Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground: The Case of Palestine

Book Review by Nadia Hijab, Senior Fellow, Institute for Palestine Studies; former UN development officer

In August 2005, I was in Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian Authority (PA), to evaluate a democracy-building project. Donors had already made a considerable investment and were trying to decide how much more to allocate. It was a surreal exercise. While I was there, the Israeli occupation forces were preparing for their unilateral disengagement from Gaza even as they were cementing the Wall around Ramallah. Access to the city was sealed off except through Israeli controlled checkpoints, one of which provided a fast track for the international community and the other a choke point for Palestinians...

How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole: Israelis Murder News Cameraman, by John Pilger

One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target". The International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist". At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated. Dr David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honour Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to Israel." He received no reply...

Why?, by Layla Anwar (Arab Woman Blues)

Who am I ? The eternal Question . Have not figured it out fully yet . All you need to know about me is that I am a Middle Easterner ,an Arab Woman - into my 40's and old enough to know better . I have no homeland per se . I live in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Egypt simultaneously ...

Yes why?

What for?

What does it say about you? What does it say about your countries? What does it say about your institutions? What does it say about your governments, your "culture", your "civilization", your history, your "progress", your "values", your concepts?..Have you ever stopped and pondered these questions? Have you ever stopped and asked yourselves ; how come?..How come we are so advanced, how come we are so democratic, how come we are so great, how come we are so free...And how come we allow so much murder, oppression, abuse, go unaccounted for?...

Noah Feldman: The Big Kvetch, by Joachim Martillo

...What Feldman's essay points up is that intermarriage is the irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish values are compatible. "We've sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when we've told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew and an American," noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. "In America you are taught you can marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews."..Rosenblatt's analysis probably applies even more strongly to Zionism than to Orthodox Judaism. American and Zionist values are simply completely contradictory in many serious ways, and when someone claims that America and Israel share the same values, many Americans and non-Americans become very uncomfortable...

Will Bush cancel the 2008 election?, by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis (Online Journal)

It is time to think about the "unthinkable."..The Bush administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election..The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don't know..But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush/Cheney/Rove that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006), we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention..The real question is not how or when they might do it. It's how, realistically, we can stop them...

Oppose $30 Billion in Military Aid Package to Israel (Ziopedia)

Written by The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

[Editor's note: While there is no possibility that the Israeli Occupied Congress will not approve this appropriation, it is nevertheless important that members of Congress begin to hear from an outraged citizenry that those who continue to put Israel's interests above those of their American constituents will be considered as foreign agents who have broken their oath to defend the US Constitution. While it is important to attack this latest giveaway on its merits, it is time to raise the stakes. -- Jeff Blankfort, Ziopedia]

The United States plans to increase military aid to Israel by 25 percent—from $2.4 billion to $3 billion per year, guaranteed for the next 10 years. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told reporters in Jerusalem on July 29 that President George W. Bush agreed to this new $30 billion military aid package when they met at the White House on June 19...

Corporate Media Blames Victims in Palestine, by Kurt Nimmo

If we are to believe “experts” quoted by United Press International, the “radicalization of Palestinians” has little to do with Israeli brutality over the span of more than two generations. It is all about “violence as a model created by bin Ladenism,” never mind the Palestinians resisted Israeli occupation when Osama was a glint in Muhammad bin Laden’s eye, well before the elder Bin Laden migrated from Al-Rubat to Saudi Arabia..“Bush administration officials said more young people in Gaza as well as the Lebanese refugee camps are turning to jihad because they feel more secular or moderate paths have failed to improve their lives,” UPI adds. No doubt, as these “secular or moderate paths” were systematically undermined and destroyed, thanks to the Mossad, also known as the “Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks,” as killing Palestinian nationalists is indeed considered a “special task” for the Israeli government. Both MI6 and the CIA worked to undermine secular Arab nationalism—including its more moderate strain, as represented by Gamal Abd-al Nasser of Egypt. In response to Nasser’s nationalist impudence, former British prime minister Winston Churchill instructed then prime minister Anthony Eden, upon Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez: “Tell them if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should have never emerged.”...

New report documents past quarter century of Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians, Review By Yasmine Ryan (Daily Star)

'The Price We Pay' seeks to counterbalance influence of Jewish lobbies on US policy in Middle East, questions morality of American aid to Jewish state

BEIRUT: Israel was once reprimanded by the United States for its use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. In 1984, The New York Times credited Franklin P. Lamb's first book with gathering the evidence that spurred former President Ronald Reagan's administration into cutting off Israel's supplies of US cluster bombs. A quarter-century on, Lamb returned to update "Israel's War in Lebanon" in the wake of last summer's war. The result is the substantial report "The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel's Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon (1978-2006)."..Extensive documentation from a wide range of sources has been compiled, alongside photographic evidence and personal testimonies. "The Price We Pay" is a well-researched and comprehensive historical record of the damage inflicted on Lebanon by its southern neighbor in the summer of 2006...

Analysis says war could cost $1 trillion: Budget office sees effect on taxpayers for decade, by Bryan Bender (Boston Globe)

The war in Iraq could ultimately cost well over a trillion dollars -- at least double what has already been spent -- including the long-term costs of replacing damaged equipment, caring for wounded troops, and aiding the Iraqi government, according to a new government analysis..The United States has already allocated more than $500 billion on the day-to-day combat operations of what are now 190,000 troops and a variety of reconstruction efforts...In a report to lawmakers yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that even under the rosiest scenario -- an immediate and substantial reduction of troops -- American taxpayers will feel the financial consequences of the war for at least a decade...

Obama Follows the Neocon Mass Murder Script, by Kurt Nimmo

It is a race to see who can kill more people. “As President, Barack Obama would order attacks on terrorist camps in Pakistan even if its president, Gen. Pervais Musharraf, refused to give permission and would link American aid on Pakistan’s progress in rooting out its terrorist havens,” writes Marc Ambinder for Atlantic Online. “That stance, one part of the multifacted counterrorrism strategy Obama unveils this morning, is tougher than the more considered approach of the Bush Administration, which has generally avoided antagonizing its ally in public.” In other words, Obama’s selection strategy consists of outdoing the neocons and he really harbors no reservations when it comes to mass murder and adding to the horrific total exacted in human life (nearly a million Iraqis) since the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq...

Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians slams Canadian Jewish Congress exclusion

The Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians responded today, to the decision by the Canadian Jewish Congress to deny membership to the progressive Jewish group. The CJC issued a letter which gave no reason for its decision.

"The decision by the Canadian Jewish Congress to exclude the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians illustrates the sectarian orientation ofthe forces controlling that organization," declared ACJC Administrative Secretary Abraham Weizfeld. "The rejection of our application to become a member of the Canadian Jewish Congress and the refusal to seat our delegates at the CJC Plenary on June 17th is a repudiation of the growing Jewish opposition to Israel's occupation and siege of the Palestinian territories."...

Ali Abunimah discusses Hamas and Fatah on Worldview Interview

On Friday, EI's Ali Abunimah appeared on WBEZ Chicago's Worldview, on which he discussed with host Jerome McDonnell the events that have transpired since Hamas routed Fatah in the Gaza Strip last month. Since then, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has created a new government of dubious legality with technocrat and US darling Salam Fayyad. The US and Israel have offered aid money and sent 1,000 M-16 weapons through Jordan to bolster Abbas's forces while Fatah security head Mohammad Dahlan has resigned..Abunimah commented on the embattled Palestinian Authority government: "'Government' implies that it has sovereignty and that it has control. In all our discussions of politics and the goings on we have to remember that Israel is the occupying power and the reason that neither the authority or the government in Gaza or in the West Bank has freedom and cannot control the territory or the airspace or the borders is that Israel retains overall control. In reality, there is only one government between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and that's the government of Israel. Nevertheless, the existence of these Palestinian entities has political importance as we'll discuss."...

Last Word on Anti-Semitism, by Joachim Martillo

Because Zionists and their supporters accuse anyone critical of Israel or Zionism as anti-Semitic, revisiting the meaning of the terms "anti-Semitism" and "Jew" is worthwhile..Who are the Jews?..Arabic uses Yahudi in the Quranic sense of a certain religious community that follows the Tawrat (Torat) Musa (Moshe). Ethnic Ashkenazim historically have used the words Jew, Yid (Yiddish) or Yehudi (Hebrew) to mean ethnic Ashkenazi. Zionists use Yehudi to refer to a mythic pan-Judaic ethno-national Volk that has a blood and soil right to Palestine..In point of fact, ethnic Ashkenazim constitute an indigenous Eastern European ethnic group most of whose recent ancestors at one time practiced modern Rabbinic Judaism. They have precisely the same mythological scriptural Biblical connection to Palestine that ethnic Poles have. Ethnic Ashkenazim have no ancestral connection whatsoever to the ancient Roman-period Judeans or Galileans of Palestine. Those ancient populations practiced a very different religion, spoke a very different language -- Modern Israeli Hebrew is very unlike Roman period Palestinian Aramaic -- and had a very different culture...

A racist Jewish state (Haaretz Editorial)

Every day the Knesset has the option of passing laws that will advance Israel as a democratic Jewish state or turn it into a racist Jewish state. There is a very thin line between the two. This week, the line was crossed. If the Knesset legal counselor did not consider the bill entitled "the Jewish National Fund Law" as sufficiently racist to keep it off the agenda, it is hard to imagine what legislation she will consider racist...

Mob wars hit new heights in Israel (AP)

JERUSALEM - When an explosion goes off on a busy Israeli street these days, it seems as likely to be a mob hit as a Palestinian attack..Rival underworld gangs are waging bloody battles for control of gambling and protection rackets, targeting each other with bullets, bombs and anti-tank missiles..Organized crime, long overshadowed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, has become such a part of everyday life that Israel has its own "Sopranos"-style TV series, "The Arbitrator," in which even synagogues are no refuge from hit men...

Truth and Tenure: Norman Finkelstein and the Perils of Impeccable Scholarship, by GREGORY AFGHANI (Counterpunch)

An impressive record of scholarship was not enough to ensure tenure for DePaul University Professor Norman Finkelstein. An unprecedented yet predictable campaign of hate and slander waged by Israel Inc., commandeered by Alan Dershowitz, the noted Harvard plagiarist, strident enemy of human rights, and America's leading apologist for Israeli state terrorism..

FDR, Pearl Harbor and the U.N., by John V. Denson (ICH)

A new book entitled The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable by George Victor and published by Potomac Books Inc. of Washington, D.C. is well researched and gives a very clear picture of how and why the Pearl Harbor myth was created. This "patriotic political myth" states that the attack by the Japanese was unprovoked and was a surprise to the Roosevelt administration, as well as, the key military personnel in Washington; but the commanders of Pearl Harbor were at fault for not being ready. Based on a good summary of the up-to-date research the author, who is an approving admirer of Roosevelt, concludes that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the attack and that he and his key military and administrative advisers clearly knew, well in advance, that the Japanese were going to attack both Pearl Harbor and the Philippines...

The closing of the Jewish mind (Al Ahram)

How long will Jewish psychosis be tolerated, even vaunted, and its brutal consequences ignored, asks Issa Khalaf

..In March of last year I wrote, in other pages, that: "The events overtaking Palestine are eerily reminiscent of 1948. Unfolding today in the occupied territories is another disaster of historic proportions, evocative of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. Israeli expansion, colonisation and consolidation of what is left of historic Palestine are reaching a culmination in the next several years. The Israeli goal, short of another 1948 or 1967- like event that would provide cover for further mass expulsions, is the complete political and social annihilation of Palestinian will and society... "

Why Our Government Supports Israel, and Why We Shouldn't, by John Spritzler (New Democracy World - .pdf)

As most Americans know very well, the United States is not really a democracy. What is less obvious is how that explains why our government supports Israel..In America, money is power. A tiny plutocracy of billionaires,with a corporate and government elite, controls every importantinstitution; our government, the major political parties, the corporations and mass media, even the big labor unions. Their values of inequality and top-down control, and what they do to stay in power and control us, like pitting people against each other and waging wars based on lies, fly in the face of the values of equality and democracy and concern for one another that most ordinary Americans share..Virtually all of our politicians and mass media support Israel because Israel helps America's rulers control both Americans and people in the Middle East. Israel does this by fomenting religious war in the Middle East pitting Jews against non-Jews, and enlisting U.S. support in that war...

The Explanation We Never Heard, by Shiraz Dossa (Literary Review of Canada)

Six months after attending a controversial Tehran conference, a Canadian professor charges the media and his own university with ignorance and intolerance.

