In 1964, Israel completed the construction of the National Water Carrier, begun in 1953. This enormous water project, a network of pipelines, pumping stations, reservoirs and canals extending from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev, diverts 75 percent of the waters of the Jordan River to Israel. While Syria and Jordan are allowed to use 160 mcm per year and 320 mcm per year respectively, Palestinians are prohibited from using any water from the Jordan River...

 

  Report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem...

 

...Were al the crimes against humanity committed during World War II the work of Hitler's underlings? That was certainly the impression created by the fact that only Germans were brought to trial at Nüremburg. Alas! It is a false impression. We all nolw know that in the terrible struggle waged between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht, the Russians displayed their fair share of insensate inhumanity. What is less widely recognized -- because the truth, until only recently, has been deliberately suppressed -- is that the Western democracies were responsible for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed in the whole course of World War II...

 

 

  During one of the first violent clashes in Italy's student unrest of 1968, often known as "The Battle of Valle Giulia", the famous Italian film director and marxist Pier Paolo Pasolini surprised everyone when he sympathised with the wounded policemen. But his logic is not to be dismissed: Pasolini stressed the fact that most of the young people belonged to the middle and upper classes, while the policemen were "children of the poor", mainly recruited from the impoverished regions of southern Italy...

 

  The NY Times is spinning the recent IMF report on Iran in order to portray the sanctions on Iran has having forced Iran to negotiations, one aspect of a recent "frame" that is being built around the nuclear talks by the US mainstream media which seeks to portray the Iranians as the intransigent party seeking nukes, never mind that it was the US that had blocked talks and killed off compromises even under Obama...

 

  The latest tensions between the EU and Russia over Greenpeace's stunt in the Arctic only confirmed a fact which nobody really bothers denying anymore: Western political and financial elites absolutely hate Vladimir Putin and they are appalled at Russia's behavior, both inside Russia and on the international scene.  This tension was quite visible on the faces of Obama and Putin at the G8 summit in Lough Erne where both leaders looked absolutely disgusted with each other.  Things got even worse when Putin did something quite unheard of in the Russian diplomatic history: he publicly  said that Kerry was dishonest and even called him a liar...

 

  In a number of my articles I have explained that the Soviet Union served as a constraint on US power. The Soviet collapse unleashed the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony. Russia under Putin, China, and Iran are the only constraints on the neoconservative agenda...

 

  International, regional and internal players vying for interests, wealth, power or influence are all beneficiaries of the “al-Qaeda threat” in Iraq and in spite of their deadly and bloody competitions they agree only on two denominators, namely that the presence of the U.S.-installed and Iran–supported sectarian government in Baghdad and its sectarian al-Qaeda antithesis are the necessary casus belli for their proxy wars, which are tearing apart the social fabric of the Iraqi society, disintegrating the national unity of Iraq and bleeding its population to the last Iraqi. The Iraqi people seem a passive player, paying in their blood for all this Machiavellian dirty politics...

 

  “When they first put the electricity on me, I gasped; my body went rigid and the bag came off my head,” Israa Salah, a detained Iraqi woman told Human Rights Watch (HRW) in her heartrending testimony. Israa (not her real name) was arrested by US and Iraqi forces in 2010. She was tortured to the point of cUltra-Orthodox Defeat Zionist Conscription Law | Roi Tovonfessing to terrorist charges she didn’t commit. According to HRW’s “No One is Safe” – a 105-page report released on Feb 06 – there are thousands of Iraqi women in jail being subjected to similar practices, held with no charges, beaten and raped...

 

  A memorandum titled “Save Ukraine!” was published on February 12.. the statement defines a “fascist and Nazi creeping coup” in Ukraine as a strategic threat to the Russian Federation. While holding the United States and the EU responsible for the regime-change project in Ukraine, the memorandum calls for summoning the USA to crisis-avoidance consultations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Ukraine’s sovereignty or, if Budapest Memorandum signers Ukraine or Britain refuse such a conference, undertaking emergency Russian-American diplomacy based on the precedent of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis—when the world went to the brink of nuclear war...

 

  "Deer of the Almond Tree" is the unlikely name of the Member of Knesset chosen by PM Netanyahu to chair the Committee for Sharing the Burden. Ayelet Shaked heads the committee preparing the Conscription Law. A secular member of The Jewish Home, MK Shaked is a key figure in the shaping of the law that will define how Ultra-Orthodox Jews will serve in the secular-Zionist Army...

 

  No Boeing 767 airliners hit the Twin Towers as fraudulently alleged by the government, media, NIST and its contractors. Such crashes did not occur because they are physically impossible as depicted for the following reasons:..

 

  Ethnic cleansing enthusiast Alan Dershowitz is unhappy with the current BDS efforts (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel).  Earlier today Haaretz published Dershowitz’ diatribe on the BDS. For the first time, I have to admit, I agree with the elder Zionist mouthpiece...

 

..Reporters Without Borders docks the United States 14 places versus last year — from 32nd to 46th worldwide — in its 2014 World Press Freedom Index. Citing the Obama administration’s abuse of the Espionage Act to harass journalists and sources, the imprisonment of US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, threats of arrest and even assassination of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, harassment of journalists assisting him in informing the public and a threatened 105 years in prison for journalist Barrett Brown for posting a link on a web site, RWB designates the US one of two “New World giant setting a bad example” (the other is Brazil)...

 

  The movement to end the Surveillance State is finally getting serious. With the failure by Congress to rein in the NSA – although the heroic Rep. Justin Amash nearly succeeded in doing so – activists on the state level are mounting a campaign that promises to hit Big Brother where it really hurts – by cutting off the NSA’s water supply at its Bluffdale, Utah, Data Center. A bill introduced in the Utah legislature by state representative Marc Roberts (R-Santaquin) would cut off the water supply to the NSA’s massive facility which will gobble up 1.7 million gallons of water per day – in a state already hit hard by a region-wide drought...

 

...U.S. foreign policy is actually much worse. It is aggressive, reckless, belligerent, and meddling. It sanctions the destabilization and overthrow of governments, the assassination of leaders, the destruction of industry and infrastructure, the backing of military coups, death squads, and drug traffickers, and imperialism under the guise of humanitarianism. It supports corrupt and tyrannical governments and brutal sanctions and embargoes. It results in discord, strife, hatred, and terrorism toward the United States. The question, then, is simply this: Can U.S. foreign policy be fixed?..

 

  Australian-American former Ambassador Martin Indyk is the lead negotiator for Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative. He heads a nearly all-Jewish American negotiating team, including David Makovsky, a “mapping expert” from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spin-off Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Indyk is currently briefing an array of Jewish leaders in the US about his plans while keeping them secret from everyone else. Scott McConnell has observed that the Israelis are characteristically screaming about being forced into an agreement even though they will get nearly everything they want...

 

 

  Vladimir gives us an excellent update on America's expansion of our Neo-Gunboat foreign policy toward China. Grass roots Americans have been completely cut out of any public input into a shift that is committing the country to aggression in another hemisphere, including any risk analysis. Congress seems totally in the bag on the shift for the Navy and defense contracts that our military industrial complex wisely spread out over as many Congressional districts as possible...

 

...not only are the Palestinians dispossessed but any meaningful discussion of redressing this issue is obscured by a very basic twisting, not just of facts, but torturing the map as well. There are so many maps, no two the same and new ones created every day, each making meaningful negotiations of a settlement that could bring a broad peace to the Middle East impossible. Perhaps this is and has been the goal all along.  After all, war has made so many so much, oil prices pushed up, oil speculators grown rich, western economies collapsed and the arms trade gone wild, a trade where Israel excels...

  I never thought I would see it. A mainstream TV programme, this one made by Australian channel ABC, that shows the occupation in all its inhuman horror. The 45-minute investigative film concerns the Israeli army’s mistreatment of Palestinian children. Along the way, it provides absolutely devastating evidence that the children’s abuse is not some unfortunate byproduct of the occupation but the cornerstone of Israel’s system of control and its related need to destroy the fabric of Palestinian society...

 

  Forty-two years late, another Israeli war crime emerges from the shadows. In this case, dozens, and more probably hundreds, of Israeli soldiers kept a decades-long vow of secrecy. One of them is Shlomo Gazit, today a respected (in Israel, at least) academic at Tel Aviv University. In January 1972, Ariel Sharon decided that 3,000 Bedouin were in the way of a massive military exercise he wanted to conduct in the southern Negev and northern Sinai. So he summarily expelled two tribes in the el-Arish area of the Sinai from their homes, during a deep winter spell. At least 40 people died, mostly babies, children and the elderly...

 

  Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank blocks a pregnant woman at medical risk from taking the quick route to a hospital in East Jerusalem, even though she is accompanying her Israeli husband in their Israeli car, because it would entail going through a checkpoint that “isn’t meant for Palestinians..”

 

  “Arabs are blight, a devil, a disaster, donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn’t create them to walk on all fours. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean..”

 

  Rabbis Threaten Kerry with 'Divine Wrath' - A group called Rabbis from the Committee to Save the Land and People of Israel sent a letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry this Sunday, warning him to end his "antagonism" towards Israel...

 

  Jerusalem's planning committee forged ahead with plans to build a nine-story Jewish seminary in the heart of a densely-populated Palestinian neighbourhood near the Old City...

