Feb 28, 2013 One State: The Palestinians' Only Option, by Alan Hart | Sabbah Report In the final countdown to the UN General Assembly vote on recognition of Palestine as a non-member state, the PLO has indicated that it’s expecting “a pleasant surprise”, it being the number of European countries which will not do Zionism’s bidding on this occasion and will vote for the resolution. Victory for the Palestinians in this forum can be taken for granted, and it will help to further isolate the Israel of Netanyahu as a pariah state, but… It won’t be, can’t be, a substitute for a viable strategy to secure justice for the Palestinians. In my analysis the Palestinians now have only one option... [They never really had any other option; nor do the rest of us] Birds of Prey: the Record of Impunity for Israeli Military Aircraft, by Brenda Heard | Intifada Palestine ...Israel’s routine overflights—characterised by UNIFIL in 2009 as not only a “humiliation to the Lebanese government and UNIFIL,” but also an “act of war,” —have been acknowledged by all parties to have been a problem since August 2000. Nonetheless, Israel has consistently invoked its quest for security, which is held to supersede not only the security of all others, but also the dictates of international law. On 14 November 2012, for instance, the UN Security Council reported:.. Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony, by Gareth Porter | Inter Press Service “Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation. More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony... What Was That All About? by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar ...anyone who pointed to the powerful Israel lobby as a decisive force in the making of American foreign policy was similarly and routinely smeared as an anti-Jewish bigot. Yet Hagel has done precisely that – and, hey lookee lookee, he’s in the Pentagon drivers’ seat! Israel’s American lobby has done much to weave a mystique of invincibility around itself, but this was always an illusion: now that spell has been broken, and, from this point on, their road will be a lot harder. Hagel was right to say the Israel lobby rules by intimidation, and his victory means their bullying will matter a lot less from now on... Delusions of Indispensability, by Ted Galen Carpenter | The National Interest One striking feature of foreign policy discussions in the United States is the widespread assumption that this country is the “indispensable nation” in the international system.. Only a handful of iconoclasts in the foreign-policy community—and even fewer mavericks in the political arena—dare to challenge the conventional wisdom. That is unfortunate, because the notion of the United States as the indispensable nation is not only dubious, but it also entrenches a counterproductive security strategy. It is a blueprint for strategic over-extension and, ultimately, a failed paradigm... Hold US Policymakers to Their Abysmal Record on Foreign Meddling, by Ivan Eland | Antiwar The United States and Saudi Arabia appear to be ramping up aid to the Syrian rebels. Here we go again on the road to debacle. Why? The media never holds anybody to either their predictions or their results–officeholders, politicians, and of course their own pundits. And it’s a good thing for people like Bill Kristol, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham. No matter what the overseas “crisis” or where it is, they are gung ho about sending either U.S. forces or U.S. arms into the fray. Recently, these war hawks have been pounding the drums for U.S. greater intervention in Syria... George Bush, Tony Blair and the century’s greatest crime, by Linda S. Heard | Gulf News ...What was done to Iraq was nothing short of state terrorism beginning with 10 years of crippling sanctions that brought Iraq to its knees and were believed to have been responsible for the deaths of up to 500,000 children who died from malnutrition, lack of medicine and disease from polluted water supplies. Rather than heed growing international calls to lift those sanctions, George W. Bush and his neoconservative band chose war which they and their British cohort Prime Minister Tony Blair then sold to gullible Western populations on lies too numerous to list. They were aided by a complicit right-wing media with Rupert Murdoch leading the charge, according to the diaries of Blair’s former spin doctor... Creating A Scandal: Suspicious Behaviour | Nordic News Network On a Friday afternoon in August of 2010, two Swedish women visited a police station in Stockholm, ostensibly to seek advice on how to compel a mutual sexual partner to take a test for HIV infection. When they emerged a few hours later, the police had transformed their health-related errand into serious accusations of rape and other sexual misconduct. The inevitable and almost immediate result was a global news sensation; for, the object of those accusations was Julian Assange, editor of WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website that had become a major news force through its disclosures of unethical and criminal conduct by numerous governments, most particularly that of the United States... I hope I will be buried in my home, Isdod, Occupied Palestine | Sabbah Report Mohammed Tuman (85) was 19 years old when, on 20th December 1948, he and his family were forced to flee their home in Isdod, now known as Ashdod. Victims of the Nakba (meaning ‘catastrophe’), they fled along with their entire village of around 8,500 people. For some time before, inhabitants of other villages had been arriving in Isdod in their hundreds, bringing with them terrible accounts of the massacres they had witnessed in places such as Qibya, Basheet, Deir Yassin, and the Dahmash mosque. No longer safe from the threat of attack by Jewish groups, with the Egyptian army withdrawing from the area, some 30,000 people set out on foot and walked for days until they reached relative safety... College Education in America: “Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash,” by Luciana Bohne | Global Research You might think that reading about a Podunk University’s English teacher’s attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we’ve embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance… On Great Photographs and Their Impact, by Lawrence Davidson | The OtherSite Some images move us, or at least should move us, to sudden insight into the consequences of our actions. Images of innocent victims of war, particularly children, should have the capacity to penetrate the most hardened defenses and touch our hearts. The remarkable fact is that this is not necessarily the case. Skewed information environments, operating over time, may teach us to react with compassion only to images depicting the suffering of our own community. This is one of the more dubious achievements of tribalism. When many of us see the anguish we have caused an “enemy” we feel not compassion or regret but annoyance... Snugly Smuggling Sudanese | Roi Tov Away from the real estate headlines, Afeka is one of the richest neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. It lacks the shiny splendor of Ramat Aviv 'C' and other tower-plagued enclaves owned by the nouveau riche, but the secluded low houses live no doubt that the people living there are veteran millionaires, because ground is worth a fortune in the over-crowded Holy Land. Its quiet streets are located next to the highway leading to the airport; Israeli millionaires always have valid exit tickets and are ready to leave at the first sign of trouble. In the early morning, a visitor would see a peculiar sight: African and Filipino domestic workers rushing to buy fresh bread... Our Men in Iran? by Seymour M. Hersh | Information Clearing House ...It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department... [If they’re our terrorists, they must be the good guys, “freedom fighters” no less. Humor aside, this group is as vile a bunch of homicidal lunatics as one could find.] Bulletins From Legalienate’s Kosher News Bureau, by Frank Scott | Legalienate Hagel Agrees To Public Circumcision Irish Catholic Lobby Approves: “My political circumcision by committee was not enough to convince friends of my deep passion for Israel so I have agreed to be physically circumcised in front of the entire congress to assure that I will serve their, uh, our interest as Secretary of, uh, what was it…Defense? Yeah, that’s it…Defense…right?".. History of the US-Israel Relationship (Part I), by Alison Weir | Council for the National Interest How the U.S. "Special Relationship" with Israel came about: The following is an uncorrected draft version of an upcoming book on this topic. We are sharing this information now, despite its unfinalized form, so that people interested in this subject may have access to these facts immediately... [This post was republished to help inform people of the National Summit to Reassess the US-Israel "Special Relationship to be held in Washington in fall 2013] Feb 27, 2013 Let’s Celebrate Purim! I’ve been seeing the above image at Jewish websites for the past several days now. It is an ad for a charity known as “American Friends of Meir Panim.” Certainly we want this young fellow to have a happy Purim, and if he’s hungry, by all means, he should be fed a nutritious meal. But one wonders if, within the ranks of this charitable organization, there is any sympathy for Palestinian children who might be hungry, or who may have had their homes demolished by Israeli bulldozers? The words Meir Panim mean to make people smile, or literally to “light up faces.” Will this charity or its American friends be doing anything to light up the faces of Palestinian children held in Israeli jails?.. ...It is largely the lack of clear corroboration of any of the details of the story of the Book of Esther with what is known of Persian History from classical sources that led scholars to come to a conclusion that the story is mostly or even totally fictional. In other words, though the moral is clear, the attempted genocide is fictional. Seemingly, the Book of Esther set its followers into a collective Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It makes a fantasy of destruction into an ideology of survival. And indeed, some read the story as an allegory of quintessentially assimilated Jews who discover that they are targets of anti-Semitism, but are also in a position to save themselves and their fellow Jews... [See also Gilad Atzmon on Jewishness and Israel: “Israel is the greatest threat to world peace”] For those involved in pro-Israel advocacy, now is the winter of our discontent. We’re on the defensive in virtually every part of the world. The BDS movement continues to spread across university campuses with even Jewish-populated Brooklyn College recently joining the fray. When I was in South Africa last week I treated to the usual orgy of anti-Israel comment in the media and even in the State of the Nation address of President Jacob Zuma. South Africa, a country I love has, sadly for now, become the new world ground zero of anti-Israel criticism... [Let’s massacre lots of Persians again; then we’ll feel a whole lot better about ourselves] One of my jobs as the adopted aunt of A. and D., two teens from Jerusalem, is to help them prepare for their exams in Bible studies. So last week I refreshed my memory of the Book of Esther. One of the prep questions given by their teacher was "Why is the sentence 'On the spoil, they laid not their hand' repeated three times in the text?" King Ahasuerus commanded that the Jews be permitted to kill everyone (or rather, everyone who attacked them, as the interpreters reassure us), "and their goods to plunder," but the Jews, the Book of Esther says in their praise, settled for killing them "only." That's the answer to the question; to prove that the purpose was not to plunder... The Biblical Book of Esther that was given to President Obama by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday was far from being a cryptic message. The Book of Esther is a genocidal recipe. It is there to educate Jews how to infiltrate into foreign administrations. In my latest book The Wandering Who I explore the role of The Biblical text in shaping contemporary Jewish political Lobbying and its open attempt to dominate American and British foreign policies.. The moral of the story is clear. If Jews want to survive, they had better infiltrate the corridors of power.. ‘Jewish power’ appears to be an embodiment of a deep Biblical and cultural ideology... The Power to Assassinate a Compliant and Submissive People, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation President Obama’s nomination of John Brennan is being held up over Brennan’s refusal to state whether the president’s power to assassinate Americans (and others) extends to American soil. The controversy is summed up in a great article by Glenn Greenwald. The fact that Brennan could not bring himself to immediately say that the president doesn’t have the power to assassinate Americans (and others) right here within the United States is revealing. He undoubtedly knows that the president does claim to wield such power and that the president just doesn’t want to alarm Americans by informing them that he now wields the power to assassinate anyone he wants... Boycotting Israel Galloway-style, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis A big fuss blew up last week when British Member of Parliament George Galloway, invited to Oxford University to debate the motion “Israel should withdraw immediately from the West Bank”, walked out of the chamber when he heard that the student opposing the motion was an Israeli. American readers may remember Galloway, who came over in 2005 and delivered a master-class in how to give a Senate Inquisition sub-committee a good spanking... [In Galloway the spirit of Wallace lives on – devoted no longer to the freedom of Scots alone, but to the freedom of all from an ancient enemy.] LIBOR: Viewing the Biggest Financial Crime in History, by Darwin Bond-Graham | Counterpunch It’s been five years since a few academics and journalists began to dig up evidence that something was wrong with the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, or LIBOR.. The data that curious researchers were compiling couldn’t be explained using the prevailing definition of what LIBOR supposedly was: a trustworthy interest rate that accurately gauged the market price of borrowed US dollars held overseas by the world’s biggest banks. Instead, their findings pointed toward something other than an idealized neoliberal market, influenced only by impersonal supply and demand forces. Many began to realize that the data could easily be explained if the banks were rigging the LIBOR rate in their favor... Sibel Edmonds on Gladio Protected Drug Running and Money Laundering | The Corbett Report Sibel Edmonds of BoilingFrogsPost joins us for the fourth part of our series on Gladio B, the NATO-directed effort to radicalize, enable and protect Islamic terrorists to further their own geopolitical ends. In this installment we discuss the drug traffickers who have been protected by the NATO Gladio network and the money launderers who help to “clean” the proceeds of this trafficking... Old Jerusalem and the Blitzkrieg of the Warring Turtles | Roi Tov When violence erupts, Israel often favors Blitzkrieg techniques, the "lightning war" model developed by Nazi Germany. The 1967 War is a good example of that. In other wars, similarly to other warring turtles, Zionists prefer a slower approach. Some of the Zionist wars are wildly slow. They are so slow that the results of their battles are reported with intervals of years between them. So slow, that if not actively searching for them, they would pass unperceived. Trapped between a rock and a hard place in Hell's Upper Neighborhood, I have time to follow up unbearably slow wars, to leisurely enjoy the Blitzkrieg of the Warring Turtles... Spider Web: The Making and Unmaking of Iran Sanctions | International Crisis Group With war a frightening prospect and fruitful negotiations a still-distant dream, sanctions have become the West’s instrument of choice vis-à-vis Iran. They are everywhere: in the financial arena, barring habitual commercial relations; in the oil sector, choking off Tehran’s principal source of currency; in the insurance sector, thwarting its ability to transport goods. Without doubt, they are crippling Iran’s economy. But are they succeeding? By at least one important criterion (the intensity of Western concern over nuclear progress), plainly they are no... Even if Iran gets the Bomb, it won’t be worth going to war, by Jack Straw | Telegraph 'All options remain on the table”, goes the mantra. This is code for saying that the West retains the choice of using military force to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. We’ll hear it repeated this week, as negotiations between Iran and the “P5 +1” (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany) resume in Kazakhstan. On occasions, I’ve used the phrase myself. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve become convinced that it is a hindrance to negotiations, rather than a help... [Why is it that it takes politicians like Straw so much longer than ordinary people – and predictably after they’ve retired from the game - to grasp the obvious? Could it be that they’re afraid of losing their jobs?] The coming collapse of Iran sanctions, by Hillary Mann and FLynt Leverett Al Jazeera English Western policymakers and commentators wrongly assume that sanctions will force Iranian concessions in nuclear talks that resume this week in Kazakhstan - or perhaps even undermine the Islamic Republic's basic stability in advance of the next Iranian presidential election in June. Besides exaggerating sanctions' impact on Iranian attitudes and decision-making, this argument ignores potentially fatal flaws in the US-led sanctions regime itself - flaws highlighted by ongoing developments in Europe and Asia, and that are likely to prompt the erosion, if not outright collapse of America's sanctions policy... Oscar to Hollywood’s “Argo”: And the Winners are … the Pentagon and the Israel Lobby, by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich | Global Research Foreign policy observers have long known that Hollywood reflects and promotes U.S. policies (..determined by Israel and its supporters). This fact was made public when Michelle Obama announced an Oscar win for “Argo” – a highly propagandist, anti-Iran film. Amidst the glitter and excitement, Hollywood and White House reveal their pact and send out their message in time for the upcoming talks surrounding Iran’s nuclear program due to be held tomorrow. Hollywood has often borrowed its story ideas from the U.S. foreign policy agenda, at times reinforcing them. One of the film industry’s blockbuster film loans in the last two decades has been modern international terrorism... [So when are they going to give Leni Riefensthal a posthumous Oscar? It’s way past due, isn’t it? After all, she set the standard.] Obama to Inform Netanyahu of Plans for Summer Iran War, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar According to unnamed officials quoted by Israel’s Channel 10, President Obama is planning to inform Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of his intention to attack Iran this summer, with June beginning the “window of opportunity” for his next war. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a press conference earlier today that time is “running out” for diplomacy, and it seems that the next P5+1 talks are being set up as the “last chance” for Iran to give in to assorted US demands before being attacked... [What else would one expect from a President who was hand-picked by the Chicago Jewish political mafia?] Impunity Forever? Iraq and the Betrayal of a People, by Hans Christof von Sponeck | Antiwar Ethnic tension and sectarianism have become a major element in Iraqi politics since the US/UK invasion of 2003, a polarization of inter-group relations Iraqis had not known before. This explains much of the existing hideous crime including murder, kidnapping, property destruction and, most noteworthy, the deteriorating relationships between Baghdad and the three northern Kurdish governorates. Since the years of war, sanctions and occupation, Iraq’s once state-of-the-art medical system has all but collapsed... Eyes Wide Shut on the Iraq War, by Ray McGovern | Antiwar Ten years ago, as President George W. Bush and his administration were putting the finishing touches on their unprovoked invasion of Iraq, the mainstream U.S. news media had long since capitulated, accepting the conventional wisdom that nothing could – or should – stop the march to war. The neocon conquest of the major U.S. news outlets – the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the national TV news – was so total that the Bush administration could reliably count on them as eager co-conspirators in the Iraq adventure rather than diligent watchdogs for the American people... Turkey’s Difficult Choice in Palestine/Israel, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle An Israeli-Turkish rapprochement is unmistakably underway, but unlike the heyday of their political alignment of the 1990’s, the revamped relationship is likely to be more guarded and will pose a greater challenge to Turkey rather than to Israel. Israeli media referenced a report by Turkish newspaper Radikal with much interest, regarding secret talks between Turkey and Israel that could yield an Israeli apology for its army’s raid against the Turkish aid flotilla.. The attack wrought a crisis unseen since the rise of the Turkish-Israeli alliance starting in 1984, followed by a full blown strategic partnership in 1996. Feb 26, 2013 Mark Glenn Interviews Gilad Atzmon | The Ugly Truth We are joined by the one and only Gilad Atzmon from the UK discussing Judaism, Jewish identity and the false left/right paradigm within Jewish politics that leaves Gentiles confused and disoriented when trying to deal with Zionism and all its various tentacles throughout the various political dramas taking place today... George Galloway speaks for BDS as much as anyone, by Paul Larudee | Shoah ...There is no single standard for BDS, no single person who speaks for the entire movement, no wrong way to practice BDS. No one can be excommunicated or found in violation of the movement's principles. All may participate in their own way. The error is to think that there is a formal apparatus or coalition that speaks for everyone... Bradley Manning and the Appalling Silence of Gay, Inc., by Andy Thayer | Counterpunch ...why is it that all of the big gay non-profits, from the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – “Gay Inc.” – have failed to utter a word of support for Private Bradley Manning, let alone really campaign for him? He’s gay, has moderately high name recognition, and unlike any number of air-head celebrities, he’s actually done something to support social justice, rather than mined charitable causes for personal fame and fortune... Obama’s diplomatic overture will fall prey to Israel’s hawks, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth ...The US president began his first term on a different footing, ignoring Israel and heading instead to Cairo where he made a speech committing the US to a new era in relations with the Arab world. Little came of the promise. Now he apparently intends to start his second term – as Mr Netanyahu resumes office too, following last month’s elections – with an effort to engage with Israel and the Palestinians that is almost as certain to prove an exercise in futility... Music Video Tribute for Palestine and Ziyad Yaghi, by Siraj Davis | Salem-News Today's youth is a beautiful and energetic resource which can be prepared toward creating a better future. I personally enjoy shaping the minds of this resource throughout my career, to prepare them not only for success, but to also bear and struggle with the unfortunate burdens we adults fail to resolve today. It sometimes appears to be an abysmal future for them, filled with obstacles which they will inherit from our time. The most difficult challenge amidst this augury is to breach the apathy and selfishness of humans, a challenge we all fight against, and some of us never get past... Caution: Middle East under construction, by Aluf Benn | Haaretz Popular uprisings and internecine hostilities will lead to the redrawing of regional maps, which will be a far cry from those underlying the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and other accords... Who Wants War With Iran? by William Boardman | Reader Supported News There are those who would have bombed or invaded Iran years ago to make sure there would be no Iranian Bomb, and their voices are getting louder again as another day of high level talks approaches. Even though Iran's Supreme Leader has spent years forswearing nuclear weapons, which he calls a "crime against humanity," skeptics demand proof that there's nothing to worry about... U.S. Diplomat: Majority of Syrians Stand Behind Bashar Assad | Moon of Alabama A member of the UN independent panel investigating human rights violations in Syria, Karen Abuzayd, said what we have asserted here all along. A majority of the people of Syria stand behind their president Bashar al Assad... [Just as the majority of Iranians support Ahmadinejad and the majority of Lebanese support Hezbollah, in spite of all the BS in the MSM] Bulgaria's Hezbollah 'hypothesis' and the EU terror list, by Gareth Porter | Al Jazeera English The US and Israel continue ignoring the actual evidence in terrorism cases to advance their political interests... Stop doing what you’re not doing? AGAIN? by L. Reichard White | Antiwar It’s the sort of bureaucratic lying-by-obfuscation below which caused the U.S. to unnecessarily nuke Japan twice in three days, attack North Vietnam for an incident which Defense Sec. Robert McNamara admits “didn’t happen,” and invade Iraq based on weapons of mass destruction it didn’t have — and at least 935 other documented lies... American Assassinations For Dummies | Not Safe For Work Corporation It’s hard to have a serious conversation about America’s drone assassination policy when no one seems to have a basic grasp of recent history. This cultural amnesia epidemic is starting to get me down— which is partly my fault for paying more than two minutes’ attention to Twitter at a single go. The problem starts with Reagan, as problems so often do. Most people on the left take for granted that Reagan’s executive order 12333 "banned assassinations" — which is not just a false interpretation, but really awful mangling of one of the dark turning points in modern American history... Exodus to the UK as French Jews escape antisemitism | The Jewish Chronicle The Chief Rabbi: ‘Jews in Europe have begun to ask, is there still a place for us here?’.. [Not to Israel? Gee, I wonder why. If the Jewish State continues to exist much longer we can expect the Mother of All Pogroms in the near future. Will they ever learn? Judging by history – nope.] Associated Press: Self-Defense Guide against American Killer Drones | Roi Tov ...The AP is one of the world's largest news agencies. Centered in New York, it provides material to almost 2,000 newspapers around the world. One doesn't expect such an organization to be respectful of human rights; simply it is strongly related to the establishment. Yet, on February 21, 2013, it published an astonishing document titled The Al-Qaida Papers - Drones. The title is linked to their site; I strongly recommend downloading the document. Before the astonishing text, the agency placed a notice: "This document is one of several found by the AP in buildings recently occupied by al-Qaida fighters in Timbuktu, Mali.”