It would be a shocking event in any university. It was doubly so in a university that takes pride in its “Catholic character.” Last December, St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, authorized a small Spanish Inquisition of its own to denounce a St. FX Muslim professor. It was launched by two Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the political science department (Michael Steinitz, Samuel Kalman and Yvon Grenier). My sin: I attended a conference in a Muslim nation on the Holocaust entitled The Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision. It took place in Tehran, Iran, in December 2006, and it was widely—and erroneously—described in the western media as a “Holocaust-denial conference.”..I have never denied the Holocaust, only noted its propaganda power. Yet my university tolerated this assault on me. I was stunned by the university’s illiteracy and bias. I was appalled by President Sean Riley’s attack on my reputation and his spurious comments on the conference. In his December 13, 2006, statement he insinuated that the “conference” was bogus and that it revealed a “deplorable anti-Semitism” that the “St. FX community” found “deeply abhorrent” and contrary to its “traditions.” Riley left little doubt that I was guilty of sullying my school’s reputation. St. FX in effect sanctioned a crusade against a Muslim Holocaust scholar, who also happens to be an outspoken critic of Israel’s brutality in occupied Palestine...

Darfur, the new American-French Protectorate, by Abu Iskandar as-Sudani (Free Arab Voice)

Most everything that has appeared in English about the situation in Darfur, the Sudan - indeed particularly in “progressive” publications in English – for the last year or so has related one basic “story.”..According to this story the Sudanese government, using armed militiamen, has been massacring Black African Muslim peasants in Darfur, trying to drive them out of the country because of their race. This story has been presented as a humanitarian and political crisis that requires urgent intervention by the “great powers.”..Indeed, the position taken by many confused “leftwing” publications has been that the US government is “not doing enough” to impose “civilization” on the Sudan. These publications, dazzled by the talk about a 'humanitarian disaster' and horrified by the talk of “racist genocide” have thus turned themselves into cheerleaders for further imperialist expansion..As people familiar with the situation in the Sudan are aware, the reality is markedly different from the propaganda version of “racist genocide” presented by the western media...

Horror among humans, sanctuary with wolves: A Holocaust survivor speaks out after 50 years

[Editor: The Holocult Fairy Tales Just Keep on Coming]

DARTMOUTH -- Whenever silver-haired Misha Defonseca, a 64-year-old Holocaust survivor, sees a dead squirrel in the road, she does not avert her gaze and drive on. She stops her car..Respectfully, she moves the animal's body to the side of the road because animal corpses still remind her of the Holocaust...

The Last of England, by Ian Buckley

..Nearly two hundred years ago, the hills here were ablaze with beacons, as Jacobite rebels took on the forces of the English State. The name of a narrow, winding road - Gallows Lane - testifies to the subsequent (and usual) fate of defeated warriors against the Empire..Now various experts have recently suggested that Britain has been fighting terrorism for hundreds of years, and will have to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But to me, history would seem to demonstrate the exact opposite of that curious hypothesis - instead of fighting terrorism, Britain's ruling classes have waged terrorism against their own people, chiefly but not exclusively on its Celtic fringes - as seen in Glencoe and during the Great Irish Famine..What is today termed 'terrorism' was in fact mostly first devised and operated in its modern form during the 1940s by Britain's wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE). Malaysian leader Chin Peng was first honoured by Britain, then became a nasty terrorist in double-quick time. It is an obvious cliché that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter...

Britain’s Gordon Brown becomes patron of Zionist agency, by Redress Information & Analysis

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has agreed to become patron of the UK arm of the Jewish National Fund, whose funds have contributed to Israeli ethnic cleansing, the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expropriation of Palestinian land, and whose constitution requires it to promote and implement policies that discriminate against Israel’s Arab population..Gordon Brown has crossed a new threshold on the path to becoming a fully-fledged Zionist..According to a report in the Jewish Chronicle, Gordon Brown has agreed to become a patron of the British arm of the Jewish National Fund (JNF UK)...

144 Settlements in the West Bank are housing 476,000 Israel settlers (IMEMC News)

Israeli Settlement Near Jerusalem

The Palestinian Census Bureau issued a report stating that there are 144 Israeli settlements, housing 476,000 Israeli settlers, spread all over the West Bank, including the occupied city of Jerusalem..The report, which is for the year 2006, states that 26 of those settlements are in the occupied city of Jerusalem, 16 of them already annexed to Jerusalem..259,000 settlers live in settlements in and around the occupied city of Jerusalem, while 77,000 settlers live in settlements around the central West Bank city of Ramallah. In addition, 46,000 live in settlements around the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem, 29,000 located near Salfit City in the northern part of the West Bank, and 1,300 settlers live in settlements near the northern West Bank city of Tubas..The report stated that those numbers do not include the random 165 settlements, home of 10,000 settlers, which the Israeli army considers to be illegal...

The burial of civil marriage, by Shulamit Aloni (Haaretz)

Israeli citizens are divided by law into 12 religious groups. Each person is born into his own group: The Jew whose mother is Jewish is subject to the tyranny of the rabbis, the Muslim to that of the kadis, and the Druze have their own religious leaders, as do the Christians, the Armenians and all the others. And they cannot marry one another, since Israel has no civil marriage. This entire arrangement of no civil marriage, in a country that pretends to be democratic, came into the world only in order to preserve the purity of the Jewish genius...On the other hand, here we have to satisfy the inclinations of the religious parties. Therefore, in 1970, then prime minister Golda Meir and justice minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira anchored in law an amendment stipulating that although the right of return would also be granted to the son and grandson of a Jew and to his/her spouse (apparently for demographic reasons), a "Jew" according to their definition was "someone who was born to a Jewish mother, or who converted and is not a member of another religion."...Now the justice minister has come along and, together with the chief rabbi, has decided to establish a new, separate group of gentiles, who are allowed to marry one another as long as they don't marry a Jewish man or woman, God forbid. That is the salvation they are being offered...

Four Zionist and Four KKK quotes: Can You Tell Which Is Which?, by John Spritzler

The quotations below are real statements made either by a Ku Klux Klaner using the red colored text or by a prominent Zionist using the blue colored text. See if you can tell which is which. If you have a hard time deciding, it's not your fault. Ku Klux Klan and Zionist racial separatism are INDISTINGUISHABLE!..The answers and references are below, but no fair peeking!...

New Bumper Stickers [just for fun]

1. Cheney/Satan '08

2. 01/20/09: End of an Error

3. That's OK; I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway

4. Lets Fix Democracy in This Country First

5. If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran!

6. Bush. Like a Rock. Only Dumber.

7. If You Can Read This, You're Not Our President

8. Of Course It Hurts: You're Getting Screwed by an Elephant

9. Hey, Bush Supporters: Embarrassed Yet?

10. George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight.

11. America : One Nation, Under Surveillance

12. They Call Him "W" So He Can Spell It

13. Jail to the Chief

14. No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade Iraq?

15. Bush: God's way of proving Intelligent Design is bullshit

16. Bad President! No Banana.

17. We Need a President Who's Fluent In At Least One Language

18. We're Making Enemies Faster than We Can Kill Them

19. Is It Vietnam Yet?

20. Where Are We Going? And Why Are We In This Handbasket?

21. You Elected Him. You Deserve Him.

22. Impeach Cheney First

23. When Bush Took Office, Gas was $1.46

24. Pray For Impeachment

25. The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century

26. What Part of "Bush Lied" Don't You Understand?

27 One Nation under Clod

28. 2004: Embarrassed 2005: Horrified 2006: Terrified 2007: Scared Stiff

29. Bush Never Exhaled

30. At Least Nixon Resigned

Is The US Preparing To Attack Pakistan?, by Eric Margolis (Counter Currents)

The Bush Administration may be preparing to lash out at old ally Pakistan, which Washington now blames for its humiliating failures to crush al-Qaida, capture its elusive leaders, or defeat Taliban resistance forces in Afghanistan..One is immediately reminded of the Vietnam War when the Pentagon, unable to defeat North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces, urged invasion of Cambodia..Sources in Washington say the Pentagon is drawing up plans to attack Pakistan’s "autonomous" tribal region bordering Afghanistan. Limited "hot pursuit" ground incursions by US forces based in Afghanistan, intensive air attacks, and special forces raids into Pakistan’s autonomous tribal region are being evaluated...

Southern Sudan: Looking for a new identity (The Economist)

And finding a paradise not yet lost

IN MANY respects, south Sudan is already its own country. It issues its own visas, decides most its own policies and mishandles its own budget. Of course, tricky deals over the ownership of oil and the Nile waters must be negotiated before full independence. And there is always a small chance that the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), which runs the south, may do well enough in elections for all of Sudan (due to be held in 2009) to alter the shape of Sudanese politics overall, the north included. But as things stand, almost all southerners believe that, after a referendum promised by the central government in Khartoum, south Sudan will become a sovereign country by 2011...Many leading lights in the south Sudanese government, including the president, Salva Kiir, want the new country, whatever it is called, to become part of east Africa rather than a southern spin-off from the rest of Sudan, which is mainly Arab and Muslim and looks more to the Arab world. South Sudan's economy would tilt to the south and east.

Steven Emerson's Disturbing Track Record, by Ahmed Rehab (Media Monitors)

"It is an unfortunate consequence of post 9/11 life in America, where fear-mongering is a reality, that notorious career Islamophobes, such as this individual, are subjected to little scrutiny and virtually no credibility tests - even as mainstream Muslim leaders with established track records are readily second-guessed."

In his latest anti-CAIR attack, Steven Emerson once again unleashes one of his trademark tirades designed to stifle free and open debate (The New Republic Online, 03/28/2008). This time, his wrath is focused against The New York Times. Its crime? Offering two sides of the story in its recent coverage of the “mounting criticism” against the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, CAIR...

Israel says U.S. aid to Saudi military is understandable (AP)

JERUSALEM: In a break from historic Israeli opposition to U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday his country understands Washington's plan to supply state-of-the-art weapons to Riyadh as a counterweight to Iranian influence..He said that alongside the arms deal, the U.S. is offering a sharp increase in defense aid to Israel, assuring the Jewish state it will retain a fighting edge over its neighbors...

US state department 'funding Blair' (Al Jazeera)

There are questions emerging over Tony Blair's appointment as the Quartet's [the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia] Middle East envoy..The uncertainties start with funding, who is paying the bills for the former British prime minister's new job as special representative for the diplomatic grouping?..This is a hugely sensitive position. It is also a position that Blair had his eyes on for some time..In this, he had the whole-hearted backing of George Bush, the US president, and the US state department...Now, senior UN and British officials have told Al Jazeera that the US state department has been paying Mr Blair's bills, either directly or indirectly, via a trust fund. The amount remains undisclosed...

Hunger, disease spread in Iraq - Oxfam report (Reuters)

BAGHDAD, July 30 (Reuters) - Hunger and disease are spreading in Iraq as violence masks a deepening humanitarian crisis, British charity Oxfam said in a report on Monday..The charity said 28 percent of Iraqi children are malnourished, 15 percent of Iraqis regularly cannot afford enough to eat and 70 percent lack clean drinking water, all sharp increases since 2003...

Converging Interests in Iraq Allow Bush an 'Iranian Option' - Arabs Threatened, by Nicola Nasser

Converging U.S.-Iran interests in Iraq are creating a common ground for an "Iranian option" for President George W. Bush that could be developed into an historical foreign policy breakthrough of the kind he has been yearning for in the Arab - Israeli conflict or India; however several factors are ruling out this window of opportunity, including his militarization of the U.S. foreign policy, obsession with the "regime changes" overseas, his insistence on exploiting to the maximum his country's emergence as the only world power in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union (USSR), an Iranian independent regional agenda that so far cold not be reconciled with his own, and a detrimental Arab feeling of insecurity of such a potentiality...

Decider Guy Demands Further Erosion of the Fourth Amendment, by Kurt Nimmo

If Bush and the neocons have their way, your cell phone will be an official government surveillance device. Of course, your cell phone and computer connected to the internet are already surveillance devices, it is just that Bush and the neocons want to enshrine this fact in law...

Fatah-led delegation to block UN initiative over Gaza crisis, by Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz

The Palestinian delegation to the United Nations is blocking a Security Council initiative aimed at expressing the organization's concern over the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip...Hamas routed rival faction Fatah in the takeover, and thus the resolution of the humanitarian crisis stands in conflict with the interests of the Fatah-affiliated Palestinian delegation to the UN...

Everyone wins [except the US taxpayers and the victims of Israel's next aggression] , by Amir Oren, Haaretz

Israel may oppose U.S. President George W. Bush's planned arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but it lacks the ability to mount much effective resistance to the deal..According to the unwritten rule in such cases, Israel must not lose the battle altogether, and it must try to reach some sort of compromise, usually in the form of compensation. However, it is even more important that Israel does not win by completely thwarting Washington's weapons deal...