 

 

  Strikingly, today, February 11, is both the anniversary of the victory of the 1979 Iranian Revolution over the U.S.-installed Shah and anniversary of the 2011 overthrow of longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (another American puppet)—surely the high point of what so many came to call the “Arab Awakening” or “Arab Spring.”.. in their approach to Egypt’s (now aborted) revolution and other manifestations of the Arab Awakening, Washington elites seem to have learned nothing from their predecessors’ destructive and counter-productive response to the Iranian revolution...

 

  A rather weird OpEd in the New York Times argues for a military "responsibility-to-protect" intervention to provide "human corridors" to allegedly starving Syrians:.. So if Russia and China block a Security Council resolution there must be an R2P Security Council resolution which Russia and China would block making any further action obviously illegal. Then some countries could illegally use military forces to help the non-existing "democratically oriented rebel groups" to provide whatever...

 

  Intertwined Jewish power families are an important aspect of Jewish history, cementing business relationships by creating networks of close relatives who married only among themselves—e.g., the Court Jews of 17th- and 18th-century Europe. We see echoes of that in the contemporary world, as among the neocons.. Ethnic networking and ties cemented by marriage are on display in the flap over Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine...

 

...If private efforts to restrain Israel's injustices through academic boycott are now regarded by our government as violating some legal right of Israel to academic privilege, the next step is easy to see. It will be to criminalize those unflattering "anti-Semitic" words that cause even more discomfort to Israel.  Such legislation may even describe critics of Israel as seditionists, undermining the joint U.S./Israel "war on terror."  Such words of criticism might, in fact, by their cutting penetrating truth have much more power to damage Israel than academic boycotts.  Legislation following passage of H.R. 4009 could well be patterned after ADL-inspired hate crimes laws already on the books in many nations...

 

...Cold War strategy was filled with oxymorons like "limited nuclear war," but the backpack nuke was perhaps the most darkly comic manifestation of an age struggling to deal with the all-too-real prospect of Armageddon. The

SADM was a case of life imitating satire. After all, much like Slim Pickens in the iconic finale of "Dr. Strangelove," American soldiers would strap on atomic bombs and jump out of airplanes as part of the opening act of World War III...

 

  Did President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz lie while speaking at the Knesset on February 12, 2014? He spoke in German and I am translating the Hebrew translation. I apologize for any minor differences. The text is simple: "Palestinians are awarded 17 liter of water per day while Israelis get 70 liter," and "Israel has placed a siege on Gaza.."

 

  Americans seem to believe that once the U.S. military exits a foreign country, its moral accountability ends. But the deadly consequences — and culpability — continue long after the last soldier leaves. Take Iraq, which the U.S. military left at the end of 2011 (though not before President Obama pleaded with the Iraqi government to let some American forces remain). Violence is flaring in Iraq, as Sunni Muslims, fed up with the oppressive, corrupt, U.S.-installed and Iran-leaning Shi’a government, have mounted new resistance...

 

  Obama heads an administration Murder, Inc. agenda. He appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. He targets anyone, anywhere for any reason or none at all. US citizens are vulnerable like foreign nationals. Murdering them in cold blood is one Obama signature away. Drones are his weapon of choice. They're instruments of state terror...
Read more...

 

  Why has it ever even bothered me that many thousands of people have been kidnapped and illegally rendered to CIA dark sites to be sometimes tortured to death or held for many years without any legitimate legal process? That the use of “intelligence” information obtained from torture, well known to be mostly unreliable and useless, is now the norm for the supposedly civilized western nations of the world?..

 

  When I saw the headline “McCain explodes at Syrian Christians” my first thought was: This must be the first time a sitting United States Senator has conducted a suicide bombing. Then I read the article. It turns out the explosion was metaphorical. McCain had a tantrum because he didn’t like the Syrian Christians’ message: “Please, America, stop arming the takfiris who are killing us!” I guess that’s better than blowing the room to kingdom come. Though I wouldn’t put that past him either...

 

  In the first century, Christ cast the moneylenders out of the Temple, but they gradually arose again during the thirteenth century, which created economic panic among the peasants. For example, the French town of Villefrance wrote to King Philip IV in the thirteenth century, saying that moneylenders “are absolutely and utterly destroying the town and district.” The moneylenders throughout the Middle Ages were involved in exploiting the peasants, and thus were hated...

 

  Islamic fundamentalists in Syria have started to destroy archaeological treasures such as Byzantine mosaics and Greek and Roman statues because their portrayal of human beings is contrary to their religious beliefs. The systematic destruction of antiquities may be the worst disaster to ancient monuments since the Taliban in Afghanistan dynamited the giant statues of Buddha at Bamiyan in 2001 for similar ideological reasons...

 

..In a cautionary tale for terrorist teachers — and a cause of dark humour for ordinary Iraqis — a commander at a secluded terrorist training camp north of Baghdad unwittingly used a belt packed with explosives while conducting a demonstration early Monday for a group of militants, killing himself and 21 other members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, army and police officials said.. “This is God sending a message to the bad people and the criminals in the world, to tell them to stop the injustice and to bring peace. Evil will not win in the end. It’s always life that wins over death.”

...the elite consensus is that Egypt and Syria are not the only countries Washington has to worry about, although they are among the most pressing problems at the moment. This grim situation means the United States has a lot of social engineering to carry out, leaving it no choice but to pursue an interventionist foreign policy. In other words, it must pursue a policy of global domination if it hopes to make the world safe for America. This perspective is influential, widespread—and wrong...

 

  When Walt and Mearsheimer published their paper on the Israel lobby eight years ago, one of its openings was that two prestige scholars were willing to risk the anti-Semite smear. They surely knew the label might be applied to them, still they went ahead with their ideas, which now seem so tame (the lobby has a stranglehold on Congress, the lobby pushed for a war); and they were duly tarred as anti-Semites by some fairly august claimants. One of the victories of the last year in the discourse is that both political scientists are still on the case, and would seem to have a more respectable following than ever, with Obama reflecting their thinking on Syria...

 

  This thoughtful, humanist work of scholarship deserves to be much more widely read. This is not only about the the history of Russia a hundred year ago, but it is really about the history of the Western world, and more poignantly, the world we live in now – to be even more specific, look at the thoroughly Zionist dominated United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, the other NATO countries, the entire Western world. A word to the wise is sufficient, but the rest of us need a little more to chew on [Editor]...

 

  No more than an hour after the World Trade Center Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001, Israel’s leaders initiated a coordinated campaign to blame their enemies for the attacks. Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, appeared live in studio at the BBC on 9/11, wherein he described his desire for the United States and other major powers to lead a global campaign of annihilation against the Arab/Muslim world. “[T]his is the time to deploy a globally concerted effort led by the United States, UK, Europe and Russia, against all sources of terror,” the Israeli war criminal stated. Dubbing this campaign a “global war on terror..”

 

  He was a prolific writer, celebrated author of various novels and other works of fiction. He was the top Soviet propagandist during the Second World War. He was a notorious liar and a pathological monster. He was a Jew.  As a leading member of the Soviet-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Ilya Ehrenburg appeared at fund-raising rallies in the United States, raising support for the Communist cause while displaying fake bars of soap allegedly manufactured by the Germans from the corpses of dead Jews. But Ehrenburg was perhaps most notorious for his viciously anti-German hate propaganda in World War II. In it, he exhorted Soviet troops to kill all Germans they encountered without pity...
Read more...

 

  “The U.S. worked hard to create the American dream of opportunity. But today, that dream is a myth.” ~ Economist Joseph Stiglitz, Financial Times. If you follow the financial news, you already know that the American people are on an epic downer...

 

...Detroit emblems the America of our time, or rather, is the living carcass of what America has done to itself, and by extension, the world at large. The mental-set is conquest, hegemony, waste, sterilized killing (as in drone “pilots” sitting 8,000 miles away pulling death-wielding levers in comfort), and, in the name of counterterrorism, perpetrating soft-glove terrorism on the American people via massive surveillance. In such a context, from every which way, the negation of social democratization, how expect any just solution to Detroit’s problems, and the Detroits down the line possibly awaiting the same fate?..

 

  Beating up on Iran is longstanding US policy. It's a prime target of choice. Washington deplores independent governments. It wants pro-Western ones replacing them. It doesn't care if they're democratic, despotic or anything in between. Subservience to Washington alone matters. AIPAC wants Iran isolated. So do congressional hawks. Most House and Senate members oppose rapprochement...

 

  In the latest offensive of Israeli ministers against  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, worldwide  attention was given to the words of Yuval Steinitz,  the man who came down from the ivory tower of the Haifa University  Philosophy Department and is at the moment the ‘Minister of Strategic and Intelligence Affairs’. " It is unacceptable to force Israel to negotiate with a gun to the head, with the Palestinians hearing that in case of failure of the talks The State of Israel would be hit by an international boycott.."

 

  Iran's supreme leader has said the US would overthrow the Iranian government if it could, adding that the country had a "controlling and meddlesome" attitude towards the Islamic Republic.. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the US is fundamentally Iran's enemy, even as he defended his country's ongoing talks to settle a decade-old dispute about the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme. "American officials publicly say they do not seek regime change in Iran," Khamenei told army officers in Tehran. "That's a lie. They would not hesitate a moment if they could do it.."

 

  An Iranian naval officer said a number of warships had been ordered to approach U.S. maritime borders as a response to the stationing of U.S. vessels in the Gulf, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Saturday. "Iran's military fleet is approaching the United States' maritime borders, and this move has a message," the agency quoted Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad as saying...