.. The document is a self-defense guide against American killer drones... The New McCarthyism: All About Israel, by M.J. Rosenberg | MCW News Sunday’s New York Times features an important piece that will serve to alert progressives and Democrats to the latest brand of right-wing provocateur: young zealots who are not “movement” conservatives but who move from pro-Israel activism to the right at large. Although they ally themselves with more traditional right-wingers, their central concern is Israel, and not so much Israel per se as supporting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right. While stridently adopting traditional right-wing stands on the usual litmus issues, those are just window dressing. Their driving issue is Israel... Read more... How Israel legitimises torturing Palestinians to death, by Charlotte Silver | Al Jazeera English Six days after Arafat Jaradat was arrested by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, he was dead. Between the date of his arrest - February 18 - and the day of his death - February 23 - his lawyer Kamil Sabbagh met with Arafat only once: in front of a military judge at the Shin Bet's Kishon interrogation facility. Sabbagh reported that when he saw Jaradat, the man was terrified. Arafat told his lawyer that he was in acute pain from being beaten and forced to sit in stress positions with his hands bound behind his back. When it announced his death, Israeli Prison Service claimed Arafat.. died from cardiac arrest. However, the subsequent autopsy found no blood clot in his heart... [Business as usual in the Holy Land] Liberating the Land of Canaan, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance ...The tour featuring me and Jeff Halper to discuss the one-state solution was organized by the European branch of “Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace”. The organizers are mostly young students (though some of them are in graduate programs). They did a tremendous amount of work. They had invited me and Jeff to speak on the issue knowing that we hold somewhat different views (he is for a binational state within a confederation of Middle Eastern states while I am for one democratic secular state). We both agree though that any dreams about the mirage of a two-state solution must be abandoned... Feb 25, 2013 The Billionaire, by John Spritzler | New Democracy World You are a billionaire. You possess more wealth than ordinary people can even dream of. You enjoy luxury and privilege unlike all others. Most importantly of all, you have enormous power--the power to make others do your bidding, to shape the world according to your fancy, to tell "the people"--the little ones--how it's going to be whether they like it or not. All of this you now possess. But can you hold on to it? That is the supreme question! You own the world today, but what must you do to ensure you still own it tomorrow? You need the Owner's Manual. Fortunately for you it is now in your hands... Palestinians Say Israel Tortured Detainee to Death | Palestine Chronicle The Palestinian government is alleging that a Palestinian man who died in Israeli custody was tortured to death, dismissing claims that his death was due to a heart attack. Arafat Jaradat’s autopsy showed torture resulting from fractures in his body and bruises in his face, while his heart was in good condition, said Issa Qaraqaa, the minister in charge of prisoner affairs, citing a Palestinian doctor who took part in the autopsy. “These results prove Israel killed him,” Qaraqaa told a news conference on Sunday... Netanyahu's Deep Pockets: The Price of Silence | Roi Tov ...Protests in the West Bank are not rare; if they end without violence they won't even be mentioned by the media. If there was violence, but the event took place in a remote area, it would appear as a tiny news item hidden in the local news section. Thus, when the mainstream media reported protests last Friday (Feb 22, 2013), there was no reason to worry too much. The first reports I saw claimed that thirty Palestinians had been wounded, there were neither dead nor significant material damages. There was nothing unusual about the event. Next morning, the reports claimed that there were one hundred wounded and that the protests were intensifying... BDS Against George Galloway | Gilad Atzmon With BDS, it’s never boring. Although formed initially to mount pressure on Israel, increasingly BDS campaigns are now, bit by bit, focusing on silencing any pro-Palestinian voice with an IQ over 90. For the BDS leadership, intellect is a threat – and they may be right.. more and more of us regard the BDS, in its current form, as nothing short of a ‘controlled opposition’ dominated by Jewish tribal interests... [For those who haven’t noticed, political correctness has all along been a tribal Jewish initiative. It follows from the basic meme “If it’s good for the Jews...” What Americans Believe: Iran War Propaganda, by John Glaser | Antiwar ...can the politicians and the media still be blamed for spreading falsehoods about Iran? In a word, yes. Former CIA officer Paul Pillar, when writing about the misinformation campaign to sell the Iraq war, explained it was “less a matter of instilling any specific mistaken belief than of instilling a mood and momentum.” It was “at least as much a matter of rhetorical themes as of manipulated evidence. The belief was cultivated by repeatedly uttering ‘Iraq,’ ’9/11? and ‘war on terror’ in the same breath.”.. [Can Americans really be that credulous? Duh.] Oscar Prints the Legend: Argo's Upcoming Academy Award and the Failure of Truth | Wide Asleep in America ..Over the past 12 months, rarely a week - let alone month - went by without new predictions of an ever-imminent Iranian nuclear weapon and ever-looming threats of an American or Israeli military attack. Come October 2012, into the fray marched "Argo," a decontextualized, ahistorical "true story" of Orientalist proportion, subjecting audiences to two hours of American victimization and bearded barbarians, culminating in popped champagne corks and rippling stars-and-stripes celebrating our heroism and triumph and their frustration and defeat. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir aptly described the film as "a propaganda fable,".. Palestinian prisoners hold mass hunger strike | MCW News Thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails are staging a one-day hunger strike in protest at the death of a fellow inmate, an Israeli official has said, as protests were held across the occupied Palestinian territories. "About 3,000 prisoners announced that they would refuse meals," Israel Prisons Service spokeswoman Sivan Weizman, told the AFP news agency on Sunday... Does Obama really want a deal with Iran? by Pepe Escobar | Al Jazeera English Almaty, Kazakhstan, is in the eye of the volcano next Tuesday, when the P5+1 - the five permanent UN Security Council members, US, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany - meet again with an Iranian delegation over Iran's nuclear programme. The record shows that all 16 US intelligence agencies know Tehran is not working on a nuclear weapon. In a real negotiation, there would be a credible US offer on the table. There is none. This suggests what Washington really wants is to maintain - and turbo-charge - its harsh sanctions package... [What Obama & Co. want is war. The US is becoming more and more like Israel in many ways, particularly in its reliance on force, and only force, to get it’s way.] Peace and Watermelons: The Riddle of the Israel Lobby, by Uri Avnery | Counterpunch One of the most interesting and prolonged private debates I have had in my life was with the brilliant Dr. Nahum Goldmann. The subject: American peace initiatives. It was an unequal debate, of course. Goldmann was my elder by 28 years. While I was a mere editor of an Israeli news magazine, he was an international figure, President of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress... Destroying a Nation State: US-Saudi Funded Terrorists Sowing Chaos in Pakistan, by Tony Cartalucci | Global Research The terrorist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group was in fact created, according to the BBC, to counter Iran’s Islamic Revolution in the 1980′s, and is still active today. Considering the openly admitted US-Israeli-Saudi plot to use Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups across the Middle East to counter Iran’s influence, it begs the question whether these same interests are funding terrorism in Pakistan to not only counter Iranian-sympathetic Pakistani communities, but to undermine and destabilize Pakistan itself... Feb 24, 2013 A Landscape of Wires: Israel’s Wall of Madness, by Andre Vltchek and Lynda Burstein Brayer | Counterpunch If someone would say: “Israel, Palestine and Golan Heights! And you have only two seconds to describe what first comes to your mind.” Then I would immediately put into words two images that would enter my mind: “Mental asylum, and enormous bag full of the intertwined professional wires.” Mental asylum, because how else to describe those long decades of lies, half-truths, and deceptions? How else to describe the state of things when the language loses its meaning, words turn to fragmented squeaks and shouts and people just don’t seem to get through to each other... Israel's original sin | Paul Eisen Like anyone else, Jews can define themselves as they wish. If they feel themselves to be a nation, then they are a nation. But, in accordance with the dictum, that ‘your freedom to swing your arm ends where your finger touches my nose’, it is when this self-definition impinges on others that the problems begin. It is then that others may ask whether this Jewish sense of nationhood—often an emotional and religious matter based on a perceived sharing of history and even of destiny—can ever be realised politically... Muslims By Birth, Not By Faith, by Mohamed Khodr | Sabbah Report ...One must ask the Muslim militants this most important and basic of all questions. What Revelation or Book and Prophet or Messenger do you follow to commit such crimes against Islam and humanity? It most certainly is not the Holy Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad given that all your crimes against humanity directly violate and contradict God’s Book and His Prophet Muhammad... Israel sues citizens for slander and apologies to Turkey | Roi Tov ...Israeli newspaper Haaretz did just that. Its Hebrew version grouped two strangely complementing pieces. One reported on an expected apology of Israel to Turkey due to the Freedom Flotilla crimes committed by Israel. A few days ago, Turkey and Israel became friends again after Israel agreed to supply spying equipment that had been frozen since 2011. In parallel, the two former allies are holding negotiations to end the rupture between them. Apparently, Israel would apologize for its crimes and would indemnify the hurt Turkish citizens while Turkey would drop its demand of Israel to end the siege on Gaza... SIGN ON to IRAN statement responding to the upcoming 5+1 talks on Iran's nuclear development | IAC ..Using an unfounded accusation as a pretext for acts of aggressions, one side of the dispute headed by the US empire is currently punishing the other side, Iran, with the genocidal sanctions, an inhuman act that has endangered the life of 10s of millions of innocent Iranian citizens for their “crime” of deciding to live independent and free from the yoke of hegemonic powers. The excuse for these aggressions is an allegation that has strongly been denied by Iranian officials and international organizations such as the Non-aligned Movement representing 120 countries. Furthermore, the charge against Iran on intending to develop nuclear weapons has even been refuted by the intelligence agencies of the U.S... Israel instructs Obama: “Iranian and Syrian Sanctions are Not Painful Enough!” by Franklin Lamb | Veterans Today On 3/26/2013 Iran is expected to meet with other world powers in Astana, Kazakhstan to discuss its nuclear program. Discussions that the occupiers of Palestine fervently hope will not be successful. It is toward this end that their key demand this week to the US Congress, the White House and the European Union is “to cast responsibility on the Iranians by blaming them for the talks’ failure in the clearest terms possible.” According to Al-Monitor, Israel also demands that the countries meeting in Kazakhstan “make it perfectly clear that slogans such as ‘negotiations can’t go on forever’ are their marching orders to the White House... Defeating single issue politics, by Luke Hiken | MCW News Nobody to the left of Karl Rove would consider sending a petition to the Koch brothers to do anything that was in the interest of the people of this country. That’s because everyone realizes that these greedy, vicious dogs restrict their actions to stealing from the poor and causing whatever harm they can to the largest number of people. Similarly, nobody in his/her right mind would send letters to General Betray-Us, McChrystal or any of the Pentagon power-brokers that define our foreign policy, asking them to stop murdering defenseless civilians around the world... From prisoner X to Lord Montagu | Crazy Country ...Samer al-Issawi, a resident of Isawiya in East Jerusalem, was placed last July in Administrative Detention without trial and imprisoned at the Ramla Prison (yes, the same Ramla Prison which this week got to the headlines for other reasons). He began a hunger strike which already passed the 200 days’ mark, lost thirty five kilograms and suffered severe damage to his kidneys. A few days ago he stopped drinking the vitamins and few nutritional supplements which kept him alive until now. All this information was completely open to publication - everything except the charges against Issawi, which were contained only in “secret evidence” presented to the judge who extended his detention... Jewish paranoia, narcissism or chosenness? by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis Do you know of anyone who has been wrongfully imprisoned anywhere in the world, let alone in the United States, for their “Jewishness”? The answer is probably no, but not as far as one Jewish group in the US is concerned. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), “a new legal defence fund for Jews seen as being held wrongfully because of their Jewishness” has been set up, and already tax-deductible – i.e. taxpayer-subsidized – money has begun to flow into it... The Untouchables: Masters of Fraud, by Rob Urie | Counterpunch The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions for the large-scale bank lending fraud behind the financial crisis of 2008, came when the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Enforcement division, Lanny Breuer, voiced his concern that bringing criminal charges might cause thousands of bankers to lose their jobs. This came after voluminous evidence was provided that senior bankers, including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were culpably aware the mortgage securitization businesses they were running were purchasing, packaging and re-selling trillions of dollars of mortgage loans that were never intended to be paid... Brennan’s Loose Talk on Iran Nukes, by Ray McGovern | Antiwar The Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on John Brennan to head the CIA focused on lethal drones, but Brennan’s loose talk lumping Iran with North Korea as nuclear threats could be even more worrisome, recalling Iraq WMD exaggerations, as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warn Sen. Dianne Feinstein... When can your government kill you? by Marcy Wheeler | Salon At John Brennan’s confirmation hearing to be director of the CIA earlier this month, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked him whether the administration could let the public know under what circumstances the government believes it can kill Americans within the United States. The exchange takes on added resonance today, as new reports reveal the Obama administration continues to hide its targeted killing authority, even from Congress... [When? It’s simple – when you fall behind on your rent or mortgage payments, or fail to salute the Israeli flag] US Blocks UN Resolution Condemning Damascus Bombing, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar Yesterday’s massive bombing attack near the Ba’ath Party headquarters in Damascus, an attack which left 100 people dead and 250 others wounded, the vast majority civilians, was a “war crime,” according to UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. In a personal statement, Brahimi said that “nothing could justify such horrible actions that amount to war crimes under international law,” and said that he “strongly condemns” the attack. Brahimi’s personal statement is going to be the closest we get to a UN condemnation of the killings, however, as the US has blocked a Russian resolution from moving through the UN Security Council condemning the attack... [I’m looking forward to a small asteroid falling on the Capitol] Boycott Apartheid, w/M1 (Dead Prez) and Lowkey | YouTube This video was made on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose sovereignty never ceased... Feb 23, 2013 The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the U.S. Criminal State, The Grand Plan for a New World Order, by Prof. John McMurtry | Global Research I was skeptical of the 9-11 event from the first time I saw it on television. It was on every major network within minutes. All the guilty parties were declared before any evidence was shown.The first questions of any criminal investigation were erased. Who had the most compelling motives for the event? Who had the means to turn two central iconic buildings in New York into a pile of steel and a cloud of dust in seconds? Other questions soon arose in the aftermath. Why was all the evidence at the crime scenes removed or confiscated? Who was behind the continuous false information and non-stop repetition of “foreign/Arab terrorists”when no proof of guilt existed?.. Gilad Atzmon Interviewed by Jason Liosatos | Global Peace Radio ..We spoke about Jewish progressive politics as an extension of Zionist supremacy. We discussed the dangers involved with marginal identity politics.. We examined the embarrassing fact that it is actually Jewish secular and socialist politics rather than Judaism that are responsible for the plunder of Palestine. We spoke about Jewish political attitude towards history and time, the role of the holocaust, anti-gentile ideologies, Jewish pressure groups, Zionist lobbying, BDS being an extension of Jewish power (Soros, Open Society), Spanish Civil War being the first Neocon war, the Occupied Palestine Solidarity movement and more. [GA] Washington JCRC launches legal fund to help 'wrongfully imprisoned' Jews | Gilad Atzmon ...The fund will help cover the defense of Jews in the United States and throughout the world who the Jewish Community Relations council believes have been wrongfully charged or imprisoned. Funds also will be used to cover costs associated with advocating for the prisoners. And I think that time is ripe for the Jewish Community Relations council to launch a fund that will help cover the legal defense of millions of Palestinians who have been wrongfully imprisoned by the Jewish State in the name of the Jewish people... [They already have a Get Out of Jail Free card: Israel is a magnet for Jewish mafiosi and other major crooks on the run. It’s one of many reasons it's called a Criminal State.] US sanctions on Iran seek to disrupt P5+1 talks | PressTV Vice Speaker of the Russian State Duma Sergey Baburin has slammed the US unilateral sanctions against Iran as Washington’s tactic to sabotage the upcoming comprehensive talks between Tehran and the world powers... Obama in Jerusalem with a Lame Spy | Roi Tov One can easily tell when Israel is unfriendly; what happens when America displays the same attitude? Aviem Sella was the Israeli handler of Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli spy within the American Naval Intelligence. Sella was a pilot that participated in the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, Commanded Operation Opera (the air strike against the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981) and was a commanding officer in Operation Mole Cricket 19 during the 1982 Lebanon War. While a graduate student in New York, Sella recruited Jonathan Pollard. After the affair exploded, Pollard's Israeli handlers were granted immunity from prosecution in the United States in exchange for cooperation... Hagel In The Dock: Aipac Dog Bites Man, by Dr. Alan Sabrosky | My Catbird Seat The doings in the US Senate over the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense are illustrative of many things, not all of which are what they seem to be at first glance. We have a few days now before this plays out, and therefore an opportunity to reflect on the dynamics at work here... What If? | Paul Craig Roberts ...What if the 9/11 Commission consisted of experts instead of politicians with their fingers in the wind, and what if the commissioners had too much integrity to write a report dictated by the executive branch? The unlikely and untenable failure of every institution of the American national security state would have been investigated, and the collapse of WTC 7 at free fall speed would have had to have been acknowledged in the report and explained. A totally different story would have emerged, a story unlikely to have locked Americans into permanent war in an expanding number of countries and into a domestic police state... India’s inequality and destructive development, by Graham Peebles | Redress Information & Analysis The “new” India is racing towards the altar of materialism and market fundamentalism, abandoning its hallmark of spirituality, its philosophical treasures and any notion of unity, justice and service. Under the careful guidance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund the Indian government has for the last 20 years or so – during which time inequality has doubled – embraced market liberalization and the global market, garlanded corporations with all manner of subsidies and damned the poor to greater poverty, destitution, suffering and suicide... 'Equal Burden': A Disaster for the IDF, by Uri Avnery | Middle East Experience I swore allegiance to the army upon its foundation, in the middle of the War of Independence. I served in Samson`s Foxes, the mother of all Israeli commando units. We were anElite unit (at least in our own eyes). We hated evaders, especially the pencil pushers in spotless uniforms who sat at offices in the rear. I wrote the above preface so that my next sentence would be correctly understood: I am against equality of the burden! I object to the Haredi military service on practical as well as moral grounds... [Although he’s a Zionist and thinks the Jewish State - albeit magically transformed into a community capable of co-existing with its neighbors and treating Palestinians as human beings – is legitimate. You gotta love the guy – a courageous idealist] Guilt by Accusation, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News Police states govern this way. Israel's one of the worst. Racism is institutionalized. Arabs have no rights. They're considered subhumans. They're viciously persecuted. World leaders turn a blind eye. Washington provides generous support. It's longstanding policy. Bipartisan support affirms it. Doing so conspires with high crimes. Palestine is Israeli occupied territory. State terrorism threatens everyone. Multiple pre-dawn raids occur daily. Beatings, arrests, torture, and imprisonment follow. Wanting to live free is called terrorism. So is praying to the wrong God... Israel sentences hunger-striking Palestinian | MCW News An Israeli court has handed a Palestinian prisoner who has been on hunger strike since August last year an eight-month sentence, of which he has another month left to serve. Samer Issawi's fate, however, remains unclear, as there is still another case pending against him in an Israeli military court. Issawi, 33, was convicted for violating his parole by the Jerusalem Magistrates Court on Thursday. The court said that he violated the terms of his early release in October 2011 by taking his car to be fixed at a garage in the West Bank... [How supposedly “decent” people anywhere could continue to sympathize with, let alone support, the Jewish State is beyond me. It truly boggles the mind.] We never know when to stop | Paul Eisen ...Jewish history is cyclical. We come to a country with nothing (or so we say), we work hard, obey the law and, inevitably we do well. But then we get above ourselves. We start to meddle and never, ever take the time to look into the eyes of the other to see that they really have had enough. But they have had enough. So, out we go and on to the next place... [Not knowing when to stop is more or less what Einstein meant when he defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. If it isn’t crazy, then it’s just plain stupid.] Sibel Edmonds on Gladio B | The Corbett Report Sibel Edmonds of BoilingFrogsPost joins us for the fourth part of our series on Gladio B, the NATO-directed effort to radicalize, enable and protect Islamic terrorists to further their own geopolitical ends. In this installment we discuss the drug traffickers who have been protected by the NATO Gladio network and the money launderers who help to “clean” the proceeds of this trafficking... Feb 22, 2013 End Endless War: Stop Becoming “the Evil That We Deplore,” by Norman Solomon | Antiwar Congress waited six years to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution after it opened the bloody floodgates for the Vietnam War in August 1964. If that seems slow, consider the continuing failure of Congress to repeal the “war on terror” resolution — the Authorization for Use of Military Force — that sailed through, with just one dissenting vote, three days after 9/11. Prior to casting the only “no” vote, Congresswoman Barbara Lee spoke on the House floor. “As we act,” she said, “let us not become the evil that we deplore.”.. Defense Budgets Sustain Bloated, Obsolete Military, by John Glaser | Antiwar Even as the Obama administration acknowledges that 21st century conflicts will not be fought with tens of thousands of boots on the ground or colossal weapons systems, Washington continues to carry through bloated military budgets and outdated armaments.. “Nevertheless, the defense budget contains hundreds of billions of dollars for new generations of aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, tanks that even the Army says it doesn’t need and combat vehicles too heavy to maneuver in desert sands or cross most bridges in Asia, Africa or the Middle East,”.. What is a Jew? | Paul Eisen Israel Shamir, the Russian-born Israeli writer, advocates the right of all people, whatever their ethnicity or religion, to live together in complete equality between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Shamir condemns the behaviour of Israel and of Diaspora Jews and calls for an end to their preferential treatment, but he also proposes an opposition to Judaism itself for which he stands accused of being anti-Jewish – a charge he does not deny but actually embraces... The myth of the Jewish people | Redress Information & Analysis Jamal Kanj highlights recent scientific research which proves that in 1948 "the children of the original Jews" – the Palestinians – were replaced by 8th century converts with no roots in the Middle East... Bulgaria's Hezbollah 'hypothesis' and the EU terror list, by Gareth Porter | Al Jazeera English ...A closer examination of the Bulgarian investigation reveals that the investigators had not, in fact, come to the conclusion desired by Washington and Tel Aviv by mid-January. But the Bulgarian government had to avoid being on the wrong side of the US and Israel on the issue. The result was language that telegraphed the absence of any real evidence of that Shia organisation in the crime, but which served the US-Israeli interests of getting Hezbollah listed as a terrorist organisation... Al Qaeda’s Top Recruiting Tool: The CIA, by Jamie Dettmer | The Daily Beast What makes someone join Al Qaeda? In the case of Abu Yahya al-Libi, the Al Qaeda luminary killed in an American drone strike in Pakistan last June, his older brother has no doubt. Americans are culpable for his sibling’s embrace of terrorism. He draws a direct line between al-Libi’s recruitment by al Qaeda and the suffering he endured at the hands of American interrogators using techniques similar to those portrayed in the movie Zero Dark Thirty... Make Tehran a Serious Offer, by Yousaf Butt | The National Interest Western leaders appear positively lackadaisical about striking a deal with Iran. As the New York Times recently reported, “Mr. Obama’s aides seem content with stalemate.” If the alleged threat from Iran’s nuclear program is so urgent that the United States—or Israel—would even consider military action, why is stalemate in negotiations satisfactory? Is the administration seriously worried?.. BDS at Brooklyn College: The Benefits of Pro-Israel Overkill, by Jay Knott | deLiberation On February 7, Omar Barghouti and Judith Butler defended the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement in front of an audience of over 200 at Brooklyn College. Far more than 200 people have heard about it, because the college’s decision to host the talk was publicly denounced by renowned lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and other Jewish supremacists, using their customary hyperbole... Drugged, Indebted, Armed-to-the-Teeth: Deranging America, by Linh Dinh | Counterpunch The coarsening of a people doesn’t happen overnight. When I came to the States in 1975, the Gong Show was about as rude as it got on television. Some earnest sap would get bumped for crooning, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings,” but no one ever got screamed at, had their wig knocked off or made to sob in public. No tune ever urged murder, and even a group named War only sang, “Why can’t we be friends?” The year’s top hit was The Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Compared to now, it was a cheesy time, for sure. American cheese... “Rational’ Totalitarianism, by Gui Rochat | Counterpunch ...Capitalist reality is the intense conditioning to prevailing standards of a binary either/or social control, like the twin towers of the former World Trade Center in New York which were fully identical but symbolically signified together the indestructible monopoly of American economic power. Similarly the thoughts of US citizens appear to veer between two alternatives which are equal, like the Republican and Democratic parties, as Twiddle Dum and Twiddle Dee, fragile identical twin white eggs with attitude... An Argument in Defense of Haredi Jews and Against Secular Zionist Militarism, by James Petras | The People's Voice Israel is heading towards a profound internal crisis: a Jew-on-Jew confrontation, which has major implications for its relations with the Palestinians, as well as its Arab neighbors. The conflict is between the highly militarized Zionist state and the Haredi religious movement over a number of issues, including recent proposals by the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to end the religious exemption of Haradi youth from serving in Israel’s colonial armed forces. Even before the forcible imposition (‘founding’) of the state of Israel, the Haredim were opposed to Zionism. Today the vast majority of Haredim in Israel remain staunchly opposed to the Zionist state for religious, ethical and political reasons... Collaboration between IDF, settlers reaching point of no return, by Yossi Gurvitz | +972 Magazine Israeli democracy is being severely compromised by the army’s collaboration with the settlers, and the fact that more and more Israeli citizens now see the occupation as the natural order of things... Iran centrifuge magnet story technically questionable | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ...Last week, the Washington Post reported that "purchase orders obtained by nuclear researchers show an attempt by Iranian agents to buy 100,000 … ring-shaped magnets" and that such "highly specialized magnets used in centrifuge machines … [are] a sign that the country may be planning a major expansion of its nuclear program.".. There are serious deficiencies in both the Washington Post story and the assertions in the ISIS report. Given that issues of war and peace may hang on the veracity of such claims, the assertions warrant careful scrutiny... [As anyone who has been paying attention must know by now, the powers-that-be will float or embrace any story, no matter how fanciful, that suits their purposes. The MSM will slavishly give it credence. If they want war - and they almost always do - there will be war.] Feb 21, 2013 Israel Sets the Narrative on Bulgaria Attack: Accuses Iran with No Evidence; Media Repeats Claim Dutifully | Wide Asleep in America The Israeli government wasted no time mourning, memorializing or reflecting on the loss of life after bombing of a bus of Israeli tourists at an airport on the Bulgarian coast. It was too busy going into full-on warmongering mode, immediately laying the blame for the tragic terrorist act on the government of Iran, despite a complete lack of evidence. But in this world of propaganda, Israeli officials were out-front, setting the narrative for the Western media before any facts emerged. Facts aren't important, just perception. Perception is reality... Egypt Joins Israel in Blocking Gaza | Roi Tov Several times I commented on the inevitable analogy between Israel and South Vietnam; both West-supported bastions had serious issues with their legitimacy. "There is no question of your transferring power. Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have;" these were the words said by Colonel Bui Tin from the Vietnamese army to Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, in what became known as the Fall of Saigon... Liberal Fascism in America, by Norman Pollack | Counterpunch ...Fascism comes in several varieties without losing its distinctive structural-ideological-political features, all of which point to an hierarchical societal framework characterized by extremes of wealth and power, a system of government authority, its opaqueness shielding it from accountability in both domestic and foreign policy, and, because of its secrecy, able to hide its disconnection from the public interest... [I agree with most of this piece, but not with its definition of fascism. Here’s mine] Barack Obama: Two Kinds of Awful, by Andrew Levine | Counterpunch There is something to be grateful for: lesser evil arguments for reelecting Barack Obama are “so last year.” Should we be grateful too that he won? Very likely. But that is small consolation for the fact that we must now look “forward” to four more years of him. This is not the time to rehearse arguments against lesser evilism or to identify the lesser evil in an election that already took place. The time for that was before November 6. What is urgent now is to understand how the results of that election burden us... Photographing Tragedy: What Victims Actually Want, by Ramzy Baroud | Tripoli Post When one looks at scenes of fleeing refugees from Syria via images of their squalid refugee camps and hears their pleas for solidarity, mercy or for God’s help to end their suffering, one finds eerie similarities between their experiences and those of the Palestinians, Lebanese and Iraqis. However, the worse part of the tragedy occurs when it is so prolonged that video footage, photos and personal accounts meant to delineate an urgent reality, wind up becoming the ever-present state of affairs, a painful and humiliating status quo... Zero Snuff Thirty, by Joe Giambrone | The Greanville Post Below we have the pleasure of presenting Joe Giambrone’s commentary on yet another toxic film (besides ARGO) muddying the waters of history while serving imperial propaganda narratives.. Incidentally, those of you with a discerning eye will note that the statuesque Kathryn Bigelow, the former Mrs. James Cameron, is once again involved in this kind of project. How does this woman explain her eager participation in such seductive (for the impressionable) warmongering tripe? Or to paraphrase Special Counsel for the Army Joseph N. Welch (clearly from another age), have you no decency Ms Bigelow?.. MSNBC boldly moves to plug its one remaining hole, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian Last month, MSNBC's Al Sharpton conducted a spirited debate about whether Obama belongs on Mount Rushmore or instead deserves a separate monument to his greatness (just weeks before replacing frequent Obama critic Cenk Uygur as MSNBC host, Sharpton publicly vowed never to criticize Barack Obama under any circumstances: a vow he has faithfully maintained). Earlier that day on the same network, a solemn discussion was held, in response to complaints from MSNBC viewers, about whether it is permissible to ever allow Barack Obama's name to pass through one's lips without prefacing it with an honorific such as "President" or "the Honorable" or perhaps "His Excellency".. [Sharpton has always been reliably racist] Hubris Isn't the Half of It | War Is A Crime ...the Senate that gave us the two wars in question was in reality controlled by Democrats, and the war lies were pushed hard by Senators Kerry, Clinton, and their comrades. Hubris touches on this reality but not with sufficient clarity for most viewers - I suspect - to pick up on it. The film presents a great deal of good evidence that the war on Iraq was based on lies. Unavoidably, endless terrific bits of such evidence were not included. Less excusably, also left out was an analysis of the evidence that only dishonesty - not incompetence - explains the propaganda that was produced. Hubris is the wrong word for what took the United States into war with Iraq... The Arrogance of Universal Democracy, by Leon Hadar | The National Interest ...not unlike the liberal internationalists and their ideological clones on the political right, the neoconservatives.. Pinker has bought into the notion that the Enlightenment project or versions of it that have taken root in America and Europe would and should be promoted in the rest of the world. It assumes that if India (the "world's largest democracy") and South Africa (supposedly a successful experiment in multiculturalism) are close to being "like us," it was only a question of time before the civilizing process would transform the Muslim world and China into liberal democracies. Only backward and evil leaders in those countries are retarding this journey to enlightenment... [The road to hell is paved with...] Russia and Islam: internal Russian politics | The Vineyard of the Saker ...the reasons why neither the modern European civilizational model nor the traditional Orthodox faith can, at this point in time, provide a viable and positive source of ideological or spiritual inspiration for post-Soviet Russia. While in the past three hundred years the ideologically dominant philosophical and political paradigm has been the "Westernizing" one, the absolute disasters which inevitably resulted from any "liberals" coming to power in Russia (Kerensky, Eltsin), combined with the West's betrayal of all its promises made to Gorbachev (NATO would not move East) has finally resulted in a collapse of this model... Yad Vashem, Power, and the Politics of History, by David Langstaff | Palestine Chronicle ...What kind of politic should I expect to undergird this museum’s framing of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies? Would this framing be a worthy tribute to those millions whose lives were extinguished, or would it disgrace their memory by cynically exploiting it for political ends? Would its representation of history help us to deepen our understanding of the forces which generated the Nazi genocide (forces which can hardly be regarded as safely relegated to some fossilized past, but rather which are alive and well in the relations which constitute our present world) or would it instead turn history against us, constructing a portrait of the past which blinds us to the cruelties and perils of the present?.. Israel's War Criminal of the Year Award, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News Israel honors a genocidist. Imagine honoring crimes of war, against humanity and genocide. Imagine calling war on humanity honorable. Imagine granting a nation's highest civilian award for waging it. It shouldn't surprise. Obama will receive Israel's Presidential Medal of Distinction... Britain’s UKIP: Another Zionist lobby tool, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis Stuart Littlewood considers the latest Israeli stooge on Britain’s political scene, the UK Independence Party, whose allegiance to Israel completes a circle of allies that has some of Europe’s most odious parties... Why Isn't the Murder of an American Boy an Impeachable Offense? by Jacob Hornberger | MCW News Article 2, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution reads as follows: The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”.. Eutelsat’s Zionist boss continues war on media freedom | PressTV The European satellite provider Eutelsat, owned by the Zionist Michel de Rosen, has ordered Nilesat to pull the plug on Iran’s English-language news channel, Press TV, as part of his war on freedom of speech... Feb 20, 2013 Samer Easawi: Hunger Striking for Justice, by Stephen Lendman | Mostly Water Samer's a Palestinian activist and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine member. On April 15, 2002, Israel kidnapped him in Ramallah. It did so during multiple community incursions. Samer was wrongly charged with allegedly planning attacks on Israel. When evidence doesn't exist, Israel invents it. He was sentenced to 30 years for supporting right over wrong. He's one of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners. They symbolize longstanding Israeli ruthlessness... Pictures speak volumes in Oscar-nominated Israeli films, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth Israelis have been revelling in the prospect of an Oscar night triumph next week, with two Israeli-financed films among the five in the running for Best Documentary. But the country’s right-wing government is reported to be quietly fuming that the films, both of which portray Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in a critical light, have garnered so much attention following their nominations... Read more... US-Saudi Funded Terrorists Sowing Chaos in Pakistan | Land Destroyer ...The terrorist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group was in fact created, according to the BBC, to counter Iran's Islamic Revolution in the 1980's, and is still active today. Considering the openly admitted US-Israeli-Saudi plot to use Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups across the Middle East to counter Iran's influence, it begs the question whether these same interests are funding terrorism in Pakistan to not only counter Iranian-sympathetic Pakistani communities, but to undermine and destabilize Pakistan itself... Greg Grandin: Why Latin America Didn't Join Washington's Counterterrorism Posse | Tom Dispatch ...Brennan even cited Attorney General Eric Holder as one lawyer who had described waterboarding as “torture,” but he himself begged off. According to the man who was deputy executive director of the CIA and director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in the years of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and knew much about them, the only people equipped to recognize torture definitively as “torture” are lawyers. This might be more worrisome, if we weren’t a “nation of lawyers” (though it also means that plummeting law school application rates could, in the future, create a torture-definition crisis)... UN fact finding mission demands member states, private companies end support for settlements, by Michael Deas | The Electronic Intifada A United Nations fact finding mission on illegal Israeli settlements has called for Israel to end all settlement activity “without preconditions” and for tough measures against Israel, as well as companies involved in settlements. The mission’s final conclusions were released last week and contain some of the strongest condemnations of Israel’s illegal settlements ever made by a UN body... The premises and purposes of American exceptionalism, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian ...it's insufficient to claim the mere mantle of Greatest Country on the Planet. It's way beyond that: the Greatest Country Ever to Exist in All of Human History (why not The Greatest Ever in All of the Solar Systems?). The very notion that this distinction could be objectively or even meaningfully measured is absurd. But the desire to believe it is so strong, the need to proclaim one's own unprecedented superiority so compelling, that it's hardly controversial to say it despite how nonsensical it is. The opposite is true: it has been vested with the status of orthodoxy... While Left and Right Fight, Power Wins | Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post ...How does the progressive Obama Regime differ from the tax-cut, deregulation Bush/Cheney Regime? Both are complicit in the maximization of executive branch power and in the minimization of citizens’ civil liberties and, thus, of the people’s power. Did the progressive Obama reverse the right-wing Bush’s destruction of habeas corpus and due process? No. Obama further minimized the people’s power. Bush could throw us in prison for life without proof of cause. Obama can execute us without proof of cause. They do this in the name of protecting us from terrorism, but not from their terrorism... Obama’s Carnival of Fraud, by Norman Pollack | Counterpunch The big picture is clear, from drone warfare as escalation of sought-after global US military hegemony to the trivialization and evisceration of government’s regulatory functions, all pointing to a business-as-usual continuation of policies and practices going back, regardless of party, at least to Reagan. In fact, Obama appears to have made a qualitative leap beyond his predecessors on several fronts:. Israeli Soldier Posts Instagram Photo of Palestinian Child in Crosshairs | Antiwar ...What the Instagram picture represents is, unfortunately, an ordinary facet of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dehumanization of “the other” is so deep and so pervasive, and the Israeli system of domination and abuse is so permeating, that horrors like this seem routine. As one member of the Israeli veteran group Breaking the Silence wrote: ”This is what occupation looks like. This is what military control over a civilian population looks like.”.. Racism and the hypocrisy of Israel's advocates, by Ben White | Al Jazeera English Two recent episodes serve as useful illustrations of the hypocrisy of Israel's apologists in the West and their approach to racism. Firstly, there was the outrage that greeted Gerald Scarfe's cartoon in The Sunday Times and which forced an eventual climb down by the newspaper. Some did not hesitate to call the cartoon anti-Semitic - others were more ambiguous but explained why others could think it was anti-Semitic. Of course, not everyone agreed with that analysis, seeing the cartoon as "an image critical of Binyamin Netanyahu's policies in the West Bank" and the chorus of condemnation as "an exploitation of Jewish historical trauma". But the dissenting voices were drowned out... Israel changes law to allow re-arrest of freed prisoners | Middle East Monitor A leading Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, revealed on Sunday that the occupation authorities has amended its military law to allow the re-arrest of 14 Palestinian prisoners who were freed as part of the Shalit deal. The released prisoners are now expected to serve the remainder of their original sentences, in some cases decades. Palestinian human rights organizations view the arrest of the released prisoners as a serious breach of the agreement brokered in October 2011 by the Egyptian and German governments between the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the Israeli authorities... Forbidden Alliance: Turkey & Israel Friends Again | Roi Tov ...Syria and Israel had been fruitfully collaborating for a generation. Two readers sent me emails claiming that I have a rich imagination. Yet, this is a basic characteristic of many situations studied by Game Theory. In small enough groups, let's say oligarchies, opposing groups can collaborate fruitfully without having direct contact. Since they have shared interests—in this case control over their respective civilian populations—they benefit from similar strategies, like the portrayal of each other as an archenemy while behaving like friends. The article linked above justifies that for Syria... Pepe Escobar on the U.S. Economic War Against Iran, by Kourosh Ziabari | Foreign Policy Journal ...He also points out that if Iran had assassinated U.S. civilian scientists, as the U.S. and Israel have done to Iran, an all-out nuclear war would have been unleashed against Iran. With regards to controversy over Iran’s nuclear program, Pepe Escobar says that Iran and the West should reach a sustainable, face-saving solution which both ensures Iran’s entitlement to its essential rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, and also alleviates the West’s concerns about the peacefulness of Iran’s nuclear activities... Israel and Syria: Behind the Bombs, by Conn Hallinan | Counterpunch Now that the dust has settled—literally and figuratively—from Israel’s Jan. 29 air attack on Syria, the question is, why? According to Tel Aviv, the bombing was aimed at preventing the transfer of sophisticated Russian SA-17 anti-craft missiles to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, which one former Israeli military intelligence officer said would be “a game-changer.” But there are major problems with that story... Robbery of Books and Ownership of Narrative, by Susan Abulhawa | Palestine Chronicle I finally watched The Great Book Robbery at the University of Pennsylvania this weekend with some friends. It’s a film documenting Israel’s systematic looting of over 70,000 books from Palestinian public and private libraries after Jewish gangs in Palestine proclaimed the state of Israel and ethnically cleansed the native population. The film itself is excellent and I have a lot of good things to say about it. But I was bothered by a certain element, at the very end... Feb 19, 2013 Bill Maher: "The Israelis Are Controlling Our Government" | Information ClearingHouse Israelis See Their Ownership of US Government in Jeopardy, by Dr. Kevin Barrett | Information ClearingHouse Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s Secretary of Defense nominee, is in trouble. Why? Because he famously said: “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.. I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator.” On Friday, forty allegedly American Senators blocked Hagel’s nomination with a filibuster. Their message was loud and clear: “We are not United States Senators. We are Israeli Senators.” Alan Hart, former lead BBC Mideast correspondent, expressed his disgust at the Israeli Senators’ vote on my radio show, Truth Jihad Radio, this Friday: “This is treason. Serving a foreign nation, rather than one’s own, is not just wrong - it is treasonous.”.. Read more... Haredim: "Better to serve in the Nazi Army than in the IDF" | Roi Tov A fortnight ago, Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett said in the Knesset: "It's impossible that Haredim won’t serve in the army." This happened as leading rabbis of his Religious-Zionist movement met leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis in an attempt to create a historic alliance between the movements. In a surprising show of mental flexibility and lack of principles, this happened while Bennett's party is likely to become a key partner in Netanyahu's next government and the ultra-Orthodox may stay out. Bennett's comment and his subsequent meeting with Netanyahu were considered by Haredim as a Cain-event; they were betrayed and killed by their brother-in-faith... Read more... The Myth of Iranian Nuclear Coercion, by Paul Pillar | The National Interest Blog One of the most oft-repeated, widely accepted and habitually unquestioned beliefs about the Iranian nuclear issue is that if Iran got a nuclear weapon then Tehran would—merely by possessing such a weapon, even if it never detonated one—throw its weight around in the region in ways that it wouldn't or couldn't do without a nuke. A nuclear-armed Iran, according to the belief, would coerce and influence neighbors in untold ways we are not seeing now from a non-nuclear-armed Iran. This belief is shared by a wide variety of people who disagree on other aspects of Iran and its nuclear program... Read more... Bulgarian Revelations Explode Hezbollah Bombing ‘Hypothesis,’ by Gareth Porter | Antiwar When European Union foreign ministers discuss a proposal to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation, Bulgaria’s Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov will present his government’s case for linking two suspects in the Jul. 18, 2012 bombing of an Israeli tourist bus to Hezbollah. But European ministers who demand hard evidence of Hezbollah involvement are not likely to find it in the Bulgarian report on the investigation, which has produced no more than an “assumption” or “hypothesis” of Hezbollah complicity... Read more... U.S. Hostility Towards the Islamic Republic of Iran Only Courts Strategic Disaster—for America | Going to Tehran ...The Islamic Republic has survived because its basic model—the integration of participatory politics and elections with the principles and institutions of Islamic governance and a commitment to foreign policy independence—is, according to polls, electoral participation rates and a range of other indicators, what a majority of Iranians living inside the country want. They don’t want a political order grounded in Western-style secular liberalism. They want one reflecting their cultural and religious values: as the reformist President Mohammad Khatami put it, ‘freedom, independence and progress within the context of both religiosity and national identity.’.. Read more... Henry Kissinger: “If You Can’t Hear the Drums of War You Must Be Deaf,” by Alfred Heinz | Global Research In a remarkable admission by former Nixon era Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, reveals what is happening at the moment in the world and particularly the Middle East. [ACCURATE SATIRE] Speaking from his luxurious Manhattan apartment, the elder statesman, who will be 89 in May, is all too forward with his analysis of the current situation in the world forum of Geo-politics and economics... Samer near death and more, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance ...here in Palestine, we had regular vigils, demonstrations, and confrontations with the occupiers to de mand the release of Samer and other prisoners of conscience unjustly held by the occupiers. Samer and others were released as part of an exchange of prisoners and tehn Israel rearrested or kidnapped them under the unlawful system of "administrative detention" without charge or trial... [When is the Jewish God going to strike down his people for worshiping false gods? Soon, I expect. Karma, neh?] Read more...Imagine (Ron Paul) | YouTube Obama, the US and the Muslim world: the animosity deepens, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian In his first inaugural address, back in 2009, Barack Obama announced: "To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect." Improving how the US was perceived among the world's 1.6 billion Muslims was not about winning an international popularity contest but was deemed as vital to US national security. Even the Pentagon has long recognized that the primary cause of anti-American Terrorism is the "negative attitude" toward the US: obviously, the reason people in that part of the world want to attack the US - as opposed to Peru or South Africa or China - is because they perceive a reason to do so... Read more... Terrorism: Manufactured Threat - Interview with Trevor Aaronson | YouTube Abby Martin interviews investigative journalist and author, Trevor Aaronson, about the war terror manufactured threat and FBI entrapment of 'terrorists'.. The War Against American Christians: Zionization of Christians, by Elias Akleh | MCW News Zionists did not just occupy Palestine and create the Israeli state; they had also occupied the governments of the most powerful countries, especially the American administration. They control both Democratic and Republican parties and had occupied the Congress with their bought congressmen. They had also occupied the White House and determine who becomes president. Zionists dictate American internal and foreign policies. They control almost every aspect of American life starting from birth control/abortion, education, industry, economy, and even death. They did that through their five thousand years old usury system... Read more... Obama Designed Iran Negotiations To Fail | Moon of Alabama The U.S. is not serious in regards to negotiations with Iran.. For the next negotiation round on February 26 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the U.S. has issued a new demand, the complete shut down of Iran's enrichment plant in its underground facility at Fordow. Of all places relevant to Iran's nuclear program, which is as U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed solely for civilian purpose, Fordow would be the most difficult to destroy during an attack on Iran. Why, if not for preparation of such an attack, would the U.S. demand that that place be shut down?.. Read more... Feb 18, 2013 Putting the Shah of Shahs on the Peacock Throne: The Coup of Coups, by Ron Jacobs | Counterpunch If there is one nation whose political situation has been omnipresent and important to the history of the past seventy-five years, it would be Iran. Much to the dismay of those imperial powers that have tried to subdue and manipulate them, Iran’s people have refused to go along. Islamic revolutionaries or leftist revolutionaries, military men and civilians, it doesn’t matter. The imposition of foreign restrictions and regimes have consistently failed to withstand the desire of the Iranians to be free of foreign domination... On Torture | Adalah “On Torture” is an edited volume of essays by Palestinian, Israeli and international legal and medical experts and practitioners based on presentations that they gave during a workshop held in Jerusalem in April 2011 entitled, “Securing Accountability for Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (CIDT) in Israel: New Trends and Comparative Lessons”.. Palestinian Prisoners: Amazing Grace | The OtherSite Dedicated to the Palestinian Prisoners on Hunger Strike for Freedom and Dignity!.. Parallel World of Finances, by Valentin Katasonov | Strategic Culture Foundation It’s a long time world money lenders see themselves as gods. Like the Creator they have started to create the world of their own out of nothing, making money “coming from air”. So an invisible parallel world has started to take shape along with the financial world that is real and can be seen with your own eyes... [Great wealth translates directly into worldly power. So who’s in charge? Well, we don’t know. All we can do is speculate. Considering what’s been happening, I would bet on the usual suspects.] Former Jewish Underground convict receives more than NIS 1.3 million from state | Haaretz This story is well worth reading if you want to understand how Israel relates to terrorism when it's done by its own Jewish citizens. Menachem Livni, a leader of the Jewish Underground and a resident of Kiryat Arba, probably the most fanatical of the all the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, was jailed for life in 1983 for his part in a shooting and grenade attack on a college in Hebron that killed three Palestinian students and wounded 33 others [J. Cook]... [In Israel such people are traditionally elected Prime Minister. Maybe this guy’s too old.] Following Shateri Assassination, Hezbollah Threatens Israeli Power Station | Roi Tov ...I found about the assassination of General Hassan Shateri in a "breaking news" article that appeared in Israeli newspaper Haaretz on February 13. Following Israeli codes, it cited several foreign sources, mainly an Iranian news agency and an Arabic newspaper published in London. This allows to avoid breaking censorship laws. Yet, at first, it was difficult to believe the details provided by Israel. They went way beyond the details provided by any of the foreign agencies. The Israeli report was so detailed—including maps of the assassination site near Damascus while other sources couldn't decide even if the event took place in Lebanon or Syria—that it left no room for doubt who was behind the event... Best Propaganda Film (OSCAR 2013 SPOILER! LEAKED CLIP!!) | Gilad Atzmon When Ethnic Cleansing Is Next to Godliness, by Rev. William E. Alberts | Counterpunch ...People who believe they possess the one true religion, or see themselves in other biblical ways as “God’s chosen people,” are unable to affirm the inherent worth and rights of those who are different. Such biblically-blessed exceptionalism, rooted in a personal or political need to gain power over people or remain submissive, turns persons deemed less than acceptable into The Other, who become objects of paternalistic and predatory behavior. Here, ethnic cleansing is next to godliness. A final example is the State of Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people... US presidents, war and institutionalizing