Israeli Company Is New Pentagon Computer Security Supplier!, by Jeff Blankfort (Ziopedia)

The Israeli company for computer security Check Points has been appointed as the official supplier to the American Ministry of Defense. In particular, the company will supply American Federal agencies with a protection system for data stored on laptop computers. (Guysen.International.News) July 17, 2007..Whatever one may think of the old Protocols of the the Learned Elders of Zion, the protocols of the current elders seem to be working very efficiently. Let's see. They control Congress and the White House, security at all our major airports, through the Israeli company Amdocs they manage the billing of 90% of US private telephone companies, and now they have a direct line into the computers of every federal agency because one may be assured that if they have a system, they know how to bypass it. Of course, by calling it "Check Points," that is equivalent to the Nazis of an earlier generation calling their school yards, "Concentration Camps." Different era, same mentality...

Something happened on 9-11, by Sheila Samples, Ziopedia (With YouTube video)

Strange how something happens and you're unaware that it "registers" with you. Later, perhaps, something will trigger that buried memory and things begin to fall into place..The day began with CNN's Wolf Blitzer frantically reporting that planes had smashed into Buildings 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center. They stood there, so tall that the smoke billowing from their upper floors could be seen for 20 miles. The scene was shocking, grisly, and the horror was broken only by the further news that a plane had rammed into the Pentagon. Death and destruction everywhere. Happening now -- right before our eyes..In an amazing "Breaking News" alert, CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McEntyre shot down Blitzer's "plane hit the Pentagon" report. McEntyre said flatly, "Although it may appear that way, from my close-up inspection, there is NO evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. The only pieces left are small enough you can pick them up in your hand. There are no pieces lying around that would indicate a plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon." ..Whoop! Happening now...Quick! Back to Ground Zero...Just in time to see WTC 2, then WTC 1, sink eerily into their own footprints -- tons and tons of cement blasting instantly into a fine powder, rolling majestically through the streets like an Iraqi sandstorm. Anyone who had ever seen one -- even one -- controlled demolition <http://www.acebaker.com/> knew without a doubt what he had just witnessed...

Now the New York Times Sells "Bloodbath" as a Rationale for Staying in Iraq, by ALEXANDER COCKBURN (Counterpunch)

There’s been no stage in the grim progress of the US onslaught on Iraq at which the New York Times hasn’t been shoving the whole ghastly enterprise along. First there were Judy Miller and Michael Gordon promoting the WMD rationale for attack. More recently there was Michael Gordon selling the surge..Now it’s John Burns, pushing the notion that if the US withdraws there’ll a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions as the Iraqis slaughter each other. The administration is seizing eagerly on this, which is a bit like Dracula saying his castle is the best security guarantee against local peasant girls being attacked by vampires...

A step too far?, by John Hooper (The Guardian)

Should Holocaust deniers be prevented from airing their views? And, if so, how far is it right to go in stopping them? The questions arise because of what happened over here on Thursday night in the central Italian university city of Teramo..Robert Faurisson, a retired academic who has been convicted five times in his native France for denying crimes against humanity, had been invited by a member of the staff to give a lecture. His host is one Claudio Moffa, a professor who runs the university's master's programme in Middle Eastern studies..Moffa was asked by the university authorities to think again. He refused. So the rector, Mauro Mattioli, decided the only thing left was to temporarily shut down the university, which he did...

Her dream, my catastrophe, by Dr. Aref Assaf (The Arabist)

This is an open letter to an American Jew who is embarking on her 'homingcoming' jounrey to Israel. The letter below is a quick response to an article headlined, "Our dream will bring us to another land" by an American citizen named Abigail Leichman. In her article, Abby, who is a staff writer for the Bergen Record and often writes about food, etiquettes, and home decorating interests, is offering her goodbyes as she prepares to return to her "biblical homeland", Israel. She also writes for Jewish papers about Israel and other Jewish matters. In fact, she wrote a rather two-part non descript articles about the recent "real estate fair" held in Teaneck to sell American Jews lands to build more settlements in Israel. Could it be that Abby was influenced by this event? The organizer's flyer proclaimed: "Come learn how you, a group of friends, or even a community can own a home and strengthen the Zionist dream."..I was very much involved in exposing that supposedly secretive gathering and followed that by having a letter published on the subject...

Mazin Qumsiyeh's Latest Report from Palestine, July 29

It is difficult to put into words our experiences since I wrote last and sent any emails in over 8 days. Our visits to Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin, Aida Refugee camp and much more. Over 10 meetings with international delegations (inc luding talks I gave to a number of these delegations). So many inspiring stories and so many sad stories...

The Saker interviews Jonathan Cook from Nazareth

Today I am publishing the second interview in my new series "Saker interviews" (which began with the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery) with a Q&A email exchange with Jonathan Cook, ... a freelance journalist whose articles have been published in The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch and many other media, is the only western reporter who chose to live amongst Palestinians and who covers the Palestinian struggle without being tied to the agenda and allegiances of the Western corporate media...Jonathan has just returned from the "Israel-Palestine: One Country, One State" conference organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on the future of Palestine...

[see alsoStatement: One country, one state]

Some Holes in the Holy Holocult

My Favorite Elie Wiesel Stories

Elie Wiesel vs Encyclopaedia Britannica

It's Official - No Actual Shortage Of Holocaust Survivors

Ground-Imaging Forensic Radar Exam Of WWII Treblinka Camp

Abraham Bomba, Barber of Treblinka

A Criminological Analysis of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Ronald C. Kramer and Raymond J. Michalowski (Oxford Journals)

In this article, we argue that the 2003 US/UK invasion and occupation of Iraq was a form of state crime and offer a criminological analysis of the event. First, we describe how the war on Iraq violated the UN Charter and international humanitarian law. Then, we provide a narrative analysis of the historical and contemporary origins of this crime through the lens of an integrated model for the study of organizational deviance that has proved useful in the analysis of a number of other upper-world crimes. A key part of our explanation of this war resides in the dynamics of America’s long-standing will to empire coupled with the imperial designs of neoconservative policy makers within the Bush administration...

Gaza: a gas for Blair?, by Arthur Neslen (The Guardian)

It's always nice to start a new job with a trick up your sleeve, and the Middle East's new envoy Tony Blair could be forgiven for thinking he has just that. In the near future, a $4bn deal to exploit Gaza's offshore gas reserves will be signed by the Israeli government, Britain's BG Group (BG), the Palestinian Authority (PA)'s investment arm, the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF) and Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC). Environmental considerations notwithstanding, an injection of this kind of capital into the occupied territories could transform the political landscape...

Brown to appoint his own Middle East envoy

Ian Black, middle East editor (The Guardian)

Gordon Brown is to appoint his own Middle East envoy, opening up the possibility of a clash with the work of Tony Blair, who is now representing the international "Quartet" - the US, EU, UN and Russia...Mr Brown told Mr Ban in London earlier this month that he wanted Mr Williams to fill the post formerly occupied by Lord Levy. The Palestinians and other Arabs will be pleased with the news and hoping that the prime minister will develop a distinct approach that is less influenced by both Washington and Jerusalem. Lord Levy, a leading figure in the UK Jewish community and a Labour party donor, was widely seen as being too close to Israel's view of the conflict...

One week in July: Israel's human rights violations, by Sonja Karkar

One could be excused for thinking that Israel's human rights violations against the Palestinians stopped since the Palestinian factions began fighting each other. Just about every report and article written in the Western media these past weeks have focused on the rift between Fatah and Hamas and US overtures to broker a peace deal that may finally allow the Palestinians a state of sorts. Any mention of Israel is in the light of urbane diplomatic discussions between it and the other main players minus, of course, Hamas with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert showing a most remarkable willingness to agree to a peace settlement that would see the Palestinians getting back around 90 per cent of the West Bank. If only there was reason to believe that the leopard has changed its spots...

State of exception: Bush's war on the rule of law, by Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

At its finest moments the Republican Party has been a vocal and unsparing advocate for human rights. “Though force can protect in emergency,” insisted Dwight D. Eisenhower, the party’s great warrior-president, “only justice, fairness, consideration, and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.” But under the current administration, those designated as enemies have no rights, neither under the laws of war nor under any notion of criminal justice. A radical rupture has occurred; American legal tradition has been swept aside and, with it, long-established precedents for dealing with adversaries in wartime—even those accused of heinous crimes. Nowhere is that more clear than in the treatment of the so-called habeas lawyers (so named because of their repeated attempts to enforce the rights of their clients through the writ of habeas corpus—the legal procedure that allows an imprisoned person to test the legality of his detention) who counsel the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba..The habeas lawyers have been tarred with ethnic slurs and accusations of homosexuality, accused of undermining national security, subjected to continual petty harassment. They have also had their livelihoods threatened through appeals to their paying clients. These events have been reported as separate incidents in the press, but this conduct results from a carefully orchestrated Bush Administration policy that goes under the rubric of “lawfare.”...

The Open Society and its Enemies - The Story of Auschwitz, by Gilad Atzmon

Living in a scientific technological environment, it is natural for most commentators to judge any given narrative reflecting on its positive contents, i.e. the story it tells, the facts it picks up on and the message it conveys. When it comes to Auschwitz, it is always the terrifying numbers, Mengele and the selection, the clinical mass murder, the Gas Chambers, the trains, the famous Arbeit Macht Frei above the front gate, the death march just before liberation, etc. And yet, I would argue that it is at least as enlightening to expose that which the Auschwitz narrative is there to conceal. Every historical tale can operate as a smoke screen; narratives are very effective in encouraging collective blindness. Auschwitz and the Holocaust narrative, in this sense, are no different...

Foreign aid for Palestinians funds Israel's occupation (AFP)

Palestinian dependency on humanitarian aid and relief efforts has been forced on the people by Israel's punitive occupation. This dependence has escalated since economic sanctions were imposed last year leaving the Palestinians internationally isolated and facing an economic and humanitarian crisis. Distressingly for the Palestinians, emergency humanitarian assistance - undertaken to keep them from starving - has exacerbated their economic problems. They are in the invidious position of having to buy Israeli imports instead of cheaper goods from Jordan or Egypt. Not only is this aid contributing to Israel's economy, it has obscured Israel's responsibility for destroying the Palestinian economy and is actually funding Israel's occupation. Palestinian reliance on aid only ever became necessary because Israel stopped Palestinian economic development in its tracks. International aid, which had contributed to the development of a self-sustaining Palestinian economy hardly managed to get off the ground as Israel's suffocating restrictions disallowed any and every initiative to achieve that. Also, Israel's frequent incursions and aerial attacks destroyed much of the equipment supplied by international donors. When sanctions were imposed by the international community to punish the Hamas Party for winning government, Israel increased its restrictions and made the delivery of aid as difficult as possible. Only the imminent starvation of a whole population has seen Israel relax the restrictions to allow some aid to go through, but the interference in the delivery of aid continues. So great is this interference that UN agents have complained "we don't know of another conflict area in the world where we've had these problems". This emergency aid no longer contributes to developmental projects and is merely a means to stave off the hunger of an entire population...

Rethinking Islam from Pakistan to Texas (FAS)

Scholars emphasize viewing Islam in historical, political contextTwo Harvard professors are spearheading a new initiative aimed at defeating "a clash of ignorances," a clash, they affirm, that perpetuates misunderstanding, prejudice, and fear between Muslim and Western societies. Fueled by widespread global illiteracy about the nature of Islam and Muslim civilizations, this clash has dangerous implications for nations that are increasingly becoming multireligious and multicultural in character. Traversing the world from Texas to Pakistan and Boston to Kenya, Ali Asani and his colleague Diane L. Moore are helping secondary school teachers recontextualize Islam and provide new interpretations and understandings of the religion to teens throughout the world...

MEPs STAND UP FOR THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Canadian Dimension)

PRESS RELEASE BY LUISA MORGANTINI, Vice President of the European Parliament

45 Members of the European Parliament, from different political groups, have decided to express their solidarity towards the 45 Palestinian colleagues imprisoned by Israel, and called for their immediate and unconditional release...All the 45 MEPs stood up symbolically in the plenary, right before the beginning of the debate with Mr. Solana on the situation on the Middle East, representing the 45 Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council detained in the Israeli jails in a clear violation of the international legality...

Gaza's Gas Reserves and the US-Israel-Sponsored 'Palestinian Civil War' Tragedy, by Genevieve Cora Fraser

There is a large natural gas field off the coast of Gaza, and its 1.3 million population is systematically starved, subjugated to non-stop military assault marginalized, and many liquidated for a reason.

