their civil rights and breaches international humanitarian law, the essence of Israel's behaviour is best described as the use of cruelty as policy... The Glaring Tip of American Imperialism: Medal of Dishonor, by Rev. William E. Alberts | Counterpunch Drone warfare has become one of the key weapons in the United States government’s global “war on terror.” But drones especially present a moral challenge for all Americans in this manufactured war. They are the glaring tip of American imperialism, and must be camouflaged to ensure a supportive citizenry. Thus The Distinguished Warfare Medal has been created, ostensibly to award “the extraordinary achievements” of “pilots” of unmanned Predator and Reaper drones, explains outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta... How the Bush administration sold the war – and we bought it, by Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson | The Guardian ...As a covert CIA operations officer working frantically in the months before the war to find and verify hard intelligence about Iraq's presumed WMD program, Valerie was keenly interested in watching Secretary of State Colin Powell address the United Nations on 6 February 2003. His reputation and service to the United States was stellar, and he was viewed as the lone moderate inside what many others considered to be a hawkish cabinet. As Valerie watched the speech unfold on TV from CIA headquarters that morning, she experienced what can only be described as "cognitive dissonance".. How Intifada Fears Show Only Israeli Security Matters, by Yousef Munayyer | Sabbah Report It’s happening again. Talk of the possibility of a third Intifada is on the rise as increased Palestinian protests are recurring in the West Bank. Many are on edge waiting for the spark. What will it be? In late 1987, four Palestinians killed by an Israeli truck driver on a road in Gaza set off the first major uprising. The massacre of 29 Palestinian worshipers in Hebron by an Israeli settler 19 years ago this week catalyzed a wave of bombings in the mid-1990s. In 2000, it was Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Dome of the Rock with a massive armed escort that set off the second Intifada. As settlements expand, as occupation deepens and with the absence of any acceptable peace plan, any event could be the spark... Washington and the World, by William deB. Mills | MCW News ...Iran is front and center as a test of the true intentions of Washington, which has--correctly or not--built the U.S.-Iran nuclear dispute into a massive diplomatic time-bomb with all sorts of short-term fuses. The reasons Washington has worked its way into such a mess are about as straight-forward as a plate of spaghetti, but most central is the confusion (intentional, surely, on the part of some) between a stated goal of nuclear transparency and the passion of many to enforce "Washington Rules" on the world. Will Washington finally put "on the table" the option of offering Iran security plus independence in return for nuclear transparency? Turkish PM Erdogan calls Zionism a "crime against humanity" at UN conference | YouTube Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday described Zionism as a “crime against humanity” on par with anti-Semitism and fascism. Speaking in Vienna at a United Nations event devoted to dialogue between the West and Islam, Erdogan decried rising racism in Europe and the fact that many Muslims “who live in countries other than their own” often face harsh discrimination. “We should be striving to better understand the culture and beliefs of others, but instead we see that people act based on prejudice.., and that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”.. History As Myth (Again!): Argo Apostasy, by Gary Corseri | Counterpunch ...Movies like “Argo” should be boycotted! Academy Award ceremonies should be picketed in the name of the First Amendment! Such movies have nothing to do with “freedom of speech” and everything to do with suppressing free speech and the truth for the sake of profits, promoting wars and hatred and slaughter. They are worthy of nothing but the fullest condemnation... Senators Press Resolution To Green-Light Israeli Attack On Iran, by Ali Gharib | The Daily Beast A joint resolution set to be introduced by Sens. Lindsey Graham (SC) and Robert Menendez (NJ), a Republican and Democrat, respectively, declares U.S. support for an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear program. The resolution, which expresses the sense of the Congress, will be supported by the thousands of delegates to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee annual conference that will stream through the Capitol this weekend. With prominent liberal Democrats already signing on, AIPAC's lobbying heft will likely propel a bill that, in Congressional sentiment at least, commits the U.S. to active support of a potential Israeli attack... [It is not hyperbole to suggest that all of these people should be tried for high treason and hanged by the neck until dead] Palestine Spring in the making? by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis A combination of internal and external Palestinian factors could result in “the street” taking over from the endless “peace process” and ending the de facto peace for Israelis. Internally, the “peace process” has produced a class of VIP Palestinians who appear to have lost touch with the public’s pulse. Externally,.. Palestinians are seeing their land disappear before their own eyes – more so than when they started what was supposed to be an interim peace process. Since the Oslo accords, Israeli governments without exception have been in a race to create Jews-only facts on the ground, making any future Palestinian state physically and economically unlivable... |
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