abuse, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis In the halls of Congress and confines of the Oval Office, the perception is that the US is at war with an enemy called Al-Qaeda. Is this actually the case or is the claim an exaggerated piece of propaganda that has conveniently captured the minds of leaders whose abuse of power has become institutionalized?.. The World Bank and the Palestinians, by Mats Svensson | Counterpunch We used to meet at Borderline Restaurant, myself and three young, well-educated men (always men) from “The Bank.” We were discussing the recent World Bank meeting in Al Ram. President Arafat had just died in Paris. The meeting in Al Ram, therefore, had an unusually high attendance. More than 100 diplomats had gathered in the cramped room. The circumstances surrounding Arafat’s death remained a bit strange with many question marks. Had he died of natural causes or had he been murdered? The political scene had changed with his passing. Everything was suddenly different... Racist tales and a discussion | Paul Eisen ...back to David Duke. I can well understand how a young man could join an organisation that in his later years he may not wish to join. (Here I must make it clear that I am NOT saying that the modern KKK is an organisation that no-one should join and If Dr Duke did want to join it, but didn't perhaps for strategic reasons, I'd be intrigued to know why and I'd admire his constancy) and anyway, how many Jews and others, once enthusiastic Zionist ethnic-cleansers now grace the platforms of solidarity meetings? And how many now very acceptable leftists are strongly allied to organisations and ideologies that have probably caused more death and misery than any others?.. [People who, like myself, cringe (or used to) at the name of DD, should actually look at what he’s been writing or videotaping for the last half-dozen years or so. He gets it.] Drone Trust the Government, by Sheldon Richman | The Future of Freedom Foundation ...If Jefferson had this reaction to restrictions on criticism of the government, we can surmise that he would have been appalled by a government whose chief executive has the unchecked unilateral power to kill people — including American citizens — away from the traditional battlefield and without due process, on the basis of suspicions and allegations that they are “involved in planning terrorist attacks against the United States.” Jefferson and others of his generation understood that government was simply not something to be trusted. Rather, it was a permanent object of suspicion, because it was uniquely positioned to steal our freedoms... The BBC Spins the Truth on Iran's New Centrifuges | Wide Asleep in America The BBC published an impressive piece of scaremongering disinformation on February 13. In an article entitled, “Iran upgrades uranium enrichment despite US warning,” the news outlet reports that new, upgraded uranium enrichment centrifuges are now being installed at Iran’s primary enrichment facility in Natanz... [Apparently the BBC has decided to model itself after Fox News. Smart move, guys.] What do Obama and Abbas have in common? by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis Short answer – both are grovelers (definition in a moment). The president of the United States of America grovels to the Zionist lobby and its neo-con and Christian fundamentalist allies. The Palestinian “president” grovels to Obama as well as Israel’s leaders more often than not. Barack Obama and Mahmoud Abbas are, one could say, grovelling twins, but if there was the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for grovelling, it would have to be awarded to Obama. (If when he leaves office Israel is still able to impose its will on the occupied and oppressed Palestinians, I think he should hand back the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded.).. Two Years of Bahraini State Terrorism | Stephen Lendman February 14 marked the second anniversary of Bahrain's uprising. Earlier protests erupted sporadically. In mid-February 2011, major ones did nonviolently. They continue virtually daily. At issue is King Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa's tyranny. Bahrainis want democratic change, sectarian Shia discrimination ended, equitable distribution of state wealth, political prisoners released, and state terrorism stopped. They want fundamental freedoms. They want popularly elected leaders replacing Al-Khalifa rule. It's despotic, ruthless and intolerable. State terrorism is policy... Feb 17, 2013 Letter from Palestinian Prisoner Samer al-Issawi: There is no going back because I’m the owner of Right | Free Haifa The following letter was published today on Shirin Issawi’s Page in Facebook. Letter from prisoner Samer al-Issawi as it came from the Ministry of prisoners: I turn with admiration to the masses of our heroic Palestinian people, to our Palestinian leadership, to all forces, parties and national institutions. I salute them for standing by our fight to defend our right to freedom and dignity. I draw my strength from my people, from all the free people in the world, from friends and the families of the prisoners who continue day and night chanting for freedom and an end to the occupation... [Among other things, Samer al-Issawi is an example of remarkable human endurance – he has been on a hunger strike for more than 200 days, far longer than any other person recorded in history. The traditional prognosis is that no one can survive past 49 days.] Obama’s Failed State, by Stephen Lendman | Global Research Obama’s State of the Union address didn’t surprise. It reflected rogue leadership. It was beginning-to-end demagogic boilerplate. Defending the indefensible took center stage. Rhetoric substituted for progressive policies. Bombast assured business as usual. Priorities include waging war on humanity, force-fed austerity, ignoring public needs, institutionalizing a repressive police state apparatus, and cracking down hard on non-believers. Doing so assures growing despotism, lawlessness, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and deprivation... How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast, by Robert Parry | Consortium News Newly available documents reveal how Ronald Reagan’s neocon aides cleared the way for Israeli arm sales to Iran in 1981, shortly after Iran freed 52 U.S. hostages whose captivity doomed Jimmy Carter’s reelection. The move also planted the seeds of the Iran-Contra scandal... [The neocons are the new Nazis, but this time they’re Jewish – fromYin to Yang] Does Obama Want Regime Change in Iran? | YouTube American University lecturer Hillary Mann Leverett says that Obama wants "soft regime change" and "tremendous concessions" from Iran. She explains how many Democrats thought the 2009 Iranian election would make these goals easier to achieve... Prospects for U.S.-Iranian Engagement | Going to Tehran ...The first of these provocative themes is that the United States is a declining power in the Middle East. The second theme is that the biggest beneficiary of America's ongoing decline in the Middle East is the Islamic Republic of Iran. If you're not sure you agree with those assessments, I want to ask you to compare the relative positions of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, where they are today with where they were just over 10 years ago on the eve of 9/11... Ban Ki Moon Is A Bad Diplomat | Moon of Alabama ...“We should not give much more time to the Iranians, and we should not waste time,” Ban said.. Ban Ki Moon will know the repeatedly confirmed united opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon program. How can he then, as the head of the organization which is tasked keep the world at peace, talk such a nonsense? The U.N. Security Council must “show a firm, decisive and effective, quick response,” Ban said, that makes plain to Iran that the rest of the world is not convinced that it is not seeking nuclear weapons.What is that? A call for war against Iran for weapons of mass destruction that do not exist? Has Ban Ki Moon additional brain defects?.. USC projects Holocaust survivors as holograms | Jerusalem Post The hagiography of the saints of the world’s newest and most popular religion continues apace. A touch of spiritualism is the latest tool in the mass conversion taking place within the Western world. By now it should be clear that the priesthood of the Holycause has replaced the traditional Old Testament God with the Jewish martyrs of the holocaust. They have been inordinately successful, at least in the West, and the money keeps rolling in while expressions of devotion pop up in the oddest ways [Ed.]... One Justice | Roi Tov ..Bassem al-Tamimi is a school teacher living in the Palestinian village of Nabi Salih, in the West Bank, next to the settlement+ of Halamish. Not only his name is ambiguous, he could pass as local in either Palestinian and Jewish towns. Emphasizing the confusion created by his name, he has published in the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz. Finally, in his latest interview—given today, Feb 16, 2013, to Haaretz—he spoke in favor of the "One State" solution, the formal goal of Naftali Bennet's extremist party The Jewish Home. At first sight, he is more Jewish than the settlers living next to his house. Then, one remembers that he was detained over ten times in what is known as "administrative detention,".. Hollywood and the Past, by Gilad Atzmon | Counterpunch History is commonly regarded as an attempt to produce a structured account of the past. It proclaims to tell us what really happened, but in most cases it fails to do that. Instead it is set to conceal our shame, to hide those various elements, events, incidents and occurrences in our past which we cannot cope with. History, therefore, can be regarded as a system of concealment. Accordingly, the role of the true historian is similar to that of the psychoanalyst: both aim to unveil the repressed. For the psychoanalyst, it is the unconscious mind. For the historian, it is our collective shame... [This is why the Historical Revisionists are hounded as heretics and prosecuted for subverting “the morals of the youth.” They have ingested a lot of hemlock so far, but that won't stop them.] Scum | Paul Eisen It's about Ernst Zundel and Ingrid Rimland and their struggle, and also a little about the German people and their struggle. It was just one section of my essay "The Holocaust Wars" which, except for amongst a small band of stalwarts, was just howled down. The essay was a long time coming, but the trigger was a statement made by Joel Finkel of Jews-for-something-or-other... Will Washington Grasp the Hand Being Offered by the Iranian People? by Franklin Lamb | Eurasia Review Truth told, this American observer has attended his share of international conferences and has traveled in more than 70 countries. But never has he visited such a complex country, evolving culture, and striving energized society, populated by idealistic people of great warmth, sense of humor and caring for those in need as he experiences in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Except when traveling in his own country... Sibel Edmonds on Turkey, the Hood Event, Israel and Gladio B | The Corbett Report Sibel Edmonds.. joins us for the third part of our series on Gladio B, the NATO-directed effort to radicalize, enable and protect Islamic terrorists to further their own geopolitical ends. In this edition we discuss the Hood Event, the Gladio A / B transition, Israel’s role in funding both sides of the regional conflict, and how the Kurds have been used and abused by every would-be regional power in the area. Sibel also takes questions on Ayman al-Zawahiri and begins to discuss Huseyin Baybasin (aka “Europe’s Pablo Escobar”) and the NATO-protected heroin operations in Europe... US global democratization campaign | Press TV/YouTube A look at how the US has purchased favorable Pro-US "democracies", plutocracies, kleptocracies around the world through USAID, National Endowment for Democracy and NGOs such as George Soros' Open Society Institute. Following the money that has gone out of the pockets of American tax payers into the four corners of the world to buy "pro-US" politicians or support pro-US opposition groups. US corporations not just buying elections and politicians in the US but also buying power and influence all over the world... The Zuabis, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom The sole contribution of Ya’ir Lapid to Israeli folklore so far is his saying that he would not join a move to block Binyamin Netanyahu, since this would mean joining forces with “the Zuabis”. This needs explanation to a foreign audience. The Zuabi family is a large Hamula (extended Arab family) located in Nazareth and the vicinity. Several members of this family served in the Knesset in the early days of Israel, all as members of Zionist parties or Arab factions attached to Zionist parties. The present member of the Knesset bearing that distinguished name is Ms. Hanin Zuabi, the 44 year-old representative of the Arab nationalist Balad party... Iran’s Leader says U.S. will receive a proper response if it acts logically | Tehran Times ...He.. stated that the West is trying to give the impression that Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, noting, “The Islamic Republic of Iran does not intend to produce nuclear weapons, and this decision is not due to the United States’ displeasure, but it is based on a belief that regards (the possession and use of) nuclear weapons as a crime against humanity. And while emphasizing that they should not be produced, it (Iran) seeks the abolition of nuclear weapons in the world.” Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa (religious edict) declaring that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are all haram (prohibited in Islam)... [The US acts from the logic of empire – not quite what he’s talking about] Feb 16, 2013 Towards a Christian Zionist Foreign Policy, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar ...This focus on Israel coming from possibly as many as 60 million evangelicals is seen most powerfully in the Republican Party, which caters to their views.. It is concentrated in a number of southern and border states, the Bible belt, which has meant that few congressmen from those states feel it to be in their interests to question what Israel does.. Some congressmen, including former Speaker of the House Dick Armey of Texas, embrace the full Armageddonist agenda, leading one to wonder why anyone would vote for a politician who fervently desires to bring about the end of the world... [Only in America, the one and only stuporpower] Birthright now offering skateboarding, hip hop-themed trips to Israel, by Mairav Zonszein | +972 Magazine As if it wasn’t enough to offer Jews around the world a trip to Israel totally free of charge, the Birthright industry is now marketing “the only skateboarding trip to Israel” and a “hip hop” trip. This is in addition to the already popular “niche” tours that include those catering to the LGBT community, food enthusiasts and wheelchair-bound Jews... [Everything’s up to date in Kansas City..] Read more...Framing Hezbollah for the Bulgaria bombing? by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera English ...given Israel's stellar track record when it comes to extraterritorial assassination and civilian slaughter, the effort to incriminate Hezbollah in murderous activity against Israeli citizens abroad appears to be little more than an example of politically-motivated projection... Risky equilibrium in Iran nuclear crisis, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online ...The longer the Iran nuclear crisis lasts, the more dangerous it becomes. This this raises important policy questions, primarily for Washington, which is in the driver's seat for the "5+1" talks. Assuming that President Barack Obama, who is planning a much-anticipated trip to Israel in the near future, opts to vigorously enforce the new unilateral sanctions, this will be interpreted as yet more evidence of hostile US intent and is nearly tantamount to imposing a trade blockade... Zionism: the real enemy of the Jews? I don't think so | Paul Eisen ...By their own reckoning, Jews are “a nation that dwells alone” it is “us and them” and, in many cases, “us or them”. And these tendencies are translated into the modern state of Israel. This is a state that knows no boundaries. It is a state that both believes, and uses as justification for its own aggression, the notion that its very survival is always at stake, so anything is justified to ensure that survival. Israel is a state that manifestly believes that the rules of both law and humanity, applicable to all other states, do not apply to it... Why Syria’s Islamists Are Gaining Support, by J. Malcolm Garcia | NYT A young fighter for the Free Syrian Army sat at a checkpoint on a couch taken from an abandoned house. He cradled his Kalashnikov and waited on the empty street for a car to inspect, or a pedestrian to pat down. If only the future of Syria would reveal itself to him as easily. The rebels in the Free Syrian Army don’t doubt that they will drive President Bashar al-Assad from power — eventually — but they have no idea what will happen afterward... Gangnam Gaza Style | Gilad Atzmon Harper Government Sides with US and Israel Against Lebanon: The Conservatives’ Latest Salvo Against Hezbollah, by Yves Engler | Counterpunch In response to hotly contested claims that Hezbollah was responsible for bombing Israeli citizens in Bulgaria last July, immigration minister Jason Kenney called the Lebanese group a “vile anti-Semitic terrorist organization” and urged the European Union to “follow Canada’s lead in listing Hezbollah as a proscribed and illegal terrorist organization.” Kenney’s comment last week is part of a concerted campaign against a group the Los Angeles Times has called “Lebanon’s largest political party and most potent armed force.”.. Italy Rejects the Supremacy of the U.S. National-Security State, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation An appeals court in Italy has just sentenced two former Italian officials, Nicolo Pollari and Marco Mancini, to 10 years and 9 years in jail. Pollari served as head of Italian military intelligence and Mancini was head of counterintelligence. Their crime? They conspired with the CIA to kidnap a man named Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr off the streets of Milan and rendition him to Egypt to be tortured. What’s wrong with that? you ask. Well, nothing in the minds of U.S. officials... The “Pro-Israel” Racket, by MJ Rosenberg | Tikkun Daily Blog I have to thank the National Jewish Democratic Council for enabling me to see the humor in the Israel lobby’s scorched earth campaign against the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense .Yes, I know that the lobby has officially declared itself neutral in the Hagel fight but (1), it is the source of all the propaganda being used against Hagel and (2), if it did not want this unprecedented attack against him to continue, it could just order its Senate cutouts to cease-and-desist just as it dictates the positions they take on any and all matters relating to the Middle East... Arch-Zionist gets top BBC strategy job, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis The incoming director-general of the BBC, Tony Hall, has put a notorious Zionist apologist, James Purnell, in charge of strategy at the corporation.. anyone who cares about fair and objective reporting of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should be gravely concerned, for Mr Purnell has a rock-solid record as a stooge for Israel... Armenian Folk Music: Silva Hakobyan | YouTube ...In 301, Arsacid Armenia was the first sovereign nation to accept Christianity as a state religion. The Armenians later fell under Byzantine, Persian, and Islamic hegemony, but reinstated their independence with the Bagratuni Dynasty kingdom of Armenia. After the fall of the kingdom in 1045, and the subsequent Seljuk conquest of Armenia in 1064, the Armenians established a kingdom in Cilicia, where they prolonged their sovereignty to 1375. Greater Armenia was later divided between the Ottoman Empire and Russia... Feb 15, 2013 From the people who brought you the destruction of Dresden... | Paul Eisen For all its notoriety the attack on Dresden [Valentine’s Day 1945] was nothing like as severe as those on, for example, Berlin, Cologne, Essen and Hamburg. But the German town whose fate moves me most is the old northern town of Duren... [Since then the Empire has bombed upwards of 40 different countries – just can’t get enough of it] The revenger’s tragedy, by Leo McKinstry | New Statesman The British government has long denied that wartime air raids on German cities were intended to kill.. The scene was apocalyptic in its scale of devastation. As the RAF bombers released their cargo of incendiaries on the night of 27 July 1943, the northern German port of Hamburg was engulfed in one of the worst firestorms in history. The flaming mass of bombs sent warm air soaring thousands of feet into the sky, creating a vacuum at ground level that was filled by winds gusting at 150mph. These tornadoes not only fanned the conflagration, but also scythed through almost everything in their path... The Story Behind The Label, by Frank Scott | Legalienate The president gave his annual state-of-the-union reading of a speech that could have been written by the Hallmark Cards Political Greetings Division, touching on all the most important aspects of our national condition: We are the greatest nation in the history of the world and we have some problems but we’re working on them and not to worry, we’ll continue to be the greatest nation in the history of the world. That established, the usual chorus of near orgasmic praise from his acolytes was accompanied by carefully worded criticism from neo-liberal progressives who took pains to point out how his sleight of mouth magic this time was much more populist than last time... The Peace Process (Official Video) | YouTube Israel’s rightward shift leaves Palestinian citizens out in the cold, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth Shortly before polling day in Israel’s January general election, the Arab League issued a statement urging Israel’s large Palestinian minority, a fifth of the country’s population, to turn out en masse to vote. The League’s unprecedented intervention — reportedly at the instigation of the League’s Palestinian delegation — was motivated by two concerns. The first was the appearance of polls indicating that, for the first time in an Israeli general election, more than half of the country’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens might fail to vote... [Perhaps most Israeli Palestinians have finally realized that their participation serves only to prop up the Jewish State by providing a ‘democratic’ fig leaf.] Diplomacy, Not More Weapons, for Syria | Going to Tehran Hillary went on Al Jazeera’s Inside Syria to argue, yet again, for diplomacy—which necessarily must include the Islamic Republic of Iran as well as the Assad government—to address the ongoing crisis in Syria. Regarding recent statements by the Syrian National Coalition’s Moaz al-Khatib indicating the possible openness of at least some elements in the Syrian opposition to dialogue with the Syrian government... Pentagon creates new medal for cyber, drone wars | Boston.com They fight the war from computer consoles and video screens. But the troops who launch the drone strikes and direct the cyberattacks that can kill or disable an enemy may never set foot in the combat zone. Now their battlefield contributions may be recognized with the first new combat-related medal to be created in decades... [No doubt the medal will be shaped like a joystick, with the foreskin removed of course] Opposition to War with Iran: Lessons of the Last Decade, by Muhammad Sahimi | IME News Hardly any day goes by in which the mass media does not speculate on the possibility of military attacks on Iran. The main stream media consistently blows way out of proportion the “threat” that the Islamic Republic supposedly poses to Israel and the West, and ignores the decade-long covert war waged by Israel on Iran. The neoconservative and pro-Israel media do the same, but in a much more one-sided way. They have been using all sorts of “rationale” to justify the military attacks, ranging from likening Iran to the Nazi Germany of 1938, to claiming that if the military attacks do happen, then, unlike what most military experts believe, Iran will not be able to mount a credible counter-attack... How to Start a Battalion (in Five Easy Lessons): In Syria, by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | LRB ...This camp, right on the Turkish border, was for foreign jihadis – the only people, as Abu Abdullah complained, who were getting money and equipment these days. Hakim al-Mutairi, a Kuwaiti Salafi preacher, was sending them millions of dollars. ‘I confronted him at a meeting a few weeks ago,’ Abu Abdullah said. ‘I told him you are hijacking our revolution. The jihadis are buying weapons and ammunition from the other units. They have no problem with money.’.. Zygier's Cell and Israel's Assassination of... | Roi Tov ...There are two ways to die by hanging. The first is by fracture of the neck; this is impossible to achieve in such a small cell. One must be high enough to allow the creation of enough kinetic energy to break the spine. The second is suffocation. Thanks to Israel, I can provide a first-hand description of that; it takes more than fifty seconds. In other words, Israel's claim of suicide in prison cannot be accepted (and not for the first time). In other words, the main witness connecting Israel with the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was assassinated in Israel's highest-security prison, while monitored by security cameras... Paranoia News: Why Iran Already Has the Bomb | Tablet Magazine If North Korea has the bomb, as this week’s nuclear test indicated, then for all practical purposes, so does Iran... [These lunatics are still worshipping the Dog of Wrath and Fear] The climatic impacts and humanitarian problems from the use of the UK's nuclear weapons | Media Lens Message Board Posted by The Editors in reply to "Scrap Trident Campaign Launched Across Scotland ": Dr Philip Webber presents evidence that the detonation of the nuclear warheads carried on just one UK Trident submarine would lead to vast quantities of smoke being generated that would led to a sharp climate cooling, causing a global crop failure which would threaten the lives of some 1 billion people. This would be in addition to the deaths of over 10 million people killed directly by blast, fire and fallout from the nuclear explosions... [Just a reminder that the leaders of the free world, most of whom appear to be criminally insane, still have a vast array of nuclear weapons at their disposal] The International Criminal Court and Palestine (Part I) | Jurist The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is reportedly considering how the new status of Palestine at the UN impacts the ICC. The UN General Assembly recently granted non-member observer state status to Palestine. The most immediate issue is whether the General Assembly resolution will change the OTP's previous decision refusing to go forward with a preliminary examination of international crimes in Palestine. Although Palestine filed a declaration accepting ICC jurisdiction, the OTP decided that Palestine's status as a "state" was too uncertain for the declaration to be effective. The General Assembly vote might change that determination... I Will Not Fight For Queen and Country | Veterans for Peace in the UK On 7th February 2013 The Oxford Union held the debate “This House Would Not Fight for Queen and Country”. it was the 80th anniversary of the original debate in 1933 in which The Oxford Union voted in favor of the motion.. The motion was defeated as it has been on every occasion that it has been held since 1937. Below a transcript of the speech given by Ben Griffin of Veterans for Peace... Urgent UN Press Statement: Release Palestinian Hunger Strikers Now | MCW News The following press statement was issued 13 February 2013 under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council in my capacity as Special Rapporteur for Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967. This nonviolent resistance to unlawful and abusive detention practices by Israel is a human rights outrage that should be the occasion of media attention and a worldwide outcry. I encourage all who can to exert pressure on Israel before these individuals die in captivity. They are currently reported to be in grave condition... French Holocaust Rescuers' Snub of Shoah Commemoration is “A Triumph for the Worldwide Campaign to Demonize Israel” | Simon Wiesenthal Center The Simon Wiesenthal Center today expressed outrage at CIMADE, a French Protestant group that helped Jewish refugees escape the Nazis during WWII, who refused an invitation to a Holocaust commemoration in Marseilles because they deemed the commemoration’s sponsor, CRIF - the prominent Jewish organization-to be too supportive of Israel. “This is a triumph for the worldwide campaign to demonize Israel,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, adding, “The situation in Europe has deteriorated so profoundly that far too many Europeans have swallowed whole the big lie that Israel is an evil colonialist occupier.”