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January, 2013



Jan 31, 2013

The Gift of the Other: Why I Do Not Want to Leave Palestine/Israel, by Lynda Burstein Brayer | The OtherSite
...Recognizing, therefore, that I have no rights in Palestine, and being of the opinion that the Jewish State of Israel is an illegitimate creation of the Western powers, sprung, as it were, from their colonialist loins, the question of why I stay is not out of place. It is clear that given my political understanding I cannot support a two-state solution because that automatically presupposes a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state. This political solution, so–called, has become a meaningless mantra...

Anti-Semitism: what it is and is not, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis
  “An anti-Semite used to be a person who disliked Jews. Now it is a person who Jews dislike “ Those are the words of my dear Jewish friend, Nazi (Auschwitz) holocaust survivor Dr Hajo Myer. They are taken from page 179 of his magnificent book, An Ethical Tradition Betrayed: The End of Judaism (published in 2007). Hajo was making a point in passing which had been provoked in his mind by an incident that happened in the Netherlands where he lives...

The “Long War” Rhetoric is Back, by Deepak Tripathi | Counterpunch
...The French-led intervention, with growing British involvement, in Mali, and possibly in other failing states, risks a scenario similar to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Both France and Britain seek to entice the United States to take on an increasingly bigger military role. Awareness of history and present interests in the region are important to avoid naïve acceptance of official rhetoric. France is the ex-colonial power of Mali, and Britain’s young prime minister shows the old imperial temperament long after the British Empire was lost...

The American Empire, RIP, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
  When will historians of the future date the beginning of the decline and fall of the American empire?.. There are those who insist it ain’t necessarily so, primarily neocons of the second mobilization such as Robert Kagan, who are quick to reassure all right-thinking patriotic Americans that we’re still Number One and warn against the fatal lure of committing "superpower suicide." To the rest of us, however – that is, to everyone outside the neocons’ cultic universe – the signs of the Great American Contraction are everywhere, most noticeably in the incomes, productivity, and general economic well-being of ordinary Americans...

Disavow Gilad Atzmon, or bury the hatchet? by Blake_Alcott | Redress Information & Analysis
  Blake Alcott debunks the “anti-Semitism” slur leveled at musician and writer Gilad Atzmon by US academic Ali Abunimah, and explains that Atzmon “illuminates the ‘pro-Semitic’ racist ideology fatal to Palestinians”..
[This is a must read for anyone interested in the specific debate, or in “The Jewish Problem” in general. I should add that on a panel in Germany including himself and Atzmon, Abunimah made the incredible statement that “culture” is of no importance – probably the stupidest thing ever uttered by a public intellectual.]

Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State.. As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning announces "a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold."..

U.N. Drone Investigator: If Facts Lead to U.S. War Crimes, So Be It, by Spencer Ackerman | Wired
  Ben Emmerson wants to be clear: He’s not out to ban flying killer robots used by the CIA or the U.S. military. But the 49-year-old British lawyer is about to become the bane of the drones’ existence, thanks to the United Nations inquiry he launched last week into their deadly operations...

Burn, burn - Africa's Afghanistan, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
  One's got to love the sound of a Frenchman's Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like... a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce. Apparently, it's a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people - with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years - in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb...
[A little dated (1/18) but it’s Escobar, always informative and fun]

Manufactured Hatred: The Politics of Islamophobia, by Andrew Levine | Counterpunch
...Even the word is new. However it is tempting to suppose that the phenomenon it designates is sadly familiar; that islamophobia is just anti-Semitism with Muslims substituting for Jews. The fact that islamophobes repeat so many of the tropes of classical anti-Semitism – mutatis mutandis, with all the necessary changes — makes this supposition difficult to resist. But the analogy is misleading...

The 9/11 Plan: Cheney, Rumsfeld and the “Continuity of Government,” by Paul Schreyer | Global Research
...The core of the following story was originally told by the authors James Mann and Peter Dale Scott whose thorough research is deeply appreciated. Yet a lot of background information was added. Thus a bigger picture slowly took shape, showing a plan and its actors...

Israeli Reprimand to Argentinean Ambassador: "Give Information!" | Roi Tov
...On July 18, 1994, a car loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil was detonated in front of the Jewish Community Center located in a densely constructed commercial area of Buenos Aires; 85 people died, about 300 were injured. Ever since, Israel keeps blaming Iran, despite the driver being Lebanese. On January 28, 2013, Argentine and Iran announced an agreement on the investigation; shortly afterwards the Argentine Ambassador in Tel Aviv got a wild reprimand from Israel...

Zero Dark Thirty & American Exceptionalism | Richard Falk
...he was so removed from the scene of the conflict that there was serious speculation that he had died or was incapacitated long before 2011. As it did with the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government fans the flames of suspicion by refusing to disclose the evidence relied upon to identify that the person killed at the compound in Abbottabad was indeed Bin Laden and by the related refusal even to allow journalists or others to see the body before it was unceremoniously dumped at sea (although after administering Muslim burial rituals and obtaining a quiet approval from the Saudi government, his birthplace)..

Third Term or Third Reich? by Parker Lawson | Huffington Post
  Once you arrive in Israel, it doesn't take much time at all to realize that the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not at all what the American media would like you to think. Indeed, having spent the last two weeks in Israel and Palestine, it's undeniable that the United States is turning a blind eye to one of the most pressing human rights situations in the world. Who knew? I certainly didn't. But the reality is that things will likely get worse before they get better as they often do after an election...

Islamofascist Rule in Egypt | Stephen Lendman
...Egypt's new constitution establishes Islamofascist rule. Junta power heads it. Repression confronts resisters. On January 25, 2011, anti-Mubarak protests erupted. Cairo's Tahrir Square became iconic. On the uprising's second anniversary, hundreds of thousands of youths, workers and others rallied nationwide. They oppose MB power. They demanded Morsi's ouster. They want Egypt's constitution revoked. They want social justice and democratic governance...

Philip Giraldi: Christian Zionism and American Islamophobia | Sabbah Report
  Philip Giraldi, Director of the Council for the National Interest, discusses the “Christian Zionism and American Islamophobia” conference on January 30 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.; the peculiar interworking of American end-times theology and Israeli politics; the CIA’s skepticism on the effectiveness of drone strikes; and how fleeing Syrians are creating a refugee crisis and security problems...

Holocaust Day Backfires | Gilad Atzmon
  The UK Jewish Lobby is in a state of panic - the Holocaust Memorial Day boomerangs. If anything it turns the floodlight on the deeply problematic inclinations that are sadly inherent to Jewish political culture and collectivism...

No Satire, Honest Dementia: Clinton: Iran's Nuclear Push 'Unacceptable' | Newsmax
  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Iran's continued efforts to develop a nuclear weapons program "unacceptable" Tuesday and hinted at possible military action to stop it. "This is an unacceptable path that they must stop or action will have to be taken,.. we've always said all options are on the table. The president has been very clear about that."..
[“All options are on the table” is Hillary’s favorite phrase. May I suggest one such option that would be appropriate in her case - the guillotine.]



Jan 30, 2013

Ilan Pappe in Haifa: The Arab Spring Puts Israel Against the Historical Trend | Free Haifa
...The one democratic state solution in Palestine becomes a hot topic for discussion in academic circles and in the media around the world. Pappe described how he, as one of the best known presenters of this alternative, can’t find time any more for all the requested lectures. But what should supporters of this solution do in order to present it as a real alternative to the public? Overcoming the difficulties of cooperation and building a shared vision between the Arab – Palestinian and Jewish components of this movement are an important part of the answer…

Murdoch Sorry Over 'Grotesque' Scarfe Cartoon | Yahoo! News UK
  Rupert Murdoch has offered a "major apology" for a "grotesque" cartoon in the Sunday Times that has sparked claims of anti-Semitism. The chairman and CEO of News Corporation commented on Twitter on the Gerald Scarfe image, which appears to show Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu paving a wall with the blood and limbs of Palestinians...
[I advise ueber-zionist Murdoch to go get a quick bris. I’m sure that will make him feel much better. Poor wee fella]

"Beitar Pure Forever!" | Roi Tov
...This Saturday violence is expected not only due to the racist sign placed last week, but also because Maccabi Umm al-Fahem, a Palestinian team from The Triangle will play against Beitar Jerusalem in Jerusalem. The event last Saturday was the result of the managers' decision to add two Muslim Palestinian players to the team. "Beitar Pure Forever," was the answer of the fans. They weren't demanding the food served to be "kosher;" they want a purely Jewish team. "Pure" here was said in the Nazi-Aryan sense. Pure as Hitler, pure as Goebbels, pure as Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor; snow white pure...

Truth-telling British MP in Zionists’ crosshairs, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
...Years ago we knew the words of the constitution, and the preamble to it, off by heart and tried to live by them. Remember, Mr Carmichael, the pledge to defend the right to speak, write, worship, associate and vote freely? And the commitment to fight oppression, ignorance and aggression wherever they occur? Remember our responsibility to promote the free movement of ideas, people, goods and services? Remember our declared support for international law and the holding of individuals and governments to account for crimes against humanity?..

US-NATO “Economic Terrorism”: The Collapse of Syria’s Industry and Agriculture, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research
The Syrian economy is being hit by the combined impacts of the US-NATO sponsored terrorist attacks and the economic sanctions regime. The ultimate objective of the US-NATO covert war on Syria is the destabilization of the Syria economy and the destruction of Syria as a nation state...

Israel Boycotts U.N. Rights Review | NYT
  Israel became the first country to boycott a United Nations review of its human rights practices on Tuesday, shunning efforts by the United States and others to encourage its participation in a process in which all countries have hitherto taken part...

Mahmoud Sarsak: Palestinian International Footballer | Free Gaza Scotland
...When he begins to speak about his experience of imprisonment he tells his story with a matter of fact, quiet sincerity that is striking and makes the horror of his experience all the more shocking. Mahmoud was 21 years old, at the start of a playing career which had already seen him being recognised as one of the best young prospects in Palestine, already a regular for the Palestinian National side. He had an invitation to play for a football team in Nablus in the West Bank. This meant that he had to ask for permission from the Israelis to cross from Gaza through Erez crossing into Israel in order to travel on to the West Bank...

Egypt army chief warns of 'state collapse' | MCW News
  The Egyptian defence minister, General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, has given warning that the unrest sweeping the country could lead to the collapse of the state. Failure to resolve the situation "could lead to grave repercussions if the political forces do not act" to tackle it, Sissi said...
[In the Arab Spring there have been lots of thunderstorms, but seeds have been planted. We’ll just have to wait and see.]

The One-State Solution Is a Fantasy, by M.J. Rosenberg | Huffington Post
  I wrote a comment re this piece, which should be there, along with the usual fanatical idiocy from the sayanim, by the time you read this,..

U.N. nuclear watchdog backs Iran's denial of Fordow blast | Yahoo! News
  The U.N. atomic watchdog made clear on Tuesday it had seen no sign of any explosion at one of Iran's most sensitive nuclear plants, backing up Tehran's denial of media reports that such an incident had taken place last week. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in an unusual move, made a brief statement after some Israeli and Western media at the weekend reported there had been significant damage at the underground Fordow uranium enrichment facility...

Russia's New Adoption Law: Putin’s Baby Crime, by Israel Shamir | Counterpunch
  To the many crimes of President Vladimir Putin, a new one was added last month: kicking babies, sweet, innocent, plump babies — out of sheer wickedness. This crime was discussed ad nauseam, until it became a meme which was summed up by the NY Times’ own Thomas Friedman: “When recently confronted with his regime’s bad behavior, [Putin’s] first instinct was to block American parents from adopting Russian orphans, even though so many of them badly need homes.” Surprisingly, in Russia the voices against the new ban are even more shrill...

How Israeli Government Officials Fueled A Conspiracy Website Story About Iran, by Ali Gharib | The Daily Beast
  Here's an object lesson that shows just how far some press—and even Israeli government officials—have gone down the rabbit hole on Iran issues by propagating a story reported on a conspiracy website. The dubious tale goes like this: there was a huge explosion at Iran's main nuclear facility at Fordow, near the city of Qom, leaving hundreds of workers trapped underground. The facility is the source of much trepidation in Israel, where fears of insufficient military capabilities make the nuclear plant impenetrable to Israeli attack...

US & Israel's Nuclear Secrets | RT ThinkTank on YouTube
  Abby Martin talks to Grant Smith, Director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, about NUMEC, Israel's nuclear ambiguity and nuclear secrets...

Stop & Frisk Coming to Oakland, Tatiana Moroz Performs, Egypt's Next Stage of Revolution | RT on YouTube
Abby Martin Breaks the Set on Egyptian Protests, Liberty Music, Political Street Art and Stop and Frisk coming to Oakland...



Jan 29, 2013

Who spread reports of an 'explosion' at Iran's Fordow nuclear plant and why? | Haaretz
  The Internet has been abuzz over the last couple of days with an uncorroborated report regarding a huge explosion in the underground uranium enrichment plant at Fordow in Iran. According to the report, the explosion seriously damaged many of the centrifuges in the plant and trapped underground 240 employees who have yet to be rescued. If this is true, it will be the most serious sabotage caused yet to the Iranian nuclear program. If this is true...
[See also denial by the head of the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission of Iranˈs Majlis]

‘Gatekeepers,’ Oscar Nominee, Has Muted Reaction in Israel | NYT
  The Oscar-nominated documentary “The Gatekeepers” braids the recollections and reflections of six former chiefs of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, into a disturbing narrative of their country’s occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967. In the United States the confessions of these tough terrorist hunters have startled and provoked audiences, fueling the criticism among Jewish liberals of the right-leaning Israeli government’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank...
[Not bad for a review written by the usually reliably Zionist shill Judi Rudoren]

Once again the PSC expels Palestinians | Gilad Atzmon
...How can an organisation that claims to lobby on behalf of the Palestinians expel a Palestinian from its annual gathering? I am afraid that, yet again, we are furnished with clear proof that the PSC is now under full Zionist control and that this group is serves now just as a mouthpiece for the British establishment and the Zionist lobby...

Brussels Think-Tank Says Emerging Alliance Between Iran and Armenia Could "Circumvent" Western Sanctions | Wall Street Online
  A report issued by Brussels-based think tank European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center (ESISC) places a spotlight on what some have termed "an unholy alliance" between Islamist Iran and Christian Armenia, an alliance that anlaysts warn could dilute the impact of Western sanctions...
[Will Iran survive the relentless Imperial Zionist assault? Somehow I think they will. Read also the ESISC report]

Verbal Defecation Buries Truth, by William A. Cook | MCW News
...If truth be told, it did not take “a few years” for the Jews to inflict “unbelievable levels of persecution” on the indigenous people of Mandate Palestine; the persecution began in earnest in 1939 against the British, the British Mandate Government established in 1922 by the League of Nations to maintain order and peace in Palestine. The Zionists undertook “a war against the British Mandate Government, its Police and Soldiers” while it lobbied and subverted the MP’s in Westminster with propaganda and money. Here are the words Weizmann and Ben-Gurion promised the Mandate Government:..

What future, exactly, did Israelis vote for? by Adam Keller | MCW News
...it turns out that quite a few people in Japan feel worried and concerned about the policies of the Israeli Netanyahu and about the continuing Israeli occupation of the Palestinians and the possibility that a flare-up in the Middle East would entail catastrophic effects well beyond the region. A considerable audience turned out at the University of Tokyo to hear what I – as well as Dr. Walid Salem of East Jerusalem – had to say...

Intifada Activism Needed | Stephen Lendman
  Sixty-five years of mass slaughter, destruction, dispossession, occupation, persecution, apartheid, and slow-motion genocide is enough. Freedom requires committed activism. Liberation depends on working for what Israel denies. The alternative is more of what's too intolerable to bear.. Intifada activism is needed. Expect it to erupt sooner or later. Liberation depends on it...

Tiny but Hyper-Wealthy Qatar punching beyond its weight | IntelliBriefs
  Qatar, a peninsular small state attached to Saudi Arabia in the Gulf, with an area of 11,571 sq.km, has a citizen population of fewer than 250,000 people only. According to the World Bank its total population was 1,870,041(in 2011). Foreign workers outnumber native Qataris and come mainly from other Arab nations (20% of population), the Indian subcontinent (India 20%, Nepal 13%,Pakistan 7%, Sri Lanka 5%), Southeast Asia (Philippines 10%), and other countries (5%). Its GDP in 2011 was 173 billion USD (World Bank)...
[Money talks, filthy lucre exudes, like a massive, toxic oil slick]

Rights erosion in the USA, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis
  Why is it that so many Americans are more angry over the prospect of relatively minor adjustments to the gun laws, than they are over the serious erosion of constitutional rights to due process in the courts?..

The United States Promotes Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians, by Francis A. Boyle | Global Research
  In direct reaction to Israel provoking the Al Aqsa Intifada, on October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian people, some of whom are Christians, but most of whom are Muslims.. the world has seen those heinous war crimes inflicted every day by Israel against the Palestinian people living in occupied Palestine: e.g., willful killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army and by Israel’s criminal paramilitary terrorist settlers. These Israeli “grave breaches” of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandate universal prosecution for the perpetrators...

Greater Israel Bus Connections | Visualizing Palestine
  Apartheid transportation system graphically displayed (using the Iraeli bus company’s route map)...

Israel’s left turn to the far right, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth
  Much of Israeli politics is myth-making – the creation of narratives based on illusions – and the country’s election last week was no exception. Commentators have been quick to characterize the result as a dramatic upset, with the right-wing led by Benjamin Netanyahu locked in a dead-heat with the left.. This election has been a personal blow to Netanyahu, no doubt, but not to the right. Netanyahu misread the public mood, but not on the central issues that should define the left-right divide in Israel: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and decades of belligerent Israeli occupation...

In Translation: On Mali's Islamist groups, by Issandr El Amrani | The Arabist
  There is a strange divide about the situation in Mali in the Arab world. Beyond the regular newspaper coverage and almost reflexive suspicion of “neo-colonialist” motives behind the French-led operations, my impression is that the average Egyptian or for that matter average Arab is not greatly concerned with this situation, especially at a time when many countries are embroiled in tense domestic developments. Yet, for Islamists, the Mali issue has been important: not only for the Salafis who protested outside the French embassy in Cairo and elsewhere, but also in the wider Islamist movement, including the Muslim Brothers...

Jews DO control the media, by Manny Friedman | The Times of Israel
  We Jews are a funny breed. We love to brag about every Jewish actor. Sometimes we even pretend an actor is Jewish just because we like him enough that we think he deserves to be on our team. We brag about Jewish authors, Jewish politicians, Jewish directors. Every time someone mentions any movie or book or piece of art, we inevitably say something like, “Did you know that he was Jewish?” That’s just how we roll.. But the funny part is when any anti-Semite or anti-Israel person starts to spout stuff like, “The Jews control the media!” and “The Jews control Washington!” Suddenly we’re up in arms...

Israeli football fans celebrated the holocaust this week | Jews sans frontieres
  Well, yes. This weekend fans of the football club Beitar Jerusalem had a very appropriate way of celebrating the international holocaust memorial day - with a proud display of their affinity with the perpetrators: a protest against hiring Muslim players, and a big sign that reads "Beitar pure for ever."..

ACJ at 70, Keeping Prophetic Jewish Tradition Alive, by Allan C. Brownfeld | Salem News
  For more than seventy years, the American Council for Judaism has advanced the philosophy of Judaism as a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and has maintained that Americans of Jewish faith are American by nationality and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestants, Catholics or Muslims. It has challenged the Zionist philosophy which holds that Israel is the "homeland" of all Jews, and that Jews living outside of Israel are in "exile." In doing so, it has believed that this philosophy represents the thinking of the majority of American Jews, a largely silent majority not represented by the organizations which presume to speak in their name...
[Who in the West would have a clue? Some 4% of Jews, by one count I’ve seen, fanatical and rich Zionists, own or control 95% of the politicians and the mainstream media. It’s about time that the 96% started speaking out and doing whatever it takes. Not to mention the rest of you.]

Israel Caught Redhanded in Propaganda Campaign | Roi Tov
  January 28, 2013, was one of these days in which I read the Hebrew media and found myself unable to believe what I saw. Not because the items were shocking or the pictures disgusting, but because the items looked fabricated.. The first item that called my attention—it had been impossible to ignore after popping out as Breaking News in the Haaretz Hebrew website while I was reading it—was that Iran had launched a monkey into space. The Hebrew newspaper reported that the achievement was carried out with the help of a Kavoshgar 5 rocket which had reached the altitude of 120km; it also claimed that the payload had returned safely to earth, though it didn't explain how...
[Don’t miss the cartoon from the Sunday Times - wow, somebody's got courage]

Australia ignores new anti-Semitism, by Gideon Polya | MCW News
...For anti-racist Jews and indeed all anti-racist humanitarians the core moral messages from the Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and from the more general WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slav, Jewish and Gypsy dead) are “zero tolerance for racism”, “never again to anyone”, “bear witness” and “zero tolerance for lying”. Only about a dozen of my wider family survived the WW2 Jewish Holocaust in Europe. “Never again” means for me and other anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish people that we are obliged to protest any human rights abuses i.e. “Never again to anyone”, including the sorely oppressed Palestinians...