 

  Hundreds of Israeli forces have raided Ein Hijleh village in the Jordan Valley and evicted all its residents violently around 1:30 am and declared the village a closed military zone.  And it is estimated that between 200-250 Palestinians were in the village at the time of eviction. 35 Palestinians were injured and taken to Jericho hospital after the eviction. At the time of the raid Israeli forces fired large amounts of sound bombs to scatter the crowd that gather at the center of the village.. Israeli forces have attacked the residents of Ein Hijleh by beating them up, kicking them and pushing them to the ground and into the fire...

 

  Like Putin in 2014, Hitler in 1936 wanted to show off. The only difference was that unlike Putin, Hitler had something to show off about. By 1936, after just three years in power Hitler and the National Socialists had worked wonders. Class conflict had been replaced by class co-operation. (Now where were those millions of Marxist voters? They couldn't all have been locked up in Dachau.)..

https://sites.google.com/site/onedemocraticstatesite/Home/a-collection-of-thought-provoking-quotes

 

...Today he was a pizza-delivery man. Tomorrow he may deliver coffee and cakes; yesterday he had delivered Chinese food. Who would have thought that when choosing to become an assassin, he had sealed his fate to become an expert in fast food packaging? At least it was a stable government job. It transformed him into an invisible man. Nobody noticed him; nobody expected him, not even his targets. He saw the car. In a move practiced until he could perform it blindfolded, he performed a fast zigzag and, walla!, he was next to Alperon. Inconspicuously he attached the bomb to the car and sped away. No passerby suspected what had happened. Five seconds to the explosion...

 

  Andrew Jackson was probably one of the most intrepid men of his era to vigorously oppose a privately-owned central bank because he foresaw that eventually usurers would end up cheating the common people. Jackson knew that fractional reserve banking was a sophisticated way of cheating that always ends up killing the economy. In order to restore the economy, Jackson reasoned that he had to kill usurious bankers...

 

  By now it's obvious to all. AIPAC is in serious trouble. It thought it could, at the very least, get its Iran sanctions bill to the President's desk. Then he would veto it and, no matter whether his veto was sustained or not, AIPAC could force Democrats to choose between Obama or Netanyahu. (Republicans, obviously, would choose Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-Un over Obama, let alone their beloved Bibi). And, if everything broke their way, the Iranians would be so offended by the Congressional action that they would quit the negotiations. And war with Iran would be back on the table...

 

  Earlier this week, a bill was hastily removed from the agenda of the New York State Assembly. The bill was designed as a response to the American Studies Association’s decision to boycott Israeli educational institutions.. Now the US Congress is getting into the act.. The bill introduced by Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) relates only to academic boycotts against Israel. Where the state bills proscribed penalties, including a reduction of funding against any institution that participated in an association that called for a boycott and even prohibited reimbursing faculty for travel expenses to attend conferences by such groups, the congressional one threatens to cut off all funding.. “

 

Surviving anti-Semitism smear, Walt and Mearsheimer seem to have influence in high places, by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss

  When Walt and Mearsheimer published their paper on the Israel lobby eight years ago, one of its openings was that two prestige scholars were willing to risk the anti-Semite smear. They surely knew the label might be applied to them, still they went ahead with their ideas, which now seem so tame (the lobby has a stranglehold on Congress, the lobby pushed for a war); and they were duly tarred as anti-Semites by some fairly august claimants. One of the victories of the last year in the discourse is that both political scientists are still on the case, and would seem to have a more respectable following than ever, with Obama reflecting their thinking on Syria...

 

...A woman who sounds like Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland was caught on tape talking to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt about cutting deals in internal Ukrainian politics, with Nuland appearing to favor one opposition leader over another. Nuland is also heard to say “fuck the EU” on the call...

 

  While the authenticity of a YouTube recording of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland on a call to the US ambassador isn't confirmed, it sure sounds convincing.. However, the White House is blaming the Russians for the leak, which probably tells you that it's the real deal. If not, it's an amazing piece of mimicry of how senior US diplomats speak in private. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki called the leak "a new low in Russian tradecraft" on Thursday afternoon and said "I didn't say it was inauthentic" when asked to confirm if the tape was legitimate. A "new low?" From a Russian perspective, assuming they did it, it was brilliant...

 

  In his annual State of the Union speech in the U.S. Congress President Obama said «In Ukraine, we stand for the principle that all people have the right to express themselves freely and peacefully, and to have a say in their country's future». The US urges Ukraine not to clamp down on peaceful protests. The officials deliberately use the word peaceful perfectly realizing any resemblance to anything «peaceful» is no more. The protests ceased to be peaceful a long time ago, especially since January 19 turning extremely violent with extremists getting a free hand in broad daylight...

 

..Could it be that with all the intercepts that the Russians must have they are going to break the golden rule of not putting them out, because then everybody might start doing it? AIPAC and the Israelis must be shaking in their boots tonight...

 

  Moscow and Beijing condemn any attempts at external interference in the situation in Ukraine, the Russian president's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "Both parties have emphasized the unacceptability of any interference from the outside in what is happening and a very serious condemnation of such interference has been voiced," Peskov told reporters following the talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping...

 

  The title might seem facetious; it is anything but.. Further research into the little-known Potomac Institute has uncovered a major find. As noted earlier, the Potomac group is reportedly tied to the powerful Washington Israeli Likud lobby linked to Netanyahu as well as to Saudi Arabian intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, nicknamed “Bandar Bush” for his close ties to the Bush family when he was Washington Ambassador. Now it turns out that a former senior Bush official runs a very secretive and very, very powerful group from his post at the Potomac Institute...

 

  A captured member of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has revealed that the ISIL and other militant groups in Syria not only are supported by a member of the Saudi royal family but the individual actually heads the ISIL. In a video admission, the member of the ISIL said the radical group actually is led by Prince Adbul Rahman al-Faisal, the son of the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and the brother of the current Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal...

 

  David Cronin’s book Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War is based on his years as a journalist in Brussels looking at the way in which the European Union’s institutions really work. I also spent thirteen years in Brussels, working at the European Parliament and, before that, five years working as an advisor to the late Tom Megahy, an EU-critical left Labour Euro-MP, back in the North of England. Cronin and I have come to very much the same conclusions...

 

  Thirty-three Israel Defense Force soldiers committed suicide since the beginning of 2005, the chief of the IDF manpower headquarters, Brigadier-General Avi Zimer, told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Wednesday.. soldiers in rear units will be prohibited to carry weapons while on leave. These steps join other measures taken by the IDF on the matter, including reducing the number of weapons in soldiers' hands when there is a fear the guns will be used to end their own lives. The IDF has also worked to increase commanders' awareness of the necessity of caring for soldiers' mental distress...

 

...the allegations of sexual abuse currently being made against him [Woody Allen] are the same ones made over ten years ago by his angry ex-wife, Mia Farrow, and her impressionable young daughter during a hotly contested divorce case. And they were found by a New York Court to be inadequate to warrant further investigation, which in street speak is to say they were baseless and likely lies, even if Farrow's money carried less clout in a New York court than Allen's. The new and unchanged allegations against Allen are noteworthy only in their being little different in tone and quality from so many false accusations made over the past thirty years against men by young females...

 

  This year’s Oscar nominations are stirring angst in certain corners of the Internet, because of something that looks suspiciously like a new trend: movies about Jewish con men. Granted, it’s just a couple of movies. Hollywood makes all kinds. Everyone knows they’re fake. That’s why it’s called the Dream Factory. Sure, some movies try to talk seriously about big issues. But not the movies we’re discussing...

 

  Al-Aqsa Mosque also known as Al-Aqsa and Bayt al-Muqaddas, is the third holiest site in Islam and is located in the Occupied Old City of Jerusalem. It's been under continuous threat to be demolished and erased by the Zionist Israeli thugs under the protection of the Israeli Occupation Forces...

 

  Without freedom of movement, one becomes a slave of those denying travel. Without freedom of occupation, one becomes a slave of those denying choices. Without choices there is no freedom; those who restrict freedom are enslavers and thus illegitimate, even if they are civil servants of a recognized administration. Enslaving states are illegitimate...

 

  Richie talks to Gilad Atzman on Israeli troops patrolling borders...

 

  Sabeel Colorado co-sponsored this bus ad, now running in Denver. If you will do the same in your city, we will match your funds...

 

  What’s wrong about the demand that the Palestinian leadership recognize Israel as the “Nation State of the Jewish People”? Well, practically everything. States recognize each other. They don't have to recognize each other's ideological character. A state is a reality. Ideologies belong to the abstract realm.. The less flattering explanation is that he really believes in it, that he is driven by some deeply rooted national inferiority complex that needs outside assurance of “legitimacy”. Recognizing the “National State of the Jewish People” means accepting the entire Zionist narrative, lock, stock and barrel, starting from the divine promise to Abraham to this very day...

 

  Western journalists have been in the business of dismissing Russian achievements and magnifying Russian failures ever since Putin drove them into a collective derangement syndrome – he even haunts their dreams, as recently revealed by the Guardian’s Shaun Walker – so the preemptive besmirching of the Sochi Olympics can’t have surprised anyone. What is startling, though, is the unusually low competence of the effort, even by the standards of these people that are sarcastically referred to as ”democratic journalists” in Russia...

 

  One week ago, some 300 Palestinian activists established the protest village of ‘Ein Hijleh’ in a cluster of palm trees and long-abandoned houses north of the Dead Sea. Their goal was to protest Israeli government demands to retain control of the Jordan Valley as part of a U.S.-brokered peace deal. One week later, their encampment was forcibly evicted by Israeli forces in the early morning hours...