.. [Oy weh iss mir! Why do they hate us?] Feb 14, 2013 Happy Valentines Day from the city of Dresden - again! | Paul Eisen February 14th is Valentine's Day when we all remember the ones we love. It's also in the middle of three days when, in 1945 the German city of Dresden was bombed by the Anglo-Americans. On a visit to Germany with my friend Dr. Francis Clark-Lowes I visited the city. We trod the tourist route so my guess is that we saw what Dresden wanted us to see. But it was only in the Altmarkt that we saw any public memorial to the bombing. It was a partially obscured metal plate on the ground which marked the spot where, to cope with disposing of the bodies, the citizens of Dresden had set up a huge funeral pyre... Crimes Against Humanity and the Apocalypse at Dresden, by R. H. S. Crossman | Christus Rex ...How was this horror permitted to happen? Was it a deliberate and considered act of policy, or was it the result of one of those ghastly misunderstandings or miscalculations that sometimes occur in the heat of battle? There are many who will say that these are academic questions belonging to history. I do not agree. Of course, what happened at Dresden belongs to the prenuclear epoch. But it has a terrible relevance to the defense strategy which the Western democracies are operating today. If the crime of Dresden is not to be repeated on a vaster scale, we must find out why it was committed... The National-Security State and the Dark Side, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation It seems to me that the most ardent proponents of such things as assassination, indefinite detention, torture, and assassination would concede that all these things reflect a dark side to which our nation has been led since 9/11. They would tell us, however, that such things are just necessary to protect our nation in the “war on terrorism” and to defend “our rights and freedoms” from those who would take them away. Unfortunately, all too many Americans have bought into this notion... Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq, by Paul Bignell | The Independent Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show. The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction... Drone Wars: Tactics in Search of a Strategy, by James A. Russell | Lobe Log The confirmation hearings of John Brennan for director of the Central Intelligence Agency serve as the latest searing reminder of the intellectual rigor mortis gripping the national security establishment and how brain dead we have become as a country in addressing strategy and strategic issues.The sole focus of these hearings has been the country’s ongoing love affair with targeted assassinations carried out by drones against our Islamic extremist adversaries... Traitors in US Congress setting the pace again, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis ...Is it really fair to label those members of Congress who do the Zionist lobby’s bidding as traitors? The answer depends on whether it is or is not in America’s own best interests to go on supporting unconditionally an Israel that defies international law and UN Security Council resolutions, steals more and more Arab land and water as it continues its colonization and ethnic cleansing by stealth of the occupied West Bank, and has no interest in peace on terms the Palestinians could accept. (It is also an Israel that has attacked and killed Americans)... [My favorite description is ‘cowards, hypocrites, whores and traitors,’ and it goes for almost all of them Congress critters.] Going Against The Grain | P U L S E Gideon Levy is someone who evokes strong emotions from fellow Israelis. The writer and journalist has made weekly visits, over the past three decades, to the occupied Palestinian territories, describing what he sees – plainly and without propaganda. For some Israelis, he is seen as a brave disseminator of the truth. But many others condemn him as a propagandist for Hamas. And his columns for the Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper have made him, arguably, one of the most hated men in Israel... [The price of being both an honest journalist and a decent human being in the ZioNazi state of Israel. My hat’s off to Gideon Levy.] A Note to AP and Amnesty International: Are They Just Waiting for Samer Issawi to Die? by Alison Weir | Counterpunch Samer Issawi has lived for 33 years, 1 month, and 27 days. I hope he lives another day. He has been on a hunger strike now for six and a half months. Gandhi’s longest hunger strike was 21 days. The IRA’s Bobby Sands and nine other Irish hunger strikers died in 1981 after strikes lasting from 46 to 73 days... [One of Israel’s great successes has been to thoroughly dehumanize the Palestinians, at least in the eyes of the West] Daniel Ellsberg: ‘Obama Has Conducted Clear Cut Impeachable Crimes’ | Absurdity Today/YouTube Legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said in an interview with Juliana Forlano that President Obama “has conducted clear cut impeachable crimes.” Ellsberg is currently involved in a legal case against President Obama (Hedges v. Obama) regarding the provisions in the NDAA that grant the power to detain individuals, including US citizens, indefinitely without due process... Why the War on Terror Endures: Spawning Terror Over There, by Steve Breyman | Antiwar Believe the War on Terror has been an unmitigated disaster? Find it difficult to wrap your head around the Long War’s long list of horrors? Think the Obama administration and Congress’s willingness to wage the War indefinitely is murderous myopia? Think again: the War on Terror is good at any number of things... A Conspiracy of Stupidity, by Tom Engelhardt | Antiwar You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American ones. Like dumb. Stupid. Dimwitted. Thick-headed. Or you could speak about the second administration in a row that wanted to leave no child behind, but was itself incapable of learning, or reasonably assessing its situation in the world. Or you could simply wonder what’s in Washington’s water supply... What does a police state look like? by David Sirota | Salon What does a police state really look like in practice in America? Is it the cartoonish dystopia of sci-fi books? Is it like 1998′s “The Siege,” which predicted a wholesale instatement of martial law? Or in the age of the drone-wielding police department, is it something more mundane and subtle yet nonetheless pernicious? From this city in the middle of Middle America, it looks like the latter... The illusory state of the Empire, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online Barack Obama would never be so crass as to use a State of the Union address to announce an "axis of evil". No. Double O Bama, equipped with his exclusive license to kill (list), is way slicker. As much as he self-confidently pitched a blueprint for a "smart" - not bigger - US government, he kept his foreign policy cards very close to his chest. Few eyebrows were raised on the promise that "by the end of next year our war in Afghanistan will be over"; it won't be, of course, because Washington will fight to the finish to keep sizeable counterinsurgency boots on the ground - ostensibly to fight, in Obama's words, those evil "remnants of al-Qaeda".. Impeach Obama: A National Imperative | Stephen Lendman Do it now before it's too late! America's Declaration of Independence states: "(W)hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, (it's the right of the people, it's) their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Straightaway as president, Obama violated his sacred trust. He betrayed his constituents. He's a serial liar. He broke every major promise made. He serves illegitimately. He institutionalized tyranny. He's a war criminal multiple times over. He's guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors... [Impeach him? Well, that’s not how the Matrix works] Knesset Recognizes Existence of Australian Prisoner X | Roi Tov ...What distinguishes Ramleh from other Zionist outposts is the presence of five prisons within its borders; an additional military prison is nearby. This includes the Ayalon Prison (better known as "Ramleh Prison"), where Israel's infamous X-Wing is located. This makes Ramleh a microcosm of that large prison known as State of Israel, and thus the zenith of the Zionist enterprise... The War Against American Christians, by Dr. Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine The American Christians have been for a long time the target of a covert religious war whose battle fields include their homes, their public schools, their churches, and their Sunday schools. They are subjected to massive well-planned scientifically-based brainwashing programs, whose goals are to distort and to weaken their Christian beliefs, and to divide them into smaller differentiated groups that can be easily manipulated, controlled and enslaved to blindly and loyally serve genocidal colonial agendas of Zionism and Israel under the fallacy of serving God’s chosen people... Wresting Islam from Islamists, by Hamid Dabashi | Al Jazeera ...After decades of ideological built up and political opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood is now the ruling regime in Egypt. Though Mohammad Morsi was democratically elected as the Egyptian president, and although the current constitution was democratically ratified by the majority of Egyptians, still Egyptians at large are not entirely happy with the prospect of the ideologically outdated and politically heavy-handed Muslim Brotherhood ruling over their homeland. It is precisely this paradox that spells out the moment of an epistemic breakthrough... Feb 13, 2013 Organizations Call for Obama to Allow Medicine and Humanitarian Trade with Iran | National Iranian American Council Twenty-five organizations called on President Obama yesterday to ensure that existing U.S. sanctions on Iran do not block access for medicine, food, and basic humanitarian goods for Iranian civilians. In a letter led by the Friends Committee on National Legislation and signed by NIAC and other anti-war, human rights, and humanitarian organizations, the groups urged the President to exempt humanitarian transactions from sanctions against Iran’s banking sector. While Obama Administration officials have reiterated that sanctions on Iran do not specifically “target” medicine or food, the broad measures aimed at Iran’s economy... Only by fear of international sanctions, by Yitzhak Laor | Haaretz The time has come to encourage the international community to fight Israeli intransigence and pressure Israel to give up on the occupied territories and its residents, who lack a voice from the perspective of our democracy.. It's doubtful if there was such foolishness in global politics since World War II as the settlement enterprise. The fact that the Israeli political leadership has engaged in it since 1967 makes the pill all the more bitter... The only 'democracy' in the Middle East, by Adam Keller | MCW News It happens every night, summer and winter, on weekdays and Saturdays and also during the Jewish holidays. A quiet street in a town or village or refugee camp somewhere on the West Bank. Suddenly, the calm of the late night hour is disturbed by the arrival of a large force of Israeli soldiers. They surround a house which was marked out in advance. Agents of the Shabak Security Service go in and after a few minutes they come out with the tenant handcuffed and blindfolded. They enter an armored car and drive away quickly... Saddam and the US failed, so why should Maliki think he can control Iraq by force? by Patrick Cockburn | The Independent The civil war in Syria is destabilising Iraq as it changes the balance of power between the country's communities. The Sunni minority in Iraq, which two years ago appeared defeated, has long been embittered and angry at discrimination against it by a hostile state. Today, it is emboldened by the uprising of the Syrian Sunni, as well as a growing sense that the political tide in the Middle East is turning against the Shia and in favour of the Sunni... Innocent Lives: Are Pakistanis People? by Charles Pierson | Counterpunch ...There’s an exchange in Huckleberry Finn where Huck tells a woman a fabricated story about a boiler explosion on a riverboat. “Was anyone hurt?” the lady asks. “No, ma’am,” Huck says: “Killed a nigger.” “Well, I’m glad no one was hurt,” the lady says. Twain’s point was that to White Southerners Blacks did not count as people. The death of a Black isn’t the death of anyone: it doesn’t even register. The same psychopathology was at work in the Nazis’ extermination of Jewish untermenschen—subhumans. It was at work at My Lai. And I am afraid that it is at work every time a drone hits... Israel cheats all the way to the Moon | Roi Tov On February 11, 2013, SpaceIl finally exposed its plan to land an Israeli vehicle on the moon. This came after the Israeli enterprise announced on January 2011 that it joins Google's Lunar X Prize, an X Prize Foundation space competition sponsored by Google. Announced on September 2007, it calls for privately-funded spaceflight teams to compete in launching, landing, and traveling more than 500 meters across the surface of the Moon with a robot, while sending back to Earth images. It offers a total of US$30 million in prizes... Proposed al-Awda withdrawal of endorsement from BDS, by Paul Larudee | deLiberation It is with great sadness that I must propose withdrawal of al-Awda endorsement from the BDS Campaign led by the BNC until the change in its mission statement has been corrected and until a public explanation is provided for the reasons for the change as well as the procedure by which the change was implemented. A more transparent public explanation of BNC finances is also recommended... Israel’s southern man and his cosmopolitan ghetto, by Neve Gordon | Redress Information & Analysis Former anchorman and middle-class darling Yair Lapid stunned the Israeli political scene in the recent elections. His party, Yesh Atid (There is a Future), won 19 seats, second in size only to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Likud-Beiteinu alliance, thus ensuring that Lapid will play a pivotal role in the next government. Who is Lapid and what does he stand for?.. Our Great Historical Dilemma, by Archie Kennedy | MCW News The lengths the great media circus will go to to make sure we are not alarmed has long crossed the line beyond irresponsibility to criminal collusion. Perhaps collusion isn't the best term since it implies a separate entity is colluding with a criminal entity. In this case, they are one and the same. Approximately 90% of media we typically use is owned by six very large corporations. It is in their interests that we are pacified and docile... [One wonders if Mr. Kennedy deliberately omitted the fact that those six corporations are owned and/or controlled by Zionists. This is not a coincidence. I’ve been contemplating for a while making the obvious connection between ruthless capitalism and Jewish culture. Maybe it’s about time.] Arrested Development, by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News In this report , B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, examines the ramifications of the Wall and the so-called security fence on nearby Palestinian communities. Its construction started in 2002. On July 9th, 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion that Israel’s building of this monstrous Wall was illegal and should be stopped immediately. For the damage done, Israel should pay reparations... Palestinians’ Life in the Shadow of the Barrier Wall, by Hasan Afif El-Hasan | Palestine Chronicle Since 1967 Israeli-Arab war, the Palestinians in the occupied lands have to contend in their daily lives with Jewish-only settlements, settler-only highways, check points and roadblocks, earth mounds and trenches, land confiscation, house demolition, raids, detention, extrajudicial assassinations, and daily attacks on besieged Gaza. And in 2002, Israel started building the barrier wall in and around the West Bank delineating unilaterally a de facto Israeli border... Read more... The Omnipotent Power to Assassinate Any of Us, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation Suppose an American citizen who is openly critical of governmental policy decides to take a trip overseas, say to Yemen. Suppose that President Obama orders the military and the CIA to assassinate him while he is traveling within Yemen. Suppose the order is carried out and that that American is, in fact, assassinated. Most Americans would consider such an assassination to be a grave wrong. They might not like the criticism that the American was leveling against the federal government, but they would ardently oppose the idea of assassinating the man based simply on the fact that he was criticizing the government... America’s Expanding Kill List, by Paul Craig Roberts | Counterpunch ...The Obama regime expanded the scope of the list to include the execution, without due process of law, of US citizens accused, without evidence presented in court, of association with terrorism. The list quickly expanded to include the American teen-age son of a cleric accused of preaching jihad against the West. The son’s “association” with terrorism apparently was his blood relationship to his father. As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote, the power of government to imprison and to murder its citizens without due process of law is the certain mark of dictatorship... DOJ kill list memo forces many Dems out of the closet as overtly unprincipled hacks, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian Last week's controversy over Obama's assassination program forced into light many ignored truths that were long obvious.. Last week's controversy over Obama's assassination program forced into light many ignored truths that were long obvious... Drones and Our National Religion, by David Swanson | War Is A Crime The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism. Its god is the flag. Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance. The flag's powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions. Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation. Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith. A "Dream Act" that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship. Its high priest is the Commander in Chief... Israel Approves Another West Bank Settlement Expansion, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar ...Though smaller than several other announced expansions in the past couple of months, the fact that they continue to announce expansions at all this close to the Obama visit is sure to create controversy, and will make President Obama’s intention to avoid the Palestinian issue all the more conspicuous, and difficult to maintain... The dangerous rebranding of John Brennan, by Mark LeVine | Al Jazeera The timing couldn't have been coincidental. Just as a previously secret memo to Congress from the US Department of Justice's Office of Legal Council was released by NBC News and picked up by every major media outlet, the process of rebranding President Obama's pick to head the CIA, John Brennan, from enabler of torture and mastermind of the drone assassination, to a crusader for peace and civil rights began in earnest... Iraq at the Brink: A Decade after the Invasion, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle ...It was Britain that triggered Iraq’s modern tragedy, starting with its seizure of Baghdad in 1917 and the haphazard reshaping of a country to perfectly fit the colonial needs and economic interests of London. One could argue that the early and unequalled mess created by the British invaders continued to wreak havoc, manifesting itself in various ways – spanning sectarianism, political violence and border feuds between Iraq and its neighbors – until this very day. But of course, the US now deserves most of the credit of reversing whatever has been achieved by the Iraqi people to acquire their ever-elusive sovereignty... Read more... Feb 12, 2013 Argentine president hints Jewish community leader linked to 'foreign espionage agency' | Haaretz Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was responding to Guillermo Borger, president of the AMIA Buenos Aires Jewish center, who said the Argentina-Iran agreement to set up a committee to investigate the 1994 bombing of the center 'will allow a third bombing in Argentina.'.. US Congress seeks to thwart Palestinian reconciliation: hearing WINEP testimony based on Israeli army blog, by Annie Robbins | Mondoweiss The big news in Palestinian politics is reconciliation: the leaders of Fatah and Hamas are meeting in Cairo this weekend to discuss the supervision of upcoming elections for the Palestinian National Council and the formation of a unity government. But preventing Fatah-Hamas reconciliation was the agenda in Congress last Wednesday... UK double standards towards Iran and Israel, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis ...It is illuminating to recall the depths to which “the allies” will stoop. The British government has menaced Iran ever since it took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian Oil in 1914 and swindled the host country out of its fair share of the profits. In 1951 Anglo-Iranian Oil (as renamed in 1935) declared GBP40 million profit after tax but gave Iran only GBP7 million. At the same time Arabian American Oil was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50-50 basis. Whereupon Iran, after many years of fruitless negotiation for a square deal, nationalized its oil to achieve longed-for economic and political independence and combat poverty... 'Haaretz' writer calls for boycott of Israel, by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss One of the refrains from Chris Matthews and other establishment types is that Criticism of Israel inside Israel is far more vigorous than it is in our discourse. And yes this is true. But so what; it's a nonsensical argument. I thought we were sovereign? Since when do we need permission from the Pope to criticize the Catholics, or the French to criticize France, or from any Israeli to criticize Israel?.. The War in Mali and AFRICOM’s Agenda: Target China, byF. William Engdahl | Global Research Mali at first glance seems a most unlikely place for the NATO powers, led by a neo-colonialist French government of Socialist President Francois Hollande (and quietly backed to the hilt by the Obama Administration), to launch what is being called by some a new Thirty Years’ War Against Terrorism... [A real war against terrorism would result in the arrest and imprisonment of the leadership of Israel, the US, the UK, Canada and so forth] Obama, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Senators Voting for Indefinite Detention Are “Enemies of the Constitution,” by Daniel Ellsberg | Global Research American Government Claims Power that Even King George Didn’t Claim Daniel Ellsberg said this week: “The indefinite detention provision of the defense bill] allows you to put an American citizen – a civilian – in military custody, treated like Bradley Manning in the marine barracks right now, indefinitely – without charges – that’s not a fight that we had to make in 1776. King George the Third didn’t have the power. No King of England had that power since John the First. Indeed, even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim that power... ISIS Encourages the IAEA to Use Unauthenticated Evidence in its Reports on Iran, Dan Joyner | Arms Control Law Friend of ACL Professor Yousaf Butt, and Dr. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, both highly qualified physicists, have just published an insightful new analysis of information which appears to have formed part of the evidence on which the IAEA has relied in its continuing determination of Iran’s noncompliance with its safeguards agreement. This is important stuff, as it goes directly to the heart of evidentiary provenance and reliability, the IAEA’s practices of evidence gathering and assessment, and thus to the reliability and credibility of IAEA reports and legal determinations regarding Iran and potentially other countries... Elie Wiesel's in trouble, by Robert Faurisson | Paul Eisen To Noam Chomsky he's a 'terrible fraud', to Norman Finkelstein he's a 'clown', to Christopher Hitchens he was a 'windbag' and 'poseur' and to Israel Shamir he's the (my favourite) "cry-as-you-pay Holocaust weepie". So many great people with so many bad things to say about Elie Wiesel... [The Weasel may go down in history as the the most outrageous fraud of all time, which is quite an achievement] Time to Face the Truth About Iran, by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | Agence Global Fifty years ago, during the Cuban missile crisis, the United States faced what is frequently described as the defining challenge of the Cold War. Today, some argue that America is facing a similarly defining challenge from Iran’s nuclear activities. In this context, it is striking to recall President John Kennedy’s warning, proffered just months before the missile crisis, that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic... Anne Frank: Dear Diary, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam I just came across this Facebook graphic created by Yuval Ben Ami and Amir Schiby, who are masters of political cartooning and collage. I always enjoy their Facebook creations. Today, they’ve created an especially provocative one that will get many people talking and in high dudgeon. But it raises some very serious questions... Does Anyone in Congress Care?: State of the Drones, by Laura Flanders | Counterpunch President Obama is going to deliver the annual State of the Union address next Tuesday and if I were to make a wild guess, I’d say he’ll declare the union strong. The economy may be troubled, some people are facing challenges perhaps, but if history’s any guide the president will say the union is special, blessed by god and strong, and there will be applause, no matter that it couldn’t be less true... Israel Setting Stage for More Attacks on Syria, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar It’s been almost two weeks since Israel launched attacks on several targets inside Syria, with the Obama Administration later revealed to have not only “green-lit” the Israeli attack but to have authorized yet more attacks in the future. Analysts, including top former Israeli officials, see this round of strikes as just the first stage of what will be an ever-escalating series of Israeli strikes against targets inside Syria, likely to get more aggressive as the civil war continues to worsen... Lessons for next uprising | Popular Resistance ...Other police states use water cannons to disperse crowds. But to my knowledge only the apartheid state of Israel invented stinking chemical weaponry to use on peaceful farmers trying to tend their lands. The mix of noxious substances and extracts from fecal matter sticks to skin and clothes and is hard to remove even if one is not knocked out and injured by the high power spray... [I imagine that one day soon the world will take a massive collective dump on Israel and that will be that. It would be a fitting end to what the former French Ambassador to the UK referred to as "that shitty little country."] America’s Global Torture Network, by Robert Scheer | Truthdig The title, “Globalizing Torture,” says it all. This meticulous accounting of the network of torture chambers that the United States has authorized in more than 54 nations is a damning indictment that should make all of us in this country cringe with shame... Beware The Consequences of Pre-Emptive War, by Rep. Ron Paul | Antiwar Last year more US troops died by suicide than died in combat in Afghanistan. More than 20 percent of military personnel deployed to combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some 32 percent of US soldiers reported depression after deployments. More than 20 percent of active-duty military are on potentially dangerous psychotropic drugs; many are on multiple types. Violent crime among active duty military members increased 31 percent between 2006-2011... Israel Attacks Christianity | Roi Tov On February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI, announced that he would resign papacy, effective February 28. Few popes have been vilified in Israel the way he was. Unwilling to repeat the claims, let me just soften them, "He was born in Germany; he is the proof that the Church is anti-Semitic." The exact accusation is utterly ridiculous and by far less credible than the fact Israel is actively anti-Christian. There is no need to perform a deep historical review to reach such a conclusion; three days before the Pope's dramatic announcement, Israel's Supreme Court approved anti-Christian activity... EU To Crack Down on Products from Israeli Settlements | Der Spiegel Israeli settlers living in the Palestinian terroritories often deceptively give their products a "Made in Israel" label. The European Union wants to move soon to end the practice and appears to be set on a collision course with the country... UK double standards towards Iran and Israel, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis ...Doesn’t Israel’s refusal to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or engage constructively on the issue of its nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) make it a leading candidate for sanctions, quite apart from its brutal oppression and occupation of the Holy Land? In any case, what threat is Iran to Britain? And who gave Hague permission to wage economic warfare against a friendly people – in our name?.. Feb 11, 2013 You Are God, by William T. Hathaway | MCW News The statement "You are God" seems an absurd and presumptuous blasphemy, so it needs to be clarified. According to the Vedic tradition and panentheism, it's not just you who are God; all of us are God. And it's not just all of us who are God; everything is God. God is the universe in synergy, the whole that is more than the sum of its parts. This contradicts mainstream Western theology, which is based on a split between creator and creature. According to this view, God made the universe with us in it and is now observing our behavior, rewarding us or punishing us based on our obedience to His rules... [This is in accord with all genuine spiritual traditions. When Jesus said “I am the son of God,” he added “We are all the children of God,” but that part has been left out by the self-serving priesthood. I propose that when referring to the theistic version of the deity, we employ the word “Dog” – to distinguish the spiritual view from what Freud called an “infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy.”] The Moral Order, by Morris Berman | Counterpunch ...the technical order was not merely overtaking the moral order, but actually obliterating it. This loss of meaning does much to account for the rise of the secular-religious movements of the twentieth century, including Communism, Fascism, Existentialism, Postmodernism, and so on. It also accounts for the depth and extent of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States. For there is no real meaning in the corporate-consumer state, which is at once empty and idiotic. On some level, everybody knows this... Demolition of Houses by Israeli Occupation Forces in Beit Hanena-Jerusalem | Intifada Palestine Israeli forces demolished a two-story Palestinian home in East Jerusalem on Tuesday, making 30 people homeless, official news agency Wafa reported. Four families lived in the Beit Hanina home, which was constructed six years ago. The families had hired a lawyer to prevent the demolition. Ibrahim al- Kiswani told WAFA that Israeli bulldozers, protected by Israeli police, entered the area at dawn, surrounded the house and gave the family of six members 10 minutes to evacuate the house before demolishing it over its contents... [An everyday occurrence in ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’] "This is why we came to Hebron?" | YouTube A soldier quickly learns that "keeping the peace" in Hebron is not easy - it involves chasing after settler girls with knives, among other things... Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II, by James Bacque | Amazon Other Losses caused an international scandal when first published in 1989 by revealing that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949... John Brennan’s Tenet-Like Testimony, by Ray McGovern | Consortium News CIA Director-designate John Brennan’s assertion to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran is “bent on pursuing nuclear weapons” is precisely the kind of dangerous “mistake” made by his mentor, former CIA Director George Tenet, who made many such “mistakes” a decade ago in greasing the skids for war on Iraq. Of course, the appropriate word is not “mistake” but “fraud.” And perhaps what should disqualify Brennan as much as anything is his intimate connection to the lies and abuses perpetrated by the thoroughly discredited Tenet. As one of Tenet’s former protégés, Brennan could not even bring himself to admit on Thursday that waterboarding was torture... Akiva Orr, co-founder of Israeli radical left Matzpen party, passes away | +972 Magazine Akiva Orr, an activist and writer, who helped form the Israeli anti-Zionist socialist party ‘Matzpen,’ passed away this week. His ideas, which can be viewed in the documentary on the history of Matzpen (below), challenged Israeli society and influenced generations of activists... [Is there anything left of the Israeli Left? Not much to speak of, I’m afraid. Israel is becoming more and more a purely rightwing fascist State.] IDF's "Good Corruption" | Roi Tov ..By far, the IDF is the largest organization in Israel; no other body has so many employees or such a large budget. Considering this, it is difficult to understand why it should be begging for donations; yet, that is what the IDF does through a complex system of allegedly civilian organizations. The most visible to Israelis was the Shirutrom, the IDF's annual telethon, organized by Galei Tzahal (“IDF Waves” in Hebrew; usually known by the acronym Galatz), the Army Radio. This was so shameful that on October 2012, it was finally cancelled. After its dismissal, three other organizations are still active... Israeli Operation Cast Lead Gaza Massacre, Israeli & American War Crimes, by Dr. Arthur F. Billy | Sabbah Report This video graphically depicts in part the most vile, evil, inhuman Zionist Israeli behavior and actions against the ever suffering practically defenseless Palestinian people of Gaza who have no military or sophisticated American made weapons as Israel has, to defend and protect them from the unwarranted cowardly Israeli military attacks, mayhem and massacres. This presentation is a Memorial and a Requiem for the Dead of Gaza, Honouring the Valiant Palestinian People and a Monument to the People of Gaza... The War for the Spirit | Paul Eisen ...The Holocaust may be the ultimate symbol of Jewish power, the most visible means by which the Jewish will in this world is enforced and displayed to a cowering non-Jewish world. It proclaims that Jews are suffering and Jews are innocent so Jews can do what they like and, by association the state of the Jews is also suffering, is also innocent and can also do what it likes... Jewish Terrorism in Israel: Reviewed by Michael Rubner | Middle East Policy Council Throughout their history — from the rear-guard assaults by the Amalekites during the exodus from Egypt to suicide-bombing attacks by Palestinian militants in more recent times — Jews have been victimized by varied and numerous acts of terror. Much less is known about the flip side of the coin: Jews as instigators and perpetrators of terrorism. In this brief yet compact volume, Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, two Israeli political scientists, test through case studies several hypotheses about the causes underlying Jewish terrorism both before and especially since the establishment of Israel in 1948... CODEPINK Repeatedly Disrupts Brennan Hearing Calling Out Names of Civilians Killed in Drone Strikes | Democracy Now ..We speak to CODEPINK founder Medea Benjamin, who also disrupted the meeting and recently visited Pakistan to speak with victims of drone strikes. "It’s not only the killing, it’s the terrorizing of entire populations, where they hear the drones buzzing overhead 24 hours a day, where they’re afraid to go to school, afraid to go to the markets, to funerals, to weddings, where it disrupts entire communities," Benjamin says. "And we are trying to get this information to our elected officials, to say, 'You are making us unsafe here at home,' to say nothing of how illegal, immoral and inhumane these policies are.".. Apocalypse and the Left, by Osha Neumann | Counterpunch ...Evo Morales President of Bolivia, formerly the militant leader of the coca workers, says we have a choice: “We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!” Professor Frederick Jameson says “It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” He speculates that this is “due to some weakness in our imaginations.”.. It Has Happened Here in America: The Police State is Real, by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts | Global Research The Bush regime’s response to 9/11 and the Obama regime’s validation of this response have destroyed accountable democratic government in the United States. So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive branch that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document. Whether a person believes the official story of 9/11 which rests on unproven government assertions or believes the documented evidence provided by a large number of scientists, first responders, and structural engineers and architects, the result is the same. 9/11 was used to create an open-ended “war on terror” and a police state... Feb 10, 2013 US officials confess to targeting Iran’s civilian population, by Franklin Lamb | Intifada Palestine ...“It would be a defense lawyer’s worst nightmare wouldn’t it? I mean to have one’s clients, in this case the Vice-President of the United States and the outgoing Secretary of state confess so publicly to serial international crimes against a civilian population?” The confessions and the crimes, she correctly enumerated to her audience,were those admitted to by US Vice-President Joe Biden and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this past week. Both of the US officials, in discussing US relations with the Islamic Republic, openly admitted that the US-led sanctions against Iran (and Syria) are politically motivated and constitute a “soft-war” against the nearly 80 million people of Iran... WANTED: A psychiatric diagnosis of Nazi holocaust denial | Alan Hart This disturbing and erratic piece by Alan Hart has stirred up a hornet’s nest. Read the comments section, including several of mine (if it’s still there by the time you read this; there were 33 of them as of yesterday). It should be helpful to those who have yet to directly confront the conflict between the Historical Revisionists and the believers in the dogma of the Holycause. This is not only about belief in a particular narrative - it is about blind faith in general, and the right and even the responsibility to challenge dubious dogmas - particularly when it is unpopular, even extremely dangerous to do so..[RT] Bishop Williamson's fourth trial | Paul Eisen I came across this bulletin from the brave and constant Richard Williamson. I have not the slightest doubt that souls like Bishop Williamson will win the day and, as a result, all humankind (including you) will benefit. But I'd also bet that Richard Williamson will never be thanked... Superb Questions, Cloudy Answers: Robert Steele Answers 6 of 40 Questions Honestly | Public Intelligence Blog ...Brennan’s answers are a mix of world-class dissembling, avoidance of substance, and specious assurances. Harry Truman would be aghast at what the CIA has become.. The CIA is broken beyond repair, and pathologically harmful in its present state. Drones and extrajudicial killings dominate its clerk-leaders’ time, its budget, and its culture. 90% of what CIA claims as clandestinely acquired information is actually a mix of hand-outs from foreign liaison services and domestically-acquired information. CIA does not do all-source analysis, its inexperienced analysts do cosmetics on very thin streams of technical collection on a handful of hard-targets... Press TV, iFilm taken off air in US, Canada | PressTV In another flagrant violation of freedom of speech, Iranian channels Press TV and iFilm have been removed from the Galaxy 19 satellite platform. The satellite platform provided broadcast services to the viewers of the 24-hour English-language Iranian news channel, Press TV, and the film channel, iFilm, in the United States and Canada... [In the land of the free and the home of the brave – oh yeah, you bet] Khamenei plays hardball with Obama, by M K Bhadrakumar | Asia Times Online It was an extraordinary week in the politics of the Middle East and it ended appropriately by being rounded off with a reality check lest imaginations ran riot. Three major happenings within one week would have to be taken as the inevitable confluence of a flow of developments and processes:.. Kerry Teases Iran | Roi Tov I have seen enough of the USA and spoke with enough of its denizens to know that after reading the first declaration of John Kerry as Secretary of State regarding Iran, Americans would probably exclaim: "After all, we are the good guys." Then, without second thoughts, they will rush to the nearest junk food outlet... I am an Englishman, by Paul Moss | Sabbah Report I am an Englishman! What does that statement conjure up in the minds of people of this World? I fear the true answer today! however when I was a child growing up I was surrounded in a fog of purported Righteousness! It seemed the notable adults in my Country had all taken part in civilising Nations around the world, with goodly policing, with harsh but necessary disciplining and finally missionary work to inject a healing peace using “our” Religion and ultimately a subservience to our ways, oh what a wonderful world it seemed I was born in... [RIP, Rudyard Kipling] Assassination Court: Senators Mull Pre-Execution Trials, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar With drones suddenly a part of the conversation during the Brennan confirmation hearings, senators are said to be considering an idea to create a secret “assassination court” on the model of the FISA courts that rubber-stamp wiretapping, only this court would be charged with deciding if “suspects” can be assassinated by US drone strikes... [How did things come to such a pass? The answer is easily come by if one speaks Hebrew, but English will do.] William Blum’s Cri de Couer, by Gary Corseri | Dissident Voice ...Bin Laden then quoted from the Foreword of Blum’s 2000 book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, in which he had mused: “If I were.. president, I could stop terrorist attacks [on us] in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize.. to all the widows and the orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. I would then announce that America’s global interventions.. have come to an end. And I would inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but.. a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims.. That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”.. BDS Better Learn from its Mistakes | Gilad Atzmon It’s almost funny to read the BDS’ leadership’s outraged reactions to top ethnic-cleansing advocate Alan Dershowitz when he tried to stop a discussion with Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti discussing BDS at NYC Brooklyn College. It’s funny because the BDS leadership unfortunately is drowning in the exact same Talmudic herem culture as is Dershowitz... Don’t Rule Out Bilateral Talks with Iran, by Peter Jenkins | Lobe Log ...Reports of a statement by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, on 7 February have suggested a subsequent contradiction of the Foreign Minister’s statement and that the Leader has closed the door to bilateral talks. I do not believe this to be the case. Knowing Minister Salehi well (we were diplomatic colleagues in Vienna for more than two years) I am confident that he would not have spoken publicly of Iran’s readiness to engage in talks had he doubted the Leader’s readiness to authorise them. He is both highly intelligent and prudent. He enjoys the Leader’s confidence and is therefore familiar with the Leader’s thinking... Iran, the Militarization of American Diplomacy, and Hillary Clinton’s Legacy as Secretary of State | Going to Tehran On Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, Hillary Leverett offered a sharp critique of Hillary Clinton’s legacy as Secretary of State. Taking on platitudinous assertions about Clinton’s support and encouragement of women’s causes, Hillary Leverett holds that such statements do not “stack up against a sober reading of the record”:.. [I fantasize about the day when Hillary et al face a truly representative World Court facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity – especially if “all options are on the table.”] An Indispensable Book on Palestine/Israel | Richard Falk I realize that without knowing it, I have long waited for this book, although I could not have imagined its lyric magic in advance of reading. It is a triumph of what I would call ‘intelligent innocence,’ the great benefits of a clear mind, an open and warm heart, and a trustworthy moral compass that draws sharp lines between good and evil while remaining ever sensitive to the contradictory vagaries of lives and geographic destinies. Pamela Olson exhibits an endearing combination of humility and overall emotional composure that makes her engaged witnessing of the Palestinian ordeal so valuable for me as I believe and hope it will be for others... Israeli Crimes Without Punishment | Stephen Lendman Serial criminality against humanity is official Israeli policy. Punishment never follows. Ruthlessness best describes these type abuses. Committing them without accountability is unconscionable. It goes on daily. Western media scoundrels ignore it. Too few people understand what everyone should. Militarized occupation is hell. Terrorizing civilian men, women, and children is worst of all... Rationally Speaking, We Are All Apocalyptic Now, by Robert Jensen | MCW News ...When we take seriously what physics, chemistry and biology tell us about the health of the living world on which we depend, we all should be thinking apocalyptically. Look at any crucial measure of the ecosphere - groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of "dead zones" in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity, and the ultimate game-changer of climate disruption - and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing the planet beyond its limits... An Interview with Marjorie Cohn About Targeted Killings, by Dennis Bernstein | Truthdig ..The White Paper allows the government to kill a U.S. citizen who is not on the battlefield, if some high government official who is supposedly informed about the situation thinks that the target is a senior Al-Qaida leader who poses an imminent threat of a violent attack against the United States. So how do they define “imminence”? Well, it doesn’t require any clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future. So it completely dilutes this whole idea of imminent threat. Under well-established principles of international law and the U.N. Charter, one country can use military force against another only in self-defense... US Officials Confess To Targeting Iran’s Civilian Population, by Franklin Lamb | Eurasia Review Azadeh, a graduate law student from Tehran University, on the sidelines of Iran’s Third Annual Hollywoodis, reminded her interlocutors of the obvious damning admissions last week by two US politicians: “It would be a defense lawyer’s worst nightmare wouldn’t it? I mean to have one’s clients, in this case the Vice-President of the United States and the outgoing Secretary of state confess so publicly to serial international crimes against a civilian population?” The confessions and the crimes, she correctly enumerated to her audience, were those admitted to by US Vice-President Joe Biden and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this past week... Feb 9, 2013 Untold Truths about War on Iran | YouTube Press TV's documentary program "Untold Truths" is a revealing documentary film about the life and experiences of former White House Middle East policy adviser, Gwenyth Todd, who has escaped to Australia to keep safe from FBI prosecution... Imagine: No Israel Lobby | MJ Rosenberg Imagine there’s no lobby It’s easy if you try No memorized talking points No need to lie... “Genocide in Iraq, The Case Against UN Security Council And Member States”: Book Review by Dr Gideon Polya | Countercurrents ...an extremely important book that sets out the case for prosecution of people involved in the Zionist-backed, US-spearheaded genocide in Iraq during the period of Sanctions (1990-2003). Of course, as recognized by the authors, the carnage continued after the illegal US-led invasion and occupation. However the authors have chosen here to limit consideration to the horrendous effects of Sanctions because they were UN sanctioned, and in being associated with an estimated 1.7 million Iraqi avoidable deaths from deprivation (1990-2003; substantially children)... Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez and the XL Pipeline, by Greg Palast | Earth Island Journal I’ve been tracking a tube of black putrid ooze, a toxic viper slowly slithering 2000 miles across the belly of America, swallowing all water aquifers, politicians and reason in its path. The XL Keystone Pipeline. As Nagini, the murderous snake in the Harry Potter tales, had its master Voldemort, I figured the Keystone XL Pipeline must also have its own dark lords. And the Dark Lords of the Keystone XL left clear clues: environmental horror, political payouts and the odor of sulfur stronger than explained by the stinking hot tar inside it. I smelled Koch... [Yes, the Dark Lords rule in Middle Earth] Applying Rigorous Imagination To America's Paranoid Style: Empire Of Panic And Ephemera, by Phil Rockstroh | Counterpunch ...Ever shifting, inchoate compulsions and endless distractions define the days of the denizens of the consumer state. Text messages and tweets gibber like souls stranded in a limbo realm between the worlds of the living and the damned. Craving and angst are interwoven. Held by the dazzle of light playing over the surface of a deep abyss, the consumer floats along on waxen wings of debt. The landscape does not seem solid... Syrian troops battle rebels around Damascus | MCW News Heavy fighting is continuing around the Syrian capital, as government forces try to halt a rebel advance. Activists said clashes continued in Jobar district in Damascus on Friday amid rocket shelling by government forces on the eastern district and nearby neighbourhoods. While opposition fighters have seen gains across parts of the country, they have so far been kept away from the centre of Damascus. But in the past three days, rebels have overrun army positions encircling the heart of the city... Bulgarian Charge of Hezbollah Bombing Was an “Assumption,” by Gareth Porter | Dissident Voice Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov’s dramatic announcement Tuesday on the Bulgarian investigation of the July 2012 terror bombing of an Israeli tourist bus was initially reported by Western news media as suggesting clear evidence of Hezbollah’s responsibility for the killings. But more accurate reports on the minister’s statement and the only details he provided reveal that the alleged link between the bomb suspects and Hezbollah was merely an “assumption” rather than a conclusion based on specific evidence... The Jihad That Wasn’t, by Kelley B. Vlahos | Antiwar A funny thing happened on the way to the jihadi takeover of America. It got lost. Same goes for Islamist radical attacks on American interests overseas – it’s just not happening to the degree that our favorite jihad hunters here in the U.S have been ranting about for the last 12 years. Turns out that most of the terror attacks occurring in the world today, according to 2012 Global Terrorism Index, are happening to someone else, and in many cases associated with conditions created by western military interventions... Legal panel: IDF doesn’t follow own procedures regarding Palestinian civilian casualties, by Noam Sheizaf | +972 Magazine ...The Turkel Committee, consisting of conservative Israeli scholars and international observers approved by Israel for their pro-Israeli positions, was an U.S.-Israeli initiative designed to provide a pretext for Israel’s refusal to cooperate with international bodies seeking to probe the raid that left eight Turkish citizens and one American citizen dead. As Roi Maor pointed out after the first part of the report was published, the committee was appointed to establish that fact that the Israeli siege on Gaza and the Maramara raid (an attack on an unarmed vessel in international water) were both indeed legal... Diplomacy with Iran Won’t Work if It’s Tied to Sanctions, Coercion, and American Fantasies of Regime Change | Going to Tehran In a Reuters Op-ed last week, we held that simply expressing an interest in “talking” to Tehran would not be enough for the Obama administration to launch successful diplomacy with Iran. The essential ingredient, we argued, is American “acceptance” of the Islamic Republic as “a legitimate political order representing legitimate national interests”—just as President Richard Nixon’s acceptance of the People’s Republic of China enabled the realignment of U.S.-China relations in the early 1970s. Subsequent events have demonstrated the accuracy of our analysis... UN says bribe payments soar in Afghanistan | MCW News A new United Nations report on corruption in Afghanistan has found that $3.9bn, twice the nation's domestic revenue, was paid in bribes in 2012. The report, titled "Corruption in Afghanistan: Recent patterns and trends", released on Thursday, found that though corruption had dropped nine percent since 2009, the amount paid in bribes has risen by 40 per cent... [The real surge] Iranian Documentation On Catching Drones | Moon of Alabama In December Iran claimed that it had retrieved all data from the U.S. stealth drone RQ-170 Sentinel it had managed to take down a year earlier: "All the intelligence existing in this drone has been completely decoded and extracted and we know each and every step it has taken (during its missions)," Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh told reporters here in Tehran on Monday. Today a short video revealed footage the drone had taken on its flights and which the Iranians downloaded from its internal storage... Court Of Human Rights: Convictions For File-Sharing Violate Human Rights | Falkvinge on Infopolicy The European Court of Human Rights has declared that the copyright monopoly stands in direct conflict with fundamental Human Rights, as defined in the European Union and elsewhere. This means that as of today, nobody sharing culture in the EU may be convicted just for breaking the copyright monopoly law; the bar for convicting was raised considerably. This can be expected to have far-reaching implications, not just judicially, but in confirming that the copyright monopoly stands at odds with human rights... Poor Governance, Good Business: How land investors target countries with weak governance | Oxfam Investors are buying up vast tracks of land across the developing world in a modern day ‘land rush’. This media brief explores where land is changing hands and why. It finds that investors are targeting countries with weak governance in order to secure land quickly and cheaply - putting the homes and livelihoods of some of the world’s most marginalised communities at risk... Embrace the Fatwa, by Hossein Mousavian | Foreign Policy As the Western media reported it, the future of U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations suffered a major setback on Feb. 7 when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seemed to reject Vice President Joseph Biden's offer of direct talks. "Some naive people like the idea of negotiating with America, however, negotiations will not solve the problem," the supreme leader said in a statement posted on his website. "You are pointing a gun at Iran saying you want to talk. The Iranian nation will not be frightened by the threats.".. Israeli Minister: "There will be a civilian revolution" | Roi Tov ...The key statement in the event was his answer regarding what will happen if the new government decides to recruit Haredim; I tried to keep his peculiar style while translating. "There will be protest rallies of thousands and tens of thousands on the streets, thousands of yeshiva students will fill up the prisons, the military police will run amok in Bnei-Brak [trapping those refusing recruitment in a town populated by Haredim], there will be a civilian revolution and.. chaos]. The worst thing is that those [Haredim] who go to the army now, will stop immediately." Yishai leads them, and he serves as senior government minister. He called for a revolution if his political goals are not achieved... [Maybe there will be a civil war. Cool. That way no innocent people will be killed, and Israel will end in suicide. Let’s call it the Masada Option. It has my wholehearted support.] Lawfare and Armed Conflict: Comparing Israeli and US Targeted Killing Policies and Challenges against Them, by Lisa Hajjar | Jadaliyya In this public lecture, I engage the concept of lawfare (an amalgamation of “law” and “warfare”) to compare Israeli and US twenty-first century armed conflicts. Specifically, I focus on both states’ targeted killing policies and the legal rationales that have been advanced to try to project their lawfulness, and legal challenges to these policies in order to tell a larger story about the relationship between contemporary practices of law and war... Feb 8, 2013 Forget ‘Normal’ Politics | Richard Falk ...we must have the courage to raise radical questions as to whether under these conditions a flawed democracy is any longer capable of serving the national public good in fundamental respects. In my view, the only morally responsible position is to mobilize the citizenry around the need for drastic reform of American democracy. At the very least, the role of big money in shaping policy choices and the electoral process must be ended, and the glorification of violence and militarism must be repudiated... Humanity's Economic Disease: Capitalism, by Frank Scott | Legalienate ...Leadership’s inability to cope with, or its desire to maintain “our situation” , even with the potential for planetary disaster, reinforces the egotistical greed of private profit and perpetuates the anti-social problem of public loss. That problem has reached a point at which it threatens all humanity and not just divided and conquered national, religious, racial or other falsely labeled identity groups... More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture, by Spencer Ackerman | Wired ...A new report from the Open Society Foundation details the CIA’s effort to outsource torture since 9/11 in excruciating detail. Known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice concerns taking detainees to and from U.S. custody without a legal process — think of it like an off-the-books extradition — and often entailed handing detainees over to countries that practiced torture. The Open Society Foundation found that 136 people went through the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition, and 54 countries were complicit in it... How Colin Powell Showed That Torture Works, by Sam Husseini | Counterpunch ...Ten years ago, Colin Powell made the case for invading Iraq before the United Nations Security Council. Many aspects of his case were clearly dubious at the time, but one notorious aspect desperately needs to be truly