The Department of Defense Is Not About Defense, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation
...Defense obviously means defense. If the United States were attacked and invaded by another nation, then Americans who would resist the invasion would be defending their country.. Obviously, when we think in terms of defense in a genuine sense, the Department of Defense has nothing to do with defense. After all, there is no nation attacking or invading the United States or even preparing to do so. Yet, U.S. troops are engaged in hostilities all over the world...
[If it were called the Kosher Department of Wall St. Defense, people might just understand]



Jan 28, 2013

Thank God For Holocaust Memorial Day | Gilad Atzmon
  So the Goyim can learn first hand about the vile impact of Jewish Power. So the Goyim grasp once and for all that their democratically elected politicians better keep their thoughts to themselves. So the Goyim accept once and for all the primacy of Jewish suffering. So the Goyim can turn a blind eye to all those Shoas inflicted by the Jewish State, Stalin’s Jews and Ziocons...

'Killing Palestinians popular in Israel around election time' | YouTube
  RT talks to Chas Freeman, the Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia about the flaring conflicts in the Middle East...

Julian Assange: Sam Adams Awards | Oxford Union on YouTube
...In 2008 WikiLeaks published Iraq's classified rules of engagement for the US army. In those rules there was a section that permitted a border skirmish to start up that allowed US troops to go into Iran under a variety of circumstances. Because of the leak Iran held a press conference saying that in no way are the US allowed into their territory. After this a second rules of engagement was published omitting the border skirmish. Between 20% and 50% of all wars have started as a result of these border skirmishes. 45 hostile military bases surrounds Iran's borders, because of this there is a constant fear of being invaded making for a very tense atmosphere in the country...

Is the IAEA Undermining Nuclear Talks with Iran? | Going to Tehran
...A number of recent pieces.. offer a meticulously detailed corrective to the prevailing, ill-informed Western narrative. We will unpack this corrective by looking at two sets of issues: 1) the IAEA’s authority to access Parchin, and 2) whether there is actual evidence of nuclear weapons-related activity at Parchin, either in the building on which the Agency is presently focused or more generally.. “Iran has been more cooperative than other countries would be in the same situation”—a judgment affirmed by former IAEA director general Hans Blix—“and indeed more cooperative than it legally needs to be...
Read more...

Chris Hedges on Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt | YouTube
  Journalist Chris Hedges and graphic artist Joe Sacco traveled to the most depressed pockets of the United States to combine narrative nonfiction with graphic art in their book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Together they report from the vast and growing zones of sacrifice imposed across the U.S. by the corporate state...
Watch video...

Venezuelan VP: ‘US should realize that world has changed’ | RT
  The US has lots of troubles dealing with other nations as they haven’t come to grips with the new global reality, Venezuelan Vice-President Nicolas Maduro told RT in an exclusive interview. He also spoke about the health of President Chavez. Speaking to RT Spanish host Eva Golinger in Caracas, Nicolas Maduro shared his views on the political and economic future of Venezuela and Latin America’s fight for independence...

Iran’s Fordo Nuclear Plant Extensively Damaged by Sabotage, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam
  A highly-placed Israeli source informs me that Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Fordo has been extensively damaged by an explosion. The bomb was the work of a joint Israeli-U.S.-MEK sabotage operation codenamed Achilles, which used a Trojan horse to infiltrate the plant.. it may mean that the State Department’s removal of the MEK from the U.S. terror list has allowed the CIA to begin working with the Iranian group in a much more direct fashion. Those of us who know about the nature of the MEK can only be alarmed that our government is allying itself with a terrorist cult...
Read more...

State of Israel Forced the Sterilization of Ethiopian Women | Roi Tov
  On January 27, 2013, Israel formally admitted having injected Ethiopian-Jewish women with venom against their will, so that they won't get pregnant. Israel brought them to Israel in a propaganda-program aimed at showing the world that Jews are not racists, and then applied Nazi techniques to ensure that they won't reproduce. Several years ago, I published Israel’s Eugenics Program: Dr. Mengele Blues, which describes the frightening "Dor Yeshorim" (roughly "Straightening Generation") Israeli eugenics program, who seeks to destroy embryos who do not fit the Zionist dream. Not surprisingly, the program originates directly in the work of Dr Epstein, a Jewish aide of Nazi Dr Mengele...
[No surprise when Jewish Nazis act like German Nazis]
Read more...

President Nominates Hagel, Israel Lobby Gives "Advise and Consent", Not U.S. Senate, by Mohamed Khodr | Sabbah Report
...For weeks prior to his nomination the “Jewish Lobby” fearful of Senator Hagel’s forthrightness, independence of thought, and his unwillingness to join the Jewish run cowardly Congress to implement and adopt anything Israel and AIPAC demands of it, launched the usual libel attacks, smears, character assassination, and the ultimate weapon of choice, calling him an “Anti-Semite.” The Lobby did not want to see a Secretary of Defense who will actually study and analyze military issues and affairs from the standpoint of America’s interests, not Israel’s...
Read more...

A Terrible Normality, by Michael Parenti | Dandelion Salad
...In the decades after World War II, many, if not most, massacres and wars have been openly or covertly sponsored by the U.S. national security state. This includes the two million or so left dead or missing in Vietnam, along with 250,000 Cambodians, 100,000 Laotians, and 58,000 Americans.. There was the slaughter of more than half a million socialistic or democratic nationalist Indonesians by the U.S.-supported Indonesian military in 1965, eventually followed by the extermination of 100,000 East Timorese by that same U.S.-backed military...
Read more...



Jan 27, 2013

British MP condemned for criticizing Israel, by Gilad Atzmon | Redress Information & Analysis
  Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, Liberal Democrat David Ward, Member of Parliament for Bradford East, made a comparison on his website. He equated the shoa [holocaust] with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But in Britain of 2013 we are not supposed to think freely, we are advised not to follow our ethical intuitions or even to think historically or critically. The Liberal Democrats have already “condemned” Ward for his “use of language”..

Fascism Wins Big in Israel | Stephen Lendman
  Israeli election results hardened fascist rule. Dominant right-wing parties control 102 of 120 Knesset seats. Israelis have themselves to blame. They elected Israel's most extremist government in history. Militarism, belligerence, state-sponsored terrorism, occupation ruthlessness, settlement expansions, and neoliberal harshness reflect official policy...

Buried two young, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
...I have returned from the US to Palestine nearly five years ago. In this period, I witnessed many Israeli atrocities. Atrocities cover just about every item of the Universal Declaration of Human rights: Forcible displacement, home demolitions, extra judicial executions, theft of land, theft of natural resources, religious persecution, destruction of infrastructure, use of illegal weapons like White Phosphorous on civilian population, unlawful imprisonment based on political beliefs, economic deprivation and many more...

The Great Zionist Cover-Up: Edwin M. Wright Oral History Interview | Truman Library
...I took the liberty of adding a number of footnotes. The material I gave Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature - one almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman...

A Long Day’s Night for Us All: Israel’s Hidden Faces, by Dr Alan Sabrosky | Veterans Today
...Far too often, issues involving Israel and its actions are addressed in a sophisticated and complex manner, often with little or no linkage among them. This is fine for professionals who are well versed in the subject matter, and can infer detail and linkages where none is explicitly given or made. But it is NOT so for a general public, most of whom are not even aware that these issues exist, and have been exposed to a steady diet of pro-Israel propaganda throughout most if not all of their lives...

You must not tell the truth! And chutzpah defined | Alan Hart
  Some of us do not believe what our politicians say especially when the subject is Israel’s behaviour – its ongoing colonization of the occupied West Bank for the purpose of making peace impossible except, perhaps, on terms which require the Palestinians to surrender to Zionism’s will. The responses of some Jewish supporters of Israel right or wrong to one British MP who did dare to tell the truth illustrate why most politicians throughout the Western world won’t. That’s yesterday’s story but I am driven to comment by the hypocrisy on display, hypocrisy which takes chutzpah to wild extremes...

jewals? by david holden | deLiberation
...this incomplete list of well-embedded sayanim in US government has been tidied up a bit and edited from a document i found dating from 2006... such information undoubtedly provides a useful initial research guide for those seeking to understand the genesis of the psychopathic Middle Eastern wars initiated by the USA/NATO in the first decade of the 21st century. dual citizenship in the technical sense is not a verified fact in every case – the reason for inclusion seems to have been primarily a demonstrated loyalty to Israel against the interests of the US...

The State of Human Rights in Israel and in the Occupied Territories 2012, by Tal Dahan | ACRI

US-led economic sanctions strangle Iran's drug supply, by Dara Mohammadi | The Lancet
  Economic sanctions against Iran are affecting the availability of essential and life-saving drugs in the country, forcing patients to turn to an unregulated black market.. “Some of my patients can't get the drugs they need—they are left thinking that this is the end for them”, explains Daryoush Sharif (not his real name), a clinician working in Tehran. “Sometimes I have to collect money from my more well-to-do patients so that they [the poorer patients] can buy medication. It makes practicing medicine in this country hard at the moment, having to observe people suffering like this.”..
[Thank you, Hillary et al, for all your good work. Cue applause from the deaf and dumb audience]

How Bush, Rumsfeld and Algerian intelligence helped foster the Islamist uprising in Mali, by Paul Woodward | War in Context
  In an analysis appearing in the New Internationalist last month, Jeremy Keenan, professor of social anthropology at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, explained how the current conflict in Mali is rooted in “a largely covert and highly duplicitous alliance” forged between Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and President George W Bush in the summer of 2001...

Yair Lapid’s mental block | Haaretz Editorial
   By rejecting Hanin Zuabi out of hand as a partner to any kind of political activity, Lapid joined those responsible for the dangerous trend of excluding Arabs from the Israeli political process...
[As if it makes a difference. Israel cannot be reformed or ‘fixed.’ It must be terminated before it metastasizes any further.]

Destruction of Syria’s Millenary History, by Franklin Lamb | MCW News
...there is plenty of anger here among the Syrian public, the NGO’s, and increasingly the international legal community among others — not toward the American people but toward the US government — over the effects of its sanctions which are severely and illegally targeting the civilian population. At the same time they are directly contributing to prospects of irreparably damaging many of this millenary country’s historic sites...

It's inequality, stupid, by Pepe Escobar | Al Jazeera
  Billions of people would apply the Groucho Marx rule to Davos - the exclusive club meeting in the Swiss Alps allegedly gathering the great and the good of business; "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that accepts me as a member". Well, to start with, those billions wouldn't get past the bouncers, because the pompously self-defined World Economic Forum is indeed about exclusion. Yet even if - by divine design - they might, what's the point? The austerity mantra devastates large swathes of Europe. The US remains mired in the fiscal cliff maelstrom. The Japanese are about to unleash an economic tsunami - devaluation of the yen at all costs...



Jan 26, 2013

The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel, by Jeremy R. Hammond | Foreign Policy Journal
  There is a widely accepted belief that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 “created” Israel, based upon an understanding that this resolution partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority or legitimacy to the declaration of the existence of the state of Israel. However, despite its popularity, this belief has no basis in fact, as a review of the resolution’s history and examination of legal principles demonstrates incontrovertibly...

Strategies of containment, by William T. Hathaway | Intrepid Report
  Many of us on the left have been kettled at demonstrations: surrounded by a wall of police, herded into a small area, and prevented from reaching our goal. The term is a translation of kesseln, the German military tactic of enclosing an enemy force within a tight cordon of troops and gradually wearing it down rather than attacking it directly. But we are also kettled by the thought police, and that’s even more insidious...

A Mind-Blowing Book on the Vietnam War, by Jacob G. Hornberger | Future of Freedom Foundation
  A book I read over the weekend absolutely blew my mind. It’s one of those types of books that shakes your world view about something, in this case the U.S. government’s war in Vietnam. It is an absolutely shocking book. It is entitled Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse. Most every one of us has been ingrained with the notion that the massacre of innocent, defenseless women, children, and old people at My Lai at the hands of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley and the men in his unit was an aberration. U.S. officials were outraged by the massacre, we have repeatedly been told, and that’s why they went after Calley in a criminal prosecution. Not so, says Turse...

Iran Sanctions Passed the Point of Effectiveness, by John Glaser | Antiwar
  The unprecedentedly harsh economic sanctions regime Washington has imposed on Iran “really has reached its end,” according to Vali Nasr, Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. Nasr, born in Tehran, is well within the mainstream in Washington’s foreign policy elite, having worked in and out of government with people like Richard Holbrooke, John Kerry, and Richard Haas. However, he has been somewhat critical of Obama’s drone policy, the lack of diplomacy on Iran, and the continuation of some of George W. Bush’s worst foreign policy strategies...

One of the myths, by Jonathan Cook | Facebook
  One of the myths rapidly emerging from the Israeli election is that there has been some sort of dead-heat between the Israeli left and right. That is a very misleading interpretation of the results. In fact, what has happened is that the right has moved much further rightwards over the past decade, including in this election, to the point where we now have three large far-right parties (Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and the Jewish Home) constituting about a third of the Knesset. The new wonder-boy, Yair Lapid, is really just a traditional rightist...

Eyes Like Blank Discs: The Guardian’s Steven Poole On George Orwell’s Politics And The English Language, by David Edwards | Media Lens
  January 21, ‘Orwell Day’, marked the 63rd anniversary of George Orwell’s death, Steven Poole notes in the Guardian. To commemorate 110 years since Orwell was born (June 25), BBC radio will broadcast a series about his life while Penguin will publish a new edition of his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’.. he was motivated to resist a process of social dehumanisation facilitated by ‘imitative’ and ‘lifeless’ communication, by a toxic ‘orthodoxy’..

Leveretts Discuss Going to Tehran at the Carnegie Council | Going to Tehran
  To offer an in-depth presentation of the key drivers underlying Going to Tehran, we appeared in New York at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs this week. A transcript and edited video and audio recordings will be available on the Carnegie Council Web site soon. In the meantime, for an unedited video of the event, including both our presentation and the subsequent discussion with the audience, click here...

Holocaust Hits India | Roi Tov
  On January 2013, with a ten-month delay, Israel answered India's decision to bar Israel Military Industries from bidding on defense contracts for 10 years. The softness of Israel's responses is a concession to India's size and importance. Yet, the approach chosen should worry India more than a direct military attack. Israel has decided to reeducate—Gulag-style—India and to bring to Israel an Indian Hill-Tribe. Naive in Western tricks despite a long British colonization, India is still deep in its beauty sleep...

Living the American Dream in the West Bank, by Kiera Feldman, Photos by Gillian Laub | VICE
  In many people’s imaginations, Jewish settlers in the West Bank are bearded, M16-toting fundamentalists living in hilltop trailers overrun with barefoot women and children. And sometimes that’s the reality—but not always. In 2010, 269 Jews moved from America to West Bank settlements, many of which are marketed as “bedroom communities” to families and white-collar professionals in the US. The migration is called “making aliyah,” which translates roughly from the Hebrew as “movin’ on up.” Never mind that it’s a violation of the Geneva Conventions for Israel, as an occupying power, to install civilians in the West Bank...
[Maybe somebody should nuke Brooklyn rather than Israel. Just kidding ? Anyway, you’ve gotta check this out.]

British conference kicks off campaign calling for apology and reparations for the Balfour declaration, by Nu'man Abd al-Wahid | Mondoweiss
  The land of Lord Balfour hosted a rare but much needed conference on his infamous 1917 declaration. The event was convened by the appropriately named organisation, the Palestine Return Centre (PRC) on the 19th January 2013 in London. The aim of the meeting was to inaugurate a campaign for British “mistakes” and to “make reparations to Palestinians who endured human rights abuses at British hands.” It is rare because not only is the ‘Balfour Declaration’ and its brutal ramifications greatly understudied but the entire period of British total military and political dominance of the Middle East between 1917 and 1948 is more or less whitewashed from contemporary discussion...

What Israel's Election Outcome Means - And Doesn't Mean, by Yousef Munayyer | Sabbah Report
...The half-half divide is more appropriately described as a split between Netanyahu’s natural allies and his political opposition. This should not be conflated with an ideological divide or even a policy divide, particularly as it relates to the occupation. Further, the “left” bloc that some have referred to includes non-Zionist Arab parties, which picked up about 9-12 seats. These parties have never, in the history of the Israeli political system, been included in a governing coalition...

Zionism and Antisemitism: Racist Political Twins – A J-Big Briefing | It's Kosher to Boycott Israeli Goods
  The movement for freedom, justice and equality for Palestinians opposes Israel’s occupation, colonisation of Arab lands and its apartheid system. The campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targets the Israeli state, institutions and companies complicit in Israel’s crimes. BDS has become an effective means for people of diverse backgrounds to express their humanitarian, anti-racist impulses in solidarity with Palestine...

Zionists call the shots in the Anglican Church, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
  Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, has stepped down from his post (sigh of relief). Williams’s role as a figure of unity in the worldwide Anglican Communion, which is represented in over 130 countries, meant that he was in a position to “bring the needs and voices of those fighting poverty, disease and the effects of conflict to the attention of national and international policy makers and donor agencies”. Or so we were told...

Israelis vote against common sense, by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis
  Israelis voted on 22 January to kill the prospect of peace. Out of 34 factions contesting the election, voters chose right wing parties advocating land annexation and Jews-only settlements. This should come as no surprise as an opinion poll conducted by Israel Democracy and Tel Aviv University last month revealed that 67 per cent of Israelis supported their government’s policies on the stalled peace process. For the first time in history, peace was not in the top two issues in the latest Israeli election...

Why were German soldiers 'attacked' in Turkey? | Deutsche Welle
...barely had German soldiers set foot on Turkish soil when they were met by protests and physical attacks by Turkish citizens. For weeks now, a colorful smattering of political groups, made up of nationalists, communists and Islamists have been protesting against the installation of Patriot missiles in Turkey. The attack on German soldiers in Iskenderun this week was the culmination of those demonstrations. "We're going to fight until NATO soldiers are driven out of our country,"..

The Hagel Haters, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
...The list of Hagel’s enemies could go on, and on: suffice to say that every neocon shill in the country is up in arms over the Hagel nomination – and this should tell us something. Why is a political faction fanatically devoted to war expending all these resources on a campaign to demonize a man whose views on matters such as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process are irrelevant to the position he’s been appointed to – a military man who is hardly likely to disarm the United States and bring about "an end to our nuclear program"? Aside from the sheer fun of wasting the Kochs’ cash, why spend good money attacking Sen. Schumer, whose reelection is 99.9 percent assured? The reason is...

Militarized politics at their worst: Mali, by Peter Dörrie | Waging Nonviolence
  When fundamentalist rebel forces overran the central Malian city of Konna on January 11, they sent shockwaves not only through Mali itself but through the international community as well. With Konna fallen, the path to the last remaining government-controlled military base in the region, in the town of Sevaré, looked clear. Having the only airstrip able to handle large transport aircraft apart from the capital, Bamako, rebel control of the base would have been a nightmare not only for the paralyzed Malian government, but also for large parts of the population, many of whom fear the harsh religious-inspired fundamentalist rule that the armed rebels have enforced over the last few months in northern Mali...

Syria's Muslim Brotherhood Propped Up by US Since 2007 Under Bush, by Tony Cartalucci | Land Destroyer
  In 2007, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, "To Check Syria, U.S. Explores Bond With Muslim Brothers." And even then, it was noted that the Brotherhood held close links with groups the US recognizes and lists as terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Al Qaeda. The report gives a disturbing foreshadowing of US support that would eventually see the Muslim Brotherhood rise as both a political and terroristic power across the Arab World, after decades of hard-fought attempts to crush the sectarian extremist organization everywhere from Tunisia to Syria, from Egypt to Libya, to Jordan, and beyond...

U.S. Military Lauded For Creating Gender-Neutral Killing Field | The Onion
  Female veterans and feminist activist groups are commending the Pentagon this week following a watershed policy change that will lift the ban on women in combat roles, rendering the battlefield an equal-opportunity death zone. “The U.S. Armed Forces have been gender-neutral in their victims for years, and now they’re finally leveling the killing field for female combatants as well,” said Nadine Hynes, a retired Marine Corps Lance Corporal who was unable to add to the carnage of Iraq’s blood-soaked, limb-strewn slaughterscapes due to the Pentagon’s 1994 rule barring women from infantry and artillery roles...

US Jewish Leaders Apologize for USS Liberty, Promise Not to Meddle in US Foreign Policy Anymore (But Promises to Shiksas Don’t Count) | Public Intelligence Blog
  Leaders of several major American Jewish organizations met today with President Barack Obama and his national security team, offering abject apologies for the Israeli covert attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 Killed in Action (KIA), and 171 Wounded in Action (WIA). For over 30 years the US Government has been a co-conspirator with Israel and its Zionist supporters in the US, whose campaign contributions to US Senators and Representatives were always accompanied by a note, “Forget about the USS Liberty — it was just business.”..