 

  Yesterday as I sat in the Old Assembly Hall of our Parliament, I experienced the South Africa I am proud of. We, members of the civil society proposed actions in solidarity with Palestine, Western Sahara and Cuba. People from all walks of life debated in the packed hall. But in the end (with the exception of four votes against the proposal) the Cape Town Declaration was overwhelmingly accepted...

 

...the new sanctions bill was not a Republican bill. It was an AIPAC bill. AIPAC wrote it and asked the senators closest to it to introduce it for them.  AIPAC is the only U.S. interest group opposed to Obama's negotiations with Iran.. Senator Menendez (owned jointly by the Israel lobby and the right-wing Cuba lobby) and Kirk (he has operated like an AIPAC staffer since his own days as a Congressional staffer) don't originate legislation or strategy related to Israel (including Iran). AIPAC does it for them. That is how it works...

 

  Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper has released a report revealing that the Foreign Ministry has acknowledged its inability to face the growing boycott campaign despite resorting to all political and judicial means, which have been ineffective, especially against private companies.. "It would be useless to launch an anti-boycott campaign to promote settlement products," said a ministry official. Israel has been able to curb several boycott initiatives, said the report. Even in unfriendly countries, the boycott has not been made law yet; however it is likely that some politicians will push this "due to the sweeping wave of hostility" towards Israel...

 

  There was little notice last week when the New York State Senate took up legislation to prohibit state aid from flowing to academic groups that boycott Israel.  It passed quietly–and overwhelmingly.  But when the same legislation started making its way through the New York Assembly, activists sprung into action–and have stopped it from advancing, at least for now...

 

  A top American Jewish leader on Thursday called on Western governments to combat the growing international campaign to boycott Israel over its settlement activities, saying the phenomenon is one of the greatest challenges facing Israel. Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told The Associated Press that the drive masks a "politically correct" form of anti-Semitism and urged "zero tolerance" of the boycott...

 

  I’d like to share, especially with American readers, a great moment in the British parliament on 5 February when the MP for Gorton, Manchester, Sir Gerald Kaufman rose to speak in a debate on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Here is what he said word for word so that you get the full flavour:.. “If the spineless Obama will not do it, we must do it – even unilaterally..”

 

  There is growing nervousness in Israel at the tide gathering pace in favour of sanctions against the apartheid state. “After several years, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) seems to be gaining strength,” the Media Line news website states.. “there is a growing sense of uneasiness in Israel that BDS will spread”, so much so that the Israeli cabinet is expected to discuss the issue for the first time next week”.. Palestinians say they see the success of the BDS movement as proof that non-violence can achieve their goals...

 

  A new study guide published by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and compiled by its Israel/Palestine Mission Network has turned a critical eye on the Zionist ideology behind the Israeli policies the divestment measure aims to challenge...

 

  The BDS movement and its attack on SodaStream and Scarlett Johansson have been much in the news. The BDS movement aims at ending the occupation, the settlements, Israeli discrimination against Palestinian Arabs, and Israel’s long-continuing exclusion from return to its territory of the Palestinians expelled and/or exiled by Israeli forces from that territory in the 1948 war...

 

  A senior Kremlin aide accused the United States on Thursday of arming Ukrainian "rebels" and, urging the Kiev government to put down what it called an attempted coup, warned it could intervene to maintain the security of its ex-Soviet neighbor...

 

  When Western intelligence agencies began in the early 1990s to intercept telexes from an Iranian university to foreign high technology firms, intelligence analysts believed they saw the first signs of military involvement in Iran’s nuclear program. That suspicion led to U.S. intelligence assessments over the next decade that Iran was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.. But the interpretation of the intercepted telexes on which later assessments were based turned out to have been a fundamental error...

 

  As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hurried to his helicopter ready to take off at the end of a visit to Iraq last year, it was becoming clearer that the Americans have lost control of a country they wished to mold to their liking...

 

  The control freaks in Washington think that only the decisions that Washington makes and imposes on other sovereign countries are democratic. No other country on earth is capable of making a democratic decision. The world has witnessed this American self- righteousness for eons as Washington overthrows one democratic government after the other and imposes its puppet, as Washington did in Iran in 1953 when the CIA, as it now admits, and as Ervand Abrahamian proves in his book The Coup, overthrew the elected government of Mossadeq, and more recently the elected government of Honduras and many governments in between...

 

...As children grow, they need iodine to enable proper brain development.  According to a UNICEF/GAIN report, “iodine deficiency is the most prevalent cause of brain damage worldwide. The sums of money required to fund delivery of iodine and fortified foods to malnourished Afghan children should be compared, I believe, to the sums of money that the Pentagon’s insatiable appetite for war-making has required of U.S. people. The price tag for supplying iodized salt to one child for one year is 5 cents...

 

  In a new interview broadcast today on CNN, Secretary of State John Kerry revealed that he has put France “on notice,” threatening sanctions against the nation over possible business contacts with Iran.. Ironically France was the last holdout on the P5+1 deal, citing Israeli opposition to any deal with Iran as their reason. It may be difficult for the Kerry to follow through with real sanctions on France, and companies may be willing to call America’s bluff...

 

  Camelia Entekhabifard, a person of no doubt very high morals and sense of outrage and indignation at human rights abuses etc etc etc, has yet again published an article in the Huffpo proclaiming that "the mullahs" have failed to improve the living standards of Iranians as they promised. Where's the free electricity we were promised! But here's the reality: Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranians are living longer, better, healthier lives than ever, according to the UNDP...

 

  On Monday, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and the International League for Human Rights (ILMR), have filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor General's office. The complaint is directed against the German federal government, the presidents of the German secret services... We accuse US, British and German secret agents, their supervisors, the German Minister of the Interior as well as the German Chancellor of illegal and prohibited covert intelligence activities, of aiding and abetting of those activities, of violation of the right to privacy and obstruction of justice in office by bearing and cooperating with the electronic surveillance of German citizens by NSA and GCHQ...

 

 

  A former US marine has accused Israel of treating the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as sub-humans and regarding them as animals. In an interview with Press TV, Ken O’Keefe was asked about the reason behind the siege that has been imposed on the Gaza Strip. “In fact…[many animals] will find better care in most Western countries than the people of Gaza find at the hands of the Israeli system, which has systematically looked at them and treated them as sub-humans..”

 

  As foreign leaders have begun to arrive in Sochi, something quite unique happened at the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping.  First, he was greeted by President Putin, like all the other heads of state, but then the two men left of a special communications room to speak with the senior commanders of the Russian and Chinese navies.  The amazing thing was that this was a joint videoconference which saw the Russian and Chinese naval commanders reporting to their respective Presidents while both sides stood literally shoulder to shoulder...

 

  The tragic news that forces linked to al-Qaeda have retaken Fallujah is just the latest reminder that George W. Bush's war of choice was a historic, catastrophic misjudgment. "Any Republican seeking nomination for the 2016 presidential election should at a minimum be willing to admit Iraq was a mistake," Jeremy Lott writes at RealClearWorld. "It was an error that cost us upwards of $1.5 trillion, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, while seriously hindering our efforts to track down the real culprits of September 11, 2001"..  several prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, all have pro-war votes on their resumes...

 

...Both Tony “I’d do it again” Blair and George W. Bush face a citizen’s arrest whenever they appear in public, with Blair also reiterating with others responsible for bombing Iraq back to a pre-industrial age (again) that the country is a better place without Saddam, “a tyrant who killed his own people.” In fact the Western trumpeted mass graves found in Iraq were from the 1991 war and subsequent US encouraged uprising and it’s predictably violent suppression.. according to a 2008 study George W. Bush: “and seven top officials – including VP Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, made 935 false statements about Iraq” during the two years following 11th September 2001...

...The security area still shows a lack of strategic vision and trust. We are still unable to overcome the phobias of the past epoch, the aspiration to see the state of affairs through the “friend-or-foe” lens. In conditions, when military confrontation in the European continent has become unimaginable, the renewal of talks about the threat from the East is perplexing, to say the least, even more so that these are not just talks – military infrastructure keeps growing on the eastern borders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, there are exercises, the goal of which is not to fight terrorism (as Russia does with its partners)..

 

  It's the interview of the century. The Fuhrer himself visits the Queen of Daytime Talk, Oprah Winfrey. What will Oprah ask him? How will Hitler respond? How will the audience respond? Can he win over the hostile crowd with his charm and intellect? Or will he be mercilessly booed off the stage?..

 

  When West Bromwich Albion’s star player Nicolas Anelka performed the Quenelle after scoring a goal in a match on 28 December he was immediately lashed by a frenzied storm in a Zionists’ teacup.. The origin of the Quenelle is surely the strangulated salute by Peter as the demented former Nazi in a wheelchair, and goes back 50 years. If anyone is entitled to be offended it’s Adolf, so playing the anti-Semitism card is ridiculous. Peter Sellers’ mother was Jewish by the way. I wonder what he (or she) would have made of all this fuss?..

 

  Israeli Arutz 7 reports: "A group called Rabbis from the Committee to Save the Land and People of Israel sent a letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry this Sunday, warning him to end his "antagonism" towards Israel. The rabbis sharply criticized Kerry for his plans to establish an Arab capital in Jerusalem for Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, and to have Israel withdraw to the 1949 Armistice lines...