understood: Some of Powell’s argument for an Iraq link to al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who was tortured into giving such “evidence” — that is, he told the torturers what they wanted to hear so that the torture would stop... [That the Bush and Obama administrations have made torture “respectable” is perhaps the worst of their many crimes against humanity.] Bloomberg Defends Brooklyn College’s Decision to B.D.S. Talk | NYT Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a vocal supporter of Israel but also a frequent advocate of free speech, on Wednesday forcefully defended Brooklyn College’s decision to co-sponsor a panel discussion about a movement that calls for economic boycotts and sanctions against Israel... [Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, or it’s just a matter of someone who’s immune to Zionist blackmail standing up for his principles and showing some integrity.] UKIP Nigel Farage: The EU is Increasingly About War | YouTube UK Independence party leader addresses French president Hollande... No Wonder China is Nervous as Obama Pivots, by F. William Engdahl | Voltaire Net The looming confrontation will be even harsher that the previous ones. U.S. forces have been withdrawing from Europe and disengaging from the Middle East. They are currently clustering around China and developing a ballistic missile shield which - should it actually prove effective some day - would enable Washington to strike Beijing without fear of reprisal... U.S. Violating Human Rights of Children, Says U.N. Committee, by Allison Frankel | ACLU The Obama Administration recently underwent its first U.N. treaty body review, and the resulting concluding observations made public yesterday should be a cause for alarm. The observations, issued by independent U.N. experts tasked with monitoring compliance with the international treaty on the rights of children in armed conflict.. paint a dark picture of the treatment of juveniles by the U.S. military in Afghanistan: one where hundreds of children have been killed in attacks and air strikes by U.S. military forces, and those responsible for the killings have not been held to account even as the number of children killed doubled from 2010 to 2011... The Talented Mr. Takeyh, by Nima Shirazi | Antiwar ...he dismisses out of hand the notion that “the principal cause of disorder in the Middle East today is a hegemonic America seeking to impose its imperial template on the region." This is exactly the worldview that has produced the disastrous U.S. foreign policy of the last few decades, policies advocated time and time again by the same people – not only people like Takeyh, but including literally Takeyh himself – never learning from their mistakes or conceiving there might be a different way to engage the world (say, by not bullying, threatening, demanding, dictating, punishing, bombing, invading, destroying, dismantling, overthrowing, occupying, and propping up dictators).. Iraq, Iran, Red Lines and Headlines, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America Could this repeated history be any more obvious?.. [A brilliant collage of headlines] Campus Report 2011-2012 | ADL They include a list of one state articles. I emailed them this response: “Thank you so much for this truly gratifying report. It appears that there is indeed some hope on the horizon. Perhaps a world without hate is possible after all. That depends, of course, on the disappearance of the genocidal, criminally insane state of Israel. I volunteer to do everything in my power to wipe Israel off the map - now if only someone would hand me the eraser.” The myth of the ‘developed’ world, by Paul Woodward | War in Context ...Consider instead another way of viewing the health of society: the way in which strangers relate to one another. By this measure one could argue — especially in America — that we don’t really live in a society. More often than not, we are aggregations of individuals who minimize accidental interactions and for whom ‘stranger’ is a label that can be applied to most other people — people whose names we will never know and whose lives we only fleetingly glimpse. The stranger is the person who lives outside the sphere of our concerns... [I live in Mexico. It’s much the same as in Mali, one big extended family, which includes “strangers.”] Former Top U.S. Military Official Warns Iran Attack Would Require Occupation Lasting 'Tens Of Years' | ThinkProgress Former Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright today said that military strikes on Iran would not completely end its nuclear program. Appearing at a conference of the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled “Dealing with a Nuclear Iran,” Cartwright laid out what he saw as the difficulties inherent in launching a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program. Topping the former General’s list: the inability of any attack to wipe out the intellectual capital developed by Iran during its research... [As my friend AS, who supplied this link, added to the subject line: “Nonsense, the Iranians are already picking flowers to greet the Western heroes.”] Jordan’s Syria Problem, by Nicolas Pelham | The New York Review of Books In a whitewashed apartment in Irbid, Jordan, near the Syrian border, officers who have defected from the Syrian air force are lunching on shakria, chunks of lamb in yoghurt, and performing the Muslim rites that are banned by the Syrian government. They open their meal with a blessing, stroke their newly grown beards, and conclude with the afternoon call to prayer led by Abu Obeyda, a white-bearded Islamist of Palestinian origin, who lost several fingers fighting alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. When I get up to wash my hands my host rushes to stop me, lest I leave the room before he has verified that his wife or daughters are safely out of view... Ahmadinejad: Iran Won’t Attack Israel, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar Spinning and respinning stories into something more alarmist is nothing new as it relates to Iran, but media outlets were doing heavy duty spin today after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in an interview with Egypt’s al-Ahram paper, said Iran had no interest in attacking Israel but was ready to retaliate if attacked.. Other outlets took his statement explicitly saying Iran wasn’t going to attack Israel, and the comments on retaliation, and ended up declaring that Ahmadinejad had threatened to destroy Israel in the interview... The NUMEC Cover-up | University of Pittsburgh School of Law Guest speaker and author Grant F. Smith presents his thoughts on the "Diversion of U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program," a new drive to declassify government documents long overdue for release, and the potential environmental and legal consequences... Some New Bits On The Syrian Al-Kibar "Reactor" | Moon of Alabama The convicted criminal neocon Elliott Abrams is writing in Commentary about the 2007 bombing of the alleged nuclear reactor at Al-Kibar in Syria. As was to be expected his story isn't straight. Indeed there is huge discrepancy in it. He starts with the Israelis coming to Washington to tell what they thought they had found:.. such obfuscation, if not outright lying, is just what one expects from such a man... Egypt: no short cuts in democracy, by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis ...Mursi’s failure is typical of doctrinal, elected leaders endeavouring to satisfy their organized ideological base and the public at large. Trying to balance the two is impossible and they end up failing both constituencies. I loathe quoting Winston Churchill, but he was right when he said democracy was not perfect. Voters have every right to change their opinion of officials they elect. But that right comes with an obligation to endure the results of the ballot box... Feb 7, 2013 Turkel report whitewashes war crimes, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance The Israeli “investigation” of its own crimes exonerated itself, again. In the first part of the so called Turkel report, in January 2011 the Israeli appointed commission (not independent but known apologists for the Israeli government) “found” that its attack on the Mavi Marmara and the Gaza freedom flotilla (Turkish and international-flagged civilian ships in International waters), was “kosher” by International law. International legal experts, UN investigators, human rights organizations, the Turkish government, and most of the world governments and world public disagreed... Read more... Study: Palestinian Schoolbooks Don’t ‘Teach Hate,’ by John Glaser | Antiwar For decades, Israel has claimed that Palestinian school books teach pupils to hate Israel and Jews. This sent a strong signal to pro-Israel voices in Washington to tell lies, like when Newt Gingrich falsely claimed in a Republican presidential debate in December 2011 that Palestinian schoolbooks “teach terrorism.” He gave an erroneous example that Palestinians “have text books that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?’”.. Hagel Wisely Caves in to the Israel Lobby, by Kevin MacDonald | The Occidental Observer The viciousness of the Hagel hearings is really amazing, especially the questioning of John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Ted Cruz. Graham and Cruz especially were being good soldiers of the Israel Lobby. The exchange that really revealed the power of the Lobby was when Graham asked Hagel to... Litmus Tests for Israel | NYT One dispiriting lesson from Chuck Hagel’s nomination for defense secretary is the extent to which the political space for discussing Israel forthrightly is shrinking. Republicans focused on Israel more than anything during his confirmation hearing, but they weren’t seeking to understand his views. All they cared about was bullying him into a rigid position on Israel policy. Enforcing that kind of orthodoxy is not in either America’s or Israel’s interest... [A scent of truth even from the JYT? Things must be looking up.] The Corbett Report: Gladio Revisited | YouTube As one of the most thoroughly-documented examples of a decades-long program of officially-sanctioned false flag terror, Operation Gladio remains a woefully under-reported piece of the War on Terror puzzle. Today we go behind the trite summarizations of this program to look at it in-depth, examine its roots, and discover how it is continuing to operate right through to the present day... Bulgaria appeases US, Israel on bus probe, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online The Bulgarian government on Tuesday made a mockery of its political independence by publicly implicating Lebanon's Hezbollah in last year's attack on an Israeli bus in the resort city of Burgas, despite the fact that its "official investigation is still going on", Sofia has yet to make an official announcement and there is an absence of trustworthy evidence to back the claim... Barnes Review: Holocaust Handbooks | CODOH This ambitious, growing series addresses various topics of the infamous “Holocaust” of the WWII era. Most of them are based on decades of archival research in archives all over the world. They are heavily footnoted and referenced. In contrast to most other works on this issue, the tomes of this series approach its topic with the necessary profound academic scrutiny and a critical attitude. Any Holocaust researcher ignoring this series will remain oblivious of the most important research results in the field... Mali and AFRICOM’s Africa Agenda: Target China, by F. William Engdahl | Voltaire Network Out of the blue in the last days Mali has suddenly become the focus of world attention. France has been asked to militarily intervene by Mali’s government to drive Jihadist terrorists out of the large parts of the country they claim. What the conflict in Mali really is about is hardly what we read in the mainstream media. It is about vast untapped mineral and energy resources and a de facto re-colonization of French Africa under the banner of human rights. The real background reads like a John LeCarre thriller... Syria: Golden Days of Disinformation, by Adam Larson | Information Clearing House In the 23 months since the start of the Syrian “Arab Spring” uprising, the charges of violent Syrian government repression of its own people have persisted and piled up. So too have credible claims the other way: car bombings, attacks on hospitals and TV stations, hostage-taking, mass executions, and more, have all emerged as crimes of the (partly foreign) Syrian opposition. Genocidal threats from the mostly-Sunni insurgents against the Alawi (Alawites – Bashar Al-Assad’s co-religionists), other Shi’ites, Christians, and others — and some delivery on those promises — have been accumulating for some time... Rethinking Iran: Does the Islamic Republic Really Want Nuclear Weapons? by Sungtae “Jacky” Park | International Affairs Review A key assumption that the international community has regarding Iran’s nuclear program is that it is for military, not civilian, purposes. However, it is illogical to make such a case, whether one assumes that the Tehran regime makes decisions based on ideology and religion or based on what it considers to be in the interest of its national security... The U.S.’s ‘Coercive Diplomacy’ with Iran and Lessons Unlearned from Iraq, by Jeremy R. Hammond | Foreign Policy Journal ...Jervis means compelling Iran to obey Washington, and by the Orwellian phrase “Coercive Diplomacy”, of course, means issuing ultimatums and threats of criminal violence. Jervis begins, naturally, with the usual obligatory assumption that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. No evidence is required for this; it is simply a matter of faith for the priesthood of the state religion who have taken upon themselves the role of manufacturing consent for U.S. policy... Britamgate: Staging False Flag Attacks in Syria | Voltaire Network On January 22 a telling leak cropped up in the Internet. British defense contractor’s BRITAM server was hacked and megabytes of classified internal files of the firm were released to the public. Now the case is acquiring a Britamgate scale due to the publication on Prison Planet. What is the story behind the leakage? Why this scandal is likely to turn around the situation in Syria?.. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: the origins of Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf, by Roham Alvandi | London School of Economics On the morning of May 31, 1972, the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, received U.S. President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, at Tehran’s Saadabad Palace in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. That spring day, these three men were in high spirits... Obama Codex is State Terror | Roi Tov ...when a President and his administration decide to be insolent, they kill. They shamelessly ignore their own legal principles, international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and let's be sincere, thousands of years of civilization. In a typical reductio ad absurdum fashion, let me ridicule the new policy of the American Government, written under the eminent leadership of Barack Hussein Obama II, 44th President of the United States. According to the new codex, an American postman—a definitely well-informed civil servant—who doesn't like one's mail, may decide to execute the obvious terrorist on the spot without any legal process. Imagine what would happen if he doesn't like your dog... J-BIG Vs. P-small | Gilad Atzmon ...A poorly-written but still revealing briefing was published a few days ago by J-BIG. J-BIG may sound like an Israeli penis enlargement clinic but is in fact an acronym for Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods - a Jews Only political organisation set up to promote Jewish interests amongst Palestinian solidarity in general and the BDS movement in particular... Israel and Palestine: One State or Two? by Rebecca Burns | In These Times November’s historic U.N. vote to recognize the state of Palestine sparked celebrations on the streets of Ramallah and Jerusalem—as well as a fresh round of debate over the future course of action in the region. While Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the initiative the “last chance to save the two-state solution,” some Palestinians and Israelis argue that the opportunity for such a solution has long since expired... Fantasized homeland: Review of Shlomo Sand’s new book, by Yossi Gurvitz | +972 Magazine “After the people was exiled from its land by force of arms, it kept faith with it in all the lands of its diaspora, and never ceased from praying and hoping to return to its land and renewing in it its political sovereignty.” Among the many falsehoods contained in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, this must be the most baseless, yet you can hardly describe the core of Zionism without it. After dedicating his earlier book, “The Invention of the Jewish People,” to debunking the notion that there is a Jewish nation, and the lie that it was “exiled from its land by force, Sand now turns attention in his new book, “The Invention of the Land of Israel”.. Shlomo Sand: ‘“The Zionist Left has never been less colonialist than the Right” | Verso Books ...L’Express interviewed the historian Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Land of Israel: from Holy Land to Homeland. He looked back to the use of religious reference points by Israeli politicians ever since the creation of the State of Israel, holding this contradiction partly to blame for the failure of the Israeli Left... Philip Giraldi: Christian Zionism’s political significance in United States, by Debbie Menon | My Catbird Seat ...He emphasizes the political significance of Christian Zionists in the United States, their involvement in and growing influence over American domestic politics and some aspects of American foreign policy, through major movements such as CUFI, two million strong (Christians United For Israel) members. He explains how their mechanism actually works... Feb 6, 2013 New book by Tel Aviv historian uncovers "Land of Israel" myths, by Asa Winstanley | The Electronic Intifada ...That book [The Invention of the Jewish People] was a fascinating journey through centuries of Jewish history, much of it swept under the carpet by Zionist historiography. Sand’s new book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, is essentially a direct sequel, focusing on the nature of an idea central to Zionism: the “Land of Israel” — Eretz Israel in Hebrew.. There’s also a brilliant chapter on the origins of Christian Zionism in the protestantism of nineteenth-century British imperialists... Read more... Avi Shlaim in conversation with Shlomo Sand | YouTube Few modern conflicts are as attached to history as that of Israel and Palestine. Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford will be in conversation with Shlomo Sand, professor of contemporary history at Tel Aviv University... International Association of Democratic Lawyers Opposes Military Force Against Syria and Iran | Marjorie Cohn ...IADL notes with concern that while the UN Human Rights Council is on the verge of adopting a new, updated declaration on the Human Right to Peace, the major Western powers are poisoning the atmosphere by creating hysteria to wage war against Syria and Iran. The IADL condemns in the strongest possible terms these threats to international peace and security which are prohibited by the UN Charter and the doctrine of jus cogens... Read more... Iranian Mothers for Peace: ‘Inhumane’ Sanctions Blocking Medicine for the Sick, by John Glaser | Antiwar The US-led sanctions on Iran are strangling the economy: unemployment is high, inflation is rampant, prices of food and other basic necessities are becoming prohibitively expensive. Washington claims the sanctions are meant to punish and coerce the Iranian government, but it’s just making ordinary people suffer. Well known by now is the fact that the sanctions have also had the effect of blocking much needed medicine for the sick, putting literally millions of lives at risk, according to the Charity Foundation for Special Diseases, a non-government organization in Iran supporting six million patients... Read more... IDF battles Jewish Orthodoxy | Roi Tov Sheer arrogance of power; humanist politicians drunken with power can be seen these days in Israel posing as rock stars. "You do what we order, and we don't stop at the red lights," they say while castrating all those who are different. Secular-Jewish politicians are above the law, and the People are supposed to applaud and shut up. The results of the recent elections proved them wrong; quietly, on February 4, a realignment of the Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel started with a dramatic encounter between ultra-Orthodox and Religious-Zionists. Netanyahu and Lapid—blind to reality—keep dancing to the sound of humanist drums. Israel's odd duality is about to hit back at the secular State... Read more... 'Racism in their DNA': Israeli fan fury as football team signs Muslims | YouTube A group of the Jerusalem-based Beitar fans have lashed out at the club's boss's decision to bring two Muslims from the Russian Chechen republic into the squad. [Just them good ol' boys yelling ‘Lynch them niggers!’ And they do it, too] Dershowitz fights academic freedom at Brooklyn College, by Belen Fernandez | MCW News It comes as little surprise that Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, Brooklyn College alumnus and raving apologist for Israeli crimes, has appointed himself commanding general in the assault on the college's Political Science department for co-sponsoring a February 7 panel discussion on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement... Read more... 'Time' embarrasses Hagel's Senate questioners for Israel focus, by Philip Weiss Time Magazine online asks the obvious question about Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing last week, why did the Senators refer constantly to Israel, 106 times, and barely mention Afghanistan (and the issue of military suicides, twice). In "Just Who Do They Represent: At Hagel Hearing, Concern for Israel Tops U.S. Troops in Combat," author Brandon Friedman, a veteran, doesn't take the next step and address the Israel lobby, but we get it... Read more... Israel arrests Hamas lawmakers in West Bank | MCW News Israel arrested 23 Hamas members in the occupied West Bank on Monday, some of them lawmakers, according to the group and the Israeli army. Hamas said in a statement that the three lawmakers - Ahmed Attoun, Hatem Qafisha and Mohammed al-Talhad - had been detained in the early hours of the morning, as well as several local Hamas leaders. "It is a criminal act that will not succeed in stopping their struggle," the statement said, "We in the Hamas movement strongly condemn the campaign of arbitrary arrests that took in dozens of Hamas leaders.".. [Well, a fascist society is not bound by mere legality let alone common decency. The 'only democracy in the Middle East' arrests members of a duly elected government, and no one, other than Palestinians pays any attention.] Read more...The Gatekeepers: demolishing the Zionist narrative, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis The Zionist leaders have in fact always had a long-term strategy to avoid any meaningful peace settlement, so as to allow: (1) occupation of all “Eretz Israel”, (2) the ethnic cleansing or cantonization of the native population and (3) settlement of the cleansed territory with Jews... Read more... Leaked Justice Department Memo Reveals Legal Case for Targeted Killings of US Citizens, by John Glaser | Antiwar The US government can order the killing of American citizens even when there is no active intelligence accusing them of carrying out a specific terrorist attack, according to a confidential Justice Department legal memo obtained by NBC News... Read more... Former UN inspector: Iran's claims of nuclear advance may be no empty boast | Haaretz Iran could be able to make thousands of next-generation uranium enrichment machines, according to a former chief UN inspector, adding credibility to Tehran's claims of technical advances in its disputed nuclear program. As Iran and world powers prepare to resume talks aimed at easing a dispute that has raised fears of a new Middle East war, Tehran announced late last month it planned to install the new machines at its main enrichment plant... Read more... Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition | Open Society Foundations Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency embarked on a highly classified program of secret detention and extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. The program was designed to place detainee interrogations beyond the reach of law. Suspected terrorists were seized and secretly flown across national borders to be interrogated by foreign governments that used torture, or by the CIA itself in clandestine “black sites” using torture techniques... Read more... Narrative on Israeli air strike on Syria starts to unravel, by Paul Woodward | War in Context In the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on Syria on Wednesday, numerous reports claimed that the target of the strike was a convoy carrying SA-17 missiles approaching the Lebanese border. The Syrian government, however, claimed that the target was a research facility north west of Damascus.. But now Syrian TV has broadcast footage of what is claimed to be the aftermath of the strike: damage to the research facility at Jamraya outside Damascus... Read more... Chuck Hagel should withdraw his nomination, by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News Chuck Hagel’s performance before the Senate Armed Services Committee was very shameful. He disappointed down the line. Hagel apologized for every truth he had said before about the Lobby’s bullying on the Hill, Iran, the disastrous wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, his prime loyalty to the US constitution and not to Israel or America’s real political interests... [They told him he would have to grovel like a dog if he wanted to be confirmed, and so he did] Read more...Feb 5, 2013 So, just how powerful is the Israel lobby in the US? by Rupert Cornwell | The Independent ...Not for nothing did Pat Buchanan once describe Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory” – so much so that an Israeli prime minister at odds with the White House can bypass the President, making his case directly to an Aipac conference or on Capitol Hill. Take Benjamin Netanyahu when he delivered an address to Congress in May 2011. I remember the assembled lawmakers jumping up and down like jack-in-the-boxes to give him 29 standing ovations. Whatever else, Bibi would never have received an acclamation like that in the Knesset... A Petition to Reclaim Our Government, Our Democracy, Our Future from Israel, by Mohamed Khodr | Sabbah Report ...If ever there is a time when we Americans need to raise our voices loudly and clearly, a time to unite under our flag, the American flag, for the purpose of once again declaring our independence, our freedom, and our liberty from the Yolk of Israel’s domination and manipulation of our government to serve its interests. Interests that usually involve offensive and preemptive military actions against innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians using our weapons in direct violation of American Laws that prohibit our weapons to only be used in Self-Defense... Hillary Clinton: Profile of Imperial Arrogance and Lawlessness | Stephen Lendman Hillary Clinton represents the worst of imperial arrogance. She supports the worst of Israeli lawlessness. She was one of the largest recipients of defense contractor cash. She backed war on Afghanistan and Iraq. She opposed a Democrat resolution. She supported restriction-free nuclear cooperation with Israel and other US allies violating NPT provisions. She endorsed nuclear weapons use in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She calls them deterrents that "keep the peace... [My nickname for this bitch on wheels is the Wicked Witch of the West] BBC acknowledges that Palestinian citizens of Israel are not guaranteed equality by law, by Ben White | The Electronic Intifada In a report last month on Israel’s racist “Judaization” policies in the Negev, BBC reporter Tim Whewell wrote that “Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel are guaranteed full equality by law.” Responding to my complaint, the BBC’s Middle East desk has acknowledged that this is not the case, and “agree the wording of the sentence in question is inaccurate.”