Zero Dark Mali, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
..Inevitably, that most convenient of bogeymen - al-Qaeda - is once again back in fashion, the whole nebula of Salafi-jihadi groups and sub-groups promoted by the French-Anglo-American triad as the root of all evil in Northern Africa (but not in Libya, where they were exalted as "freedom fighters"). Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of the founding members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is for all practical purposes an easily digestible Osama bin Laden remix...



Jan 24-25, 2013

Israeli Election: Time to bin Left and Right Terminologies | Gilad Atzmon
  Most commentators on Israeli politics fail to see that notions of Left and Right are pretty much irrelevant to the understanding of Israeli politics. Israel defines itself as the Jewish State and, as the years pass, Israel does indeed become more and more Jewish. Naftali Bennett, who, for a while, appeared to be the rising star of the current election, realised this all too well. He re-invented Jewish Home, a political party that celebrates the Israeli aspiration to fulfill his or her true Jewish destiny – He promised his followers that they can live as The Chosen in their Jew-only state, regardless of ethical or moral concerns...

Judaization = Racism? Really? by Paul Larudee | Aletho News
...The Haaretz editorial is a criticism of the “benighted racist position that sees the presence of Arabs in the Galilee or anywhere else as a national threat.” Nice words, but is not the entire Zionist project one of “judaization”? Is that not how its founders conceived it? Is not Israel itself the product of “judaization”? What is different about Upper Nazareth? What about the expulsion of the Bedouin in the Naqab (“Negev”)? Is the confiscation and demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem not merely an extension of the ethnic cleansing of 1948? How are the orders to evacuate and obliterate eight villages in the hills south of al-Khalil (“Hebron”) not consistent with the aims of Zionism?..

Sen. Chuck Hagel and the Requirement of Apology to Jews, by Rev. Ted Pike | NPN
...increasingly, we indulge Jewish supremacists, allowing them to destroy the political careers and reputations of anyone who does not give Israel the servile obeisance Zionists demand. Today, the Jewish liberal, political and social agenda is full of inversions of truth to which leaders must submit in order to professionally and politically survive. Following are some shibboleths to which political and religious leaders must now assent for fear of being labeled "anti-Semitic" and ruined...

US military says Martin Luther King would be proud of its weapons, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  A repellent piece of propaganda appropriates the words and images of this nonviolence advocate to glorify US militarism...

Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley’s New Film Exposes Hidden Truths of Covert U.S. Warfare | Democracy Now
  Premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the new documentary "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield" follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truths behind America’s expanding covert wars...

Extreme Wealth v. Global Sharing: Neoliberalism Can’t Die Soon Enough, by Rajesh Makwana | Counterpunch
...For how much longer will policymakers continue to ignore the common sense alternatives that millions of people across the world are calling for? What can be done to strengthen democracy and remind politicians that they are in office to serve ordinary people, not corporations? Perhaps the only answer is the mass mobilisation of engaged citizens in a common cause against rising inequality that extends beyond national borders. Or perhaps only further financial crises, environmental chaos and economic hardship will eventually force policymakers to rethink their distorted priorities...

Torture Is Trivial, by Robert Jensen | Common Dreams
  The great American torture debate has been rekindled by the nationwide release of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the hot new movie about the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. But all the fussing over whether or not the movie condones, glorifies, and/or misrepresents torture is trivial, because the United States’ use of torture after 9/11 is trivial in the context of larger U.S. crimes...

Asian news and current affairs, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
  One's got to love the sound of a Frenchman's Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like... a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce. Apparently, it's a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people - with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years - in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb. So welcome to the latest African war...

Book Review: Destroying Libya and World Order, by Francis Boyle | Global Research
  It took three decades for the United States government-spanning and working assiduously over five different presidential administrations (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama)-to overthrow and reverse the 1969 Qaddafi Revolution in order to resubjugate Libya, seize control over its oil fields, and dismantle its Jamahiriya system. This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened, and what was both wrong and illegal with what happened from the perspective of an international law professor and lawyer who tried for over three decades to stop it...

No War against Iran: The Israeli and American elections, by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News
...The main massage that comes out of this election is that the Israelis don’t want to go to war with Iran. The American people have sent a similar message by reelecting Barack Obama. The nomination of John Kerry as Secretary of State and Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary has sent a clear signal to Netanyahu. When rumors of Hagel’s nomination began circulating in December, the neoconservative war party together with the lunatic fringe of the US-American “Israel Lobby” started a smear campaign against Chuck Hagel. They even stigmatized him an “anti-Semite”..

Universalism and Individualism versus Tribalism, by William A. Cook | MCW News
...America’s unqualified support for the State of Israel, for this looming contradiction to American core values--tolerance for all religions, inherent rights by birth for all citizens, belief in the pursuit of happiness, equality before the law, and justice regardless of race or creed or color or gender--hangs the rope of hypocrisy around our necks as we confront the communities of the world with our acceptance of a country that forces all to take an oath of loyalty to “the Jewish State” thereby denying individual freedom of thought, the antithesis of American values...

Foreign Agents: The Zionist Organization of America | Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post
  In this third episode of EyeOpener Video Report Series on Secret Societies James Corbett introduces us to The Zionist Organization of America...

Obama and the (Mis)management of Imperial Decline | Going to Tehran
...The world is increasingly giving up on the proposition that the United States can act in any manner other than that of an imperial power—even as more and more important players in global affairs are coming to see it as an imperial power in decline. Obama’s second inaugural displayed no appreciation for this reality. And that does not augur well for any meaningful recovery of America’s international standing during Obama’s second term...

Qatar Leaks: The Business of Foreign Affairs, by Radwan Mortada | Al Akhbar
  An important dimension of the Syrian crisis is the electronic war being waged by both sides. One of the groups active in this area calls itself the Syrian Electronic Army and it has recently succeeded in hacking into several official Qatari, Saudi, and Turkish websites and downloading thousands of secret documents from them. Al-Akhbar gained access to some of these through an intermediary and, after confirming their authenticity, agreed to publish them in coordination with the Syrian Ajel website...

Zionist Plan, by Oded Yinom: Translated by Israel Shahak | AAUG
  The following essay represents, in my opinion, the accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime (of Sharon and Eitan) for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states. I will comment on the military aspect of this plan in a concluding note...

New U.S. Counterterrorism Playbook to Exclude Pakistan from Drone “Kill” Rules | AllGov News
..The rules, referred to as the “playbook” by officials, are supposed to establish parameters for killing overseas threats. Once completed, the playbook will detail how names are added to assassination lists, which legal principles justify the killing of U.S. citizens, and what offices must sign off before drone strikes are carried out. But the CIA will be exempted from the rules for at least a year. Agency leaders objected to being bound by the playbook, citing the pressing need to continue bombing Taliban and al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan before the U.S. withdraws from neighboring Afghanistan, where the drones are based...

A Leader’s Lexicon for the 21st Century, by Lesley Docksey | Dissident Voice
  Intended to help all 21st Century leaders (Western, of course) when making speeches or statements to the press and their gullible public. N.B.: this is not an exhaustive list, and leaders will invent their own useful words and phrases, freely copied by their fellows...
[Fox News probably has a cheat sheet given out to new staff somewhat like this]

When Fact Becomes Opinion: Half-Truths, Non-Truths & the Phony Objectivity of the Associated Press | Wide Asleep in America
  An Associated Press report from this past week demonstrates how plain facts and provable, documented historical events are often described as subjective perceptions and matters of perspective in the mainstream media whenever an honest presentation and assessment of those facts would serve to reduce the fear-mongering propaganda over Iran's nuclear energy program...

SAAII Award at the Oxford Union Society, by Annie Machon | Using Our Intelligence
  The SAAII is one of the few inter­na­tional recog­ni­tions for those within the intel­li­gence com­munity who fol­low their con­science, often at great pro­fes­sional and per­sonal cost. This year’s win­ner is Dr Tom Fin­gar, who headed up the 2007 US National Intel­li­gence Estim­ate on Iran. He col­lated the offi­cial assess­ments of all 16 of America’s intel­li­gence agen­cies, which unan­im­ously assessed that Iran had ceased try­ing to build a nuc­lear weapon in 2003. This evidence-based ana­lysis made it impossible for the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to push through its plans to launch a war against Iran in 2008. This excel­lent art­icle by ex-CIA ana­lyst Ray McGov­ern explains Dr Fingar’s achieve­ments far bet­ter than I could...

US think tank fuels Iran nuclear crisis, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online
  Several years ago, when a US Congressional report erroneously caused false alarms about Iran's "weapons-grade" uranium enrichment, it was publicly rebuffed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a top IAEA official criticized the report's authors for making statements that showed "they are interested in fueling the crisis, not solving it". Today, the same criticism is warranted against a new report, entitled US Nonproliferation Strategy for The Changing Middle East, which recommends increased US sanctions and "credible military threats" against Iran in order to halt its march toward nuclear weapons...

War on terror forever, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
  And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to... The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of "Geronimo", aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty. It's now official - coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at the AFRICOM site, the Pentagon's weaponized African branch...



Jan 23, 2013

Palestinian diaspora must become engaged, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis
...it’s time for the Palestinian diaspora to put its act together and become politically engaged. If it does not, there is a very real prospect that it will be charged with complicity by default in a final Zionist ethnic cleansing. So here’s the question: How could the Palestinian diaspora put its act together and for what purpose?..
Read more...

Comment on 'Why the Palestinian diaspora must become politically engaged' by Alan Hart, by Roger Tucker | One Democratic State
  First off, thank you, Alan, for this exquisite presentation of the facts of the case and the dilemma facing all of us, not just the Palestinians (because Israel’s continued existence threatens all of humanity). Secondly, the crux of the dilemma, as you put it so well, is indeed the lack of a viable Palestinian leadership. But, unlike you, I trace this problem to Arafat, who basically sold out the Palestinians for a virtual mess of pottage. Without him the idea of two states would never have gained legitimacy among the majority of Palestinians or their supporters. He also compromised on the basic and fundamental right of return...
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A Review of Alan Hart's Zionism: The Dead End of the Oppressor, by Kim Petersen | Shamir Readers
  Zionism is the ideology that dispossessed the Palestinians of their traditional territory. It is the ideology that nuclearized the Middle East. It is the ideology whose lobby gained inordinate sway over the world superpower through manipulating the US electoral process (former BBC and ITN correspondent Alan Hart says Jewish Americans account for three percent or less of the US population but nearly 50 percent of campaign funds; result: Americans have a choice between two pro-Zionist parties). It is the ideology that foments instability and wars in the Middle East...
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Shedding Crocodile Tears while Collaborating with US-led Sanctions, by Franklin Lamb | Al Manar
...The Arab League’s recent ministerial-level meeting held in Cairo was called to focus on the Syrian refugees file. But the rather pathetic quick one day deliberations ignored the causes of the suffering of the civilian population as well as the fact that most of the 22 countries comprising the Arab League have been a main cause behind the displacement of the Syrian civilian population. Both the AL and the OIC stand accused here in Syria of participation in the sanctions which are decimating the Syrian people's livelihood...
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The Psychopathology of Zionism: Ken Freeland's review of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine by Joel Kovel | Shamir Readers
...my seasoned distrust of so-called progressive Jewish intellectuals (who always seem to turn out to have a soft spot for racist Israel) has been resolved, for here, in this man and in this book, I have encountered the 21st century reincarnation of Israel Shahak, that first great (Jewish) writer to expose from within the perfidy and counterfeit nature of Zionist Israel, and its relation to Judaism and to a very checkered Jewish history. Joel Kovel takes up where that late, great scholar left off, but interestingly, while he holds absolutely no quarter for Zionism, he does lead the reader to a reasonably sympathetic understanding of how this pernicious ideology could have developed in the first place...
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A Disaster 50 Years in The Making | Dekhnstan
  Mali’s problems did not start with the fall of Libya’s Qadhafi. They started even before it gained independence from France. A diverse set of ethnic groups were forced to coexist without much thought of the immense potential for conflict caused by that arrangement. France’s 25th hour short-legged attempt at Shock and Awe is potentially a doomed effort because it is a decade late. Relying on inept militaries, and hoping to win a guerilla warfare without a credible strategy is a defeat waiting to happen...
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Breathing Forgiveness: Anti-Slavery Campaign Interview Series, with Richard Forer | Breathing Forgiveness
...Our internal logic colors the way we see the world. It leads us to interpret the world in ways that reinforce our mind’s conception of reality. The logic of my youth continued basically intact into my adult life. So, when I heard that Israeli soldiers had killed children and other civilians, I automatically responded with skepticism if not outright denial. My “logical” mind explained what really must have occurred, which is that these children and civilians were killed because Hamas or Hezbollah, whoever the enemy was, embedded their soldiers within civilian populations...
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Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Who’s Who? Who is Behind the Terrorists? by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research
  Who is behind the terrorist group which attacked the BP -Statoil-Sonatrach In Amenas Gas Field Complex located on the Libyan border in South Eastern Algeria? The operation was coordinated by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of the Al Qaeda affiliated Islamist al-Mulathameen (Masked) Brigade, or “Those who Sign with Blood.” Belmokhtar’s organization has been involved in the drug trade, smuggling as well kidnapping operations of foreigners in North Africa. While his whereabouts are known, French intelligence has dubbed Belmokhtar “the uncatchable”...
[The Empire’s pets just might bite the hand that feeds them]
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Iran wants a nuclear deal, not war, by Hossein Mousavian | The Guardian
...There is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003, and Iran's leadership has not yet made a political decision to do so. In contrast, Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, has not permitted the IAEA even a single inspection and possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. The reasons that international efforts to realise a "nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East" have made no progress since Iran proposed the idea almost 40 years ago must therefore be clear...
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Imagine if you were born at an Israeli checkpoint | Sabbah Report
  Born at Qalandia Checkpoint focuses on the impact of Israeli movement restrictions on the everyday lives of Palestinians. The phenomenon of Palestinian women forced to give birth at military checkpoints peaked during the Second Intifada (2000-05). Since this time, Palestinian women in remote areas have increasingly resorted to coping strategies of relocating in the weeks prior to delivery, or giving birth at home...
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On Earth You're Either a Superior Jew or an Inferior Gentile Anti-Semite, by Mohamed Khodr | Sabbah Report
...The political, not religious, ideology of Zionism arose out of the hatred of Jews in Christian Europe and Russia. The founders of Zionism concluded that this hatred is due to the Gentile world being afflicted with a permanent disease, a genetic disorder of psychosis that is hereditary, irrational, and incurable thus the only solution for this disease is for Jews and Gentiles to live apart and thus Jews need a homeland of their own to end such “anti-Semitism”. This incurable psychosis was diagnosed by the physician, Leo Pinsker, one of the earliest Zionists to call for a Jewish homeland...
[Projection is the prototypical psychological fallacy of the Zionists – their own arrogance and aggression are projected onto the ‘other’ - which is why they are certifiable sociopaths]
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We, the People; You, the Liar | Roi Tov
...Excuse me, Mr. President, but in your speech you said "We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security." Your deep voice was so impressive that it almost distracted me from your words. I am unworthy of attempting to understand your wisdom, but I believe that your definition includes the right of any American citizen not to be killed by his government. Yet, there is at least one case in which a third-generation American was assassinated by your direct order without having been given even the opportunity to defend himself in a court! I understand that the following question of mine is unfair, but, Honorable Mr. President, was your father American?..
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What Really Happens In Palestine | YouTube

Slave! | YouTube
  America is enslaved by the Jewish Lobby...
Watch video...

Malaysian PM in solidarity visit to Gaza | MWC News
...Malaysia's prime minister has defied Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip to visit the Palestinian enclave, a move that has earned the ire of West Bank leaders, despite Najib's pledge of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Najib Razak, along with a group of Malaysian ministers, crossed into Gaza on Tuesday via its land border with Egypt for what he described as a humanitarian visit. He told a joint news conference in Gaza City with Hamas leader Ismail Haniya that he came "to express my solidarity with the Palestinian people." "This is a humanitarian visit to express our deep concerns for what happens to the Palestinian people in Gaza and to express our opposition to the aggression on Gaza,"..
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Jan 21-22, 2013

Susan Abulhawa PennBDS Opening Keynote on Vimeo

BDS campaign questions academics’ courage, by Stuart Rees | Australians for Palestine
...Many academics are interested in human rights, teach such a subject and even obtain human rights oriented research funds. But unless they make the link between theory and practice, they are, in the prophetic words of the American social scientist Robert Lynd, ‘Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.’ In the face of continuous human rights abuses affecting Palestinians, the time comes for citizens to find other ways to address these issues. The BDS movement provides one of the hopeful ‘other ways’...

Israel Abandons Former Arab Collaborators | Roi Tov
..."Kiryat Shmona" means "Town of the Eight." Founded in 1949 on the western edge of the Hula Valley, it was named after the eight persons who died in the Tel Hai battle of 1920. With just above twenty thousand inhabitants, it is the archetypal Jewish "development town." New immigrants are often sent to remote places, Soviet gulags in a Middle Eastern Siberia, where they don't have opportunities to become part of the society that invited them. This town is populated mainly by Moroccans, who in late 2000, received about one thousand refugees, formerly known as members of the Southern Lebanon Army, who became denizens of Israel's northernmost city. This couldn't end well...

Aaron Swartz Died for the Justice Department’s Sins, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam
  Aaron Swartz hung himself a few days ago in his Brooklyn apartment. Many of you will ask: who was Aaron Swartz? He was only a cross between Henry David Thoreau and Steve Jobs, someone who stood at the divide between the digital world and a visionary quest for freedom. A man who devised RSS at the age of 14. Those of you who use any sort of online reader to collect or aggregate the blogs and websites you follow couldn’t have done so without the genius Swarz employed to create it. Those of you who follow social networking sites will have heard of Reddit.. Swartz created Reddit when he was the ripe old age of 20...

Bab Al Karama, by Mazin Kumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
  It was too cold to sleep for most of us last night at the Gate of Dignity encampment and the army “visited” us early in the morning. Yesterday we had to overcome the Israeli checkpoint at the entrance of Beit Iksa but today the occupation forces closed the checkpoint and are attacking peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and stun grenades then invaded the camp village and gave notice of intention to evacuate the location...

Gilad Atzmon With Zeinab Assaffar On Al Mayadeen TV | YouTube
  This is probably the clearest interview I have given about my thoughts, The Wandering Who, Israel, Judaism, Zionism, Jewishness, Palestine, AZZ, identity vs. identification, the 'left', the One State Solution and more...

Sylvia Stoltz speaks... | Paul Eisen
  You've met Galileo now meet Joan of Arc. This is Sylvia Stoltz, defender of Ernst Zundel who, while properly defending her client also fell foul of Germany's quite incomprehensible Holocaust denial laws. She refused to bend her knee and of course, paid the price. She's been called the German Joan of Arc. A trifle overblown? Perhaps. But if ever a people needed a St Joan, it is the German people and if ever anyone had, at least a go at playing that role, it is Sylvia Stolz...

Anti-Semitism 'ridiculed' in Germany, by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News
  Neoconservatives, right-wing pro-Zionist defenders of Israel’s and of the US-Empire’s crimes against humanity do everything to immunize Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, its violations of human rights and its distain for international law against criticism by labeling it “anti-Semitism”. Concerning Jewish critics, it’s called “Jewish self-Hatred”. Concerning Israel’s occupation policy towards the Palestinian people, both characterizations are misnomers. The German-Jewish polemicist Henryk M. Broder is a “specialist” in inciting smear campaigns against people who do not share his views on the Israeli occupation. For the foreign audiences, some traits of Broder could explain his odd character...

‘A Time Comes When Silence Is Betrayal’ | Antiwar Blog
  Worth remembering on MLK day is his vehement opposition to the ruthless American terrorism in Indochina. He called it “the destruction of Vietnam.” Hear and read his famous speech, delivered on April 4, 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, below in its entirety...

The Struggle: Civil Rights, Blacks, Zionism, by Lenni Brenner | The Struggle
...Most Black Americans were religious. They identified with the Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt for “the promised land.” But, beyond specialists in Black-Jewish relations, Parks’ subsequent employment by by Conyers, a severe critic of Israel, and the later politics of the civil rights movement is unknown to today’s public. Therefore this article will focus on the evolution of America’s Black rights leaders and movements attitudes towards Zionism, from the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, thru to 1994, when apartheid South Africa, Israel’s open ally, vanished into history...

N Syria learns to hate FSA occupation, NATO errs to add new front, by Webster Tarpley | PressTV
  When the history of the NATO destabilization in Syria finally comes to be compiled, this past week may be regarded as the turning of the tide against the foreign death squads and in favor of the Assad government. On the one hand, official Washington - the principal sponsor of the foreign fighters - has been deeply shaken by reports coming from circles close to the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) which depict a rising wave of hatred in northern Syria against the catastrophic misrule experienced under the death squad occupation there...