 

  New Zealand-born film composer/ songwriter/arranger Gerald Clark has only a minimal track record in the jazz world, and no particular personal connections to Palestine and its painful history, yet his beautiful, poignant jazz-infused suite arises from a deep sense of outrage at the brutality being waged there. Clark was initially inspired by a talk given by the mother of Tom Hurndall, the British photography student and a member of the International Solidarity Movement who was killed in Palestine in 2004. He has been working on the pieces since 2002, and the potency of the full and proper gestation which the music has undergone really shines through...

 

  This struck me as Iran wanting to get in their version of ‘all options are on the table’. And it was cute really. All they would do is crank their civilian nuclear program back up to the level it was, and of course, they have no plans to invade the US. They are short on transportation, and no one there would want to invade us anyway. The Swedish foreign minister is in Tehran until Thursday. He lost no time in getting out a statement that a complete nuclear deal should be wrapped up in six months…the sooner the better. So as we expected, there is pent up investment demand ready to go into Iran, where it is taking a pass on other places, like the West. Do you see a bit of irony there?..

 

  In March 2011, Obama launched proxy war on Syria. Regime change remains policy. Peace talks are subterfuge. They're fake. Geneva II reflects more sideshow than substance. Washington abhors peaceful conflict resolution. Human suffering doesn't matter. Conflict continues unabated. January perhaps was the deadliest month so far. An estimated 6,000 or more died...

 

...The intensity of the fighting in the battered city of Homs, which began unexpectedly on Monday evening, was greater than anything the people here had experienced in months.The city is one of the centres of the original uprising and has seen some of the most destructive fighting. Even when there is no fighting the city is tense...

 

..Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is a skeptic of the official 9/11 story, who is particularly aggressive in speaking his mind. The gifted field general for the Hawks gave a four-star Army general a grilling over 9/11, sparking a dialogue in forums previously no more political than a quarterback's shoulder injury. But what were the questions? Reports are muddled. SBNation.com wrote last week of the possible public relations ploy by the military which backfired:..

Chiarelli's mention of Iraq sent Carroll in another direction: He wanted to know if the September 11 attacks had been planned or faked by the United States government...

 

  OMAR is the second film directed by Hany Alu-Assad to be a finalist among foreign language films nominated to receive an Oscar at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony on March 2nd.. In these respects OMAR is superior even to PARADISE NOW, telling the story of what life under Israeli occupation means for the way Palestinian lives are lived, the normalcy’s of romantic attraction contrasting with the abnormalities of humiliating lives lived behind prison walls...

 

  An exchange in January with Paul Farhi, Washington Post columnist, about coverage of US foreign policy: Dear Mr. Farhi, Now that you've done a study of al-Jazeera's political bias in supporting Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, is it perhaps now time for a study of the US mass media's bias on US foreign policy? And if you doubt the extent and depth of this bias, consider this:..

 

  When Barack Obama was elected president, the chickens came home to roost above the sordid nest that conservatives made for us after the 9/11 attacks. It was after those attacks that conservatives, quivering and quaking in their shoes over the thought that the terrorists were coming to get us, traded away the freedom of the American people to the federal government in the hope of gaining safety and security from the terrorists...

 

  Israel has approved plans for more than 550 new homes in three settlement neighbourhoods of occupied East Jerusalem. The Jerusalem municipality said its planning committee had granted permits to build 386 units in Har Homa, 136 units in Neve Yaakov and 36 units in Pisgat Zeev; built on land taken by Israel in 1967...

 

  At least 40 people have been killed and 87 injured after a series of blasts rocked Baghdad, some of them near the heavily-fortified Green Zone where key government offices are located, Iraqi officials said. The deadliest of Wednesday's attacks took place across the street from the Foreign Ministry building, when two parked car bombs went off simultaneously in two different parking lots. Those explosions killed at least seven people and wounded 15, a police officer said. Shortly afterwards, a suicide bomber walked into a nearby falafel restaurant where he set off his explosives-laden belt, killing five people and wounding 12...

 

  Aimed at highlighting Palestinian rights and the occupation, the BDS movement has pressured academics and even pop stars not to visit Israel. The Israeli government has described the international campaign to boycott Israel as a strategic threat. The campaign is gaining momentum, with the Israeli finance minister warning that his country is vulnerable to a boycott from the European Union, Israel's biggest trading partner..

 

...Obama and the corporate democrats have only one primary objective – holding on to power so that they can continue to enjoy the state banquets, media attention and campaign dollars that derive from the benefits of being the “party in charge.”  The fact that they are playing with the lives and hopes of millions of people who are desperately looking for some relief from the material and psychological insecurities of life on the edge are of little real concern for these party operatives. The Obama – Clinton centrists who make up the dominant core of the democratic party, along with a subordinate sliver of liberal reformers, have no substantive policy prescriptions to offer the long-term unemployed or the general U.S. public beyond inchoate policy recommendations  framed as representing the elements of an “opportunity agenda..”

...Most institutions have a propensity to promote mediocrities, those whose primary strengths are knowing where power lies, being subservient and obsequious to the centers of power and never letting morality get in the way of one’s career. The military is the worst in this respect. In the military, whether at the Paris Island boot camp or West Point, you are trained not to think but to obey. What amazes me about the military is how stupid and bovine its senior officers are...

 

  Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters has fiercely criticized Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson over her decision to endorse SodaStream, an Israeli company that operates a factory in an illegal colony in the occupied West Bank...

 

  Some Israeli media, including Ynetnews and German TV station Phoenix, have misquoted the Iranian foreign minister as saying that “Holocaust should not happen again” and that “the extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime was tragically cruel and should not happen again.” Speaking to FNA, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hassan Qashqavi rejected the media reports about Zarif’s statements as untrue, and said, “In a phone conversation that I had with Mr. Zarif he completely rejected the remarks attributed to him and declared that the Islamic Republic’s stance about the (Zionist) regime is what has been repeatedly announced by the country’s diplomacy apparatus and this stance has not changed..”

 

...Imagine that the scrolls, the oldest known copies of the books forming the Bible, show that the rabbinical Bible is a fake. The State of Israel will lose its narrative overnight. Will PM Netanyahu then say "Mister Secretary General of the UN, we are sorry, we were wrong, God loves all people, not just Jews."Even at the most basic level of analysis the scrolls contain cultural dynamite...

 

  The investigative reporter and author Gareth Porter has recently published a book entitled A Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. An impressively written and researched work, it is also frightening in its implications. For if Porter’s allegations are accurate, it is not Iran that the American people should fear – it is their own politicians, bureaucrats and an “ally” named Israel...

 

  Dieudonné M'bala M'bala , the genius outspoken French comedian who rebelled against the primacy of Jewish suffering has been banned from entering Britain.. As we all know, in recent years the British governments have launched more than just one immoral Zionist  interventionist war. In the name of elementary ‘freedom’ we dropped bombs and killed over a million innocent Muslims. Hence, I am curious to know how the UK Home Office justifies its latest measure against freedom of speech. Do they really believe that a French comedian who hardly speaks English endangers our homeland security?..

 

...The Georgian people have thrown off America's puppet regime and begun prosecuting the gangsters that tortured, murdered and raped their country under the tutelage of our own American Ambassador (and others), as Henry describes below. But the big time gangsters take care of their own. Those whom Mikheil Saakashvili left behind now find themselves facing well deserved charges of murder and mayhem, Mr. Saak got a soft landing at Tufts University where an attempt will be made to bleach the blood from his hands and whitewash his crimes in Georgia...

 

...if you are a U.S. Taxpayer and were outraged when you heard that Texas was building Christian Only Roads, well then, ask yourself why aren’t you outraged that Israel is doing the same thing with your money? Answer that question and we can come a very long way into understanding why this is happening in our names and why we in the USA are being ridiculed all over the world for our support of Apartheid, Bigotry, and Racism...

 

  I’m fond of books that don’t claim to have The Answer but instead are useful guides in our search for answers. Such a volume is Cynthia Kaufman’s Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope, which expresses in clear, concise language thoughts that likely have been bumping around in the minds of many of us who reject capitalism. The book is particularly powerful because of its modesty; Kaufman promises no new grand theory and instead offers insights that we all can use in our daily lives...

 

  Dieudonné is the true meaning of resistance.  Being cogent and coherent, he has managed to expose in France the corrosive bond between contemporary Zionised socialism and Jewish political power. For some time now, many of us who, in the 60s and 70s, were inspired by Left thinking have been confused by contemporary ‘progressive’ politics. For some reason, the so-called ‘New Left’ was very quick to compromise on crucial issues to do with labour and working class politics.. The Left has always found it difficult to bond with working people, in fact, the entire ‘progressive’ ethos is elitist to the bone...

 

  Most western Middle East experts see Islam as a problem for the West — a source of terrorism, religious fanaticism, unwanted immigrants — and they see their job as helping to change the Middle East so it’s no longer a problem for us. Eric Walberg, however, recognizes that this is another instance of the Big Lie. The actual problem is the multifaceted aggression the West has been inflicting on the Middle East for decades and is determined to continue, no matter what the cost to them and us will be. His books and articles present the empirical evidence for this with scholarly precision and compassionate concern for the human damage done by our imperialism...

 

  Citizens of Saudi Arabia who fight in conflicts outside the kingdom could receive prison sentences ranging from three to 20 years in jail. Saudi king Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz issued a royal decree on Monday, which says that any Saudi citizen who join "extremist religious and ideological groups, or those classified as terrorist organisations".. Supporting such groups, adopting their ideology or promoting them "through speech or writing" would also incur prison sentences, the decree added...