His name is Ibrahim. He is a Muslim and the 34-year-old Palestinian husband of an American, a Christian minister, Reverend Dr. Mary Ethridge, DTh, who is several years his senior. Their marriage took place by “power of attorney” because he was never able to come to her, or she to him. Mary calls him her heart, and Ibrahim calls her his soul. They shared a dream. Until recently, Dr. Ibrahim Al-Majayda was the director of the American Cultural Center in Gaza City. “But now Ibrahim's life is at stake because of the Center and his relationship to me,” Mary wrote me. She asked if I could petition government officials and write an article to help get Ibrahim out of Gaza to safety...It was widely known that the CIA was involved in the unrest. The US, their Western allies, and Israel had successfully boycotted, sealed off, and starved Gaza since the Palestinian election in January 2006. And along with non-stop military assaults by Israeli Occupation Forces, the US and Israel have been funding, arming, and training Fatah to take on and destroy the popularly elected Hamas government...

The Christian Zionist Lie Must Die, by Charles E. Carlson, Straight Gate Ministries

At first blush, one could hardly characterize the show of power exhibited by John Hagee’s Christian Zionists at his brash Washington Israel Summit in D.C. last week as a dike about to break: 4500 Christian Zionists filled the Washington Convention Center. Senators and Congressmen kowtowed to the crowd for four days. Senator Lieberman likened Hagee to Moses, a "leader of a multitude." John Hagee was the dealmaker of the hour for Israel, their political rock star, a political money machine. The mere 15 resistors standing outside would not seemed to have made much difference..But a closer look by religion writer Abe Levy reporting in the San Antonio Express-News, Hagee's hometown newspaper, shows that the Christian Zionist dike is holding back a surging sea of truth and truth-telling. There are cracks. Cracks Hagee will not be able to contain since they are coming from the very people Hagee claims to be saving from holocausts and persecutions...

Darkness from the West, by Israel Shamir

The Catholic Church, the biggest apostolic church in the US, is under heavy attack. The plotters had united media effort and legal machinery, utilized American obsession with money, and given the Church the treatment they gave tobacco industry, that is, suing it to oblivion. For their chance to get thirty pieces of silver (over a million dollars, in present prices), hundreds of American Catholics denounced their church...

No place to call home (Cincinnati Enquirer)

An immigration agent called Maha Dakar to his office a few weeks ago and told her the time had come to make a choice..Dakar began to weep..The choice was simple, yet impossible: leave behind her Green Township home, her four young daughters and her husband and move to Jordan alone, or take the girls with her and subject them to a new and frightening life in a country they’d never seen..Her husband was not permitted to go with her. She was not permitted to stay..How could she decide, Dakar asked, when neither choice would keep her family together?.How could any mother do such a thing?...

A Lost Opportunity?: The Palestinian Left, by RAMZY BAROUD

When Hamas members were elected as the majority bloc of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and as it became apparent that a US-led international embargo would be an adjoining price to that victory, I contacted many intellectuals and writers in Palestine, mostly those who often positioned themselves as part of the Palestinian Left. I asked them to solidify behind the collective choice of the Palestinian people and to shield Palestinian democracy at any cost...

Political Prisoner: Loose Change Producer Korey Rowe Arrested, by Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson (Prison Planet)

Iraq, Afghanistan veteran handed over to military officials by police under charges of "deserting the Army"

Loose Change producer and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Korey Rowe has been arrested and handed over to military officials without bail for allegedly "deserting the Army"..Arrests and court martials for deserters are incredibly rare and this appears to be an obvious case of political persecution as the Loose Change crew prepare the cinematic release of the final version of their popular documentary...Alex Jones interviewed Rowe at a conference in Chicago last year, during which he exposed how CNN and the military would stage photo-ops to make it appear as if Al-Qaeda members were being killed in Afghanistan, along with a host of other cover-ups and atrocities...

Muslim American Society of Boston (MAS Boston) Holds Press Conference to Challenge Witch Hunt Against Muslim Community Leadership

MAS Boston held a press conference yesterday at the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston to express shock and dismay at the government’s actions against Imam Masood and other leaders from the Muslim community. Speaking at this press conference were the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Rabbi Barry Starr from Temple Israel in Sharon, Imam Abdullah Faaruuq from the Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Roxbury. The court room was packed beyond capacity and a crowd of over 45 supporters from the Muslim and other communities had gathered to support the Imam at the hearing on just a few hours notice. All of the Imams from the Greater Boston area also came in support. The Press conference was covered by the NPR and the Boston Globe, both of which gave good coverage to the story today..Our concern revolves around the fact that last Thursday, the US Attorney's Office, interrogated Imam Masood for six hours during which he was threatened with jail, "humiliation" and abandonment from the community, unless he "cooperated." Cooperation included answering questions about various respected mainstream leaders and organizations in the Boston Muslim community, many of whom are involved in a monthly dialogue project with law enforcement agencies called BRIDGES (Building Respect in Diverse Groups to Enhance Sensitivity). The goal of the questioning was apparently to seek incriminating information against community leaders even though it does not exist. The Imam did not have information which the US Attorney's office was apparently hoping for. He was then informed that he would be criminally charged in two days...

Zionism as Jewish National Socialism, by Lasse Wilhelmson

Zionism - more than traditional colonialism and apartheid

The Jewish colonisation of Palestine under the Zionist slogan "the land without people to the people without a land" started almost a hundred years ago and reached its first climax with the proclamation of The Jewish State of Israel in 1948. A second climax is now in the offing through the ongoing colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza..A Jewish state needs a substantial majority of Jews in the population. This has been insured by means of immigration, terror and expulsion of the native Palestine population. Jewish hegemony in Israel today is secured through a system of apartheid inherent in all aspects of Society, be it law, administration or religion. Israel lacks a constitution and fixed boarders, which is fully consistent with Zionism's call for continual expansion...

Misunderstanding Islam, by John Alden Williams

...I must be brief, and I want to talk about the most serious religious crisis of our time. It is the rift that certain fundamentalists--Christians, Jews and Muslims--are trying to open between Christianity and Islam, the two largest religions on the planet. Sadly, some people are seeking to foster hatred and religious war on both sides. The sort of misinformation that is being disseminated among Christians and Jews is quite alarming and distressing. Some of it is outright falsehood..For example, one thing you may hear today is that Muslims do not worship God, they worship something else called Allah. But Allah is simply the Arabic word for "God." It is closely related to the word for God, Alaha, in Aramaic, the language that Jesus and his disciples spoke, a language still spoken in a few areas in the Middle East. If you are an Arab Christian, or Arabic speaking Jew or Muslim, you pray to Allah. To question that is like arguing that French speakers don't worship God, they worship something else called "dieu". Muslims worship the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and anyone who opens an English translation of the Qur'an will see that...

What is Antisemitism?, by Michael Neumann

Every once in a while, some left-wing Jewish writer will take a deep breath, open up his (or her) great big heart, and tell us that criticism of Israel or Zionism is not antisemitism. Silently they congratulate themselves on their courage. With a little sigh, they suppress any twinge of concern that maybe the goyim--let alone the Arabs--can't be trusted with this dangerous knowledge..Sometimes it is gentile hangers-on, whose ethos if not their identity aspires to Jewishness, who take on this task. Not to be utterly risqué, they then hasten to remind us that antisemitism is nevertheless to be taken very seriously. That Israel, backed by a pronounced majority of Jews, happens to be waging a race war against the Palestinians is all the more reason we should be on our guard. Who knows? it might possibly stir up some resentment!..I take a different view. I think we should almost never take antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun with it. I think it is particularly unimportant to the Israel-Palestine conflict, except perhaps as a diversion from the real issues. I will argue for the truth of these claims; I also defend their propriety. I don't think making them is on a par with pulling the wings off flies...

Should we consider a boycott of Israeli academic institutions? (British Medical Journal survey)

[anyone from anywhere can vote]

The "One State Solution" is the best solution, by Joel Bainerman

While the One State Solution(OSS) to solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is typically rejected outright as being a demographic threat to Israel- this approach could very well be the only viable path to solving the conflict...

The modern Muslim, by Steve Paulson (Salon)

Controversial scholar Tariq Ramadan explains why Mohammed had progressive views of women, why the Quran is a prescription for peace -- and why he is banned from Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

Why are there so few moderate Muslims speaking out against Islamic terrorism? That's a common complaint heard in the West, but in truth, plenty of Muslims are critical of suicide bombers. What's harder to find are Muslim leaders who condemn terrorism while also maintaining credibility among disaffected Muslims, and intellectuals who can appeal to both secular Europeans and Middle Eastern imams. That's why the Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan is such a compelling figure..Ramadan has been called the Muslim Martin Luther King, and he's often described as Europe's most important Muslim intellectual. He has no shortage of charisma -- a quality that serves him well as he reaches out to various constituencies. There's no doubt that Ramadan commands a large following. Hundreds of young Muslims turn up at his public talks, and tapes of his lectures are widely circulated. He travels frequently throughout the Islamic world, trying to build bridges between European Muslims and conservative clerics...

A day in the desert with Prince Alwaleed [the world's richest Arab]

The desert does different things to different people. Some fear the emptiness, some dread the loneliness, while others find happiness and serenity. None more so than HRH Prince Alwaleed, for whom the dunes are just another location from which to play the role of international dealmaker, global peacebroker and world philanthropist..."Islam is very sophisticated. It has been hijacked by a small minority who choose extremism but Islam is a very gentle religion. Islam loves Christianity. Islam loves Jewish people also, and you can quote me on that. But a small number of people hijacked our religion."...

'GOODNESS WILL PREVAIL': EMINENCES MEET IN JOHANNESBURG TO ADVANCE GLOBAL JUSTICE

Current of joy powers The Elders' peace gathering, by STEPHANIE NOLEN (Globe and Mail)

JOHANNESBURG -- The official order of business yesterday was the introduction of The Elders: convened at the request of Nelson Mandela, a collection of former leaders that has begun to work together to advance the causes of peace and global justice..Five Nobel Laureates and a handful of other eminences gathered on the stage in Johannesburg as Mr. Mandela announced that they would seek to fulfill the traditional role of elders in a village, providing wisdom and leadership and attempting to resolve conflicts, taking on everything from climate change to the fighting in Darfur...

Time for a New Palestinian Liberation Movement, by Tony Sayegh (Palestinian Pundit)

Let’s face it, the Palestinians are at a major decision point and the reality today is not what it was just a month ago. The forces amassed against them are preparing a major push to liquidate Palestinian rights, once and for all. There is nothing new in seeing the U.S., the E.U., the U.N. and the puppet Arab regimes conspiring for a final solution. What is new is the formation of a Vichy, collaborationist “government” that is working openly with the occupier to formalize this liquidation of Palestinian rights. It is true that the main quislings in this open collaboration are old faces who have been preparing for this day for sometime. What is new is their emergence in the open as a tool of the occupation, with no apologies or shame. Some of the collaboration used to take place quietly, behind closed doors, and if found out, used to be denied; no more. When the “old man” Arafat was around, this vermin did not dare to go this far in their collaboration and treason, and that is why they conspired with the Mossad to poison him...

China's delicate role on Darfur, by Jason Qian and Anne Wu (Boston Globe)

SOME IN the West have recently begun referring to the 2008 Beijing Olympics as the "Genocide Olympics" because of China's continued business ties with Sudan and its reluctance to intervene decisively in the Darfur conflict. Is China really turning a cold shoulder to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, or has the explosive charge of complicity in genocide blinded observers to China's aid and quiet diplomacy in Sudan?..

Poll Shows Low Global Opinion Of U.S. (CBS)

Not only has global disapproval of the United States and its policies worsened, but confidence in the international system and many of the world’s leaders has significantly dissipated as well..These conclusions, and many others on international affairs, are presented in the findings of an extensive survey by the Pew Research Center. Over 45,000 interviews were conducted in 47 countries for the “Global Attitudes Survey,” released Wednesday..Support for the U.S. and its policies has fallen, both in the Middle East as well as in countries that traditionally ally themselves with the U.S. Spain’s confidence in President Bush’s leadership, for instance, fell to 7 percent, the poll reveals. That abysmal approval rating wasn’t even what shocked former Senator and Ambassador John Danforth, who spoke at a press conference where the Pew report was presented..“When the plurality of people in Israel say the U.S. is too supportive [of their country], it’s as though the message is ‘we can’t do anything right to anybody ever,’” Danforth said...