A Speech Full Of Lies and Delusions | Moon of Alabama
..’A decade of war is now ending.’..
[Tell it to the billions of people under threat of obliteration by ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ – for the sake of corporate profits and the ersatz State of Israel]]

Chuck Hagel Moves Toward Mainstream on Iran, by Nathan Guttman | Jewish Daily Forward
...The new image Hagel is fashioning for himself is less contrarian than the persona he adopted during his years in the Senate. On January 15, in a meeting with New York Senator Charles Schumer, the former Republican senator from Nebraska presented a new profile. Hagel, who earlier criticized U.S. sanctions against Iran as counterproductive, and military action against it as potentially ruinous, “rejected a strategy of containment and expressed the need to keep all options on the table...
[“all options on the table” is DC code for “do what we tell you or we will obliterate you.’]

Overthrowing the Washington Mindset, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
...In the Imperial Court of Washington, D.C., where one’s importance is measured by one’s proximity to power – to the President and his courtiers, and to the governmental apparatus over which he and his appointees preside – the worship of Power is the state religion. To question the permanence of American hegemony, to even consider the possibility that all this pomp and circumstance sits atop a house of cards – why, it’s not only treasonous, it’s unfathomable. The Washington mindset will simply not allow such thoughts to enter the conscious realm...

Who Are The Real Terrorists? by Dr. Paul J Balles | deLiberation
...As Noam Chomsky observed in his book 9/11, if Western powers ever abided by the Code’s definition of terrorism, it “would at once reveal that the U.S. is a leading terrorist state, as are its clients.”..

Is Mali The Real Target? | Moon of Alabama
  What country is the actual target of the French intervention in Mali? There isn't much to win in that country. While their might be some oil and Uranium somewhere in the ground nothing is yet developed. Next door though there is much more to win like fully developed gas and oil fields. The people in Algeria seem to think it is their country that is the target and they are fuming that their government allowed French overflights...



Jan 20, 2013

David Albright and Company Call for Intensifying War on the Iranian People, by Muhammad Sahimi | Antiwar
  The standoff between Iran and the Western powers led by the United States has created an entirely new "industry" in Washington, which consists of "pundits" on Iran, its political system, and its nuclear program. Some of them are not experts at all, as their "expertise" consists entirely of hollow rhetoric, great exaggerations about the "threat" posed by Iran, and half-truth, if not outright lies..

The Neo-Conservative Assault on Chuck Hagel: The Politics of Character Assassination, by Allan C. Brownfeld | The Conservative Curmudgeon
  When former Senator Chuck Hagel, a conservative Republican from Nebraska, was nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Defense, he was promptly subjected to a withering attack by neoconservatives, the people who so eagerly promoted war with Iraq and are now promoting a pre-emptive war with Iran. They have rushed to the barricades to oppose his selection. Their tactics, and the arguments against Hagel, are the ones they usually employ against anyone who challenges their views, among them the charges of being "anti-Israel" and, far worse, "anti-Semitic."..

The Institutionalization of Tyranny | Paul Craig Roberts
...The institutionalization of tyranny is the achievement of the Bush/Obama regimes of the 21st century. This, and not the Great Society, is the decisive break from the American tradition. The Bush Republicans demolished almost all of the constitutional protections of liberty erected by the Founding Fathers. The Obama Democrats codified Bush’s dismantling of the Constitution and removed the protection afforded to citizens from being murdered by the government without due process. One decade was time enough for two presidents to make Americans the least free people of any developed country, indeed, perhaps of any country...

Open Letter to New York Times Editors | Stephen Lendman
...Those most disadvantaged, deprived, persecuted, harmed, and abused concern me most. A better world is possible. Everyone deserves equity, justice, rule of law protection, and real democracy. No other reasons drive me. I call today perhaps the most perilous time in world history. It's true. It matters. It's frightening. Times reports should explain. Instead they support dark forces imperiling us...
[Sadly, I wholeheartedly concur. It isn't hyperbole to call it the Jew York Times - a "liberal" bastion of the USraeli Empire.]

Palestinian citizens wearily eye Israeli elections, by Jonathan Cook | the View from Nazareth
...these Palestinian parties, though without influence in the political system, have grown increasingly noisy in demanding equal rights for their constituents. They may not be able to effect change, but they have shown a talent for embarrassing their Jewish colleagues by using the Knesset — and platforms outside it — to express truths Israeli Jews would prefer remained unspoken. The continuing presence of Palestinian representatives in the Knesset is threatened by two related developments: a consensus among the dominant right-wing parties that the Arab factions are a “fifth column”; and an internal debate among the Palestinian electorate about the value of taking part in national politics given the current climate..

Prof. Tony Martin 1942 - 2013 | Paul Eisen
  I was sorry to learn,just a minute ago, that Tony Martin had died. I hope the material below will go some way to showing you the measure of the man...
[Yet another victim of the paranoid tribal Jewish assassination campaigns]

The Revolt of the B'Seder Arabs | Roi Tov
  Three days before the elections in Israel, the mainstream media concentrates its efforts on the "rise and rise" of Bennett against Netanyahu and the futile appeals to the public by the parties that Lieberman called "The Polish Trio." Everybody assumes that Netanyahu will be the next Prime Minister. Not surprisingly, the Jewish media ignore the real question, namely to which extent will the "B'seder Arabs" vote; if they arrive en masse, Netanyahu will find himself out of his cozy office...

Bennett says Israel takes half its water from West Bank, as argument for annexation, by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss
  Societies get the leaders they deserve, right? Here is an astoundingly slick ad by Naftali Bennett, the rising radical-right star of Israel's Jewish Home party, laying out his "stability initiative" to annex most of the West Bank, and thereby "do what Zionism has always done"- take land with as few non-Jews as possible on it. Notice that Bennett is afraid of the BDS movement, which is painting the West Bank as an apartheid situation, and repeatedly describes Palestinians as a "demographic" threat to the Jewish state. The admission that Israel sucks up Palestinian water is...

Who to vote for in Israel? by Uri Avnery | MCW News
...I agree with President Barack Obama that Netanyahu is leading us to certain disaster. His total rejection of peace, the obsession with the settlements, the deepening of the occupation - all these are turning Israel (Israel proper, not just the occupied territories) inexorably into an apartheid state. Already in the outgoing Knesset, abominable anti-democratic laws have been passed. Now that all the moderate Likud members have been purged, this process will be accelerated...
[The worst possible outcome might turn out to be the best. It could lead to Israel’s abandonment by the US, it's only solid ally, which would be its death knell. Hallelujah!]

Chasing Roadrunner Over a Cliff?: France’s Mali Debacle, by Barry M. Lando | Counterpunch
...Hollande said the menace of a radical Islamic takeover was so imminent that he had no choice but to intervene—to save not just Mali, but all of Western Africa, and, the French now imply, Europe as well. Strange thing though, despite the supposed urgency of the situation, France has had precious little luck so far in convincing its European partners to contribute their own troops to the intervention. Indeed, the last thing those countries want, after the traumatic experience of Iraq, Libya and the Afghan crusade, is to become enmeshed in what risks to be an open-ended conflict, on behalf of an unelected Malian government, against a vague assortment of ethnic rebels and jihadis in the desert wilds of North Africa...

US Withholds Evidence for Iran Cyberattacks, by Barbara Slavin | Al Monitor
  Iran is a logical suspect in a barrage of cyberattacks that have hit major US and international banks in recent months. The so-called distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) – which make it hard to access websites that are being bombarded with requests from hacker-run computers – seem understandable for two reasons: They could be revenge for the computer viruses such as Stuxnet that destroyed more than 1,000 Iranian centrifuges in 2010 and other covert assaults on Iran’s nuclear program. They could also be a response to draconian US-led sanctions on Iranian banks that are making it difficult for Iran to conduct normal trade and especially to repatriate money from oil exports...

Time for a reckoning on Iran sanctions, by Hilary Matfess | Asia Times Online
...In lieu of employing ineffective policies that please neither hawks nor doves while wreaking havoc on the lives of millions of Iranians, the administration should recognize Iran's motivation for developing nuclear weapons - namely as a deterrent in a region dotted with US military installations, beset by all-too-recent US invasions, and ruled by hostile US-armed regimes. Hopefully the confirmation process for Obama's next cabinet appointees will kick off a reasoned, nation-wide debate about the failure and future of US policies towards Iran...



Jan 19, 2013

Book Review: ‘Beyond Tribal Loyalties,’by Gideon Polya
  Ex-Israeli psychologist Avigail Abarbanel’s “Beyond Tribal Loyalties. Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists” is an important, must-read anthology of the views of 25 anti-racist Jews, who variously, from positions ranging from pro-Zionism to a-political apathy, overcame my-lot-right-or-wrong tribal loyalty and came to realize the immense crime being committed against the Palestinian people and their obligation to speak out for Palestinian human rights...
[I somewhat regret giving it a pass when Avigail, who is quite wonderful, asked me to contribute, but on principle I don't participate in tribal projects, no matter how well intentioned.]

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Intifada, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
...Historically there has been a leadership deficit in Palestine and it is not because Palestinians are incapable of producing upright men and women capable of guiding the decades-long resistance towards astounding victory against military occupation and apartheid. It is because for a Palestinian leadership to be acknowledged as such by regional and international players, it has to excel in the art of “compromise”. These carefully molded leaders often cater to the interests of their Arab and Western benefactors, at the expense of their own people. Not one single popular faction has resolutely escaped this seeming generalization...

“Attack on Sovereignty”: The “Obama Regime” and America’s Unipolar World, by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts | Global Research
  Those concerned about “The New World Order” speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which China, Russia, and Iran complain, is all about. Washington has demonstrated that it has no respect for its own laws and Constitution, much less any respect for international law and the law and sovereignty of other countries. All that counts is Washington’s will as the pursuit of hegemony moves Washington closer to becoming a world dictator...
[Darth Cheney, the Prince of Darkness (Elliot Abrams) and the rest of the neocons, backed up by the ZPC (Zionist Power Configuration, a la James Petras) may win this game after all. If they do, the pain and suffering in this world will increase exponentially. But I’m optimistic that won’t happen. At least somewhat optimistic. People need to wake up pretty damned soon.]

Is Rand Paul A ‘Christian Zionist’? by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
  As Israel’s ultra-nationalist parties continue to gain traction, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to appease them by building "settlements" with US taxpayer dollars on Palestinian land, the hostility between Washington and Tel Aviv is coming out into the open. While tension has been building for a while – I would argue since George W. Bush’s second term, when Dubya balked at going along with the Cheney-neocon plan for war with Iran – it is now reaching a dramatic climax with the spectacle of the Israeli Prime Minister openly rebuking Washington for alleged "interference" in Israeli politics...

Jonathan Schell: Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late | Current TV
“Strafe the town and kill the people,
Drop napalm in the square,
Get out early every Sunday
And catch them at their morning prayer.”..

The Lies Of Democracy and the Language Of Deceit, by Colin Todhunter | Global Research
  In an increasingly media-driven age, language is everything and is often used by officialdom to tyrannise meaning. With the deaths of millions on its hands since 1945, the US has become the world’s number one terror state. By the 1980s, former CIA man John Stockwell had put the figure at six million. As a recent article has indicated, from mass bombing in Southeast Asia to employing death squads in South America, the US military and the CIA have been directly and indirectly responsible for an updated figure of an estimated ten million death.. But it’s not called mass murder these days. Ironically, the US has hijacked the word ‘terror’ to justify its brand of tyranny through a war on terror...

Napoleon in Mali, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
...News accounts refer to the rebels as "Islamists," an easy label to affix to groups very few know anything about. The reality, however, is quite different: the rebels are Tuaregs of Northwest Africa, a nomadic group whose historic homeland crosses the boundaries of Mali, Algeria, Libya, Niger, and Burkina Faso. They are herders and smugglers, whose caravans once provided the only source of commercial contact between the empires of central Africa and the Arab lands to the north. Their fight for independence precedes the existence of Al Qaeda by a hundred and fifty years...

“Grand Waffle” in the Middle East | LobeLog
...Amb. Chas Freeman (ret.) spoke to a Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) forum on U.S. Grand Strategy — or, in his words “Grand Waffle” — in the Middle East on Capitol Hill yesterday.. Readers of the blog are already well acquainted with Freeman, a victim for 4 years, when he was appointed to chair the National Intelligence Council (NIC), of a McCarthyite-like campaign driven by many of the same neo-conservatives and Israel lobby activists opposed to Chuck Hagel’s nomination...
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US-Russia Confrontation: Breakdown of International Diplomacy, “More Abrasive and Dismissive than During Cold War,” with Rick Rozoff and John Robles | Global Research
  The owner of Stop NATO, Rick Rozoff, recently spoke to the Voice of Russia about NATO’s global plans and Russian-US relations. In part 2 of our interview Rozoff states that the US has been intentionally baiting and insulting Russia as it encroaches on Russian geopolitical space. He says that it is only the diplomatic maturity and the sense of responsibility of the Russian government that has prevented the situation from becoming a far worse crisis...

Sax Offender Vs. Progressive Rapists | Gilad Atzmon
  Once again leading UK AZZs , their Sabbath Goyim (Laurie Penny and Richard Seymour) and Islamophobic Hasbara outlet Harry’s Place have been caught together in bed. The exact same Judeocentric tribal coalition that, a year and a half ago, was formed to wreck my career (and failed) is now pursuing Martin Smith AKA Comrade Delta, former secretary of the UK SWP (Socialist Workers Party) who, they insist, is a ‘sex offender’..
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Jordan Paust's Bad Law: UH Law Professor Tries & Fails to Legalize an Israeli Attack on Iran | Wide Asleep in America
  On January 15, 2013, University of Houston Law Center professor Jordan Paust penned an article entitled "Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program and Lawful Israeli Self-Defense," which was published on Jurist, a website of analysis and opinion pieces written by law professors, lawyers, and legal scholars. It is clear throughout Paust's piece that his arguments are neither sound nor based in fact, and unfortunately rely entirely on false premises and long debunked propaganda...
[The Jewish Nazis just won’t quit. Hopefully it won’t have to come to the rest of us making them cease and desist, but they have to be stopped, so how do we do it?]
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Jan 18, 2013

It Is All About Israel, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar
  Something curious is taking place. The nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense came under fire from the friends of Israel even before it was certain that President Barack Obama would name him to the post. Hagel demonstrably has no particular animus towards Israel but he, while senator, refused to kowtow to the Israel Lobby, failing to sign on to letters and position statements, saying that he was first and foremost a United States Senator, not a representative of a foreign power...
[Giraldi at his best – and that’s saying something]

A Broken Foreign Policy Establishment Turns to Mali, by Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic
  Today's big news is that "the Obama administration is considering significant military backing for France's drive against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali." According to the Washington Post, "the United States is already providing surveillance and other intelligence help to France and may soon offer military support such as transport or refueling planes." The article mentions that "its support for a major ally could test U.S. legal boundaries and stretch counterterrorism resources in a murky new conflict," but nowhere hints that Congress should make the call...

"There would be no Arabic schools!" | Roi Tov
..."Nazareth Illit" means “Upper Nazareth;” it is the archetypal Zionist stronghold watching over ancestral towns. The first parcels of lands used for the construction of the settlement were illegitimately expropriated from Palestinians. Protests at this action reached the Supreme Court of Israel, which in 1955 accepted (HCJ 30/55) the government’s word that the sole purpose of the land was to erect government facilities. Yet, its first neighborhood was completed in September 1956; Jewish settlers moved in immediately afterwards...

Israel’s War with Iran and the Zionist Power Configuration in America | James Petras
  Zionists and their allies in Congress authored, implemented and enforced sanctions against Iran, which hinder the ambitions of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies. Israeli war exercises and public declarations threatening a massive air assault on Iran has pushed petroleum prices to world records. This spring 2008, the most powerful pro-Israel Jewish Lobby in the US, AIPAC held their annual conference and secured the support and commitment of both major US Presidential candidates and the majority of US members of Congress for an Israeli initiative to impose extreme economic sanctions on Iran with threats of a US/Israeli military attack...

The Emotional Violence of Jewish Advocacy | Karin Friedemann
  Gideon Levy a Ha’aretz newspaper reporter recently asked: “If Israelis were so sure of the rightness of their cause, why the violent intolerance they display toward everyone who tries to make a different case?” In "Survival Instinct or Jewish Paranoia?" my favorite shrink, ex-Israeli Avigail Barbanel writes that, “The implications of seeing the conflict from within the lens of Jewish trauma are very serious. Can we really negotiate with this? Can we explain to Israelis that their perspective on life and on the conflict is seriously flawed? If we tried will they listen, and do the Palestinians have time to wait until they do?”..

Pope Thanks CIA War Crimes Criminal, by Jay Janson | Dissident Voice
  ‘Leon E. Panetta had an audience on Wednesday morning at the Vatican with Pope Benedict XVI, who told him, Mr. Panetta said, “Thank you for helping to protect the world.” Mr. Panetta said he replied, “Pray for me.”
Mr. Panetta, … who attends Mass every Sunday, is halfway through a week-long trip to Europe meant as a goodbye tour of American allies.’ The reader is invited to read the whole short NY Times report before going on to the paragraph below on Panetta’s to-be-prosecuted crimes, a quote from Reagan’s Asst. Sec. of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, and the author’s commiseration with fellow born-Catholics...

What Dershowitz & Abunimah have in common? One simple wet dream | Gilad Atzmon
[D & A, stern and humorless, the right and left wings of political correctness, must really detest Atzmon, so full of zest, decency and irreverence]

Emmanuel Goldstein is Dead. Long Live Emmanuel Goldstein!: A Review of Zero Dark Thirty, by Bob Boldt | MCW News
  Sometimes I think many of our most honored (not necessarily our best) filmmakers are under the direct employ of The Oceana Ministry of Truth. I have pointed out several examples of this in the past, most notably Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (War as a male bonding experience), Hurt Locker (American adrenalin is the only valid kind), even Avatar (having people hating the virtual military/industrial complex is so much safer than having them hating the real one). Now we have Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn (Hurt Locker) Bigelow...

Obama v. Netanyahu: Round Two, by Stephen Lendman | Indybay
  They've gone at each other before. Neither one likes the other. A previous article said Netanyahu repeatedly puts both feet in his mouth and risks swallowing them. He's arrogant, abrasive, offensive, duplicitous, thuggish, and dangerous. He's an embarrassment to legitimate governance. It's hard imagining why Israelis put up with him...
[Hard, Stephen? He personifies the Israel of today]

Suicide Bomber Auction for Syria in Saudi Arabia | YouTube
  An unbelievable leaked video of an auction for a suicide bomber against Syria! This takes place in a hotel conference room in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The atmosphere is festive, and the audience has children in it. But the merchandise auctioned is human flesh and blood! The video shows the father, Abu-Salah, attending the auction and offering his son Khaled as a sacrifice This is his SECOND son to be sold as a suicide bomber...
[Along with Israhell, America's principle ally in the Mideast]

Choice between extremists, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
  Just got back to Palestine after a trip to Berlin for a workshop exchanging experiences on issues of popular resistance in different countries (Egypt, Nepal, Palestine etc.) and evolution of forms of resistance. I regretted being outside the country when the action happened called Gate of the Sun (the village was attacked again the day before I came back and emptied)...

Welcome to the Shammies, the media awards that recognise truly unsung talent | John Pilger
  There are awards for everyone. There are the Logies, the Commies, the Tonys, the Theas, the Millies ("They cried with pride") and now the Shammies. The Shammies celebrate the finest sham media. "Competition for the 2013 Gold Shammy," said the panel of judges, "has been cutthroat." The Shammies are not for the tabloid lower orders. Rupert Murdoch has been honoured enough. Shammies distinguish respectable journalism that guards the limits of what the best and brightest like to call the "national conversation"..

The Conflation of Criticism of Israel with Antisemitism, by Ronen Bergman | Spiegel Online
  "You are part of the anti-Semitic propaganda yourself, and you don't even know it. You don't speak German and you don't understand the nuances of the text, yet you sign it as one of the authors." This allegation was hurled at me by Melody Sucharewicz, a communications and strategy consultant in Israel and Germany. I myself am the son of two Holocaust survivors who lost their entire families in the war, and I tried to defend myself against what I thought was a false accusation, but to no avail...
[He’s very soft on them, but no doubt to no avail. Scratch a German apologist for Israel and you’ll find a Nazi.]



Jan 17, 2013

Neocon Nightmare: The Truth Behind the Attacks on Chuck Hagel, by Arianna Huffington | Huffington Post
  If President Obama's second term includes decision making as bold and intelligent as his nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, his presidency might finally fulfill the promise of audacity and change that rallied so many to his campaign five years ago. In fact, the more ridiculous the claims being made by Hagel's critics become, the more the real reasons they don't want him -- and the wisdom of the choice -- come into stark relief...