.. Israel’s systematic racism is not only enshrined in the law — it is manifested in official government support for groups openly promoting an agenda equivalent to that of European far-right fringe groups. Hopefully the reality of Israel’s so-called democracy will be increasingly reported by the mainstream media... [What, the Emperor has no clothes?] The real invasion of Africa is not news and a license to lie is Hollywood's gift | John Pilger ...The invasion has almost nothing to do with "Islamism", and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a "menacing arc" of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus "red menace" of a worldwide communist conspiracy... Brooklyn College's academic freedom increasingly threatened over Israel event, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian New York politicians join the Alan Dershowitz-led campaign to dictate to colleges what academic events they can hold.. Dershowitz has been joined in his current crusade by a cast of crazed and fanatical Israel-centric characters such as Brooklyn State Assembly member Dov Hikind... Biden’s Tepid “Overture” to Iran Continues to Reflect America’s “Imperial Turn” in the Middle East | Going to Tehran Speaking at a security conference in Munich, Vice President Biden made headlines by affirming the Obama Administration’s willingness to participate in bilateral talks with Iran, if “the Iranian leadership, Supreme Leader, is serious.” This formulation completely obscures how it is the Obama Administration, not Ayatollah Khamenei, that has not been diplomatically serious. That’s because the Obama Administration remains unwilling to detach itself from the neo-imperial strategy in the Middle East that it inherited from its predecessors... The Wandering Who (Part 7) | YouTube Gilad Atzmon Interviewed by Rinaldo Francesca on September 27th, 2011... The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won’t Tell You About What They’ve Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War | Public Intelligence Blog ...those who take us to war have no clue — nor any moral grasp of their errors — with respect to the human cost of war, the cost to society of war, the cost to the globe entire of war. As my colleague David Swanson never tires of pointing out, war has been made illegal in the USA before, and it SHOULD be illegal. Cf. When the World Outlawed War Countries should not be able to go to war without a national vote... Rogue Elements within US Military: Defense Nominee Hagel had warned Obama, by Steve Watson | Global Research ...The assertion here seems less centered around the concept of ‘new world order’ and more towards the simple notion that the military industrial complex is driving perpetual war for its own ends; not really a major revelation in itself, and more an obvious statement. Nevertheless, Hagel’s comments make for interesting reading. However, there is no reason to believe that Obama, as president, would not already be aware of any form of ‘new world order’, be it rogue elements within the Pentagon or a vast elite shadow government structure, if Chuck Hagel, as a Senator, was aware of it... Israel’s Perpetual Terrorism, by Elias Akleh ...Israel’s unfounded claimed fear of having Syrian chemical weapons in the hands of Hezbollah is a total nonsense and smoke screen in the face. If Syria wanted to transport such weapons to Hezbollah it wouldn’t do it in conspicuous convoys crossing the border. Hezbollah had demonstrated its capability to defeat and deter Israeli aggression using conventional weapons during summer of 2006 and does not need any chemical weapons. Such claims are used as a justification for aggressive interventions on the Syrian borders to relieve pressure on the anti-Syrian terrorist groups... Neither Justice nor Morality, by William A. Cook ...Borowski believed there was no crime a man would not commit to save himself. That belief, salvation for self at the expense of justice, precludes moral virtue. Borowski, a poet and a writer, labored at Auschwitz from 1942 until the liberation of the camps; he was not a homosexual, or a Roma or a Jew; he was an observer of human nature in a place where it was bared to the bone. But if his life there brought him to the realization of the barbarity of humans, devoid of morals, then he also understood what we lost as a result of that void: “There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.”.. Feb 4, 2013 The American Manifest Destiny, by Clive Hambidge | MCW News ...Americans and their European poodles coiffeured red white and blue in American power salons are unlawfully targeting, and killing from afar, suspected militants innocent bystanders, and helpers, labelled “collateral damage,” whilst avoiding more politically toxic body bags containing returning American “heroes” to military bases and more lachrymose wailing from American politicians... Tolerance and Intolerance, by Daniel Mabsout | deLiberation ...while the reputation of tolerance goes to Gandhi and Mandela , the real tolerance is embodied in Hizbullah which is sitting on a ready to explode bomb and not allowing it to explode. Never a party or a faction who had so much sacrificed and offered been so much exposed and attacked and provoked and accused of unbelievable fictitious crimes... Assad's Best Friend Attacks Syria | Roi Tov ...Syria is neither Libya nor Mali. It is not a desert country that can be conquered by NATO overnight. Western generals won't be able to claim that they have defended the democratic will of the Syrian people. Two years after the Syrian Civil War started, Assad still runs the country. The rebels made remarkably little territorial gains; those were limited mainly to areas next to the Turkish and Iraqi borders. In the beginning of 2013, several reports on the rebels violence flooded the media with pictures that left no room for imagination: they are neither democratic nor Syrian. They are rapidly losing the population's support in the areas that they have conquered, though they are still fighting... SHOA LITE (Holocaust Lite) | YouTube Here facing immorality, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance Here is where Israeli colonial settlements continue to expand on our lands. Here is where Israeli elites make billions from injustice while nature and people suffer. Here is the forefront of a global struggle. Here is where western hypocrisy gets exposed. Rhetoric about democracy and liberty in Syria and Iran is stripped naked when people see Western supported colonialism, racism and subjugation in Palestine. Here is where billions of Western taxpayer money is used to destroy life while enriching land thieves and war criminals... Say “no” to the Saudis and their Gulf allies, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis ...The British are putting their soldiers in harm’s way and exposing their population to terrorist attacks fighting an enemy that is backed mainly by their – and the USA’s – key collaborator in the Arab region, Saudi Arabia. This paradoxical relationship is so precious to the British elite that it is prepared to sanction corruption in the UK itself in order to protect the Saudi royal family from embarrassment, as was clear back in 2006 when the then British prime minister, Tony Blair, intervened to stop the Serious Fraud Office investigating allegations that BAE, Britain’s biggest arms company, had paid massive bribes to Saudi princes to win lucrative contracts... How to Play 'Jewnopoly" | deLiberation Jewnopoly is played on many levels, as evidenced by the ZOG owned psyops industry called Hollywood, a land of smoke and shadows that never tires of putting out mind-numbing holocau$t movies,178 to date and that doesn’t include documentaries or endless ‘TalmudVision’ outlets like the ‘Hitler Channel,’ uh, excuse me, the History Channel, which produces endless amounts propaganda, lining up Iran, Mali, Niger, Syria etc. for the next ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign waged by GOYIM troops, fighting and dying to keep Apartheid Israel safe from reality and to keep their brethren at the numerous Federal Reserve type of banks safe, by ensuring that the ZOG banking fronts are filled with gold... So, just how powerful is the Israel lobby in the US? by Rupert Cornwell | The Independent ...Not for nothing did Pat Buchanan once describe Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory” – so much so that an Israeli prime minister at odds with the White House can bypass the President, making his case directly to an Aipac conference or on Capitol Hill. Take Benjamin Netanyahu when he delivered an address to Congress in May 2011. I remember the assembled lawmakers jumping up and down like jack-in-the-boxes to give him 29 standing ovations. Whatever else, Bibi would never have received an acclamation like that in the Knesset... Feb 3, 2013 Syria’s first line of Defense: Dial 133, by Franklin Lamb | Intifada Palestine There are more than 9000 of them. Predominately young but of all ages. Volunteers everyone. Often risking their lives just to come for a twelve hour work-shift, as many as seven days a week at the Syrian Arab Republic Red Crescent Society (SARCS) Emergency Operation center.. It is here where Syrians, some Palestinians and even a few from the region and the West receive training as qualified paramedics... The greatest battle of all time – and why it still matters today for Americans and Russians, by Martin Sieff | Voice of Russia Saturday, February 2 marks a very obscure date for Americans, but one that saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young American boys in World War II: It is the 70th anniversary of the final surrender of German forces at Stalingrad – The decisive battle of World War II... [My favorite Russian folk song, called Katyusha, has a line in the chorus that translates as “never forget that simple girl who stood on the river bank, never forget how she sings.”] Chief Rabbis Election Creates Israeli Tower of Babel | Roi Tov ...A fake society can't create anything but a fake sense of unity; after its incomplete foundation, the State of Israel created the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, which is defined by law as the Halakhic (Jewish law, parallel to Muslim Sharia) authority for the Jewish people in Israel. The institution is in charge of personal status issues, like marriages, divorces, burials, conversion to Judaism and other more esoteric issues like kosher certification. The institution is divided into Ashkenazi and Sephardic sections. This division was imposed by the secular authorities of the State of Israel and is the source of the urban legends abounding on the topic... More on the Gilad Atzmon controversy – and why it matters | Alison Weir I feel I need to briefly take time out to provide information about the Gilad Atzmon controversy, since I feel the attacks on him are enormously unfair, they continue to occasionally interfere with productive efforts, are sometimes used to try to block my presentations (more on this later), and because an important new article on the topic has just come out... Hagel Had no Choice But to Lie, by M.J. Rosenberg | MCW News Like most supporters of Chuck Hagel’s appointment as Secretary of Defense, I was dismayed by his performance at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. He was inarticulate, incoherent, and bumbling. Nonetheless, I completely sympathize with him. As an honest man, lying about his views doesn’t come naturally to him. Unlike John McCain and his other attackers, as well as many of his supporters, Hagel has a real inability to say what he doesn’t mean... [The chicken hawks are going in for the kill] Radical Peace by William T. Hathaway | TrineDay This symphony of voices—a loosely united network of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in Afghanistan, Europe, Iraq, and North America—vividly recounts the actions they have personally taken to end war and create a peaceful society. Frustrated, angered, and even saddened by the juggernaut of aggression that creates more counter-violence at every turn, this assortment of contributors has moved beyond demonstrations and petitions into direct, often radical actions in defiance of the government’s laws to impede its capacity to wage war... The Dark Side of America, by Timothy V. Gatto | MCW News ...Sometimes, the questions are more important than the answers. In this 21st Century, there are so many of our leaders that will give us the answers to any questions we ask, they just aren't the right answers. In fact, they lie continuously. One question I have is why do we support a collection of fundamentalist Islamic States like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE with their Wahhabi and Salafi militant Muslim sects? According to the “official” 9/11 explanation, all of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and were members of the extremist Wahhabi Muslim sect. Just like the majority of al-Qaeda... [Just ask AIPAC, CUFI, the neocons and the rest of what James Petras calls the Zionist Power Configuration] Winds of war, by Adam Keller | Crazy Country ...International Law does not authorize any country (for example, the one called Israel) to regularly send its planes into the airspace of another country so as to gather intelligence. Certainly there is no reference in International Law to the right of a state to set its neighbor "red lines" and forbid it to obtain effective air defenses. But as with regard to building settlements in the West Bank, on this issue, too, successive governments of Israel have created their own peculiar international law which is quite different from that practiced in the rest of the world... Unprecedented War Lobby Attack On Chuck Hagel Appointment | Charles Carlson Chuck Hagel, former Republican Senator from Nebraska, was roasted on a Republican spit in his confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense. Nevertheless, it is quite possible he may be confirmed, if he gets some public support. He is also the target of a national smear campaign on major networks, unprecedented, since he is not running for office but as a presidential appointee. Hagel’s good name is also being smeared on the internet. Those who do not want Hagel to be confirmed by the US Senate have set up an attack website as though it was Hagel’s personal domain... Feb 2, 2013 Ethnic cleansing is 'sexy' by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera English Over the last 13 years, the Taglit-Birthright Israel programme has escorted over 340,000 young Jewish people on 10-day, all-expenses-paid excursions to the Jewish state. During the trip, which costs approximately $3,000 USD per capita - ie five times the annual per capita income of Gaza in 2009 - youth are presented with a thoroughly airbrushed, fantastical version of the country and are encouraged to immigrate... Syria warns Israel of 'surprise' retaliation | MCW News Syria has threatened to retaliate for an Israeli air attack while its ally Iran says there will be repercussions for Israel over the attack. Ali Abdul-Karim Ali, the Syrian ambassador to Lebanon, said in Damascus on Thursday that Syria "has the option and the capacity to surprise in retaliation".. Pathetic: Hagel Offers Himself as Secretary of Israel’s Defense, by Philip Weiss | Information Clearing House ...the most revealing part of the spectacle was watching Hagel stand up to John McCain when McCain said he had been wrong to oppose the Iraq surge in 2007 and the Afghanistan surge in 2009 - and then watching Hagel fold pathetically when Lindsey Graham asked him to condemn Israeli settlements. So: it was alright for Hagel to criticize the U.S. But not alright to criticize Israel... R2P and Genocide Prevention: The Good Intentions That Pave the Road to War, by Diana Johnstone | Counterpunch ...Since the Holocaust has become the most omnipresent historical reference in Western societies, the concept of “genocide” is widely and easily accepted as the greatest evil to afflict the planet. It is felt to be worse than war. Therein lies its immense value to the U.S. military-industrial complex, and to a foreign policy elite seeking an acceptable pretext for military intervention wherever they choose. The obsession with “genocide” as the primary humanitarian issue in the world today relativizes war. It reverses the final judgment of the Nuremberg Trials... [Of course, the genocide perpetrated by Israel and by the US against Iraq et al (at Israel’s bidding) are off the table. It doesn’t count when “we” do it.] Human rights orgs: Israeli obstruction of UN Human Rights Council shields Israel from accountability and undermines human rights, by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss ...Through this uncertainty, Israel and the Council are setting a dangerous precedent on the international stage, one that could be followed by other States refusing to engage with the UN in order to avoid critical appraisals. Israel’s decision to disengage from core mechanisms of the United Nations human rights system has, in effect, resulted in preferential treatment. All but one of the 193 UN Member States have attended their UPR as scheduled... Israeli Election: Fake Democracy, by Dr. Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine To be democratic a country must have a constitution that regulates the government. Since its illegitimate inception Israel had never established a constitution as demanded by the UN in 1948 as a condition for inclusion in the international organization. Israel’s governmental system is guided and shaped by Judaism; an extremist racist theology based on the ideology of Jews, only, as god’s chosen people in god’s promised land where all goyims (non-Jews) are their slaving donkeys, whose sole purpose of life is to serve the Jews who will live as masters, as the Israeli Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef boasted... 5 Broken Cameras, from Rebel Videos | Vimeo A documentary on a Palestinian farmer's chronicle of his nonviolent resistance to the actions of the Israeli army. When his fourth son, Gibreel, is born, Emad, a Palestinian villager, gets his first camera. In his village, Bil'in, a separation barrier is being built and the villagers start to resist this decision. For more than five years, Emad films the struggle, which is lead by two of his best friends, alongside filming how Gibreel grows. Very soon it affects his family and his own life. Daily arrests and night raids scare his family; his friends, brothers and him as well are either shot or arrested. One camera after another is shot at or smashed, each camera tells a part of his story... Megalomaniac vs Monomaniacs in Syria, by Jamal Kanj | Palestine Chronicle ...In 1982, Zionist protagonists commissioned by The World Zionist Organization published “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”. The document states: “The dissolution of Syria… into ethnically or religiously unique area… is Israel’s primary target.” It also stated that breaking up Syria’s military power was “the primary short term target”. Consciously or unintentionally, Al Assad and the opposition are contributing equally to Israel’s 30-year-old vision to destroy the Syrian army and to bring about the fragmentation of Syria... Israel: an entire society gone insane? | The Vineyard of the Saker ...it is undeniable that, on one hand, the Israelis allow themselves to completely and comprehensively ignore both international law and world public opinion while, on the other hand, they also want the entire planet to treat them with some kind of awed admiration and love. Any criticism of them, Jews and/or Israelis, is considered a ultimate in crimethink.. The [antics?] of the past couple of days just add another proof to the immense amount of evidence showing that the entire Israeli society is completely insane... Justice Foreclosed in America: The Exterminators, by Paul Craig Roberts | Counterpunch In the 21st century Americans have experienced an extraordinary collapse in the rule of law and in their constitutional protections. Today American citizens, once a free people protected by law, can be assassinated and detained in prison indefinitely without any evidence being presented to a court of their guilt, and they can be sentenced to prison on the basis of secret testimony by anonymous witnesses not subject to cross examination. The US “justice system” has been transformed by the Bush/Obama regime into the ”justice system” of Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia. There is no difference... The real invasion of Africa is not news and a licence to lie is Hollywood's gift | John Pilger A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media. The invasion has almost nothing to do with "Islamism", and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine... When Truth Tried to Stop War, by Ray McGovern | Consortium News Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war against Iraq on false pretenses. Doing what she could to head off what she considered, correctly, an illegal war of aggression, she printed a copy of the memo and arranged for a friend to give it to the London Observer. “I have always ever followed my conscience,” she said, explaining what drove her to take such a large risk... Woe to the Victor, by Uri Avnery | Palestine Chronicle “Vae victis!” was the Roman cry. Woe to the vanquished. I would alter it slightly: “Vae Victori”, Woe to the victor! The outstanding example is the astounding victory Israel won in June, 1967. After weeks of approaching doom, the Israeli army beat three Arab armies in six days and conquered huge stretches of Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian territory. As it turned out, this was the greatest disaster in our history... Feb 1, 2013 UN fact-finding mission: Israeli settlements violate international law; Governments and companies must must '[terminate] their business interests in the settlements,' by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss A U.N. fact-finding mission into "the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory" has issued a blockbuster report on the Israeli settlement project warning of "creeping annexation" of the occupied territories and making the closest call yet from the U.N. for sanctioning Israel over its violation of Palestinian human rights and international law... Hasbara and the Control of Narrative as an Element of Strategy, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman (USFS, Ret.) | Middle East Policy Council In the brief time available to me as a panelist, I would like to put forward some thoughts about the control of narrative and the manipulation of information as an essential element of modern warfare. The Israelis call this “hasbara.” Since they are without doubt the most skilled contemporary practitioners of the art, it seems appropriate to use the Hebrew word for it. And, since Israel’s most recent war (against the Palestinians in Gaza) sputtered to an end just ten days ago, I’ll cite a few examples from that war to illustrate my main points... Chuck Hagel and Murder in Vietnam. by Nick Turse | Tom Dispatch ...what little fresh space might exist between the Obama I and Obama II years.. has been rapidly closed. Hagel was soon forced to mouth the pieties of present-day Washington, offering an ever friendlier take on Israel and an ever-tougher set of positions on Iran, while assuring everyone in sight that his previous positions had been sorely misunderstood. This should be a healthy reminder that, at least when it comes to war and national security policy, debate in Washington can be fierce and bitter (as over the Benghazi affair), even as what Andrew Bacevich calls “the Washington Rules” ensure that not a genuine new thought, nor a genuinely different position, can be tolerated... Why Palestine Should Take Israel to Court in The Hague, by George Bisharat | NYT Last week, the Palestinian foreign minister, Riad Malki, declared that if Israel persisted in its plans to build settlements in the currently vacant area known as E-1, which lies between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, “we will be going to the I.C.C.,” referring to the International Criminal Court. “We have no choice,” he added... I Love Israeli Ministerial Jazz!!! | Gilad Atzmon Israel’s answer to world music and the European classical tradition... In Mali, Forces Backed by UN, France, and Obama Slaughter Civilians, by Alex Newman | The New American Summary executions and mass human rights abuses targeting innocent civilians in Mali are being perpetrated by soldiers loyal to the dubious Malian regime in a campaign supported by the United Nations, the new socialist French government, and the Obama administration. According to human rights groups and witnesses on the ground, the atrocities are increasing as the number of murdered victims continues to rise — eerily reminiscent of similar tragic interventions in Libya, Syria, and the Ivory Coast... Next Steps Forward for the IAEA and Iran, by Robert Kelley | Arms Control Law The IAEA and Iran’s government have developed a tense working relationship for which both bear blame. On several occasions, Iran has failed to declare nuclear fuel cycle-related activities in a timely way, as it is obliged to do under its agreement with the agency. At best this can be seen as bad faith in the relationship; at worst, deliberate withholding by Iran. Beyond that, however, the IAEA is trying to expand its inspection program in Iran by demanding access to undeclared facilities. These requests are on shaky ground, partly because since Iran has not ratified the Additional Protocol they go well beyond the IAEA’s clear rights and authorities... [International institutions, like most political institutions, are under the control of the rich and powerful. The IAEA is no exception.] Little Israel Banned | Roi Tov "Shiver my timbers!" exclaimed American settler Itamar Marcus in Efrat, near Bethlehem, on January 31, 2013. His organization, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), had just learned that the State of Palestine he lives in, had declared a commercial ban on "Little Israel." PMW studies Palestinian society by monitoring and analyzing its media and schoolbooks; it is closely related to the Israeli government, resembling the activities of "Kalanit," the open media section of IDF's Unit 8200. Considering this, it was surprising that it took them a few days to discover Ahmed Majdalani's public statement on Palestinian television... 17-Point Guide To Anti-Semitism And Its Abuse, by Eli Valley | The Daily Beast Telling the story in images...Cartoon Politics: Rupert Murdoch, The Pro-Israel Lobby And Israel’s Crimes, by David Cromwell | Media Lens A crucial element of pro-Israel political lobbying is the reprehensible smearing of justified criticism of the Israeli state as 'antisemitic'. Thus, a recent cartoon by Gerald Scarfe in the Sunday Times provided a convenient target for outrage. Scarfe had depicted Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, building a wall that encased the bodies of Palestinians depicted in various states of agony. The mortar was blood-red and the caption said: 'Israeli elections: Will cementing peace continue?'.. Israel Produces A Film Replacing Al-Aqsa Mosque With Temple, by Saed Bannoura | International Middle East Media Center In a film that was produced by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and was banned from being officially published, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, is seen standing and speaking in various areas of Jerusalem, including in front of the Dome Of The Rock, where in the film, it disappears and is replaced by Jewish temple... The curious case of David Ward's scalp, by Stuart Littlewood | Sabbah Report ...If you call yourself “the Jewish State” (even though it’s really a Zionist state), and tell everybody it’s the “Jewish Homeland” and hide behind the Jewish faith, your crimes will inevitably reflect badly on ‘the Jews’, or Jewish people generally. So how is this new language rule going to work? In what circumstances, exactly, mustn’t David Ward or other Liberal Democrats use that dreaded phrase ‘the Jews’?.. Drone Reality: When Will We Realize That It Is Murder? by Tom McNamara | Counterpunch ...all this talk of killed children is surely a moot point, isn’t it? The US government, once more, assures us that drones are used in a responsible manner, and therefore, rarely kill civilians, let alone children. Unfortunately, a study by the Brookings Institute leads us to believe the contrary. It argues that for every “insurgent” killed, there are, on average, 10 civilians killed as well. And the New American Foundation has found that the US government has the habit of repeatedly underreported the number of civilians killed and wounded in drone attacks... [Includes a great shot of the Wicked Witch of the West] UNHRC condemns Israel, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance ..Israel attacked Syria in violations of the UN charter and this will seems intended to provoke a war. Israel also did not show up at a mandatory review of its human rights record in front of the UN Human Rights Council. All 193 U.N.-member nations are required to submit to such a review every four years, and council diplomats said they worried that if nation were let off the hook that could undermine the process. Israel was the first country to do so in the history of the council setting a precedent that is very dangerous... The Ominous U.S. Presence in Northwest Africa, by Sheldon Richman | The Future of Freedom Foundation Ominously but unsurprisingly, the U.S. military’s Africa Command wants to increase its footprint in northwest Africa. What began as low-profile assistance to France’s campaign to wrest control of northern Mali (a former colony) from unwelcome jihadists could end up becoming something more. The Washington Post reports that Africom “is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa [probably Niger] so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.”.. It's still inequality, stupid, by Pepe Escobar | Al Jazeera English So what came out of the supposed Masters of the Universe - in government, business, the economy, technology - discussing "Resilient Dynamism" at the World Economic Forum in Davos? Not much - apart from the title of the address by the head of the IMF, the metronomic yet sartorially irreproachable Christine Lagarde.. Another way of seeing it is the whopping $10 trillion China and India will be consuming by 2020, with both their middle classes, in ten years, reaching 1 billion people, and surging from 28 percent to 50 percent of the global middle class... U.S. Purchases Fuel for Afghanistan, Possibly Undermines Own Iran Oil Sanctions | Time America’s attempts to cripple Iran through economic sanctions may have been undermined by, you guessed it, America. Yesterday SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, released a report showing that the U.S. spent nearly $1.1 billion to import fuel for Afghanistan’s National Army (ANA) between 2007 and 2012. Where the fuel came from is anyone’s guess... [Gotta love it] |
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