 

  Ukraine’s authorities have voiced the possibility of early presidential elections for the first time as the government tries to show its determination to find a peaceful solution to the continuing conflict. Yuriy Miroshnychenko, Viktor Yanukovich's personal representative in parliament, told AFP news agency on Tuesday that the president has spoken at a meeting with politicians last week of "two possible scenarios" to end the two-month crisis...

 

  After 94 years, on January 27, 2014, the world lost Pete Seeger. The world is the lesser for that loss. The accolades for this giant of folk songs and herald of all causes just, are pouring in from around the world. He is celebrated for regularly showing up at mass protests, for singing songs so transcendent (This Land is Your Land; We Shall Overcome; Where Have All the Flowers Gone) they are sung in many foreign languages all over the earth and for his mentoring and motivating of millions of people and children. Pete Seeger overcame most of his doubters and adversaries. On his famous five string banjo, he inscribed the slogan, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender..”

 

  Despite Obama’s promise in last week’s State of the Union address that he will veto any bill that heaps additional sanctions on Iran while the interim agreement is still in place, hawks in the House of Representatives are still pushing for it. Indeed, a mixture of hawkish Republicans and Democrats in Congress are aligned with AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their belief that the interim deal reached with Iran in the P5+1 talks in Geneva is tantamount to appeasement and will inevitably lead to a nuclear-armed Iran...

 

  I normally don't do movie reviews here, but after watching "The Fifth Estate" yesterday I felt that I ought to warn everybody that this is a crude hatchet job clearly aimed at maliciously slandering Julian Assange and, through him, his defiance of our "1%" overlords. A quick visit on Wikipedia showed me that there was some "controversy" around the movie.  I will let you read that section yourself, but let me tell you that the truth is infinitely worse than what Wikipedia might suggest...

 

  According to the BBC Western leaders are having a great time in Munich: they are re-igniting the Cold War under the pretext of - what else? - "supporting democracy" in the Ukraine:.. When Yanukovich does exactly *nothing* to stop the neo-Nazi rioters from burning cops, seizing government buildings, threatening to "go on the attack", calling for the overthrow of the government and openly calling for the intervention of foreign powers the West considers that as "trampling upon democracy". But when Yeltsin orders his tank to shoot at the Russian Parliament and kills thousands of civilians the West gives him full support. Go figure..

  Exactly 35 years ago, I had the experience of a lengthy meeting with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his tent where he received visitors in the Paris suburb of Neuphle-le-Chateau. It was on the day preceding his triumphal return to Iran after almost 14 years of exile, mostly spent in Najaf, Iraq. I was returning to the United States after spending two weeks in Iran during the turbulent final stage of the revolution that was on the verge of victory. My presence in Iran was in response to an invitation from Mehdi Bazargan, soon to become interim president of the Islamic Republic of Iran...

 

  Jews and Arabs have lived together in one state since 1948; Israelis and Palestinians have lived together in one state since 1967. This country is Jewish and Zionist, but not democratic for everyone. Its Arab citizens are deprived, while the Palestinians in the territories are disinherited and lacking rights. Yet the one state solution is here - and has been for quite a long time...
Read more...

 

..More and more countries, NGOs and companies have joined the 2005 “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS," an initiative that calls for “the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”..

 

  What constitutes this “historic breakthrough”? Who got what? Did the agreement provide for symmetrical concessions? Does the interim agreement strengthen or weaken the prospects for peace and prosperity in the Gulf and the Middle East? To address these and other questions, one also has to include the powerful influence wielded by Israel on US and European policymakers. Equally important, the current ‘interim’ agreement is just that – it is a first, limited agreement, which does not in any way spell out the strategic objectives of the major imperial powers. Any realistic appreciation of the significance of the interim agreement requires putting it into historical perspective...
Read more...

 

Fabrizio Cristiano De André  

  "I feel myself religious, and my religion is to feel part of a whole, in a chain that includes all creation and so to respect all elements, including plants and minerals, because, in my opinion, the balance is exactly given from the well-being in our surroundings. My religion does not seek the principle, you want to call it creator, regulator or chaos makes no difference. But I think that everything around us has its own logic and this is a thought to which I turn when I'm in difficulty, perhaps giving the names I've learned as a child, maybe because I lack the imagination to find out other ones"

 

♫ Fabrizio & Luvi De André: Geordie 

♫ Volta la carta + finale 

♫ Il Pescatore

 

..."Why am I reading this inner account of Zion?" Most of my readers are asking now. Zilber is not my friend. If he knew me, he would consider me a sworn enemy. Yet, I value his life and respect his right to fight for his values. That is what separates us, the people, from them. If we don't accept this freedom we become them, Communists and Zionists, National-Socialists, and Western-Democracies. Only by knowing evil, one can defend oneself from it. Am I right, dear Dalia?..

 

  America's long war in Afghanistan isn't likely to end well, and the American people seem to know it. Despite a wholly predictable effort to portray the war as an American victory, the United States isn't going to defeat the Taliban between now and the scheduled departure of most U.S. troops later this year. Meanwhile, relations between the United States and the Karzai government are going from bad to worse. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not only refusing to sign a security agreement that would allow the United States to leave a residual force in country, he is also making increasingly strident accusations that the United States is to blame for recent civilian deaths...

 

...New 2014 EU guidelines prohibit awarding grants or loans to entities involved in illegal settlement projects. Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni expressed concern about BDS successes.

They "won't end," she said. "The boycott is advancing uniformly and exponentially. Those who don't want to see it will end up feeling it." Israel is a pariah state. It's incrementally becoming "a lone settlement in the world," Livni added...

Read more... 

 

...Two weeks before the game, I also predicted that it might be “a 9/11 truth Super Bowl.” This one came true in spades, as 9/11 truth supporter Pete Carroll’s Seahawks upset the favored Denver Broncos in one of the most definitive Super Bowl blow-outs of all time…and then, during the MVP interview, 9/11 truth-seeker Matthew Mills of We Are Change commandeered the microphone!..

 

...I think now what their strategy is, the millions of Syrian people who are suffering living as refugees, particularly the traumatizing that’s happening with the children, they think that after time that is just going to collapse the Syrian people’s will to support Assad and they will be willing to do anything to get anybody in there just to stop it. I think it’s a new type of terrorism where, not the guys running around on the ground, but you have governments decided that they’re going to hold millions of people hostage under horrible conditions and that that’s going to work to their advantage. It’s just a horrible situation and makes someone embarrassed to be an American and see their government actually doing this...

 

  Do world leaders today even know the underlying causes of the Holy Land’s misery? Hansard is the official verbatim report of proceedings in the UK parliament. You’d expect powerful intellectual stimulation, especially from the House of Lords, but too often the record reads like pulp fiction, punctuated as always with antique language, flowery manners and a pinch of pompous poppycock. But from behind it all emerge some uncomfortable truths...

 

  This appeared in the Guardian. It seems that Dieudonné's been banned from Britain. That's bad news but there's worse. After I'd looked at it I scrolled down to the comments, just to get a feel for how people felt. They overwhelmingly towed the party line and were pretty anti-Dieudonné. Then I saw a comment that had been deleted because it transgressed the Guardian's "Community Standards". After reading these I knew exactly why the Guardian is truly yesterday's news...

 

 

  This new piece by Julian Borger, detailing the history of clandestine and illicit means by which Israel developed its nuclear weapons stockpile is an absolute must read.  Borger subtitled the piece: “Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won’t come clean?” Good question. There’s some very damning stuff in here – a lot of information I’d never read before...

 

  AIPAC is in deep, deep trouble. First, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee tried, and utterly failed, to destroy President Obama’s critical diplomatic dialogue with Iran by pushing for a new economic sanctions bill that would have ended the US-Iran talks. Now, AIPAC will have to face a real, existential challenge, namely, the about-to-be-released “framework agreement” for the Israel-Palestine conflict, a framework developed by Secretary of State John Kerry over months of shuttle diplomacy in the region. If AIPAC hadn’t confronted the White House over Iran—and lost—it might have more muscle now to fight the Obama-Kerry plan for Israel-Palestine...

 

  Munich has opened a new front in the Israel-Palestine wars.  There John Kerry warned Israel that his peace talks would be the last chance.  If they failed, he predicted the rise of BDS and a looming one state solution:..  Israeli nationalists, who dominate Israel’s political landscape, have raised a great geschrei over this rhetoric.  What?  Even John Kerry must weary us with talk of boycotts, Intifadas and delegitimization?  We don’t hear this enough from our enemies that we have to hear it from him as well. The result has been shouts of “anti-Semite” and worse.  As only these Israel apologists can muster. But what did Kerry say but the truth?..

 

...Jews were an elite one percent in pre-WWII Germany and, as Slezkine notes, had a similar profile throughout Eastern Europe at the time; there can be little doubt that this elite status was part of the context of anti-Semitism throughout the area, along with other volatile  issues, such as Jewish opposition to national cultures throughout the area, also documented by Slezkine. It’s a familiar pattern, also apparent elsewhere in the West, especially in the U.S...

 

  "Lest We Forget" is an indictment of our Leaders, our Media, our Actions and ultimately of ourselves for remaining intentionally blind to an American made Holocaust. Watch this film only if you are prepared to face the truth about the predatory nature of the ruling elite and their manipulation of your perceptions and beliefs...