On Obama’s New National Security Team, Keep Your Eye on the Policy, by Rep. Ron Paul | Antiwar
...If the president decides to continue to provide support to rebels in Syria who have dubious ties to Islamic extremists, to continue to meddle in the internal affairs of countless countries overseas, to continue to refuse to even talk with Iran without preconditions, and so on, we will not see a return to foreign policy sanity no matter who occupies what position in the president’s cabinet...

A Senator's Lonely Crusade to Learn the CIA's Secrets, by Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic
...There is no one in America more justified in demanding to know the official legal rationale behind actions like targeted killings. Obama isn't just keeping this information from the American people. He isn't just hiding his legal reasoning from the U.S. Congress. He is stonewalling one of 15 senators that federal law establishes as the most important check on secret abuses by the CIA...
[Good luck with that, Sen. Wyden]

The Death of Dr. Kelly: An Open Case | GRTV
  This documentary studies the suspicious death of Dr. David Christopher Kelly, an internationally recognized British authority on biological weapons, after his claims before the Iraq war...

An Ally Out of Control, by Ivan Eland | Antiwar
...The United States foolishly had trained Malian units led by generals who were Tuareg, an ethnic group that been rebelling against the Malian government for a half century. To make matters worse, because of these battlefield setbacks in the north, another U.S.-trained military man then overthrew the elected Malian government in the south...
[Here we go again]

Putting their feet to the fire | Paul Eisen
  I'd only just started posting reports from the JWPF vigils outside Beth Israel Temple in Ann Arbor and about Jewish political accountability when I learned that this lonely little protest is now not quite so lonely. Someone else is now doing the same and, blow me, if these two ragged little bands of Jews and their friends haven't had the bloody chutzpah to hold a summit meeting no less!..

Palestine 1896 | YouTube
  First film footage taken in Palestine (Lumier Bros.)..
[Paradise Lost]

Israel Pt.1: If only Americans Knew | YouTube
...Either, the WHOLE WORLD is Anti-Semitic, OR as is more likely, the rest of the World, not subject to the same propaganda & media distortion, sees the Palestinians as legitimate freedom fighters & not as 'terrorists'..
[Ain’t projection wonderful? ]

Israel's insecurity industry, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera English
...In a new report entitled "Israel's Worldwide Role in Repression", the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) endeavours to set the historical record straight by cataloguing "the role of Israel's government, its military, and related corporations and organisations in a global industry of violence and repression". Relying on Israeli and other sources, the well-documented report cites numerous manifestations of said industry beyond the aforementioned instances of nefarious collaboration from Rwanda to Colombia...
[Israel astride the world - Our motto is ‘bringing death and destruction to one and all’]

And the winner is … Islamophobia, by Rachel Shabi | The Guardian
  America's Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (the film Argo); a heroically struggling agent tracking down Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty) and heroically flawed CIA operatives protecting America from mindless, perpetual terror (TV series Homeland)..
[and certified Kosher to boot I betcha]

New Push in U.S. for Tougher Sanctions, War Threats Against Iran, by Jim Lobe | Inter Press Service
  Four U.S. non-proliferation specialists are urging the Obama administration to impose tougher economic sanctions against Iran and issue more explicit threats to destroy its nuclear programme by military means. In a 155-page report, the specialists, who were joined by the head of a right-wing pro-Israel lobby group, the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), said Washington should declare its intent to institute a “de facto international embargo on all investments in, and trade with” Iran, excepting food and medicine, if it does not freeze its nuclear-related work...

Electronic Sanctions: Targeting Iran’s Media, Preventing Iranians from Using the Internet, by Kourosh Ziabari | Global Research
  The inhumane sanctions of the United States and its European allies against Iran know no boundaries. At the cost of the lives of thousands of Iranian patients suffering from different types of cancer, thalassemia, hemophilia, HIV/Aids, psychiatric disorders and other diseases, the West has banned the export of life-saving medicines and medical equipment to Iran and this is deteriorating the lives of those patients who cannot find medicines needed for their survival. The companies that do business with Iran will be immediately penalized by the U.S. government and so far no exemptions have been made...

Zionist Organization of America: extreme Israel lobby faltering | IRmep
  James Corbett interviews Grant F. Smith about his January/February Washington Report on Middle East Affairs special report about the peculiar origins of the ZOA, its status as a foreign agent under the FARA Act of 1938, its recent IRS troubles over tax-exempt status, connection to Israeli conventional and nuclear weapons smuggling rings, and a budding movement for accountability...

Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression | International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
  This pamphlet focuses on the role of Israel's government, its military, and related corporations and organizations in a global industry of violence and repression. The states most involved with this industry profit from perpetual war and occupation across the globe while maintaining vastly unequal societies of their own. Israel exports weapons, technologies, training, and techniques of violence for use by governments and corporations against populations around the world...

AIPAC Ran The Anti-Hagel Campaign, And It Lost, by M.J. Rosenberg
  The news that Sen. Chuck Schumer will support the Hagel nomination means that Hagel will almost certainly be confirmed as Secretary of Defense. It does not mean that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not opposing the appointment. It means that, at long last, it has been defeated. It is obvious why AIPAC is so insistent that it is not trying to prevent former senator Chuck Hagel from becoming the Secretary of Defense...
[There may yet be hope]



Jan 16, 2013

Preplanned Mali invasion reveals France's neo-colonialist agenda, by Finian Cunningham | PressTV
  The speed and extent with which French warplanes have been deployed over the weekend in the West African country, Mali, point to a well-honed plan for intervention by the former colonial power. Indeed, such is the careful choreography of this salient military development that one could say that the French have finally given themselves a green light to execute a plan they had been pushing over several months. That plan is nothing less than the neocolonial re-conquest of its former colony in the strategically important West African region...

Rabbi Abraham Cooper: Bigots Threaten to Push Us Off the Other Cliff | Huffington Post
...MEMRI, the respected[sic] Middle East research group has published a 2010 interview with Morsi wherein he refers to Jews as " descendants of apes and pigs.. " This poisonous mindset is also reflected in growing anti-Christian rhetoric that threatens to further isolate and target Egypt's largest minority, the over 10 million Coptic Christians. These ominous developments take place even as Egypt's top competitor for leadership in the Muslim world, Iran, continues its own anti-Semitic invective and threats against the Jewish state...
[Such statements from the Associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance(sic) are to be expected. It’s instructive to contrast them with quotes from the Talmud like "Even the best of the Gentiles should all be killed," :A heretic Gentile you may kill outright with your own hands,” "Every Jew, who spills the blood of the godless (non-Jews), is doing the same as making a sacrifice to God," or "The Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs," (PM Menachem Begin), and “Palestinians are a malign cancer that must be removed,” (Benjamin Netanyahu), etc., etc.]

End “apartheid,” ensure “one person, one vote” in Palestine says brief from influential EU think tank, by Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada
  An influential EU-funded think tank has published a commentary urging the European Union to rethink its policies towards Palestine and the Israelis to end “apartheid” and suggests a one-state solution...

Death Of A Hero: The General, The Media Adulation And The Forgotten Victims, by David Cromwell | Media Lens
  One measure of a society's honesty is what it says about its political and military leaders when they die. Are the deceased leader's perceived virtues exalted, while any blemishes are airbrushed out of the picture? Recent media coverage following the death of General Norman "Stormin' " Schwarzkopf, the Allied military commander during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, is a case in point...

Enlightened racism, by Kobi Niv | Haaretz
  Racism in the eyes of urbane Israel is when Mizrahim, Arabs and all kinds of dark people say not-nice things about European white Ashkenazim...

Review of "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956" | Eric Walberg
The period following WWII in eastern Europe is considered to be a black one, best forgotten. All the pre-war governments had been quasi-fascist dictatorships which either succumbed to the Nazi onslaught (Poland) or actively cooperated with the Germans (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria). The Soviet liberation was greeted with trepidation by many – with good reason for the many collaborators. Within a few years of liberation, eastern Europe was ruled by austere regimes headed by little Stalins...

EU urged to ban Israeli settlement products, by Jillian Kestler-DAmours | Al Jazeera
...The EU is Israel's largest trading partner. In 2011, total trade between the two parties reached almost $20bn. Israel imports approximately 35 percent of its products from the EU, while more than 26 percent of Israeli exports land in European markets. According to "Trading Away Peace", a report released by 22 European human rights groups working in the area, exports from Israeli settlements to the EU total approximately $300m annually and represent about 2 percent of all Israeli exports to the EU...

Israel named "world humanitarian leader" in EU propaganda exercise, by David Cronin | The Electronic Intifada
  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream when tipped off about the latest propaganda blitz planned by European Friends of Israel, a key lobby group in Brussels. Its calendar for the next few weeks — not yet posted on the EFI website — features a number of events designed to present Israel as a caring and liberal country...

The Twinning: Palestinian Children in Israeli Military Detention, By Clive Hambidge | Sabbah Report
...Is it not an indicative trait marking the acme of a dangerous state of heightened hubris aside from exposing the depths of an “increasingly fascist state”? when Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israel Prime Minister, asserted The test of a democracy is how you treat people incarcerated, people in jail, and especially so with minors.” (The Guardian, 22 January 2012). It is indeed Mr Regev; and history will show that Israel has failed the tests of democracy and the stringent tests of human rights, willfully and criminally misusing her “right to exist.”..

A Political Culture of Violence: America in the Crosshairs, by Norman Pollack | Counterpunch
...The NRA is an excrescense of the wider political culture. Its goals and tactics would be seen as puerile, easily countered, were there political will to stand upright for the achievement of a social order founded on principles of peace and justice, not as words but structurally inscribed and demonstrably realized in the culture, values, and condition of the people. Yet that exactly flies in the face of a corporate framework which, had that vision been realized, must renounce its most cherished attributes: hierarchy, toughness (toward those viewed as weaker), and, now perhaps more than ever, militaristic...

Jung the Nazi | Paul Eisen
...I still had no doubt that Nazism was an evil ideology. But by my 65th birthday I had somewhat changed my position. It now seemed to me that the elements in Nazism which Jung had liked were not as reprehensible as I had previously thought. Indeed they seemed to echo my own. Hadn’t I for long been saying that cultures were deeply embedded in our psyches, and that they largely formed our identities, without us even being aware that they did so?..

US War Crimes in Vietnam, by Sherwood Ross | MCW News
  Massacres of civilians by U.S. forces in Vietnam were not rare aberrations but everyday occurrences, an authoritative new book on the subject charges. Worse, the massacres were a result of deliberate Pentagon policies handed down from the very top, often to build false “body count” figures that could lead an officer to promotion. The inflated body counts reported civilian dead as combatant Viet Cong when they were actually women, children and old men...
[Wait until, 30-40 years from now, we get the real lowdown on Iraq and Afghanistan – it would explain a lot of things, including the very high rates of PTSD, suicide and inability to re-enter society.]



Jan 15, 2013

Iran and the Fallacy of Saber-Rattling, by Paul Pillar | The National Interest Blog
  Among several broadly held misconceptions about Iran is that to get Iranians to make concessions we want them to make at the negotiating table the United States must credibly threaten to inflict dire harm on them—specifically, with military force—if they do not make the concessions. Some in the United States (and some in Israel) who are especially keen on promoting this notion would welcome a war. If war preparations and brinksmanship used to communicate such a threat lead the two nations to stumble into an accidental war—and there is a real danger they might—so much the better from their point of view...

Christian Zionism and American Islamophobia: Giraldi, Utley Jan. 30 in DC | Antiwar
  The Council for the National Interest, the International Council for Middle East Studies, and the Freda Utley Foundation will be hosting a program titled “Christian Zionism and American Islamophobia” at the National Press Club (Zenger Room, 13th floor, 529 14th St., NW, Washington, D.C.) on Wednesday, January 30, beginning at 12:15 p.m. The one-hour conference will be followed by Q &A, and is open to journalists. A major focus of the seminar will be on evangelical Christian Zionism’s support for a new war against Muslims, this time with Iran, and its antagonism toward Muslims and Islam...

Waking Up in Tehran, by David Swanson | Let's Try Democracy
  According to one theory, U.S.-Iranian relations began around November 1979 when a crowd of irrational religious nutcases violently seized the U.S. embassy in Iran, took the employees hostage, tortured them, and held them until scared into freeing them by the arrival of a new sheriff in Washington, a man named Ronald Reagan. From that day to this, according to this popular theory, Iran has been run by a bunch of subhuman lunatics with whom rational people couldn't really talk if they wanted to. These monsters only understand force. And they have been moments away from developing and using nuclear weapons against us for decades now. Moments away, I tell you!..

How 20 tents rocked Israel, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth
...By establishing Bab al-Shams, the activists visibly demonstrated the apartheid nature of Israel’s rule in the occupied territories. Although one brief encampment is unlikely by itself to change the dynamics of the conflict, it does show Palestinians that there are ways they themselves can take the struggle to Israel. Following the Israeli raid, that point was made eloquently by Mohammed Khatib, one of the organisers. “In establishing Bab al-Shams, we declare that we have had enough of demanding our rights from the occupier – from now on we shall seize them ourselves.” That, of course, is also Netanyahu’s great fear...

The Myth of Human Progress, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig
...The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence...

Netanyahu: The Face of Israeli Fascism, by Stephen Lendman | MCW News
...Hitler terrorized Jews for a dozen years. Israel waged war on Palestinians for decades. It rages out-of-control. It shows no signs of ending. During his first late 1990s prime ministerial term, Netanyahu was Israel's most polarizing leader. He exceeded the worst of his predecessors. Right-wing extremists adore him. He's worse than ever now. Polls favor his January 22 reelection. Israelis will have themselves to blame. They're as out of touch as Americans. They accept what demands rejection. Netanyahu wages war on democracy. He threatens his own people. He defies them. He gives chutzpah new meaning...

Naftali Bennett and Israel’s Rightward Shift, by David Remnick | The New Yorker
...the story of the election is the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right. What Bennett’s rise, in particular, represents is the attempt of the settlers to cement the occupation and to establish themselves as a vanguard party, the ideological and spiritual core of the entire country. Just as a small coterie of socialist kibbutzniks dominated the ethos and the public institutions of Israel in the first decades of the state’s existence, the religious nationalists, led by the settlers, intend to do so now and in the years ahead...
[Bennett should write a book. He could call it - let’s see – ah, I’ve got it! – Mein Kosher Kampf!]

Major French Magazine Acknowledges Auschwitz Gas Chamber Fraud | Journal of Historical Review
  One of France's most influential and reputable magazines, L'Express, now acknowledges that "everything is false" about the Auschwitz "gas chamber" that for decades has been shown to tens of thousands of tourists yearly. "Auschwitz: The Memory of Evil," a lengthy article by journalist and historian Eric Conan, a dedicated anti-revisionist, appears in the January 19-25, 1995, issue, pages 54-73 (and in the Jan. 26 international edition). L'Express is a liberal large-circulation weekly news magazine, similar in format to Time or Newsweek...
[Paul Eisen’s comment: “This happened in 1995 and still people are being persecuted for questioning the gas-chambers at Auschwitz. How long are we going to go on with our interminable "Free, free Palestine" while this atrocious state of affairs continues?” My answer is – as long as the Holycause remains the predominant religion in the West.]

Why forget the Holocaust? | Paul Treanor
  At least until 11 September 2001, the Holocaust was the primary historical reference used to justify military intervention, by the US and its allies. Indirectly, it is also used to legitimise social injustice in liberal-democratic nations, and to imply a liberal-democratic entitlement to a monopoly of power. It is used to legitimise global inequality, as if it entitled opponents of the Holocaust to prosperity, while others starve. Remembering the Holocaust is not a moral imperative: the memory serves no good purpose, only evil purposes. The Holocaust should be publicly forgotten, in the same sense as it is now publicly remembered...

Foreign-Policy Pickle, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation
  It’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. interventionist crowd is finding itself in a pickle with respect to the U.S. government’s 12-year occupation of Afghanistan and 12-year “war on terrorism. “On the one hand, we have President Obama’s announcement that he’s going to end the Afghan occupation by 2014. On the other hand, we all know that there are still plenty of people to kill in Afghanistan who are denominated “terrorists.” How does President Obama justify pulling U.S. troops and CIA operatives out of Afghanistan while there are still “terrorists” to kill there? Hasn’t the war on terrorism been the chief justification for the 12-year occupation of Afghanistan?..

America’s strategic stupidity, by Andrew J. Bacevich | The Spectator
...The one thing that the US actually could do to secure its future is the one thing that it refuses to do: demonstrate a capacity to manage its own affairs; live within its means; set its own house in order. In Washington, talk about global strategy provides an excuse to avoid doing what needs to be done...



Jan 14, 2013

John Pilger's latest film 'The War You Don't See' available to watch online | John Pilger
...The film is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an 'electronic battlefield' in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?..

US Hostage to Israel? Al Gore: Grade A Hypocrite, Dawning of the Drones | RT/YouTube
  On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to Mark Bruzonsky, publisher of MiddleEast.org, about the power and influence of the Israeli Lobby over the US government. Abby then highlights Adam Harvey, a New York artist who created a clothing line that can make you practically invisible to the thermal cameras of surveillance drones, and calls out former US vice-president, Al Gore, for his hypocritical stance on a clean energy future while becoming rich off fear mongering and oil money...

Does Torture Work? Does It Matter? by Lawrence Davidson | MWC News
  Back in the fall of 2005 I wrote an essay, published in the journal Logos (issue 4.4), entitled “Torture in our Time.” In it I laid out the historical evidence for the conclusion that torture rarely works. This position goes back at least to the Enlightenment when Cesare Beccaria wrote a famous pamphlet, “On Crimes and Punishments” (1764) in which he observed the obvious:..

On U.S. Intelligence Predictions for 2030: Its Vision of the Future Threatens Everyone, by J. B. Gerald | Global Research
...The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released its predictions for 2030: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds.. Its vision of the future, available online threatens everyone. The programs and concerns of a U.S. Intelligence community are those of a group causing more suffering and death to more people than any group of wage earners in human history. Under the pretence of prediction its report simply affirms what’s happening now. The propaganda basis for the document rests in presupposing the future of the world’s peoples as its domain...

Rabbi issues modesty rules from age 3 | Ynet News
  Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, known as one of the strictest Religious Zionism leaders when it comes to women's modesty, has formulated a new dress code in which he orders women to avoid wearing red, keep their hair tied in a braid and put on 40 denier stockings.. a woman's garment must not be transparent or tight, must cover the entire body and be "calm and reserved." Girls must be educated on modesty rules starting at the age of three, or seven at the latest, the rabbi stated...
[Kosher Sharia – they should team up with the Taliban]

Are you an American named Rafik? You're a Terrorist! | Roi Tov
..El Al's spokesman Ran Rahav told Haaretz "civilian security airport checks in Israel and abroad are conducted as per the instructions of the national security services [Shin Beth]; the company just follows the instructions." They were sent for further checking due to their odd combination of names and looks; in other words, it was racial profiling. Rebecca committed an error during the early interrogation. She was asked which church she attends. She said that she is Jewish and that she attends a synagogue. The interrogators went ballistic...

Bab al-Shams uses tactic of 'residing' akin to Jordan Valley villages - not Israeli settlers, by Allison Deger | Mondoweiss
  Israeli special forces have detained Palestinian villagers in the protest encampment of Bab al-Shams, in the E1 area of the West Bank, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the eviction Saturday night. The Israeli Supreme Court had issued a stay of eviction Friday (responding to a petition filed in anticipation of the raid)...
[What’s good for the goose is.. good for the goose]



Jan 13, 2013

Wiesenthal Center Refuses to Debate Jakob Augstein without Apology, by Clemens Höges | Spiegel Online
  The Simon Wiesenthal Center has triggered a major debate by listing a prominent German publisher and SPIEGEL ONLINE columnist among the world's top 10 anti-Semites. The evidence is debatable, but now the center refuses to speak to the publisher unless he apologizes first...
[Turn over almost any rock and you’ll find some critters chirping "antisemite, antisemite" crawling around. Don’t touch them – they’re poisonous!]

Zionjuana: Netanyahu Headlines Birthright Rally | The Real News on YouTube
  Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu headlines Jerusalem mega event for thousands of Jewish teenagers on Israel-bonding trip...

The Gravest Threat to World Peace, by Noam Chomsky | Truthout
...Who exactly sees Iran as the gravest security threat? And what do Arabs (and most of the world) think can be done about the threat, whatever they take it to be? The first question is easily answered. The "Iranian threat" is overwhelmingly a Western obsession, shared by Arab dictators, though not Arab populations. As numerous polls have shown, although citizens of Arab countries generally dislike Iran, they do not regard it as a very serious threat. Rather, they perceive the threat to be Israel and the United States; and many, sometimes considerable majorities, regard Iranian nuclear weapons as a counter to these threats...