Israel’s Primal Myth: A Barrier to Peace, by Barry Lando (truthdig)

Forget about Hamas, the wall, Gaza and the occupied territories. There can be no peace in the Middle East until Israel and the Palestinians deal with one key issue: the Palestinian demand that Israel recognize their right of return. That demand is based on the Arab charge that the Zionist state created the refugee problem in the war of 1948-49 by a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. It’s an accusation that Israel’s leaders have consistently rejected. Jewish soldiers could never commit such crimes. It was the Arabs themselves, they say, who created the refugees..It has become increasingly evident, however, that the Israeli position is, in fact, a self-serving myth created when the Jewish state was born, perpetuated ever since by the country’s leaders and still blandly accepted by Washington...

Agency of Rogues, by Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch)

The secret prison was set up on a secure U.S. naval base outside the U.S. and so beyond the slightest recourse to legal oversight. It was there that the CIA clandestinely brought its "suspects" to be interrogated, abused, and tortured..That description might indeed sound like Guantanamo 2002, but think again. According to New York Times reporter Tim Weiner's new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes – a remarkable treasure trove of grim and startling information you hadn't known before – this actually happened first in the Panama Canal Zone in the early 1950s...This was but a small part of "Project Artichoke," a 15-year, multi-billion dollar "search by the CIA for ways to control the human mind."..No book in recent memory has done such a superb job of illuminating the roiling, disastrous, thoroughly destructive path through history of America's top covert-operations agency over the last six decades, what Chalmers Johnson has often called "the president's private army."...

For USA Today, Freedom of the Press Means the Right to Report It Wrong (CounterPunch)

...It is a historic occasion. An independent, blue-ribbon commission is to release its findings from an investigation into an internationally significant 36-year-old attack on a US Navy ship that left more than 200 American sailors killed or wounded..The commission consists of:

A former ambassador to one of the US’s most important allies

A US Navy rear admiral and former head of the Navy’s legal division

A Marine general, America’s highest ranking recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor and the former Assistant Commandant of Marines

A US Navy four-star admiral, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the highest military position in the country), former Chief of Naval Operations, a World War II hero, and the only Naval admiral to have commanded both the Pacific and the Atlantic fleets

The panel is moderated by a former ambassador who served as Chief of Mission in Iraq and Deputy Director of Ronald Reagan's White House Task Force on Terrorism.

The commission announces explosive findings:

» That the attack, by a US ally, was a “deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew”

» That the ally committed “acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States”

» That the attack involved the machine-gunning of stretcher-bearers and life rafts

» That “the White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of the [ship]... never before in American naval history has a rescue mission been cancelled when an American ship was under attack”

» That surviving crewmembers were later threatened with “court-martial, imprisonment or worse” if they talked to anyone about what had happened to them; and were “abandoned by their own government”

» That due to the influence of the ally’s “powerful supporters in the United States, the White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people”

» That due to continuing pressure by this lobby, this attack remains “the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress”

» That “there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history”

» That “the truth about Israel's attack and subsequent White House cover-up continues to be officially concealed from the American people to the present day and is a national disgrace”

» That “a danger to the national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation...” and that this policy “endangers the safety of Americans and the security of the United States”

Newsworthy?

Not when Israel is the attacking nation. Not when Israel is the “ally” to whose interests American needs are said to be subverted...

Goodbye To The City Upon A Hill And To Its Fabled Economy, by Paul Craig Roberts (Countercurrents.org)

“We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” - John Winthrop

America is being destroyed. Many Americans are unaware, others are indifferent, and some intend it. The destruction is across the board: the political and constitutional system, the economy, social institutions including the family itself, citizenship, and the character and morality of the American people..Those who rely on the Internet for information are aware that the Bush regime has successfully assaulted the separation of powers and civil liberty. Both Bush and Cheney claim that they are not bound by laws that impinge on their freedom of action or that interfere with their ideas of the power of their offices. Bush has issued presidential directives that permit him to make himself a dictator by declaring a national emergency. Cheney asserts that his handling of secret documents is not subject to oversight or investigation or bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information...

“We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy”, by Mike Whitney (uruknet)

Americans don’t believe in revolution anymore. It has become a meaningless event in the distant past. But we need a revolution and we need it now. We need to remove the present administration and restore the people’s confidence in government..The Bush administration is not a government at all. We all know that. It is a crime family—an oligarchy of racketeers. They have no moral authority, no legitimacy, no right to govern. They’re criminals...

Dialogue is the only way forward, by Amira Hass, Haaretz

Even in this region, where diplomatic platitudes don't begin to disguise the preferential treatment afforded Israel (although it is the occupier), the mandate of the new Quartet envoy Tony Blair rings particularly hollow. His role is reported as being "to help create viable and lasting government institutions representing all Palestinians ... and a climate of law and order for the Palestinian people."..Internal Palestinian negotiations between Hamas and Fatah may yet stop the disintegration of the Palestinians' civil institutions and the complete severance between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, at the last moment. These institutions functioned during the most difficult times under Israeli military attacks, but started to crumble after January last year when the West, Israel and some Fatah elements tried in vain to topple a Hamas government founded on democratic elections...

The Holocaust and the 4 million variant: Australian scientists cast doubt on story of Treblinka (YouTube)

[Editor's note (from Ziopedia): By now readers are well aware that the museum at Auschwitz has reduced by three million the estimate of the number of people who died at Auschwitz from all causes, including the Typhus epidemics that raged across Germany at the end of the war. Readers are also aware that when Rudolph Hoess confessed (under coercion) to war crimes at Nuremberg, he not only supposedly wrote and signed the confession in English (a language he did not speak) but claimed that Jews were murdered at Camp Wolzek, which never existed. Readers are aware that many claims made about the holocaust, such as the soap and lampshades stories, have been totally discredited and nobody takes them seriously any more. Readers are aware that so-called holocaust memoirs, such as "Fragments", have been exposed as hoaxes. Now attention has turned to Treblinka. And again serious doubts have surfaced.--Michael Rivero]

A tsunami has swept across the search engines, purging all but Zionist sites, universally claiming that 6 million Jews were butchered in "nazi death camps" between 1940 and 1945 and that all questioners are anti-semites. Why did Zionism feel it necessary to launder the search engines? Is the Holocaust vulnerable? What is the true history?...

Bush's Martial Law Plan Is So Shocking, Even Congress Can't See it, by Paul Joseph Watson (Prison Planet)

Executive über alles as member of Homeland Security Committee barred from viewing post-terror attack provisions

President Bush's post-terror attack martial law plan is so shocking that even sitting members of Congress and Homeland Security officials are barred from viewing it, another example of executive über alles and a chilling portent of what is to come as constant reminders of the inevitability of terror attacks reverberate...

Bush’s Policy of Escalation May Extend Beyond Iraq, by Rachelle Marshall (WRMEA)

No one loves armed missionaries.—Robespierre, to the French National Assembly, 1791.

A RECENT COVER of the Economist magazine pictured George Bush as a demented cavalry officer waving a sword and shouting “Charge!” to the troops behind him as he rides his horse over a cliff. It is an apt illustration of current U.S. policy in the Middle East, where the Bush administration is escalating military action in two wars and threatening to launch a third..Harvard historian Stanley Hoffman warned in a November 2001 article for The New York Review of Books that a war directed against the Taliban would be the wrong response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Such an action, he wrote, “risks sending us into an Afghan quagmire of disastrous proportions, causing a huge new exodus of miserably poor people, and creating revulsion and perhaps revolt among the Pakistanis, or at least some faction of them.”...

Islamophobia: A Call to Confront a Creeping Disease (Middle East Online)

The last time a world religion was considered a problem and a question was in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Then, the ‘Jewish Question’ was widely debated by both the enlightened and bigots among European thinkers, says Louay Safi..President Bush reacting to the unearthing of the alleged bombing plot over the Atlantic August 10 remarked: "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation."...

US Empire and the Middle East: Zionism, Puppet Regimes and Political Allies, by James Petras

An understanding of US imperial policy in the Middle East requires an analysis, which centers on four points:

1) The power and influence of Israel and the Zionist power configuration over US political institutions...

2) The capacity of the US Empire to construct and instrumentalize Middle East client states and mercenary forces to implement US policies...

3) An alliance with right-wing regimes and rulers in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel to provide military bases, intelligence and political backing for the colonial occupation in Iraq, the division of Iraq, economic sanctions and war against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and any other clerical-nationalist and leftist movements in the Middle East.

4) The capacity to contain, repress and limit the opposition of the majority of the US public and a minority of Congress members to the current war in Iraq and a future war against Iran...

Trafficked women back from Israel face harsh reality upon arrival home (JTA)

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) – Tatyana Tatureevych, a social worker here, is all too familiar with the problems facing women who make it back home after having been trafficked as sex slaves. "Most who return from Israel have a lot of problems beyond what they suffered from trafficking," Tatureevych says. "They're often addicted to drugs and alcohol. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress or depression."..Although most women from the former Soviet Union who are trafficked as sex slaves work in Eastern Europe and Arab countries, many also end up in Israel. According to the Israel Task Force on Human Trafficking, 80 percent of the prostitutes in Israel were brought there against their will...

Picking American Pockets for Israel, by Karin Friedemann and Joachim Martillo

Political pressure from the Israel Lobby induces the U.S. government to fund Israel's ongoing program to remove the native population of Palestine, primarily Muslims and Christians, and supplant them with European-American Jewish colonists. Our tax dollars facilitate this ethnic cleansing and colonization of Occupied Palestine. Israel has cost the USA well over $1.6 trillion since 1973...This figure does not even count all the harm done to the US economy and strategic foreign policy because of the loss of international good will that accompanies the alliance with Israel and Bush's war for to make the Middle East safe for racist Zionist colonizers..Why do seemingly normal, middle class Jewish American families take part in genocidal ethnic cleansing?...

Our Second Biggest Mistake in the Middle East, by Alastair Crooke (London Review of Books)

Hamas: Unwritten Chapters by Azzam Tamimi

Where Now for Palestine: The Demise of the Two-State Solution ed. Jamil Hilal

Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict by Sara Roy

‘The situation in Gaza is dangerous, and the danger is that Hamas will take over and turn Gaza into “Hamastan” – into a kingdom of thugs, murderers, terrorists, poverty and despair.’ This was the reaction of Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s deputy defence minister, to Hamas’s seizure of a number of key security institutions in Gaza in the days leading up to 14 June, when Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah, dismissed the unity government. But, despite what much of the media says, this is not a ‘civil war’, and Hamas is not made up of ‘gangs beyond the control of their leaders’. Hamas’s action was conducted with the aim of removing the influence of just one of Fatah’s security forces in Gaza, the militia controlled by Muhammad Dahlan, Abbas’s national security adviser. Hamas has insisted that this has not been a conflict with Fatah in general, and it was notable that neither the Palestinian security forces – effectively the Palestinian ‘army’ – nor the police in Gaza were targets of the recent violence...

Why Israeli anti-Zionists do not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, by Henry Lowi

Text of address to the first public forum of the group Not in Our Name, Toronto, 15 March 2007..Henry Lowi says that Israeli anti-Zionists are against Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state because it is predicated upon settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing and racist discrimination, and because it is “the main engine of anti-Semitism in the world today”..

In recent times, the demand has been raised, by representatives of the state of Israel, and by its supporters abroad, to recognize the state of Israel’s "right to exist as a Jewish state". I am told that this demand is a debater's trick that was invented by Henry Kissinger several years ago..Let me start with an example: In Canada, the aboriginal First Nations have never been asked to recognize the legitimacy of the government of Canada, or the “right to exist” of the Canadian state, and, in fact, in general, they deny that legitimacy. The First Nations say repeatedly that they are the ongoing victims of colonialism, and genocide. Representatives of First Nations negotiate as de facto parties to contract, and they sign treaties, and then they demand that the treaties be performed in good faith...

RECOMMENDATION: A Poem by Thich Nhat Hanh

...Even as they

strike you down

with a mountain of hatred and violence;

even as they step on you and crush you

like a worm,

even as they dismember and disembowel you,

remember brother, remember:

man is not our enemy...

Israel's illegal settlement project is being consolidated in the Palestinian West Bank

Israel's settlement and security policies are being pursued relentlessly and without interruption in the West Bank, despite the latest attempts to allow the Palestinian Authority (PA) to administer its own security arrangements as well as most civil Palestinian affairs. The illegal settlement project has devastatingly undermined the territorial basis for Palestinian self-governance established by the Oslo II accord of 1995 and gives Israel an excuse to intensify security which only adds to the unbearable day-to-day conditions endured by every Palestinian living under occupation. Despite the seemingly amicable talks going on between Israel's Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian President Abbas, Israel is not countenancing in the slightest ending the occupation or dismantling and removing the settlements...