 

  They call it the "Good War," one supposes, in order to differentiate it from all the really bad wars we’ve been fighting – and losing – lately: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the future wars our political class has up its collective sleeve. I call it the Worst War, because it fathered all the ones to come: it was the war that set us, finally, on the road to empire – and, as Garet Garrett put it years ago, that road was marked with "a sign that reads ‘No U-Turns.’" The war that killed millions, and finally killed our old republic, haunts us still...

 

  World War II was not only the greatest military conflict in history, it was also America's most important twentieth-century war. It brought profound and permanent social, governmental and cultural changes in the United States, and has had a great impact on how Americans regard themselves and their country's place in the world. This global clash -- with the United States and the other "Allies" on one side, and Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and the other "Axis" countries on the other -- is routinely portrayed in the US as the "good war," a morally clear-cut conflict between Good and Evil...

 

  Some time ago I decided to write a book about the damaging and deluded cult of national victory which has done this country so much damage since 1945. No doubt it will receive the usual mixture of abuse and  silence which most of my books receive. But I shall write it anyway, as it seems to me to be a truth urgently in need of being expressed, especially as we shall soon be marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the supposedly ‘Good’ Second World War...

 

  Venture capitalist Thomas Perkins pens letter to editor warning of a progressive Kristallnacht, gets called an idiot...

 

  If you really want to understand the world we are living in, you better stick with the Zionist media. The Jerusalem Post will provide you with the names of the Jews who own the planet. The British Jewish Chronicle will teach you about arch pedophile Jimmy Seville’s ties with Israel. Even Haaretz will let me speak about all those topics The Guardian (Of Zion) is there to shamelessly suppress...

 

  As the media spotlight shines on U.S. negotiators talking with Iranians and Syrians, the Israeli-Palestinian talks have faded into the background. They're still grinding on, slowly, with several contentious issues unresolved. One of those issues doesn't get as much attention as it deserves in U.S. media. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "has catapulted to the fore an issue that may be even more intractable than old ones like security and settlements," the New York Times' Jodi Rudoren recently reported: "a demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as ... 'the nation-state of the Jewish people.'”..

 

  The stories told by five top Syrian Christian leaders about the horrors their churches are experiencing at the hands of Islamist extremists are biblical in their brutality...

 

  The Washington-based group 'Human Rights Watch'- controlled by the US foreign policy elite - has released another volley in its campaign to back the 'humanitarian war' being waged against the independent nation of Syria. This is not the first or second fabrication against Syria run by Human Rights Watch. The group was amongst the first to falsely blame the Syrian government for the East Ghouta chemical weapons incident of August 2013. The 'moral panic' from that accusation almost sparked a major escalation of the war...

 

  He was politically conservative, a gun owner, a geek – and the man behind the biggest intelligence leak in history. In this exclusive extract from his new book, Luke Harding looks at Edward Snowden's journey from patriot to America's most wanted...

 

  A polling expert from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs said this week that a recent poll commissioned by the Israel Project (TIP) — which found majority support for a new Iran sanctions bill currently languishing in the Senate — is not neutral and the results on the sanctions bill question should not be considered credible...

 

  "Secrecy is NICE," they say. Finding details on NICE's business is difficult. Even after it was published that the Israeli company got the contract to build the war room of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, little else was added. Even the size of the contract was kept NICE, except for the worrying fact that its cost crossed the $100 million mark...

 

  “Birds of a feather flock together,” so the saying goes. So, we should hardly be surprised at seeing the Israeli flag take pride of place at a demonstration by the English Defence League (EDL), a racist and neo-fascist group, as you can see in the video below...

 

  An interview with Gilad Atzmon hosted by Greta Berlin in the south of France; shot in September 2013...

 

  The idea of offering a prize for the best proposal of how to recycle Israel's "Separation Barrier" when it is torn down was conceived at the One Democratic State Conference in Munich in 2012.  The seed money came initially from Dan McGowan and Gilad Atzmon.  Other organizations and individuals subsequently joined. A description of the project and prize is listed below...

 

  It was, of course, utterly inevitable that Tony Blair would back Egypt’s new authoritarian leaders. After all, can you imagine Blair – our very own Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara – stepping forth to offer his courageous, unstinting support to a democratically elected President overthrown in a military coup d’état? Can you imagine him condemning a General – no, I forget, General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has just been made a Field Marshal – whose men have gunned down 1,000 protesters since last summer and who has now put the elected President on trial for his life as a “terrorist”? Ye Gods, if such bravery burned within the heart of Lord Blair, we would all suffer immediate cardiac arrest...

 

  Kerry mocks legitimacy. He represents the worst of America's dark side. He's going all out to be Washington's worst ever Secretary of State. He's Obama's war on humanity front man. He blames Syrian President Assad for US-supported death squad crimes. He wants him ousted. He wants Syrian sovereignty destroyed. He wants Washington deciding Syria's future. He wants it colonized for profit. He wants Ukraine exploited the same way...

...The charts give you an idea of the golden cornucopia awaiting the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC), if its proponents can start a new Cold War.  Anyone who doubts the possibility of the MICC’s capacity to pull this off, need only use these charts to think about (1) the durability of the so-called “peace” dividend accompanying the end of the Cold War in 1990 and (2) how the MICC exploited the horror of 9-11 to power boost the defense budget to levels undreamed of by the threat inflators during the worst days of the Cold War or Vietnam.  Just try to think about what a new wave of cold-war hysteria could trigger...

 

  Among dozens of Syrian and foreign journalists covering the Syria peace talks in Geneva, Elissar Moualla stands out. The popular Syrian news anchor, working for the state-sponsored Syrian TV, never misses an opportunity to confront the opposition delegation. With a loud and agitated voice, she asks tough questions in press conferences and she challenges statements the opposition representatives make in the more informal media hub, the garden of the UN headquarters. “Can you tell me why the armed groups [you support] are holding women and children hostage in Homs?” she yells to an opposition spokesman...

 

...it is clearly illegal for an Occupying Power to move its population into occupied territory (Geneva Convention of 1949), far right wing Israeli governments have flooded this Palestinian territory with hundreds of thousands of illegal squatters, who have usurped Palestinian property, confined Palestinians to Bantustans, and imposed onerous checkpoints on them. The Jewish supremacist squatter settlements are Jewish-only and no Palestinian can live in them. The militant squatters are often heavily armed and are increasingly attacking Palestinians and their mosques and other institutions, as well as waging economic warfare on them by cutting down their olive trees...

 

  The first round of Geneva-2 international conference is over.. The talks happened to be nothing more than a formal reason for the continuation of the dialogue between the opposing parties sticking to confronting positions. There had been enough doubts about the outcome of the conference even before the event kicked off. The United Nations Secretary General sent an invitation to Iran at the last moment and then called it back in a few hours under the United States pressure.. Lavrov warned, «If this list of countries invited does not include Iran, then, in my opinion, the conference will resemble a profanation». Tehran never hid its doubts about the chances for the conference to succeed...

 

  In the long story of the evolving Iran nuclear issue, we naturally tend to focus on whatever is the chapter immediately before us. Right now that mainly involves the negotiation-subverting Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill, which President Obama in his State of the Union address explicitly threatened to veto if Congress passed it. But we also ought to keep a longer-term view of how opponents of an agreement with Iran have kept changing their tune and changing their arguments as their earlier arguments have become inoperative...

 

  The question of the Syrian opposition’s representation at the Geneva 2 Conference may seem incongruous now that the inaugural meeting in Montreux is already behind us. On the contrary, it remains the central issue. The National Coalition, who spoke before the cameras, has been abandoned by almost all its components and has lost its antennas in Syria. The sole purpose of its presence at the public session was to satisfy Saudi Arabia. It should now quickly give up its seat to other players...

 

  Scott Fitzgerald famously said the rich are different from us. To which Hemingway snorted, "Yeah, they have more money." And now seems like a good time to offer up a few words of sympathy for the rich. Because our wealthy brothers and sisters are going through some tough times. Not financially. No, no, no. They're doing pretty good on that end. Last year the stock market shot higher than the 4:20 break at a Denver pot dispensary on Jerry Garcia's birthday. The fortunate among us are comfortable alright, but becoming increasingly uncomfortable, if you catch my drift. It's us nasty poor people. Again...

 

...Rouhani ran as a reform candidate, and many have interpreted his victory as a harbinger of a possible liberalization or rationalization of Iranian domestic and foreign policy. But the dominant figure in Iranian politics is not the president but rather the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iranian constitution endows the supreme leader with tremendous authority over all major state institutions, and Khamenei, who has held the post since 1989, has found many other ways to further increase his influence. Formally or not, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government all operate under his absolute sovereignty...

 

  Walid Moallem, Syria’s minister of foreign affairs and expatriates, called for a national unity government including a more expansive Syrian opposition than those represented by the National Syrian Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SOC) at the Geneva talks. “I don’t see the only opposition as the Coalition. There are other opposition who must join so we can have a national unity government..” Moallem said he found it “unfortunate and strange” that the SOC rejected a Syrian government proposal brought forward during the talks that rejected terrorism. “It was really astonishing that this opposition refused [the declaration on terrorism]..”

 

  The New York Times’ oped pages have recently been opening up to much more critical commentary on Israel. This trend has not been quite as dramatic as it may appear. Two strong recent opeds.. looked liked they had been made available to US audiences in the NYT but were actually only available in the international edition – or what used to be called the International Herald Tribune. In a recent email, John Whitbeck explained that the NYT had made them all but impossible to find on its website:. the fact that the NYT is prepared to give a platform to him and the boycott movement.. would truly constitute a revolution in what can be said in the US establishment’s paper of record...