France Displays Unhinged Hypocrisy as Bombs Fall on Mali | Land Destroyer
  A deluge of articles have been quickly put into circulation defending France's military intervention in the African nation of Mali. TIME's article, "The Crisis in Mali: Will French Intervention Stop the Islamist Advance?" decides that old tricks are the best tricks, and elects the tiresome "War on Terror" narrative...

The Age of the Siege: Nazi Military Tactics Revisited, by Felicity Arbuthnot | Global Research
  The siege of Leningrad is still considered the most lethal siege in world history, a shocking “racially motivated starvation policy”, described as: “an integral part of Nazi policy in the Soviet Union during World War 11.”.. Sieges now extend to entire countries, they have become the torture before the destruction. And they are not counted in long days, but in long years. Iran thirty three years, Iraq thirteen-plus years. Ironically the disparity in the deaths in Iraq resultant from that siege, mirror near exactly what was considered a “genocide” in Leningrad...

Think Hagel represents meaningful change for US foreign policy? Think again, by Adam Horowitz and Alex Kane | Mondoweiss
  The nomination of Chuck Hagel is being celebrated in some circles (including here on this site) as a strike against war with Iran and a colossal failure for the Israel lobby. But even assuming he's confirmed, there is very little evidence that Hagel will do much to shift an administration that has continued to press AIPAC-inspired pressure on Iran and maintains a foreign policy slanted heavily in favor of Israel and its interests...

Israel's 'self-defense' argument against Hamas holds no water, by Jerome Slater | Christian Science Monitor
  As part of a November ceasefire agreement with Hamas, Israel has partially lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip, allowing private construction materials into the region pummeled by Israeli airstrikes. It’s a single, forward step that ends a five-year ban on such materials. But without progress in settling the overall conflict, Palestinian rocket or suicide attacks and heavy Israeli responses will almost surely resume. If the past is any guide, even those who would criticize such Israeli attacks as “disproportionate” would hasten to add: “Of course, Israel has the right to defend itself.”..

A Conversation with Ali Akbar Salehi, Foreign Minister of Iran | World Policy Institute
...In 2009, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad named him head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, a post he held until he resigned to take on the duties of foreign minister. Salehi, though apparently a worldly liberal and a significant intellectual cut above Ahmadinejad, is said to be especially close to the nation’s Supreme Leader, the Grand Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s real power, which has only intensified speculation as to his potential rise to the presidency when Ahmadinejad’s term expires in 2013. When in New York, he receives an unceasing parade of visitors in the lavish, Persian-style reception rooms of Iran’s Mission to the United Nations in a Fifth Avenue townhouse...

Obama's gift to al-Qaida, support for tyranny, and FBI monitoring of dissent, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
...I can't recall any one news article that so effectively conveys both the gross immorality and the strategic stupidity of Obama's drone attacks as this one from Monday's Washington Post by Sudarsan Raghavan. It details how the US-supported Yemeni dictatorship lies to its public each time the US kills Yemeni civilians with a drone attack, and how these civilian-killing attacks are relentlessly (and predictably) driving Yemenis to support al-Qaida and devote themselves to anti-American militancy...

Excusing Torture, Again, by Ray McGovern | Consortium News
  Would-be tough guys like former CIA torturer-in-chief José A. Rodriguez Jr. brag that “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists – or doing what the rest of us would call “torturing” – has made Americans safer by eliciting tidbits of information that advanced the search for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Rodriguez makes this case again in the Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section in the context of the new “hunt-for-bin-Laden” movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” though Rodriguez still disdains the word “torture.” He’s back playing the George W. Bush-era word game that waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation and other calculated pain inflicted on detainees in the CIA’s custody weren’t really “torture.”..
[More often than not “would-be tough guys” are cowardly brutes. I’ll lay 10:1 that he beats his wife (and/or mistress).]

World War in Asia? by Linh Dinh | Dissident Voice
  With the Asia Pivot, the US wants to encircle China, and supplies old and new allies with missiles aimed at its biggest rival. An amped up arms race means cash flow for the world’s biggest death dealer. If all these Asian nations buy as many American fighter planes as Taiwan, US armament workers can knock down a few more Bud Lites, and take their wives and kiddies to Ruby Tuesday twice a week even...
[Oh Dog, here we go again. Last time we were on the other side, but what’s the dif – baby needs a new pair of shoes]

“Mr. Obama, Tear Down These sanctions!” by Franklin Lamb | Counterpunch
...Today in Syria, from the streets and cafes to the Universities, a main subject of discussion and one that is nearly universally judged immoral and illegal are the US-led sanctions, that in effect, are targeting the civilian population. Partly as result of these brutal sanctions, today four million people in this country need of some type of humanitarian aid and as of today, there are 637,958 registered refugees inside Syria who are in need of emergency help, a 57,000 person increase from last year at this time...

Fraudulent Nazi Quotations, by Mark Weber | IHR
  Fraudulent quotations attributed to Hitler and other Third Reich leaders have been widely circulated for years. Such quotes are often used by polemicists -- of both the left and the right -- to discredit their ideological adversaries by showing that Nazis held similar views. This tactic works because people have been educated to believe that anything Hitler and other Nazi leaders thought or said was malevolent, wrong-headed or evil, and that no reasonable or ethical person could hold similar views. Here's a look at a few of the many remarks falsely attributed to Hitler and other top Nazis...
[Zionists and American (and British, French etc.) ‘patriots’ must maintain the fiction that Hitler was unique, an incarnation of Satan himself. This myth is also necessary to picture the Holocaust as a “special” event, not comparable to the numerous other genocides committed in history, like, for example, the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis - which is just as bad, if not worse, than what the Germans (actually) did.]

Israel orders Palestinians out of 'tent city' | MCW News
  The Israeli Civil Administration has given Palestinian activists an ultimatum to quit a protest camp in part of the occupied West Bank where Israel has vowed to build new settler homes...

It's Blame Iran Week | Moon of Alabama
  Four different stories involving Iran in some nefarious affairs were published last week. They have all one thing in common. There is actually no proof that Iran was or is involved in any of these. On Tuesday the Financial Times ran a story about alleged Uranium in Syria which was then speculated about as having been moved to Iran. But the big issue here is that no one has ever seen the alleged 50 tons of Uranium metal Syria is said to have had and there is absolutely no proof that it ever existed...



Jan 12, 2013

AP: Israel Left Wing Sees Jewish State's End | NYT
  An apocalyptic tone has crept into Israel's hitherto muted election season, with opposition leaders and others sounding increasingly desperate warnings that a few more years of rule by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's heavily favored right wing might well destroy the Jewish state...
[Ask not for whom the bell tolls...]

When I was seven, Jesus cried… | Poetry for Palestine
When I was seven
I was living
In a beautiful village
North of Jerusalem
Near the heart of Palestine...

Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?: Blowback at the Holy Triumvirate, by William Blum | Counterpunch
  “France no longer recognizes its children,” lamented Guillaume Roquette in an editorial in the Figaro weekly magazine in Paris. “How can the country of Victor Hugo, secularism and family reunions produce jihadists capable of attacking a kosher grocery store?” I ask: How can the country of Henry David Thoreau, separation of church and state, and family Thanksgiving dinners produce American super-nationalists capable of firing missiles into Muslim family reunions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia?..

US Zionist lobby in retreat over Chuck Hagel, by Uri Avnery | Redress Information & Analysis
  I find Chuck Hagel eminently likeable. I am not quite certain why. Perhaps it’s his war record. He was decorated for valour in the Vietnam War (which I detested). Like so many veterans who have seen war from close up (myself included), he has become an enemy of war. Wonderful...
[Well, not exactly. He appears to have courage and personal integrity - rare qualities among America's leaders - but he's a diehard servant of the Empire and isn't likely to throw any curve balls.]

A significant defeat for the Zionist lobby? by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis
  As I write it looks as though the Zionist lobby realizes that it overplayed its hand in smearing Chuck Hagel in the hope of causing President Barack Obama to back off nominating him for the post of defence secretary. The implication is not that the lobby’s stooges in the Senate will refrain from giving Hagel a hard time at his confirmation hearing, but that they will not risk, at least for a while, further public exposure as Israel firsters by causing the nomination to be rejected...

E1 Boomerang: Palestinians First Settlement | Roi Tov
...After criticizing Netanyahu's "policy of creating facts on the ground," the group declared in a formal statement "today, we are the ones creating facts on the ground, on our land." The statement began, "We, the sons and daughters of Palestine, declare the founding of the village 'Bab al-Shams,' by order of the people, without permission from the occupation, or any other body, because this land is ours, as is the right to build on it." Mr. Netanyahu, if you declare them illegal, then you cannot recognize Jewish settlements in the West Bank as legal. We are joyously waiting your decision...

‘My Family Is Living through Hell:’ Samer Issawi Speaks from Jail, by Shahd Abusalama | Palestine Chronicle
  I can’t kick the bad habit of biting my fingers when I’m stressed despite my constant attempts. My forefinger is swollen due to this habit and it really hurts; the cold weather makes it worse. The pain was intolerable this morning and it made me cry, but I quickly wiped my tears. I felt ashamed to think that our hero Samer Issawi suffers pains incomprehensible to the human mind. However, he makes us all proud as he continues to fight injustice. His body has broken the limits of hunger. His hunger has broken the silence and will help defeat Israel’s injustice and oppression...

The Founding Document of Catastrophism: The Hula Hoop Theory of History, by Morris Berman | Counterpunch
...The American writer, Eric Hoffer, described this syndrome roughly sixty years ago in a book that also generated a lot of zeal (for a short time, anyway), The True Believer. People convert quite easily, observed Hoffer; they switch from one ism to another, from Catholicism to Marxism to whatever is next on the horizon. The belief system runs its course, then another one takes its place. What is significant is the energy involved, not the particular target, which could be anything, really. For what drives this engine is the need for psychological reassurance, for Meaning with a capital M–a comprehensive system of belief that explains everything...



Jan 11, 2013

The State of Palestine Exists, by John V. Whitbeck | Counterpunch
  On January 3, Mahmoud Abbas, acting in his capacities as President of the State of Palestine and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, signed “Decree No. 1 for the year 2013”. While he did so with minimal ceremony or fanfare, and while the change formalized by this decree should surprise no one after the UN General Assembly’s overwhelming vote on November 29 to upgrade Palestine’s status at the United Nations to “observer state”, this change is potentially historic...

John Brennan vs. a Sixteen-Year-Old, by Medea Benjamin | Antiwar
...The people Brennan recommends for the hit list are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law. The kind of intelligence Brennan uses to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the "worst of the worst," only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?.. Brennan pushed for the CIA to have the authority to kill with even greater ease using “signature strikes,” also known as “crowd killing,” which are strikes based solely on suspicious behavior...

The Endgame in Syria: Strategic Stage in the Pentagon’s Covert War on Iran, by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | Voltaire Net
  The ultimate goal in Syria, this pundit argues, is not regime change per se, but to do whatever it takes that will result in Iran’s isolation in the region. Believing that they have succeeded in neutralizing Tehran’s allies in the Levant: Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, the opponents of Iran will be concentrating now on subduing her supporters in Iraq. Revealing the endgame behind the plans for Syria, an Israeli intelligence report has signaled that Iran can now be attacked without coordinating a regional response. Meanwhile, there is a clock ticking in Washington which may be chiming a different tune...

Washington Post Supports Israeli Settlements | Stephen Lendman
...Instead of telling readers what’s important to know, they defile responsible journalism. They turn truth on its head. They support wrong over right. They believe might is right. They endorse Jewish supremacy and specialness. They're comfortable with belligerence, persecution and land theft. Israel has a divine right to settlements, they suggest...

Keeper of the Kill Lists, by Ray McGovern | Counterpunch
  As Washington’s pundit class sees it, Defense Secretary-designee Chuck Hagel deserves a tough grilling over his hesitancy to go to war with Iran and his controversial detection of a pro-Israel lobby operating in the U.S. capital, but prospective CIA Director John Brennan should get only a few polite queries about his role helping to create and sustain Dick Cheney’s “dark side.”..

Unchecked Israel Firsters, by Jamal Kanj | Sabbah Report
  How do American allow Israel Firsters to declare their loyalty to a foreign state and can be counted on to put interests of Israel in front of America’s? The undue influence of money and single issue interest groups is bankrupting the essence of American democracy and discouraging honest Americans from serving their nation. In current debate over Chuck Hagel’s pick to head the Pentagon, it is becoming self-evident that any political appointment in a US administration must first pass the Israeli litmus test...

Syria: A jihadi paradise, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
  So Bashar al-Assad hath martially spoken - for the first time in seven months - predictably blaming the Syrian civil war on "terrorists" and "Western puppets". Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, he of the former "zero problems with our neighbors" policy, commented that Assad only reads the reports of his secret services. C'mon, Ahmet; Bashar may be no Stephen Hawking, but he's certainly getting his black holes right...

University of California students mobilize against California bill equating activism with anti-Semitism, by UC SJP Chapters | Mondoweiss
  This summer saw the release of a controversial Campus Climate Report that conflated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and recommended broad forms of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech, ranging from limiting who can be invited to speak on campus to enforcing balance at pro-Palestine events. It was followed by HR-35, a non-binding California Assembly bill that endorsed the reports and claimed that use of terms like apartheid to describe Israel should be banned on campus...
[The Inquisition is tireless - any hint of heresy must be ruthlessly crushed]

Syria must be defenseless for America to illegally invade: Rated XXX, by John Robles | Voice of Russia
  Poised and ready to invade Syria and continue its plans for complete global military and political domination at any cost, the US is faltering and has yet to invade Syria. Most likely stopped by the fact that Syrian defenses are robust enough to effectively deal with the invader's forces and that Russian troops are on the ground, the US is stuck in a holding pattern. The next illegal US act of aggressive war is Syria. Coming soon! Rated: XXX...

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People | YouTube
  This groundbreaking documentary dissects a slanderous aspect of cinematic history that has run virtually unchallenged from the earliest days of silent film to today's biggest Hollywood blockbusters. Featuring acclaimed author Dr. Jack Shaheen, the film explores a long line of degrading images of Arabs--from Bedouin bandits and submissive maidens to sinister sheikhs and gun-wielding "terrorists"--along the way offering devastating insights into the origin of these stereotypic images, their development at key points in US history, and why they matter so much today...

Iran is guilty because...we say so | Left I on the News
  The U.S. is ramping up pressure on the American public to accept an attack on Iran, with not one but two stories in today's news. It wasn't enough to accuse Iran of producing nuclear weapons based on no evidence, now we're throwing into the mix accusations of cyberattacks and hostage taking as well. In perhaps the more serious charge, an AP story accuses Iran of holding retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in 2007 on an Iranian island...

Syrian 'Endgame': 'Quick victory' in Middle East or Big Regional Fire? by Dmitry Minin | Strategic Culture Foundation
  Many think the events in Syria are nearing the climax. The West and Israel are openly talking about the ‘endgame’ soon to come. Any peace initiatives put forward by Bashar Assad are flatly refused from the start, like the one he came up with at the beginning of 2013. The only thing demanded is his resignation and transfer of power to the opposition that enjoys the Western support. The indications of an imminent foreign intervention are becoming more tangible.. the realization of the plans requires that power in Syria be consolidated in ‘the hands of right forces’, there is each and every reason to conclude a large-scale operation is to be launched no later than March this year...



Jan 10, 2013

Are Israel and the U.S. Becoming Fascist States? by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar
...Both Israel and the United States claim victimhood from terrorism and have used that as an excuse to maintain aggressive foreign policies that emphasize the use of force as a first option. Both spend far more proportionately on "defense" than other developed countries and both are actively engaged in proxy and shooting wars around the world. Israel exploits its alleged victimhood to occupy Palestinian land while the United States does the same to justify its continued presence in Afghanistan and its threats against both Iran and Syria. The victimhood also feeds resentment that reinforces ultra-nationalism which in turn glorifies militarism...
[Only becoming? That depends on whose definition of fascism..]

Some of My Best Friends are Zionists | Paul Eisen
  This beautifully made clip gave me lots to think about. Many people will say that it's just more of the same - well-spoken Jews just "wishing Israel wouldn't behave quite so badly and stop embarrassing them in front of their friends." I'm not so sure. These people seem really sincere and many could well move on to rejecting the whole notion of a Jewish state...

Palestine in Israeli School Books: Nurit Peled-Elhanan | YouTube
  Alternate Focus interviews Nurit Peled-Elhanan, author of the forthcoming book Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Nurit Peled-Elhanan argues that the textbooks used in the school system are laced with a pro-Israel ideology, and that they play a part in priming Israeli children for military service...

Israel Vows To Use Veto Power If Chuck Hagel Confirmed As U.S. Secretary Of Defense | The Onion
  Top-ranking government officials in Jerusalem confirmed Tuesday that Israel would exercise its longstanding, constitutionally granted veto power over American policy if U.S. lawmakers confirmed retired congressman Chuck Hagel as the United States’ next Secretary of Defense. “In light of Mr. Hagel’s worrying remarks on Israeli-Palestinian relations and questionable classification of Israeli interests as ‘the Jewish lobby,’ we consider him a highly inappropriate choice for Defense Secretary who stands far out of line with our national priorities, and therefore we are prepared to swiftly and resolutely use our official veto power over this U.S. action,”..

Palestinians, Egyptian Jews and propaganda, by Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera
  The current propaganda war in Egypt about the Palestinians and about Egyptian Jews, which was provoked by the recent pronouncements of Issam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is nothing but a distraction from the real problems that the country faces with the increasing incompetence of the Morsi government and the opportunism of his vocal opposition. If this propaganda war did not have major implications with regards to Israel and US plans to undermine the Egyptian uprising and to control its outcome so as to serve US and Israeli interests, it would be nothing but a storm in a teacup...

Reconsidering the Massive U.S. Aid to Israel: Has it become an impediment to peace? by Allan C. Brownfeld | The Conservative Curmudgeon
...Israel continues to settle occupied territory in violation of both international law and U.S. policy. This continuing and escalating occupation is making a two-state solution less and less likely. Without U.S. aid Israel's pursuit of such a destructive policy would be increasingly difficult to pursue. Friends don't let friends drive drunk. Clearly, the time has come to reconsider the billions we give Israel each year — and which is used to make the genuine peace we seek less and less possible to achieve...
[At the risk of repeating myself, yet again, the last thing the Empire wants is peace]

Palestine: Oppression Will not Work | YouTube
  Anyone who knows a little bit of history realizes that when there is situation where a people has refused to surrender and abandon its rights, oppressing it will not work. The only ones who may live in denial of this fact are the oppressor and those who support it. Their wishful thinking thus leads them to trying different types of violence and criminality, coupled with mass lies and distortion campaign...

Just One Life by JB feat, Ben Jammin & Agron Belica | YouTube

Obama Defeats AIPAC, by M.J. Rosenberg | MWC News
  In 1983 or thereabouts, during my four year stint at AIPAC, the powerful organization that is the main component of the pro-Israel lobby, I asked Tom Dine, its executive director, if a president of the United States could ever successfully challenge Israel's behavior even in cases when U.S. national security interests were clearly at stake...



Jan 9, 2013

Does Truth Have A Future In America? by Paul Craig Roberts | OpEd News
...one problem in communicating with readers is that many have political, social, economic, or ideological agendas. They read in order to confirm their beliefs and agendas. Neither the right-wing nor the left-wing can escape their ideological boxes and are creatures of their biases. They want their prejudices vindicated and their beliefs supported. A writer who tells them something that they do not want to hear receives abuse...

Is Chuck Hagel a Hippie? Only if You Ignore His Record, by Spencer Ackerman | Wired
...Hagel earned his reputation as a skeptic of American military adventurism, as anyone who remembers his consistent criticism of the Iraq war will remember. But that criticism has blown Hagel’s reputation for dovishness out of proportion: After all, he voted in 2002 to authorize the war. National Journal’s Michael Hirsch insightfully argues Hagel’s reward for asking hard questions about the war is to have official Washington forget the rest of his record. So consider this a refresher...

Jakob Augstein: an also ran in Wiesenthal's Zionist Olympics | Jews sans Frontieres
  In the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's top ten antisemites list there were bound to be some real cases of antisemitism. Carlos Latuff stood out in third place as the kind anti-zionist who you'd expect to be smeared by a zionist organisation like SWC. Carlos came sufficiently high in the hit parade to be noticed. He also has a very large anti-racist following. But there is another highly questionable case and that is Jakob Augstein...
[I’m an antisemite, you’re an antisemite, god’s an antisemite, does the word mean anything anymore? Other than a clinical symptom of tribal paranoia and knee-jerk political correctness, not really.]

Mleeta, Khiam, Sabra, Shatila and Resistance In General | Gilad Atzmon
  Lebanon is incredible - an intoxicating blend of natural beauty, rebellious spirit, pious clarity, tolerance, wild night life and unbelievable hummus. I landed in Beirut four days ago. The purpose of my visit wasn’t all that clear. I knew that a talk and a musical performance were scheduled by Almayadeen TV, but I never expected such a spiritually transforming experience...