The Project for the New American Century, by William Rivers Pitt (ICH)

The People versus the Powerful is the oldest story in human history. At no point in history have the Powerful wielded so much control. At no point in history has the active and informed involvement of the People, all of them,been more absolutely required.

The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is a Washington-based think tank created in 1997. Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana...

Kissinger’s Secret Meeting With Putin, by Mike Whitney (ICH)

"RAF fighter jets were scrambled to intercept two Russian strategic bombers heading for British airspace yesterday, as the spirit of the Cold War returned to the North Atlantic once again. The incident, described as rare by the RAF, served as a telling metaphor for the stand-off between London and Moscow over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.”...When a political heavyweight, like Henry Kissinger, jets-off on a secret mission to Moscow; it usually shows up in the news..Not this time..This time the media completely ignored---or should we say censored—Kissinger’s trip to Russia and his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In fact, apart from a few short blurps in the Moscow Times and one measly article in the UK Guardian, no major news organization even covered the story. There hasn’t been as much as a peep out of anyone in the American media...

Cheney Determined To Strike In US With WMD This Summer: Only Impeachment, Removal or General Strike Can Stop Him, by Webster G. Tarpley (The People's Voice)

Darth Cheney

The greatest threat now is "a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities." - Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, CBS, April 15, 2007..A few days ago, a group of lawyers from western Massachusetts met with the local congressman, Democrat John Olver. Their request was that Olver take part in the urgent effort to impeach Bush and Cheney. Olver responded by saying that he had no intention of doing anything to support impeachment. He went further, offering the information that the United States would soon attack Iran, and that these hostilities would be followed by the imposition of a martial law regime here...

A racist Jewish state (Haaretz Editorial)

Every day the Knesset has the option of passing laws that will advance Israel as a democratic Jewish state or turn it into a racist Jewish state. There is a very thin line between the two. This week, the line was crossed. If the Knesset legal counselor did not consider the bill entitled "the Jewish National Fund Law" as sufficiently racist to keep it off the agenda, it is hard to imagine what legislation she will consider racist...

[Commentary by John Spritzler: "The Haaretz editorial starts out by asserting that there is a thin line separating Israel as a "democratic Jewish" versus a "racist Jewish" state. This is racist logic. The former is merely a euphemism for the latter, and only racism could prevent somebody from seeing that. When groups like the KKK call for America to be a "white state," only a racist would talk about a thin line separating a "racist white" from a "democratic white" state, while advocating the latter..Haaretz...acts as if Israel is a democracy as long as it treats its "minority" citizens as equals under the law. This is racist logic because the very reason that Palestinians are a small (20%) minority inside Israel is because Israel is NOT and never was a democracy for the simple reason that in a democracy the people choose the government, but in Israel the government chooses the people..."]

Embracing the empire, by Ian Buruma (Haaretz)

Bernard Kouchner, France's new foreign minister, has a long and distinguished record as an advocate of intervention in countries where human rights are abused. As a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, he stated that "we were establishing the moral right to interfere inside someone else's country." Saddam Hussein's mass murder of Iraqi citizens is why he supported the war in Iraq. One should always be careful about attributing motives to other people's views. But Kouchner himself has often said that the murder of his Russian-Jewish grandparents in Auschwitz inspired his humanitarian interventionism..One may or may not agree with Kouchner's policies, but his motives are surely impeccable. The fact that many prominent Jewish intellectuals in Europe and the United States - often, like Kouchner, with a leftist past - are sympathetic to the idea of using American armed force to further the cause of human rights and democracy in the world, may derive from the same wellspring. Any force is justified to avoid another Shoah, and those who shirk their duty to support such force are regarded as no better than collaborators with evil..Revolutionary Islamism is undoubtedly dangerous and bloody. Yet analogies with the Third Reich, although highly effective as a way to denounce people with whose views one disagrees, are usually false...

How Hamas Got Where It Is Today, by Stephen Zunes (antiwar.com)

In light of Hamas' seizure of the Gaza Strip, it is worthwhile to understand how this radical Islamist organization came to play such a major role in Palestinian political life and how Israel and the United States contributed to making that possible..Ironically, it was Israel that encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist movements. Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the antecedents of Hamas began to emerge through the establishment of schools, health care clinics, social service organizations, and other entities that stressed an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, which up to that point had not been very common among the Palestinian population. The hope was that if people spent more time praying in mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left-wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli occupation...

The Pentagon as Global Gas-Guzzler (TomDispatch)

Today, Michael Klare, expert on war and energy, and author of the indispensable book, Blood and Oil, gives us an unprecedented sense of what it means when the Pentagon fills its own tank (as well as its tanks). It is, after all, the Hummer of Defense Departments, the planet's gas-guzzler par excellence..On the other hand, in the occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration turns out to be unable to find a local gas station still in operation...

Secret trials for terrorists, says US judge (The Australian)

A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being "hog-tied" by the US constitution..Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had "over-invested" in them..His proposed "big brother" solutions flabbergasted delegates at the Australian Bar Association's biennial conference, where David Hicks's lawyer, Major Michael Mori, is to be awarded honorary life membership.."We have to fight terrorism with our strengths, and our strengths evolve around technology, including the technology of surveillance," said Justice Posner, a prolific legal scholar who sits on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit...

World Likud head seeks evangelical funding (THE JERUSALEM POST)

[In addition to U.S. taxpayer dollars - The Editor]

World Likud chairman Danny Dannon is going to the United States next week to take part in an evangelical Christian fund-raising campaign to bolster his campaign for party leadership..Dannon, who will be traveling to Texas next weekend, is facing off against Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu in next month's internal party primaries..Dannon said that he was proud to accept contributions from evangelicals "whose ideology about the Land of Israel is equal to [his]," rather than receive funding from Israeli building contractors..Netanyahu, who was long a star in the evangelical Christian world, has disappointed Christian Zionists as he takes a more centrist view to pander to Israeli voters, Dannon said...

Elders of Zionism debate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, furthering Jewish domination in America, Europe

Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

Zionist leaders from around the world are debating ways and means to effect further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as consolidating Jewish influence and domination in the western hemisphere, especially North American and Europe..Participating in the three-day conference, organized by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI), are leaders of major Jewish organizations in the United States and Canada as well academics, rabbis and Jewish business tycoons from around the world...According to the Israeli media, participants, dubbed as the crème de le crème of the Jewish people, are discussing three main themes: growing western opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which many delegates viewed as expression of "anti-Semitism," strengthening Israel's Jewish identity, an implicit reference to Israeli efforts and plans to check Palestinian demographic growth, and assimilation of Jews in the West.."We should do everything possible to prevent these voices from evolving into a phenomenon, but without appearing as silencing freedom of speech," Dennis Ross, President Clinton's former peace envoy to the Middle East reportedly said. Ross is the JPPPI Chairman...Interestingly, peace between Israel and the Palestinian people was conspicuously absent from the deliberations of the conference....

'All the dreams we had are now gone' (Haaretz)

...Wolfensohn's period in the Middle East has left its mark on him. He may have left Israel and the Palestinian territories at the end of April 2006, but Israel and the territories have not yet left him. Which is understandable..An Australian-born American Jew, Wolfensohn arrived in the region three months before the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, brimming with good intentions. His decade as head of the World Bank, his relaxed temperament and his intimate acquaintance with the leaders of the Quartet made him an ideal candidate for the post of special envoy. His father, who served with the Jewish Battalions in World War I, planted emotional ties to Zionism and the region in his heart...

Dershowitz Once Celebrated Jewish Influence and Called Support for Israel a 'Secular Religion', by Philip Weiss

I'm reading a surprisingly-good book, The Vanishing American Jew, by Alan M. Dershowitz. Dershowitz can be angry, or mean, but in 1997, when he wrote this book, he had a more open spirit. The book is surprising because Dershowitz and I agree in many ways. Ours is a spectacular time in Jewish history. Jews are highly influential, Jews dominate in many prominent American fields, from the movies to newspapers. Support for Israel is a "secular religion" for Jews. And fighting for Jewish survival against their enemies is a "sacred mission" for Jews like Dershowitz. And oh yes: the Israel lobby is a potent force in public life..Dershowitz could say all this because it was not controversial when he wrote the book in 1997. It was pre-9/11; and 9/11 changed everything. 9/11 put Israel front and center as an issue in American foreign policy. For me, it forced me at last, in my late 40s, to overcome what Dershowitz correctly diagnoses as the remarkable illiteracy among Jews about Jewish history. I began to study my people's fascinating history...

Bush's credibility deficit (Al-Ahram)

He can talk about peace as much as he likes, but Palestinians don't believe the US president, reports Khaled Amayreh from Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem

Ever since the Nakba and the creation of the state of Israel, the Palestinian has been treading a torturous path. He makes his way between barbed wires, with no choice but to move ahead unabated, because he has no faith in US President Bush's two-state solution..President George Bush's history of unfulfilled promises and fanatical embrace of Israel's expansionistic policies mean that most Palestinians dismiss his latest peace proposals as "mendacious" and "insincere".."Only gullible people would give Bush the benefit of the doubt," said Hamas, reacting to Bush's Monday call for a "regional-international meeting" to plot general outlines for a possible final-status settlement.

"Hamas doesn't trust Bush and gives no weight to his proposals. We have had experience of this man once, twice, three times, and all we have heard from him are lies and more lies," said Hamas spokesman Yehia Moussa, the deputy-head of the movement's bloc on the Legislative Council..Moussa urged "the Arab and Muslim umma " to support the Palestinians and not leave their cause "at the mercy of Israel and America." A second Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, vowed to thwart "the new conspiracy"...

Mazin Qumsiyeh's Latest Report from Palestine

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency (London Review of Books)

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?...

Islam In Western Mirror, by Dr Nasir Khan (Countercurrents)

Present-day images of Muslims and Islam in Western media vary considerably. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union the general drift of Western concerns has been to portray Islam as the main enemy of the West and the Muslim world as a hotbed of terrorism that threatens Western civilisation and its democratic values. Thus in the present-day hegemonic world order -- under which all norms of civilised behaviour in the conduct of foreign policy have been discarded by the Bush Administration and its allies in London and Tel Aviv -- Muslims are associated with terrorism. We have seen over the last few years the expansion of President Bush’s destructive war, the inhuman treatment of captive population of Iraq and Afghanistan, rampant abuse of prisoners from Muslim countries by American and British forces, total indifference towards the human rights of prisoners of war or of those suspected of resisting or opposing the American occupation of their countries and false propaganda to cover up the real objectives and crimes against humanity of the neocon rulers in Washington and London...

Communists, Leftists Defy Indian Politics of Liberal Economics, by Nicola Nasser

India’s Non-Alignment in the Balance, Communists on Alert

The accelerated pace of India’s liberal economics and pragmatic ties with the United States and Israel risks polarizing Indian domestic politics and invoking a deep-seated communist as well as Islamist anti – Americanism with a realistic potential for a foreign policy strategic shift leading unintentionally and indirectly to creating an internal political environment that could be receptive for the first time to the agitation of the extreme violent Islamists who have been waiting on the sidelines for such a “golden opportunity” in the turbulent Afghani and Pakistani neighborhood, as well as for the agitation of the violent Indian Maoists...

This paper puts the case that The Protocols of Zion is a genuine document.

I wrote Hiding Behind Auschwitz in 1995. Since then, I have discovered more evidence, and considered the counter-arguments of Herman Bernstein and Norman Cohn, but I have decided to leave the original unchanged...The sequel to Hiding Behind Auschwitz (1995) is the Protocols of Zion Toolkit (2002) - the most complete study of the Protocols of Zion available...The strongest arguments that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a forgery, and why they're wrong.

[Just a year ago my reaction to such material would have been that of most people - absolutely preposterous, violently "anti-semitic," and so forth. Now, after intensive exposure to the history and anatomy of Zionism, I'm not so sure. Mr. Myers' website is technically and aesthetically amateurish, but it is voluminous, original and comprehensive, well worth the trouble to explore. Also see comments by a fellow Jew below. - the Editor]

The Absolute Best Authentications Of The Protocols Of Zion, by Leland Lehrman

The following are my nominations for the four top authentications of the Protocols of Zion, including Ivan Fraser's Proofs of an Ancient Conspiracy, Henry Makow's Protocol Forgery Arguments Are Flawed, Paquita de Shishmareff's Waters Flowing Eastward and Peter Myers Protocols of Zion Toolkit, to which I give first prize...In my research and discussion with Henry Makow, one of the top scholars on the subject, I found Peter Myers' website, an Australian who is perhaps the living master of the subject of the Protocols of Zion...Myers goes into enormous detail on the technical aspects of the "forgery" argument, explaining the nuances of the arguments as well as demonstrating that only one-sixth [a liberal interpretation according to Makow] of the Protocols by word count can in fact be linked to any earlier document. The other five sixths, including the most egregiously offensive predictions regarding the Russian Revolution and other then-in-the-future events, are completely original, as is the crown jewel, the financial program - painfully evident if you look at our State Finances and the private ownership of all the major Central Banks worldwide...