 

  It has been nearly nine years since Ward Churchill was the talk of Fox News and the target of a concerted campaign to remove him from his teaching post at the University of Colorado. Well, as many of you know, they were successful. No longer living in Colorado, Ward is still defending himself and his scholarship. I recently caught up with Ward to see why we haven’t heard much from him in recent years and if the right-wing (and liberal) assault on his character had finally forced him into retreat...

 

 

...Even before it ended, an apparently unimportant meeting of the Middle East Quartet (UN, USA, Russia and EU) that took place on February 1, 2014, in Munich made headlines in Israel. After U.S. Secretary of State Kerry was declared "Enemy of the Jews" by Zion, every word he utters shocks and shakes down to the last coin in Zion's coffers...

 

  In the heat of recent exchanges and deaths of protesters in Ukraine, many have lost sight of the insidious role key players in Washington and certain EU countries are playing. Their agenda seems to be to force an immediate end to the elected Yanukovich government in Kiev and lock Ukraine into the EU and, ultimately, NATO. Washington’s agenda has little to do with ‘democracy and freedom’, and a lot to do with destabilizing Putin’s Russia. On Sunday, January 19, the eight-week-long series of protests and demonstrations against the government of President Viktor Yanukovich in Kiev escalated to a new level of violence...

 

  This week, Martin Indyk and Thomas Friedman released details of John Kerry’s unacceptable acquiescence to Israeli demands in his soon to be released “framework agreement”.  The framework is dead-on-arrival if these details are correct.  Kerry is demanding that the Palestinians declare that Israel is a Jewish state.  Is the U.S. officially a Christian nation? No. What happens to the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Arabs in a “Jewish state”? John Kerry also is demanding that the Palestinians agree to give up the Right of Return...

 

  "Big Brother is Watching You," George Orwell wrote in his disturbing book 1984. But, as Mikko Hypponen points out, Orwell "was an optimist." Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use...

 

  Photos in which the film star looks at her best appeared prominently on Yediot Aharonot’s front pages, under the title “Scarlett for Israel”: Supporting Israel has become a real professional risk to the world’s artists, writes Tzippy Shmilovitz. Anyone daring to come here or even say a good word about Israel is subject to great pressure and intimidation and most of them fold up. Not, however, Scarlett Johansson...

  The mistakes that were made in the years leading up to 2008 have been corrected, and we are recovering. Not only is the stock market booming but the massive corporate welfare program my buddy George and I began in 2008 has succeeded in restoring your wealth so effectively that you will soon need no more welfare at all…except for the regular things, like the oil corporation subsidy–which, I might point out, I was able to protect for you one more time. (Laughter.)  I also kept all of you protected from embarrassing court trials, you may recall, after, well, mistakes were made....

A must read...

 

  Israeli occupation forces shot and wounded 10 Palestinians near the West Bank town of Ramallah Friday during a protest over the killing of a teenager, Palestinian medics and security sources said. In Gaza, meanwhile, medics said five more Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire near the border in two separate incidents...

 

  'Propaganda' sounds like an old-fashioned word from a bygone era. It evokes images of the Nazis in WW2, particularly Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, or Soviet leaders in the Cold War and dictators in 'Third World' countries. Propaganda is something spewed out by official enemies of the West, and surely not a vile practice indulged by 'our' politicians and business leaders. This is a convenient illusion that serves powerful Western elites very well indeed...

 

  Make no mistake about it, Ukraine’s troubles, engineered from outside of the country by the usual troika of the European Union «securocrats» who are beholden to the interests of the United States and NATO, George Soros-funded and U.S. non-governmental organization-trained street and social media provocateurs, and the Central Intelligence Agency and its diplomat-spies, is a template for what the West has planned for Russia...

 

...the experience of a state in repressing resistance and people struggles also often becomes the focal point of inter-state interaction. In this light it is of importance to illuminate the structural ties between the Zionist Israel and the Sinhala chauvinist Sri Lankan state. As the oppressors collaborate and extend aid to each other, the oppressed also integrate their struggles and identify common grounds, thus the dynamics of resistance and oppression does not unfold in geographic isolation...

 

  By now, it’s become a very familiar (albeit unfortunate) tale; gory pictures of American marines’ criminal shenanigans in third-world countries surface, with little to zero indignation from the mainstream media or the public, the Pentagon announces a full investigation and/or a “thorough” inquiry into the matter (which, for the uninitiated, are nothing more than shoddy euphemisms for letting the perpetrators slide through unpunished and their crimes un-probed), the story dies down quickly and the U.S. carries on preaching democracy and human rights the world over at the point of a gun… or a drone missile for that matter. Rinse, repeat...

 

...Grotesque amoral army, dare we whisper or shout/Victimizers! What cruel twist of fate has blinded you?/A haunted people now fiercely perverse. Once you too were brutalized./ Moral army, have you forgotten?/ Has the past inferno faded to fiction/ or lost in your unconscious as you dream of nirvana in the Jewish state?/ I feel the presence of an enemy, the boat can sail no more./ Ghouls in military attire walk across a vast terrain scorched and silent...

 

  On Jan. 14, the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, told the daily Yediot Aharonot, “Secretary of State John Kerry — who arrived here determined, who operates from an incomprehensible obsession and a sense of messianism — can’t teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians.” Even by Israeli standards, Mr. Yaalon’s comments were rather rude. Mr. Kerry’s crime was to try to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that began last July and to stipulate a nine-month deadline. This is the kind of talk that gives chutzpah a bad name...

 

  If Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to revive talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority fail because of Israel’s continuing construction of illegal settlements, the Israeli government will likely face an international boycott ‘‘on steroids" as Mr. Kerry warned last August...

 

...These strengths have enabled the Islamic Republic to withstand sustained regional and Western pressure, and to pursue a foreign policy strategy likely to reap big payoffs in 2014.  This strategy aims to replace American hegemony, regionally and globally, with a more multi-polar distribution of power and influence.  It seeks to achieve this by using international law and institutions, and by leveraging the Islamic Republic’s model of participatory Islamist governance, domestic development, and foreign policy independence to accumulate real “soft power”—not just with a majority of Iranians living inside their country, but...

 

 

  In the final stages of the new Conscription Law legislation, it is difficult to imagine new issues. The anti-Haredi coalition led by Netanyahu is attempting to send Ultra-Orthodox Jews to the army. Bibi wants to accomplish what the Queen of England and the Czar of Russia failed to achieve. Screaming murder in a variety of ways, the victims of the law provided material for several articles in this website. The comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany were expected....

 

  Since the 1968 Student Revolution, the European and American Left, together with a herd of Jewish progressive intellectuals, have invested enormous effort in attempting to break society down into multiple segments of identities. The Left adopted this peculiar approach because it could never cope with its own failure to bond with working people. The Jewish intellectuals, who led the campaign, realized that fragmented and divided nations are far less dangerous for Jews. As we know, Jews are threatened by cohesive, patriotic nationalism, and for a good reason. After all, they were amongst the prime victims of such an ideology...

 

...We have to end our war because America can no longer trust itself. With all of Americas media outlets owned by defense firms, lets call them “war profiteers” and be honest about it or citizens of the State of Israel, a “huckster” nation, smaller than Vermont that is the third largest weapons exporter in the world, no American can be certain about anything, what is true or false, what is fact, what is myth. Every day every American is told two things. Don’t trust your government. Don’t trust your press. Both things are correct...

 

  It's an open secret. It's been known for years. Media scoundrels suppress it. They pretend none exists. It's real. It's menacing. Imagine ignoring what threatens humanity. Imagine pretending Iran's peaceful nuclear program does so. Imagine risking regional or global war by doing it...

 

  By ousting elected President Morsi – and seeking to root out his Muslim Brotherhood supporters – Egypt’s military has touched off a wave of violence that threatens to deepen tensions across the region, including in the Gaza Strip and Israel, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar...

 

  Pete Seeger touched my life only once. But what a touch. It was a few days before the 1967 Six-Day War. After almost three weeks of mounting tension, the war fever was nearing breaking point. I knew that the war was only days, perhaps hours, away. Dina Dinur, the wife of the Holocaust-writer K. Zetnik, called to invite me to meet Pete Seeger. Dina, a huge woman, had for years gathered a small group of Jewish and Arab intellectuals who met regularly in her home to discuss peace...

 

...Hysterical media spin aside, Clapper is merely reaffirming what the U.S. intelligence community has been saying for years: Iran has no nuclear weapons program, is not building a nuclear weapon and the Iranian leadership has not even made a decision to do so. Meanwhile, Iranian officials have, for decades, condemned nuclear weapons as strategically useless, morally abhorrent, and religiously forbidden and foresworn any intention of ever acquiring, stockpiling or using such weapons. These conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community are nothing new. Clapper’s own testimony and reports from both 2011 and 2012 have all said effectively the same thing...

 

...The terms of the latest agreement include ending all hostilities by Israelis and Palestinians, and facilitating the freedom of movement and transfer of goods within Gaza. Though mainstream media has been silent, Israel has violated these simple truce points continuously since they were agreed upon. Not only are the crossings still very restricted, but the fire into Gaza continues, with the first one occurring the next day after the truce agreement. Here we list some of Israel's breaches of the ceasefire agreement and will continue to update as events occur...