When Wall Street Pulls the Strings, by Dave Lindorff | Counterpunch
  The set-up for the big battle was the Fiscal Cliff charade. That hyped drama in the last days of December was a moment of truth for the Democratic Party and for President Barack Obama to make it clear whether they were still defenders of the New Deal legacy, or whether they were ready to toss Social Security overboard on behalf of the party’s new constituency: the Wall Street gang...

When did India Become Part of Israel’s Stable,? by Paul Larudee | Counterpunch
...The self-proclaimed Jewish state is selling itself to India as a worthwhile ally on the basis that it is a) an experienced and effective leader in the fight against Islamist extremism and terrorism, b) a supplier of high-tech weapons and intelligence, and c) a means of access to U.S. support and cooperation. In effect, Israel is saying that both states have common friends and enemies and that Israel is in a position to provide what India needs. India appears to be buying, and is currently the largest customer for Israeli military arms systems and services...

Wilhelm Höttl and the elusive 'six million,' by Mark Weber | Institute for Historical Review
  So ingrained has the Six Million figure become in the popular consciousness that while the average American may be quite sure that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Germans in the Second World War - that is, in what is now called "the Holocaust" - he has no idea of how many British, Poles, Russians, or even Americans died during that global conflict, or, for that matter, of how many of his fellow countrymen lost their lives in the American Civil War...

What Bush-Cheney-Obama Don't Want Known on Torture, by Nat Hentoff | Cato Institute
...it will take months before the Senate Intelligence Committee will let you know at least some of its 6,000-page report on the tortures (officially masked as “enhanced interrogation techniques”) committed by the U.S., but especially by the CIA, after 9/11. The report must first be reviewed by the president, the executive branch and — wow — the CIA itself...

First Depardieu, then Bardot - does any of that matter? | The Vineyard of the Saker
  By now we probably have all seen the footage of French actor Gerard Depardieu proudly showing his Russian passport and most of us have also heard reports about French actress Birgitte Bardot declaring that she will leave France in disgust and also ask for Russian citizenship. Does any of that matter?.. There is much more to this than meets the eye...

History of the People: Articulating ‘Palestine’ Despite Israeli Hasbara, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
  What does a Palestinian farmer who is living in a village tucked in between the secluded West Bank hills, a prisoner on hunger strike in an Israeli jail and a Palestinian refugee roaming the Middle East for shelter all have in common? They are all characters in one single, authentic, solid and cohesive narrative. The problem however, is that western media and academia barely reflect that reality or intentionally distort it, disarticulate it and when necessary, defame its characters. An authentic Palestinian narrative – one that is positioned within an original Palestinian history and articulated through Palestinian thought – is mostly absent from western media and to a lesser degree, academia...

Democracy and the Secret State: The Deception and Terrorisation of Populaces from the Era of Gladio to the War on Terror | Adeyinka Makinde
...How to sum up or rationalise the role of the secret arms of state in the key Western powers during the anti-communist period and the present War on terror? In the future, it will be detailed that both eras were dominated by the security and material concerns of the American empire and that its efforts to maintain its power and status required that it did not always act as a benign hegemon.. history may likely find evidence of a manufactured fear and a manipulated heightening of antipathy towards Islam, as a cover for the goal of an the expansion of American influence and consolidation of a form of global hegemony...



Jan 8, 2013

Israel's PM plans to build Syria-Golan fence | | MCW News
  Israel's prime minister has pledged to build a fortified fence along the frontier with Syria, warning that hardline Islamist forces have taken over the area. Binyamin Netanyahu spoke at a weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad delivered a rare nationwide address in Syria, calling for a national reconciliation conference. Assad claimed that "terrorists who carry the ideology of al-Qaeda" were active in his country and demanded that foreign countries stop arming the rebels...
[The walls around the new, improved Jewish ghetto are nearly complete, and it is working feverishly on a protective dome. Its fifth columns have assumed virtual control of the levers of power in the Western world. It is armed and ready for attack, seemingly impregnable, but for how long can it hold out against the rest of the world and the patterns of history, while in the meantime it is clearly rotting from within?]

Stop the Press: 0.000125 % of the Jews are Ethical and Universalists | Gilad Atzmon
  The Messiah must be finally here--or at least just around the corner! What other conclusion can be drawn from the fact that in the last few days almost 50 Jews, most of them notorious for being Anti-Zionist Zionists (AZZ), have now decided to support the universal and elementary right of the Palestinians to return to their homes. These elite 50 even formed an exclusively Jewish list and a website for the matter. Isn’t it wonderful?..

A Chronology of the War Against Chuck Hagel, by Marsha B. Cohen | Lobe Log
  The smear campaign against Chuck Hagel did not begin on Dec. 14, 2012. The former Nebraska senator’s opposition to war as the preferred means of conducting foreign policy made him a maverick during the post-9/11 Bush years. Although most Republicans agreed with Hagel’s socially conservative positions on domestic issues, his nuanced approach to foreign policy — and his view that diplomacy was a more efficacious means of securing long term US interests than sending in troops with an unclear and/or undefined strategic objective — set him apart from many of his fellow party members...

Palestinians, Egyptian Jews and propaganda, by Joseph Massad | MCW News
  The current propaganda war in Egypt about the Palestinians and about Egyptian Jews, which was provoked by the recent pronouncements of Issam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is nothing but a distraction from the real problems that the country faces with the increasing incompetence of the Morsi government and the opportunism of his vocal opposition. If this propaganda war did not have major implications with regards to Israel and US plans to undermine the Egyptian uprising and to control its outcome so as to serve US and Israeli interests, it would be nothing but a storm in a teacup...

Khaled Abu Toameh: Israel’s Palestinian propagandist, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis
  Observers of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict expect from time to time to come across individuals and organizations whose intent is to find the worst possible news and information from the Arab and Muslim worlds and disseminate them widely while painting a rosy picture of Israel and Zionists. Usually these tarnished messengers are themselves Israelis or organizations with close links to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, such as Memri, foreign Jews who act as Israeli agents abroad – known as sayanim – or non-Jews who perform services on behalf of Israel – sometimes referred to as Sabbath Goyim – such as the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel lobby groups in the British Parliament...

Intelligence says more about now than future, by Tom Engelhardt | Asia Times Online
  Think of it as a simple formula: if you've been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you're going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be. And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the future but to plant the Stars and Stripes in that future has had the US Intelligence Community (IC) in its grip since the mid-1990s. That was the moment when it first occurred to some in Washington that US power might be capable of controlling just about everything worth the bother globally for, if not an eternity, then long enough to make the future American property...

All hail the new Terrorist-in-Chief: John Brennan's extremism and dishonesty rewarded with CIA Director nomination, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
Obama's top terrorism adviser goes from unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013, reflecting the Obama legacy...

The Fascinating Case of Lynne Stewart, by Jacob Hornberger | MCW News
  Lynne Stewart is a New York attorney who is serving a 10-year sentence in the federal penitentiary for being a supporter of terrorism. Her crime? Two years after the 9/11 attacks, she read the following message from her client, convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, at a press conference in New York City: “I am not withdrawing my support of the cease-fire, I am merely questioning it and I am urging you, who are on the ground there to discuss it and to include everyone in your discussions as we always have done.” What’s criminal about that message?
[It is on a par with the judicial persecution – in 17 European countries – of anyone who dares to question any of the established dogmas of the Holycause religion, including any attorneys who have the gall to defend them in court.]

The Anthropology Wars, by Eliza Jane Darling | Monthly Review
  In 1929 Bronislaw Malinowski, the primogenitor of twentieth-century anthropology, published an article extolling the merits of his science in the process of colonial administration. “My own opinion, as that of all competent anthropologists, is that indirect or dependent rule is infinitely preferable,” he held. “In fact, if we define dependent rule as the control of Natives through the medium of their own organization, it is clear that only dependent rule can succeed. For the government of any race consists rather in implanting in them ideas of right, of law and order, and making them obey such ideas.”..

Iran Nuke Deal Within Sight, by Paul Pillar | Consortium News
  A resolution to the Iranian nuclear dispute is within reach, with Iran ready to accept limits on its program and many in the West willing to ease sanctions. But the real question remains whether chest-thumping politicians and pundits will let a deal go through...
[Unfortunately, the last thing the Empire wants is a deal. The USraeli Empire is based on permanent domination through war, and Iran makes a perfect victim of this policy.]

Settlers Give False Testimony to Supreme Court | Roi Tov
...It is impossible to ignore the fact that the State and the settlers are on the same side of a complex charade. It is difficult to believe that the Justices did not understand that the declaration of Mr. Barak was false. The fact is that after openly giving false testimony to the State's Supreme Court, there are no signs that he is about to be detained. In other words, the Justices accept his behavior as legitimate. On the week this was published, Haaretz added several disturbing news about state-sanctioned crimes by settlers...

The Syria Endgame: Strategic Stage in the Pentagon’s Covert War on Iran, by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | Global Research
  Since the kindling of the conflict inside Syria in 2011, it was recognized, by friend and foe alike, that the events in that country were tied to a game plan that ultimately targets Iran, Syria’s number one ally. De-linking Syria from Iran and unhinging the Resistance Bloc that Damascus and Tehran have formed has been one of the objectives of the foreign-supported anti-government militias inside Syria. Such a schism between Damascus and Tehran would change the Middle East’s strategic balance in favour of the US and Israel...


Jan 7, 2013

Nominating Hagel Will Send a Message to Netanyahu, by MJ Rosenberg | Huffington Post
  Thus far, President Barack Obama is sitting out the January 22nd Israeli elections. There is no indication about who he hopes to see as the next Israeli prime minister. His noninterference, even disinterest, is not surprising except when contrasted with Prime Minister Netanyahu's open preference for the Republicans in the U.S. election two months ago. One might have thought that a little payback would be in order...

By Any Measure, the U.S. Is the Largest Sponsor of Terror | Washington's Blog
  Preface: As a patriotic American – I was born here, lived here all of my life, and love this country – I want the best for the U.S. Lawless actions are tearing my country apart. I want my country to regain its vision, strength and moral compass. Thomas Jefferson said that “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. I criticize my country because I know we are better than this … and that if enough people know how far we have fallen, we can start to pull ourselves back and reclaim our greatness...

Israel anticipates US-Iran talks, by M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline
  There can be no two opinions that 2013 is going to be the year that the United States’s standoff with Iran will have to give way. It has been a toss-up so far, but the pendulum is steadily tilting toward the prospect of peace doves spreading wings and taking to the blue sky. Many tell-tale signs are appearing. First and foremost, belying all logic, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shied away from attempts to raise the Iran issue to drum up support in the crucial parliamentary election later this month...

Israel's New Attraction: "Follow the Spy" | Roi Tov
  Where do Israelis vacation? Where do they rest from the Jewish wars? The most popular destinations are Greece, Turkey and Egypt. They are cheaper than Israel. Unluckily, their accessibility is limited. The 2012 Travel Warnings of the Israeli National Security Council recommended Israeli citizens to avoid visiting Tunisia (Djerba Island is the site of a religious festival), Egypt (especially the Sinai Peninsula), and Turkey. Greece is not always welcoming; in the past, Israeli vandalism towards local facilities closed the island of Kos to their visits...

President Assad: Syria conflict between nation, enemies | PressTV
  In a key speech on the situation in the country, Assad said on Sunday that his government will always extend its hand for dialogue with the opposition and political parties. The Syrian president, however, said that the government “will not have dialogue with a puppet made by the West." “Government will call for a comprehensive national dialogue” in the near future, he said. “Syria wants peace and reconciliation,” he said, adding that “Armed groups must halt terrorist acts.”..

Israel’s Gaza Bantustan: The Palestinian ID Cards War, by Samah Sabawi | Sabbah Report
  Israel’s one state reality greeted us at the gates of the Gaza-Rafah crossing when we were asked by the Egyptian officer to present our Haweyah (Palestinian IDs) in order to be allowed through. It is not like we weren’t expecting this request, we knew that it would come down to this even though our Australian passports clearly showed Gaza as our place of birth we were still not considered Palestinian nationals in our own home city. Rather, we were treated like foreigners who needed an almost impossible amount of bureaucratic red tape designed to discourage the likes of us of ever thinking of visiting loved ones back home...

Will Americans ever get to see Al Jazeera? by Danny Schechter | Al Jazeera
...Now that Al Jazeera has bought Current TV, a channel shown on Time Warner cable, the Time Warner megacorp became the first system operator out of the box to say it would not carry the new news channel that the Qatar-based network wants to launch in America, in much the same way that BBC set up BBC America to offer its programming to US viewers. Even as Time Warner carries Russia Today, CCTV out of China and other foreign-owned channels, it is excluding this channel before they even know what it will offer. This could be a ploy to jack up licence fees - a la Fox News - but there is probably more to it...

A "Legal Intifada" Appears Likely for More Than Just the Palestinians: Will Syria Go on the Offensive at the Hague? by Franklin Lamb | Counterpunch
...Were Syria, and others, to take the illegal and immoral US-led sanctions case to the World Court and other available venues, they would shift their diplomatic position from a defensive status to taking the offense. Such a bold initiative would advance accountability under international law and, because the ICJ would likely grant a Petition for Interim Measures of Protection, the US-led sanctions could be suspended during the course of the judicial proceedings. Obviously this lifting/freezing of the sanctions would immediately and directly inure to the benefit of the Syrian civilian population...

“Jews for Palestinian Right of Return” statement backs single state and refugees’ right to go home | The Electronic Intifada
  The following statement, dated 1 January 2013, is issued by Jews for the Palestinian Right of Return. The initial signers are listed below along with a link for those who wish to sign on...
[This is the PC wing of the One State movement and a tribal Jewish initiative, but the ultimate goal is a noble one and as far as I'm concerned the tent is big enough - we can use all the help we can get. I even signed up, although my membership will no doubt be rejected because I'm notoriously not PC nor am I tribal, although I'm technically jewish - it's probably just as well.]


Jan 6, 2013

Brazilian cartoonist hits back at Simon Wiesenthal Center | JTA
  A well-known Brazilian cartoonist hit back at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for including him on its top-ten slur list. Carlos Latuff recently published a cartoon of the center's founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, awarding Latuff a medal in response to the center’s publication in December of a list of the top ten anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slurs of 2012. Third on the list was Latuff’s caricature of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu squeezing votes out of the body of a dead Arab child. In the cartoon, an aggravated presents a beaming Latuff with a medal that says “3rd” as Latuff sits on a chair drawing an airplane indiscriminately bombing Gaza...
[See the cartoon here]

Major Test for Israel Lobby As Obama Leans to Hagel for Pentagon, by Jim Lobe | Antiwar
  With President Barack Obama reportedly primed to nominate former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to head the Pentagon early next week, the powerful Israel lobby, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), faces a major dilemma. If it mounts a vigorous campaign to fight Hagel’s confirmation by the Senate, it could put at serious risk its relations with the president, who is about to be inaugurated for another four-year term...

Terrorism with a “Human Face”: The History of America’s Death Squads, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research
  The recruitment of death squads is part of a well established US military-intelligence agenda. There is a long and gruesome US history of covert funding and support of terror brigades and targeted assassinations going back to the Vietnam war. As government forces continue to confront the self-proclaimed “Free Syrian Army” (FSA), the historical roots of the West’s covert war on Syria –which has resulted in countless atrocities– must be fully revealed...

The Case Against Kerry, by Stephen Zunes | FPIF
...Kerry’s record in the United States Senate, where he currently chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, has included spurious attacks on the International Court of Justice, unqualified defense of Israeli occupation policies and human rights violations, and support for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, thereby raising serious questions about his commitment to international law and treaty obligations. Furthermore, his false claims about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and his repeated denials of well-documented human rights abuses by allied governments raise serious questions about his credibility...
[It must be so tempting to go over to the Dark Side]

The Main Goal Is to Depict Iran as Threat to US: Interview with Mohammad Rouhisefat | Iran Review
...One of the reasons why the US Congress passes such laws is that Latin America has been Washington’s political backyard for many long years and the United States has been increasingly losing control over that backyard during past years. Iran has not been the sole reason for the loss of control. Overthrow of military regimes in Latin America followed by free elections which swept nationalist groups to power as well as rivalry over the regional market have been more important reasons. It is difficult for the United States to idly stand by and watch that big market being wrenched out of its control by countries like Iran...

The Gatekeepers: Exposing Israel's Dark Side | Stephen Lendman
...Perhaps fears of Israel's demise motivated them to speak. Doing so may help save the country, they likely feel. Gillon said "We are making the lives of millions miserable." Outspoken Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903 - 1994) warned that governing occupied "foreigners" would transform Israel into "a Shin Bet state." Zionists can't admit that indigenous Palestinians lived in today's Israel for centuries. Calling them "foreigners" demeans their longstanding ties to land rightfully theirs...

UK Chilcot Inquiry: “The Iraq War Was Unlawful”Global Research, by Carl Herman | Global Research
  The UK Cameron government is blocking publication of their “official” report on Iraq war until perhaps 2014 or later, according to the UK’s most popular newspaper website.Perhaps this delay is in part because the Blair government was advised before the war by all 27 attorneys in their Foreign Affairs Office that war on Iraq was unlawful. That would mean armed attack on Iraq would be an unlawful War of Aggression, with identical criminal implication on US armed attack on Iraq...

Ethnic cleansing the nice way | Alan Hart
  Moshe Feiglin, one of the most deluded and racist of those who make up the extreme right of Israeli politics and who is guaranteed his first seat in the Knesset after the upcoming election, has proposed what I imagine he regards as a nice way to complete Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine...

The Israeli-Afghani Torah Trade | Roi Tov
  In the first days of 2013, an exceptional package arrived at the National Library of Israel from Afghanistan; it contained 29 old Torah scrolls allegedly purchased from the Taliban. Israeli Channel 7 reported that hundreds of additional scrolls were left behind due to the exorbitant prices asked for them. The manuscripts date back to the 10 and 11 centuries and are already considered by experts the most prominent such finding since the finding of the Cairo Geniza in the 19th century, apparently surpassing the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls (this claim is doubtful). Hiding behind the news is the odd fact that the Taliban has commercial relations with Israel...

Israel’s Weird Elections, by Uri Avnery | Counterpunch
  In a few hundred years, a professor looking for an especially esoteric subject will ask his students to research the Israeli elections of 2013. The students will come back with a unanimous report: the results of our research are incredible. Faced with at least three grave dangers, they report, Israeli parties and voters just ignored them. As if joined in a conspiracy, they tacitly agreed among themselves not to talk about them...



Jan 5, 2013

Uproar over 'anti-Semitic' Spiegel column | Jerusalem Post
  Inclusion of Jakob Augstein in Wiesenthal Center's 2012 top-ten list of anti-Semites has sparked fierce debate in German media...
[Well, if you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em. I propose that anyone who accuses someone of being an “antisemite” or a “holocaust denier” be prosecuted for a thought crime. Or does that make too much sense?]

No to War, Bigotry and Oppression. No to the Wiesenthal Center | Institute for Historical Review
...Although it claims to promote "tolerance," and makes a pretense of concern for humanity, the Center's real agenda is a narrowly Jewish-Zionist one. The Wiesenthal Center is a staunch supporter of Israel and its Jewish supremacist regime. It fervently defends Israel 's policies of oppression, occupation, dispossession, and institutionalized discrimination against non-Jews. The Center supports Israeli policies that violate United Nations Security Council resolutions. It applauds Israel 's "security fence," a hideous barrier that is part of a long-term Zionist effort to seize land of non-Jews, and which the International Court of Justice says is illegal...

Manufacturing Dissent: The truth about Syria | YouTube
  Manufacturing Dissent is a documentary posthumously dedicated to Syrian Palestinian actor Mohamad Rafea, who was kidnapped, tortured and finally brutally murdered on Sunday November 4th 2012 by terrorist groups that have been set loose on the country since the US, UK and their western and Gulf State allies launched a covert war in Syria in early 2011, dressed up by the media as a "revolution". The words spoken in this video by Rafea, and the courage he shows here, is why he was murdered...

Netanyahu's Palace | Roi Tov
...How could the son of a university professor, who spent his life in the army, studying, and in the State service buy a house in Caesarea? A house so sumptuous and large that in September 2010 it was used for a meeting between Netanyahu and former UK's Prime Minister Blair (just think of the security needs). In September 2012, Forbes Israel ranked Benjamin Netanyahu as the sixth richest Israeli politician. His house in Jerusalem was valued at $2 million, and the one in Caesarea at almost $5 million. His personal fortune crosses the $10 million mark. He couldn't have accumulated that even if he saved his army and government salaries...