A Wake-up Call, by Paul Craig Roberts

This is a wake-up call that we are about to have another 9/11-WMD experience.

The wake-up call is unlikely to be effective, because the American attitude toward government changed fundamentally seventy-odd years ago. Prior to the 1930s, Americans were suspicious of government, but with the arrival of the Great Depression, Tojo, and Hitler, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Americans that government existed to protect them from rapacious private interests and foreign threats. Today, Americans are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to government than they are to family members, friends, and those who would warn them about the government’s "protection."...

Why the Right of Return Matters to Palestinians, by Saifedean Ammous (3 Quarks Daily)

My father’s family is from a Palestinian town named Atteel that lies a few kilometers north of the West Bank city of Tulkarem. In 1948, as Zionist gangs set about ethnically cleansing most of Palestine, they did not succeed in eradicating our village. Today, the town lies in the West Bank, just east of the Green Line—the virtual separation line between the West Bank and “Israel proper”...

"Baghdad is a smashed city..." (Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches)

Below is an email I have just received from my close friend and translator Abu Talat. While he has fled Baghdad with his family and is now a refugee in Syria, he recently had to return to Baghdad in order to try to salvage what is left of his former life (his car, belongings from his house, etc.) before returning back to Syria. His note is instructive as to the current living conditions in the capital city of Iraq. Here is the full text of his message:...

Secret Briefing by Zinni Seen as Key In Aipac Duo Trial, by Nathan Guttman (Jewish Daily Forward)

Washington - New details are emerging about a secret 2003 briefing that could play a key role in the defense of two pro-Israel advocates charged with passing classified information.

Until now, the identities of the participants were not publicly known, except for one of the defendants, Steve Rosen, then policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In recent weeks, however, the Forward has confirmed that the meeting featured a briefing delivered by top Middle East peace envoy Anthony Zinni and was attended by Jess Hordes, head of the Washington office of the Anti-Defamation League, and Dan Mariaschin, executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International..Defense lawyers have sought the testimony of those in attendance to demonstrate to the jury that meetings between administration officials and Jewish representatives were common practice, and that intelligence was frequently shared during these powwows without the participants knowing the information was classified. But, as first reported in the Forward last month, the Jewish representatives who attended the meeting are refusing to cooperate with the defense team...

Anti-Semitism is a good thing, by Andrew Winkler, The Rebel Media Group

“Anti-Semitism is an unmistakable sign of solid mental health.” – Horst Mahler, lawyer and human rights activist

'Anti-Semitism' is no longer what it used to be. Being a dissident activist running an anti-Zionist blog and online encyclopedia, I am used to wholesale accusations of Anti-Semitism. That comes with the territory. The recent Israel Lobby debate in the US, stirred up by the Walt/Mearsheimer study, made large portions of the public aware of the fact that an 'Anti-Semite' in today's use of the term in the media and public debate is no longer someone who hates Jews, but - the other way round - someone the Jews hate...

Gordon Brown tells British Zionists he always loved Israel, by Redress Information & Analysis

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has appointed Israel apologists to key positions and has been at pains to reassure British Zionists of his support and affection for Israel

If anyone had harboured illusions that Britain’s new prime minister, Gordon Brown, might adopt a less biased position towards Israel than his Zionist predecessor, Tony Blair, now is the time to dispel them..To begin with, Gordon Brown has appointed Israel apologists to key positions in his government, with arch-Zionist James Purnell heading the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which has oversight responsibilities for the British media, including the BBC, and Douglas Alexander, a recipient of Labour Friends of Israel hospitality, taking over the Department for International Development...

Giuliani Stacks Campaign Staff With a Who’s Who Of Mideast Hawks (Jewish Daily Forward)

Neoconservative Leader Podhoretz Picked as a Foreign Policy Adviser

As the roster of Republican presidential hopefuls grapples with the seeming implosion of one-time front-runner John McCain’s candidacy, Rudolph Giuliani is taking steps to claim his place as the field’s leading hawk..The former New York City mayor announced last week that he had assembled a team of foreign policy advisers featuring several prominent neoconservatives, including one of the movement’s founders, Norman Podhoretz. In addition to being an unwavering supporter of the war against Iraq, Podhoretz, a former editor of Commentary magazine, has grabbed headlines in recent months as one of most vocal proponents of American military action against Iran...

1 out of 11 whites in federal prison is Jewish... (RePorters NoteBook)

Nine percent of whites in federal prison are Jewish-American or you can say one in eleven whites in federal prison is Jewish. For a group that is 2-4% of the US population, that is 2-5 times disproportionate. More shocking since they are the most affluent ethnic group in America! The top 25 white ethnic groups represent over 90% of the white American population. This makes Jews the single largest white ethnic group in federal prison. Is Hollywood interested in a documentary? Or a news magazine program like 60 Minutes?...

Overcoming the conspiracy against Palestine, by Ali Abunimah (The Electronic Intifada)

Mohammed Dahlan's 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz.

"Be certain that Yasser Arafat's final days are numbered, but allow us to finish him off our way, not yours. And be sure as well that ... the promises I made in front of President Bush, I will give my life to keep." Those words were written by the Fatah warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose US- and Israeli-backed forces were routed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month, in a 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz and published on Hamas' website on 4 July this year..Dahlan, who despite his failure to hold Gaza, remains a senior advisor to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, outlines his conspiracy to overthrow Arafat, destroy Palestinian institutions and replace them with a quisling leadership subservient to Israel...

Cheney: The Darksider, by Hendrik Hertzberg (The New Yorker)

...More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of “cruel,” “inhuman,” and “degrading” treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: “a no-brainer for me”), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild...

George Galloway - UK MP (Video - YouTube)

He's been dubbed 'the MP for Baghdad' and is a hero to the anti-war movement. But have George Galloway's actions provoked a smear campaign to destroy him?

"I have the most powerful enemies of all", states Galloway. "The US neo-con leadership is after me. Tony Blair is after me." When documents emerged, purported to show he had benefited from the oil for food programme, it appeared his political career was over. It was later proved that these were fake but Galloway believes they were produced by Iraqi exiles in league with the US and UK government. "It was a very serious forgery. Very few people could have done it."

---

When Victims Rule: A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America (Online Book)

The origin of this volume rests simply in a question posed about the state of Israel: "How can such an anti-democratic, ethnocentric, racist, and morally bankrupt socio-political system (Zionism) be so grossly misrepresented as a noble endeavor throughout modern America?" Originally conceived as a traditional book, and a scholarly one, it was soon clear that no publisher would ever be willing to produce so frank an investigation about it's subject matter. Above and beyond all other people, Jews, in western society, have been popularly configured to be beyond the pale of public criticism. And this censorship is zealously, militantly, enforced...

Interview with Leila Farsakh - The Two State Solution is Dead (PeacePalestine)

Leila Farsakh, Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts University “The Two State Settlement is dead, make way for the One State Solution”.

The seminar “Palestine-Israel, one country, one state” ended yesterday in Madrid with the approval of a document in which the promoters, ­amongst which are the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, as well as American, South African, Israeli and Palestinian scholars and activists, will commit to giving voice to the single democratic State solution as the sole, pressing way out from the negotiation deadlock the Palestinian question has been undergoing for years. We talked about it with one of the lecturers, Leila Farsakh, professor of Political Science at Massachusetts University (Boston) and author of “Independence, Cantons or Bantustans. Whither the Palestinian State?” and of a series of publications about the Palestinian-Israeli economy...

Clergy Abuse: Rabbis, Cantors & Other Trusted Officials (The Awareness Center)

The Awareness Center looks at Clergy Abuse and Mass Molestation Cases as a Jewish Issue, not a denominational issue. We need to tackle these issues together as a people..Opening up darkened spaces is a scary, saddening task, but it is a sacred one as well..Let us be "or La-Goyim", a light to show the way for other nations, by mending our communities without fear or shame..(Why do we only hear about sexual abuse by the Roman Catholic clergy - could it have anything to do with the Zionist controlled mainstream press? (rhetorical question) - the Editor)

Weapon of the weak, by Ghada Karmi (Haaretz)

In conflicts, boycotts are the weapons of the weak. Their chief importance lies in their ability to raise public awareness and arouse disapproval. Yet, going by the paranoid reaction to the academic boycott of Israel, it might as well have been a declaration of nuclear war. No peaceable action in recent times has provoked so much anger and hostility as this British-based boycott...

Hamas prisoner's vision: 1 state for 2 people (Ynet)

When he was a child Salim discovered Islam and admired assassinated Hamas leader Rantissi, but the year he spent in Israeli prison changed his opinions. Now he preaches for one democratic state in Holy Land with Lebanese-style leadership.

JORDAN – "The idea of establishing a Palestinian authority, as well as the two states for two people vision, have failed miserably. The real solution is one state for two people," says a former Hamas member, who was jailed in Israel for about a year due to his activity in the Palestinian movement..

Truth against Truth (Gush Shalom - .pdf)

An excellent summary, in preparation for the Avnery-Pappe debate, of the basic history of the Occupation and the ongoing genocide . Here is some commentary from a friend (a fellow Shambhala Buddhist):

...a good attempt to show both sides of the dynamic, which is definitely a healthy approach..I think they both made good points and now I understand the 'left' point of view(s) better..Avnery has a point when he says that Israelis will simply not accept a one-state solution; they want a jewish state, period. Pappe makes good points about how a two-state situation simply won't work given that Israel will never go back to the 67 borders...Personally, I think neither one of them is going deep enough into what needs examining, which is not arguing about fruition but establishing what is the actual ground, and what it should/could be instead...Israelis have to confront directly what Zionism is, and its effects on themselves and the indigenous peoples on the lands they are appropriating. They have to examine this in depth without flinching. That is the needed education process.

Speaking up: Federally funded language program shatters stereotypes, advances efforts to teach more American students Arabic

By Tracy Jan, Boston Globe | July 15, 2007

Arabic words for teacher, student, and homework decorate metal classroom doors. The 28 letters of the alphabet dot rows of orange lockers in the dimly lighted halls. The fourth floor of Charlestown High School, a five-story brick fortress that abuts two housing projects, has been transformed into a slice of the Middle East for five weeks...

Indonesians Live Islam (IslamOnline)

"Of course there is growing conservatism, but not in terms of becoming more radical," said Azra.

CAIRO — A growing conservative tide manifested in the emergence of Islamic political parties and an increase in hijab-clad women is by no means an indication of the radicalization of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, experts believe.."In my experience, Indonesian Islam will remain tolerant, remain moderate," Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, told The New York Times on Monday, July 2...

Xenophobia in the USA concerns UN Special Rapporteur, by Ernesto Cienfuegos (La Voz de Aztlan)

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Migrants, Jorge Bustamante, expressed deep concerns over the increased xenophobia in the United States. In a radio interview in Tijuana, Baja California, Mr. Bustamante said that expressions of xenophobia were particularly virulent during the recent debates on immigration reform in the US Senate...

Pakistan APC Declaration Exposes the Terrorist Musharraf Mafia (InformPress.com)

- The All Parties Conference (APC) of 37 Opposition political parties of Pakistan was held on 7-8 July 2007 at a hotel in London, UK. On Sunday, 8 July, 2007, the APC adopted and issued its 15-points official document entitled “The APC Declaration, 2007."

We the political parties assembled here together declare that military dictatorship has brought Pakistan to the edge of a precipice, leading to strife, chaos and the threat of disintegration. The Musharraf regime uses brute state force against its peoples to perpetuate its illegitimate rule and suppress dissent. Innocent citizens are kidnapped by the state as militancy and sectarianism thrive. Provincial autonomy has been denied, leading to further strains in the federation. From Khyber to Karachi, the regime is unable to maintain the writ of the state, and as a consequence there is a total breakdown of law and order...

OVERCOMING ZIONISM: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, by Joel Kovel - Review by Michael Steven Smith

Joel Kovel has given us an impressive important book. The first printing of OVERCOMING ZIONISM sold out without a single review, major or otherwise. The Library of Congress, which has copies of nearly everything, still doesn't have it on its shelves. Neither does the library at Bard College, where he teaches. Nevertheless word of this extraordinary work is spreading. The taboo in the United States (not Israel) against seriously discussing and criticizing Zionist Israel has been broken with the publication of Jimmy Carter's bold book labeling the situation in the Occupied Territories "apartheid" and with prestigious professors Walt and Merscheim's exposure in the London Times (it was turned down by the Atlantic Monthly) of the power of the Israeli lobby. I anticipate that OVERCOMING ZIONISM is going to get a long run. Kovel takes the discussion on how to "overcome" Zionism exactly where it ought to be and articulates how this may be accomplished. He writes beautifully, even poetically, not just on Zionism's sordid history, but on its ideology, its ethics, even on the terrible ecological devastation in Israel itself, where every river is polluted, some to lethal levels. And he writes with courage and hope...

Israeli Hate Education, by Maureen Meehan (Wake Up From Your Slumber)

Israeli Textbooks and Children's Literature Promote Racism and Hatred Toward Palestinians and Arabs

Israeli school textbooks as well as children's storybooks, according to recent academic studies and surveys, portray Palestinians and Arabs as "murderers," "rioters," "suspicious," and generally backward and unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule rather than the exception in Israeli schoolbooks..Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied 124 elementary, middle- and high school textbooks on grammar and Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship...

Israel's illegal Occupation is violent and ongoing, by Sonja Karkar (Women for Palestine)

Plan Iraq - Permanent Occupation, by Stephen Lendman

Congress is back from its July 4 break and with it more bluster and political posturing on changing course to keep things the same, including everything not working in place. It's the same old scheme, back again, to fool enough of the people all the time and most all of them long enough to move on to the next change of course mission shift starting the whole cycle over again. Even the blind can see the hopelessness of staying the course in Iraq. Aside from its lawlessness and immorality, pushing on with a failed effort qualifies as a classic definition of insanity - continuing the same failed policies, expecting different results...

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Dr. Ilan Pappe (with YouTube video)

The present dismal reality unfolding in the Middle East has clear historical roots and a journey into the past may help to illuminate what lies behind the destructive policies of Israel in both Palestine and Lebanon..Zionism arrived in Palestine in the late 19th as a colonialist movement motivated by national impulses..The colonisation of Palestine fitted well the interests and policies of the British Empire on the eve of the First World War...

AIPAC and Mahmoud Abbas: The Undemocratic Road to Defeat, by JAMES BROOKS (Counterpunch)

When the current Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) first "met" on March 6, 2006 (via videoconference, thanks to Israel's travel restrictions), the Palestinian Authority embarked on the final phase of its struggle to become a democratic proto-state. This was to be the first government formed under the new Palestinian constitution, the Basic Law passed by the PLC in 1998 and finally signed by President Arafat in 2002..The government envisioned by the constitution is a dramatic departure from the autocratic days of Arafat. The bulk of practical state power, including "public order and internal security", is expressly assigned to the Council of Ministers, the prime minister's cabinet. The president has the power to hire and fire the PM, approve the cabinet, and declare states of emergency, but is otherwise little mentioned in the document...

Toward a Palestinian-led rebuilding, by Osamah Khalil (Electronic Intifada)

The newly appointed official envoy of the Quartet, Blair is expected to help "build up" Palestinian institutions..As Middle East envoy of "the Quartet," Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, has been charged with helping to "build up" Palestinian institutions. It is a cruel irony that one of the handmaidens of the destruction of those very institutions is now being dispatched with the portfolio of resurrecting them. Yet, this should not come as a surprise. In spite of Blair's passionate rhetoric to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during his decade of rule, he joined Washington in actively subverting Palestinian institutions and their hopes for self-determination. In reality, the Quartet that Blair represents as envoy, comprised of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations, is a hollow organ designed to provide international legitimacy to the staunchly pro-Israel policies of the Bush administration...

Impeachment or War?: Cheney Urges Bush to Strike Iran, by GARY LEUPP (Counterpunch)

"Cheney Pushes Bush to Act on Iran." That's the headline of a very frightening article by Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger in the London Guardian. Sub-heads:

· Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out

· President 'not prepared to leave conflict unresolved'

What a nightmare Dick Cheney is visiting on our planet! Isn't it time we awaken to the fact that he's a crazed monster egging on a vain, cruel, delusional religious fanatic of a president as he inflicts incalculable suffering on the Middle East, sacrificing American blood and treasure in the process? Of course many of us have awakened to that fact, one reason why 54% of us want to see Cheney impeached. Yet he's still there, operating in his highly secretive fashion, gaining rather than losing influence...

Hamas rejects 'illegal' government (Al Jazeera)

Hamas has dismissed a new Palestinian caretaker government appointed by Mahmoud Abbas, the president, as illegal.."This government, from the outset, is unconstitutional," Ahmed Bahar, the acting parliament speaker, said on Saturday..The caretaker government was installed to replace an emergency cabinet that stepped down after its mandate expired on Friday..The emergency cabinet was formed by Abbas after the Hamas faction took full control of the Gaza Strip after street battles in June..On Friday, Abbas appointed three new ministers and reappointed Salam Fayyad as prime minister after he formally stepped down, aides said...

Regurgitating Osama’s Greatest Hits, by Kurt Nimmo

In the wake of the Dorgan and Conrad amendment designed “to double the reward for information leading to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks,” as KXMB in North Dakota puts it, a “new” Osama video has surfaced, prompting the corporate media to circle like a brood of hungry vultures. “A brief clip of an older-looking Osama bin Laden appeared yesterday in a newly posted jihadist video on the Web, ABC News reported,” claims the scurrilous neocon propaganda newspaper, the New York Post. “The al Qaeda boss appears for just one minute and discusses martyrdom with an unseen group in a mountainous location, wearing fatigues, a watch and a ring and showing extensive graying in his beard.”...

Jewish consciousness and the river of denial, by Andrew Winkler

One of the most interesting aspects of the Palestinian discourse is the number of people involved in it with a Jewish background. Many of my fellow dissidents regard them as gatekeepers, who – secret agenda or not – do their utmost to steer the debate away from topics that really hurt the Zionist entity, such as the dogmatic belief in Israel’s right to exist, the Jewish Holocaust, or taboo topics such as Mossad's alleged involvement in September 11..The weapon those gatekeepers always use are the libel of anti-Semitism and - if that doesn't work - the magic word of conspiracy theory. In reality though, those taboo subjects boil all down to the question whether or not a Jew could possibly do any evil and what exactly it is that makes a Jew a Jew...

US fails to self-correct its Israel foreign policy, by Louis Werner (Middle East Times)

The hallmark of democracy is that it allows for the self-correction of government policies. Whether from the privacy of a ballot box, or the public arena of free speech and a free press, the necessary political will eventually emerges to change a bad policy or to stop it dead in the water. But such political will falters in the case of US foreign policy regarding Israel, which - for a variety of structural and historical reasons - has been set on a self-defeating course ever since the June 1967 war...

BLACKWATER : THE SHADOW WAR (YouTube)

If the Republicans lose in 2008, they will leave office armed and dangerous. Bush's Praetorian Guard, paid by YOU the people, could presage the final stage in the collapse of American democracy...

In Search of Islamic Fascists - Part 1: Entering Syria, by Alexander Gainem

In this four-part series, Alexander Gainem embarks on a special mission to Syria — one of George W. Bush's primary Axis of Evil states — where he begins his search of the American president's proclaimed "Islamic fascists." Gainem describes in detail his encounters with Syrians — the primary suspects...

Towering weapons of mass digestion. Syrian sweets are known to be among the best in the Arab world.

Language as an Instrument of Crime: A Primer on Israeli Doublespeak, by RANNIE AMIRI (Counterpunch)

It is indeed a great irony that George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, the same year Israel was created. For this nation, above all others, has proven itself most adept in the use and promulgation of doublespeak..Defined by Webster's Dictionary as "evasive, ambiguous, high-flown language intended to deceive or confuse," Israeli governments have always relied on it to justify the expansionist nature of their state, excuse the confiscation of land and minimize the extent to which its inhabitants have been mistreated or abused...

Now the U.S. military is assassinating Iraqi peace workers, by Kathlyn Stone

Murder of Iraq Freedom Congress leader is a blow to labor and peace activists around the world

At 3 a.m. on the 4th of July, U.S. military forces and Iraqi national guards opened fire with a barrage of bullets and grenades on the Baghdad home of Abdel-Hussein Saddam. The severely wounded Abdel-Hussein was taken away and his 18-year-old daughter was left alone, injured and bleeding on the floor..Abdel-Hussein’s beaten body turned up at the Yarmouk Hospital morgue on July 6. The murder of Abdel-Hussein was the most devastating of four attacks by the U.S. military on the Iraq Freedom Congress in the past 10 months. The IFC is an organization comprised primarily of trade unionists, community leaders, and women’s and children’s rights workers who are determined to look after their own...

Ilan Pappe - opening words

Uri Avnery - opening words

In just a few minutes, you can see the sort of wilful acts being carried out by Israel against the Palestinians to take their land and destroy their livelihood. And this is just one of many such acts happening all over Palestine. How much longer is the world going to let Israel violate international law and the human rights of the Palestinians before it realises that Israel is ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from the land that has been home to them and their ancestors for millenia? We should all be ashamed of the silence that allows such crimes to go unchecked. Please write a letter to the newspapers and/or our government representatives and register your protest. - Sonja Karkar

Arab Woman gives Muslims a Thrashing (Video)

Arab-American Psycologist, Wafa Sultan on Al Jazeera TV, February 21, 2006

[This video is posted here in case any of our readers are under the impression that we don't consider all sides of the numerous issues discussed on this site. On the contrary, we are "devoted to truthiness," in whatever form it takes and no matter whose ox gets gored. No "side" is all "right" or all "wrong." This interview presents the views of a passionate and articulate woman, taking to task what she perceives as the failings of the Umma - the Editor]

Jewish Good Fortune, Russian Tears (Jewish Tribal Review)

Representatives of Russian society demand from the Procurator General of the Russian Federation the suppression of illegal propagation of Jewish national and religious extremism.

Private contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq (LA Times)

New U.S. data show how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of the war-torn nation.

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns..More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times...

Mazin Qumsiyeh Reports from Palestine (7/13/07)

1) Report from this trip into Palestine: Right to enter Palestine

2) A New call (please email back if you support this)...

Iran's Jews reject cash offer to move to Israel (The Guardian)

· Expats offer families £30,000 to emigrate

· Our identity is not for sale, say community leaders

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers..The incentives — ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families — were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel from among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community...

International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid

Adopted and opened for signature, ratification by General Assembly resolution 3068 (XXVIII) of 30 November 1973, entry into force 18 July 1976, in accordance with article XV

Article I

The States Parties to the present Convention declare that apartheid is a crime against humanity and that inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination, as defined in article II of the Convention, are crimes violating the principles of international law, in particular the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and constituting a serious threat to international peace and security..The States Parties to the present Convention declare criminal those organizations, institutions and individuals committing the crime of apartheid.

Article II

For the purpose of the present Convention, the term "the crime of apartheid", which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:..

Michael Moore Rips Wolf Blitzer on CNN: "Why Don't You Tell the American People the Truth" [VIDEO]

Here's a leaked internal memo from a Health Industry honcho about how they're going to deal with the devastating attack in SiCKO.

'SiCKO' Truth Squad Sets CNN Straight

"Western Civilization": They Too Have Dreams , by Judy Andreas

...People regard them as eyesores. The homeless litter your landscape. They seek refuge in doorways and on park benches.You turn away from them in disgust. You step over them with thoughts of condemnation. You see them as less than human. You see them as a visual nuisance. "They created their situations", you tell yourself..How easily you rationalize your inhumanity...

Indian - Israeli Ties Could Neutralize Delhi's Palestinian Policy, by Nicola Nasser

A seminar on "Palestine: 1967 and After" organized by the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) and the mission of the League of Arab States (LAS) in New Delhi on June 22 highlighted India's still unwavering historical support for the Palestinian people, but failed to address the potential political effects of the growing Indian - Israeli ties on New Delhi's more than ten - decade old policy on the Arab - Israeli conflict in Palestine...

Lieberman: US will back Israeli strike on Iran (Israel Today)

[Letter to the Editor of Israel Today: It'll be nice when Israel wakes up and STOPS eliminating Arabs and Muslims, from one country to the next. In no way should Iran be touched by another sinful war the like of which we see going on in Iraq. Tearing up countries with rich histories and cultures should be prohibited..It will also be very nice when Israel stops living off the money of the United States. We give and we give and we give, and Israel is always asking for more..It will be nice when Israel removes itself from 'urging' our Congress to pass laws inimical to the health and well being of United States' citizens..We are not against the Jewish people. We are against the current machinations of the US and Israeli governments to stop freedoms that Americans used to enjoy. We are against imperialism. - THE MEDIA MONITORS]