Ken O'Keefe spits hatred | YouTube
  Extremist and thug Ken O'Keefe spits hatred at Middlesex University in February 2012. His audience applauds...
[The joke’s on you, ha-Bibi1655 – as always, the great O’Keefe speaks the unvarnished truth]

US imposes fresh sanctions on Tehran, including ban on Iranian media | PressTV
  The United States has imposed fresh sanctions on Iran that include bans on the country’s media despite Washington’s claims of protecting freedom of speech...
[Should one laugh or cry?]

"Before our very eyes": The FSA continues to shine like a dead star, by Thierry Meyssan | Voltaire Net
  While the French press persists in announcing the "imminent fall" of Syria and the "flight of Bashar al-Assad," the reality on the ground has turned around completely. Even though chaos is plaguing most of the territory, the "liberated zones" have melted like snow in the sun. Deprived of its anchor points, the FSA has been left with no prospects in sight, while Washington and Moscow are poised to blow the whistle to end the game...

Haneen Zoabi: Another Persecuted Truth-Teller, by Lawrence Davidson | OpEd News
  Haneen Zoabi is an Arab Israeli member of Israel's parliament, the Knesset. She was elected in 2009 as a member from the Balad Party. Balad is an Arab party that was formed in 1995 with the aim of "struggling to transform the state of Israel into a democracy for all its citizens." In the West, this is a perfectly normal goal. But Israel's Zionist ideology disqualifies it as a "Western" nation. Thus Balad's aim is in direct opposition to the Zionist idea of Israel as a "Jewish state," a concept that Ms Zoabi labels "inherently racist."..

Iran's Best Response To Israeli or U.S. Attack Would Be Non-Violent, by Sherwood Ross | OpEd News
  If Iran militarily resists an American/Israeli attack, it may well suffer the same tragic fate as Viet Nam, which lost some 2 million civilians to U.S. depravations. Not only does the U.S. possess some of the most fiendish weapons ever devised, such as nuclear-tipped artillery shells, napalm, white phosphorus bombs, and shrapnel bomblets (one of which can dice human bodies in an area the size of a football field), but it has shown no hesitation to use them on civilian populations in its cruel wars. The U.S. and Israel have threatened Iran with attack just as though an international court to settle disputes does not exist...

Hardening Israeli Fascism, by Stephen Lendman | Daily Censored
  Israel’s war on Palestine and Israeli Arab citizens reflects it. So does extreme hardline governance. Pre-election polls show Netanyahu’s Likud/Yisrael Beiteinu coalition favored to win. They’ll partner with likeminded extremists. Most Israelis remain shockingly indifferent. Many are ideologically supportive. Haaretz sounded the alarm...

Late Stage Capitalism and the Shame Haunted Life: You Can’t Kill Trauma With A Gun, by Phil Rockstroh | Counterpunch
  In an era of corporate-state colonization of both landscape and mental real estate, when the face of one’s true oppressors is, more often than not, hidden from view, thus inflicting feelings of anxiety borne of powerlessness over the criteria of one’s life and the course of one’s fate, often, to retain a sense of control, people will tend to displace their anger and shame. Firearms provide the illusion of being able to locate and bead down on a given target. (How often does a person without wealth, power, and influence have any contact with — or even a glimpse of — the financial and political elite whose decisions dictate the, day by day, criteria of one’s existence?)..

Can we find compassion for Israelis in 2013? by Ilan Pappe | The Electronic Intifada
  I have just spent the last few days of 2012 in the city of Haifa. Accidentally, I met a few of my acquaintances who in the past deemed me at best as deluded and at worst as a traitor. They seemed more embarrassed today — almost confessing that mine and my friends’ worst predictions about Israel’s future seemed to be materializing painfully in front of their very eyes. In fact, our predictions came very late in the day. Already in 1950, with unsettling accuracy, Sir Thomas Rapp, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, foresaw the future...
[Compassion for Israelis – most of whom are ZioNazis? Yes, otherwise we lose our humanity as they have lost theirs.]

7 Steps to Transform the World Financial "Crisis," by Alfred Webre | Exopolitics
...The Federal Reserve is a fraudulently granted monopoly to a private central bank controlled by the Rothschild family which has been given the monopoly to create money that was really granted in Article 1 Section 8 to the U.S. Congress. [The Federal Reserve] then creates money and charges the U.S. government interest for the process of doing that. In the process, the wealth of the United States, a great portion of it, is paid over in interest to these bankers and to other creditors. And so the public debt becomes structural; the fiscal cliff becomes structural; and war becomes structural - World War I, World War II, and the Federal Reserve is now trying for World War III...



Jan 4, 2013

2013, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
  Obama was reelected president of the USA, a country still under Israeli occupation. So he fails to make Israel accountable for violating International Law and even American law. US law prohibits funding a country that persistently violates human rights. Israel goes on doing just that on a daily basis. But despite Zionist efforts, most countries recognized Palestine and Israel lost its attack on Gaza and lost more of its credibility. Bethlehem is celebrating its first Christmas as a world heritage site (per UNESCO) also despite efforts by the increasing isolated US and Israel to stand against the tide of history and people power...

Cash Strapped Red Cross Predicts Violent Riots in Europe, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars
  The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Tuesday that the organization’s staff experienced working in conflict areas will now concentrate on Europe. “We need to prepare for more violence here,” ICRC Director General Yves Daccord told the Danish daily Politiken. “For the first time we see growing pressure on Europeans, where more and more people have become really poor...

US patriots vs Zionist lobby, by Jamal Kanj | Redress Information & Analysis
...I worked with an ex-congressman who at the time was retained as a lobbyist for an organization I worked for in San Diego. He had a near perfect pro-Israel voting score during his service in Congress. He once confided to me that his and many of his colleagues’ votes on issues pertaining to the Middle East were influenced first and foremost by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Jewish financiers. He also said that said while he was sympathetic to the Palestinians, he remembered those (he named a few) who were ousted when “Jewish” money started pouring into their opponents’ coffer during election...
[See also these videos by Anthony Lawson: AIPAC: The Voice of America — Part 1: The Orange and the Pea, Part 2: The Treasonous Dollar Drain  and Treason by Members of the United States Congress]

2012 Predictions of war with Iran that didn’t Happen (20th Anniversary Edition), by Marsha Cohen | Lobe Log
  It’s June 15, 1992. A news nugget on page A-12 of the Washington Post reports that the chief of Israel’s Air Force believes military action might be necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons:. This was the birth of what we can now look back on as two decades of threats by Israel to “bomb Iran” — with or without the consent, assistance and/or leadership of the United States — to prevent Iran’s impending development of nuclear capability...

White House wins fight to keep drone killings of Americans secret | RT
...While Judge McMahon ends up agreeing with the White House, she does so by making known her own weariness over how the Obama administration has forced the court to rely on their own insistence that information about the attacks simply cannot be discussed.. Responding to the decision on Wednesday, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer issued a statement condemning the White House’s just-won ability to relieve itself from any fair and honest explanation.. The ACLU says they plan to appeal Judge McMahon’s decision and are currently awaiting news regarding a separate lawsuit filed alongside the Center for Constitutional Rights that directly challenges the constitutionality of the targeted kills...

The Iranians Are Coming, by Ramzy Baroud | Dissident Voice
  Reading the text of a bill that was recently signed into law by US President Barack Obama would instill fear in the hearts of ordinary Americans. Apparently, barbarians coming from distant lands are at work. They are gathering at the US-Mexico border, cutting fences and ready to wreak havoc on an otherwise serene American landscape...

The Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: from holocaust historian to holocaust? by Thomas A. Fudge | Joel Hayward's Old Website
  In June 2002, Joel Hayward resigned from his position as senior lecturer in history at Massey University where he had been respected as an effective teacher and productive scholar. His departure generated applause from some quarters. Others lamented academe's loss. "Shame on the scholarly community for not rallying behind the universities' necessary freedoms." What brought Hayward, a year and a half after the Hayward affair, still in the early stages of a potentially distinguished career, to this act of professional extinction? The protracted "facts" in the so-called Hayward affair may be distilled briefly...
[The Hive never sleeps]

How Government Grows, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar
  Playwright Neil Simon once joked that there are only two universal truths – the law of gravity and that everyone loves Italian food. He might have, in a moment of more serious contemplation, added that it is true that every known form of government is inefficient but nevertheless exists primarily to grow and protect itself. We Americans have witnessed in the short space of eleven years a government that has metastasized built around a fiction that the American people are somehow under serious threat from foreign enemies...

Comparing America’s Failure in Afghanistan to the Soviet’s in 1989, by John Glaser | Antiwar
...a major problem is that so long as any foreign occupation exists in Afghanistan, and so long as any Kabul government is propped up from abroad, the insurgency will remain alive and well. The insurgency has persisted for 11 years despite the efforts of the world’s most advanced military. And all signs tell me they will continue to fight to oust the occupier even after a “withdrawal” (which we now know really only means a smaller occupation)...

Drone War Escalates: Blowback Breeds New Enemies, by Joe Wolverton | The New American
  While millions of Americans celebrated the birth of the Prince of Peace, agents of the federal government were delivering death by remote control overseas..
What isn’t an accident is the targeting by Yemenis, Pakistanis, and others weary of constant bombings of Americans and those perceived to be aiding them. It is a deadly development known as blowback. "You want us to stay quiet while our wives and brothers are being killed for no reason. This attack is the real terrorism,"..
[The policy of Permanent War needs, above all, “enemies.” What better way to create them?]

A Short Tour of the Zionist Sewers, by B Vacy Vlazna | Palestine Chronicle
  The Parisian sewer system is famous. Victor Hugo described it as such: ‘Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form.’ Israel too has a sewer system that is spread internationally… a system of interconnected corporations in the USA, Australia, Canada, and Europe with subterranean links to Israel’s Leviathan- ‘slime minus the human form’ – the savage Zionist illegal occupation of Palestine...

Netanyahu's Warning, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News
  Netanyahu represents lawless rogue leadership. He belongs in prison, not high office. Pre-election polls suggest he'll retain power. Israelis aren't smart enough to spurn him. Palestinian suffering will continue. The new year began like 2012 ended. More on that below. On December 22, Netanyahu warned he'll hit Hamas "with a heavier blow" than Pillar of Cloud. He spoke on Israeli television...



Jan 3, 2013

Palestinian PR coordination and unity, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis
  One of the best articles I read in the whole of 2012 was published at the tail end of the year, on 30 December, by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.. The article was written by Barak Ravid. The headline over it was “Think tank: Israel’s poor international image not the fault of failed hasbara” (the Hebrew word for explaining and advocacy, for which read propaganda)...

The Hypocrisy of Israel's Supporters: Subsidizing Land Theft, by Yves Engler | Counterpunch
  The double standard of Israel-no-matter-what supporters can reach spectacular proportions. The recent case of Liberal Party leadership candidate Justin Trudeau’s speech proves the point and also illustrates the tactics employed to demonize the Islamic community. Montreal-based anti-Muslim website Point de Bascule and pro-Israel Jewish group B’nai Brith successfully turned Trudeau’s speech to the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference last weekend into a controversy...

The Descent of a Nation, by Ralph Nader | Counterpunch
  Before the electoral year of 2012 slinks into history, it is worth a comparative glance back to the electoral year of 1912 to give us some jolting perspective on how degraded our contemporary elections, voter performance and election expectations have become...

The U.S. War Machine: Book Review by Anthony Gregory | The Future of Freedom Foundation
...the reason for the continuity of militarism transcends anything that can be found in Obama himself. The sad truth is that Bush’s two terms were never quite the aberration that they were widely characterized as being. His neoconservative advisors were particularly belligerent in some avenues of foreign-policy theory, but they never represented a hard break from American traditions going back several generations...

Hitler's War: What the Historians Neglect to Mention | Paul Eisen
  History is written by the victors so this revisionist narrative of the Second World War is very different from what I was taught in school. As always, I'm no historian, so I can't with any certainty, vouch for the absolute historical accuracy of this or any text. But in any event, it's a point of view that should be heard...

Born in the USA: Regimen of Permanent Wars, by Ron Ridenour | Counterpunch
...The so-called Cold War ended with the fall of any pretense of functioning socialism but wars continue, and the militarization of the world marches hand in hand with globalization extending even into outer space. The United States gets off with its aggressive wars by simply declaring them necessary to stop terrorism, especially in the Middle East, but not, of course, its terrorist friends in Israel and Saudi Arabia...

Could Saudi Arabia be next? by Robert Fisk | The Independent
  Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...”

How The New York Times erases Israel's crimes, by Robert Ross | The Electronic Intifada
  According to The New York Times, there is no siege of Gaza, no occupation of the West Bank, and never was there a Nakba (the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine). Three recent articles erase these key Israeli crimes from the historical record...

Abbas Too Weak to Make Transition from PA to Functioning State, by Hasan Afif El-Hasan | Palestine Chronicle
...Through all his political life, Abbas has been a concessionist, a push-over and an empty suit with no back-bone. He even agreed to suppress the UN-backed report by international Judge Richard Goldstone about Israeli war crimes against the residents of Gaza Strip in 2008. Abbas revealed the low quality of his leadership and even his manhood in an interview given to an Israeli television station when he relinquished his “right of return” to his birth Palestinian town...

UN Article 19: Freedoms of Opinion and Expression and History Revisionism, by Gabi Weber and Gilad Atzmon | The OtherSite
  Just a few days ago we came across the following from the UN Human Rights Committee – an independent body tasked with supervising compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The document, from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR), dates from July 2011 and concerns freedom of opinion and expression. It states that "anti-blasphemy laws and restrictions on criticism of governments are incompatible with existing norms and that free expression is essential for the protection of human rights."..

2013 New Year’s Resolutions, by Gideon Polya | MCW News
  Our World is rapidly running out of time and these desperate times mean serious New Year’s Resolutions. The World is acutely threatened by Nuclear Weapons, Poverty and Climate Change. Many of the 99 percent feel helpless to act against the remorseless One Percenters but we can and must win...

Reviving the cold war, by Belen Fernandez | MCW News
...Two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a new expansionist enemy has been trotted out. According to certain policymakers in Washington, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now lurking along the southern fringes of the US - necessitating the "Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act" just signed by Barack Obama in order to "address Iran's growing hostile presence and activity"..
[It would be hilarious were it not for the fact that the great majority of Americans will blithely buy into this crap.]



Jan 2, 2013

Syria is many conflicts rolled into one. It is also at the centre of two regional struggles, by Patrick Cockburn | The Independent
  "Shame on you! Shame on The Independent!" boomed the voice of a Syrian intellectual in my phone half an hour after I had returned from Damascus to Beirut. He was so incoherent in his rage that it was difficult to know his precise objections, but my sin seemed to be that I had been in Damascus, talked to members of the Syrian government and concluded that it was not going to collapse any time soon.

Congratulations to Carlos Latuff and Jakob Augstein, by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News
...Criticism of Israeli government policy is more than necessary because the Netanyahu government violates democratic and other Western values by colonizing another people for the past 45 years, by depriving them of their liberty, discriminated against their citizens and treating them as second-and third-class citizens. They robbed them of their land and their freedom of movement, walled them in, besieged them and from time to time the Israeli military machine attacks as took place in 2008/09 and 2012 in Gaza. If criticizing this is "anti-Semitism", then there is something wrong in the West...
[Darn, they left me off the list again – I’ll just have to work harder]

Why Chuck Hagel Is Irrelevant, by Max Ajl | Jadaliyya
  The latest non-scandal scandalizing the American commentariat is whether Barack Obama will be able to nominate former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as his new Secretary of Defense. The narrative is that the Zionist lobby is eager to scuttle Hagel’s nomination because he has uttered one too many words “critical” of Israel, and displayed too many sentiments suspected of being contrary to the agenda of the lobby: namely, destroying Iran...

Meir Javedanfar: Iran “Analyst” as Pro-Israel Cipher, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam
  The impasse between Iran and the west has produced a bumper crop of Iranian opportunists who’ve latched onto a western gravy train as analysts, media commentators, political consultants, and think tank pundits. As opposed to genuine independent analysts with their own sources and expertise, this group caters to the interests of whichever particular group offers the most lucrative funding opportunities.. There is also an effort, often by pro-Israel interests, to parachute these individuals into the Beltway political mix...

Report to the Facebook Operations Police (FOP) | Dissident Voice
  I congratulate you on creating the intelligence operative’s surveillance dream that is Facebook Nation. A controlled environment within the controlled environment that is the Internet itself — oh, what fun I and my fellow informants might have had with such toys when I was but a pipsqueak .. My compliments to the designers of whatever software is intelligent enough to isolate Good Citizens from the contagion of dissent and unpopular opinion (or any opinion that has not been informed by the general Media narrative outside and within Facebook Nation)...

Netanyahu Deploys Holocaust Weapon | Roi Tov
...Israel is nothing more than an isolated island surrounded by a wall of terror; its denizens are kept captive with the help of a physical wall surrounding their country and with a cultural wall in the form of a language that few comprehend. Mr. Ifargan was offensive, but also correct in the wider sense of his claim. The new Judenrat, better known as the Government of Israel has created the Israel Ghetto, the legal successor of the Warsaw Ghetto. The new ghetto is surrounded by state-of-the-art fences; Moshe Ifargan baptized it the Jewish Ghetto. Were its walls designed to block the entrance, or to stop the escape?..

Towards “Somalization”? Syria Swings between “Dialogue”, Chaos and Bloodshed, by Dr. Ismail Salami | Global Research
  Lakhdar Brahimi, who represents the United Nations and the Arab League, has predicted as many as 100,000 people could be killed “in the next year as Syria moves toward Somalization and rule by warlords.” Apart from his foreboding tone, his remarks are testimony to a broader gamut of interference at the hands of those who have infiltrated into the country from abroad. In point of fact, what is corroding Syria is not an internal unrest but a ‘foreign-made’ crisis...

The Syrian Diary: Russian Documentary from TV Rossiya 24 on Events in Syria | YouTube
...his exclusive documentary by Russian TV station, Rossiya 24, is a "must watch" as it gives a very good insight on the events that have been taking place in Syria since 2011. It shows how both the Syrian Army and the Syria people are defending their country Syria from the unimaginable crimes committed by extremist terrorists who operate with massive international media, military, intelligence, and financial support, a situation that no one would ever want to be in...

The G20 Fiddles While the Planet Burns, by Hon. Paul Hellyer | Global Research
...when people say, as they do almost daily, “The world is in an awful mess” they are not only speaking the truth, but are guilty of a masterful understatement. Just about everything we are doing is wrong, and almost every major policy must be reversed. Our leaders are steering us toward a precipice, and just turning the wheel a little bit to the right or left won’t save us. Only a “u-turn” will work – a complete reversal of just about every existing policy direction...
[I don’t know about the extraterrestrials, but most of the rest of this speech is on the money, literally]


Jan 1, 2013

The conspiracy to thwart Palestinian freedom hopes, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
  This Christmas the Palestinian embassy in London sent out a particularly pathetic message. Headed “Palestine mulling ICC if UN takes no action on settlements”, it warned that if the UN Security Council didn’t act against Israeli settlements Palestine would “consider complaining to the International Criminal Court [ICC], an option made available by Palestine’s admission as a non-member state to the UN in November”. What is there to mull? In all the years since 1967 what action has the Security Council taken to halt Israel’s illegal settlements? Even now, does it show any sign of doing so?..

'Foreign Policy' magazine's 'distinguished' Global Thinkers, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera
  A few years back, Foreign Policy magazine began compiling annual lists of "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers". Aside from some worthy exceptions, the lists are populated by individuals whose dearth of intellectual qualifications tends to render the whole business an exercise in oxymoron proliferation...

The War Party and the Israel Lobby Wish for War With Iran in 2013, by Muhammad Sahimi | Antiwar
  As we begin 2013, the War Party and its ally, the Israel lobby, are pushing hard to make sure that they get their wish for the New Year, namely, a devastating war with Iran. To them, it is not enough that the illegal unilateral sanctions that the United States and its allies have imposed on Iran are ruining the lives of tens of millions of ordinary Iranians.. The War Party and Israel lobby will be satisfied only if Iran is attacked and destroyed, which will inevitably lead to a much wider war in the entire Middle East...

Rare Israeli Justice | Stephen Lendman
  Instances indeed are rare. An important one deserves mention. In mid-July 2010, Knesset members stripped MK Hanin Zuabi of key parliamentary rights and privileges.. On December 30, High Court justices ruled. Unanimously they overturned efforts to disqualify Zuabi. She's free to seek reelection.. Many Supreme Court decisions violate fundamental international rule of law principles. Sunday they ruled responsibly...
[The Supreme Court, though seriously flawed ('Israeli justice' is, after all, an oxymoron), does indeed appear to be the last bastion of some decency and sanity within the Israeli power structure.]

An Open Letter of Response to CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France) | Richard Falk
  I am shocked and saddened that your organization would label me as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew. It is utterly defamatory, and such allegations are entirely based on distortions of what I believe and what I have done. To confuse my criticisms of Israel with self-hatred of myself as a Jew or with hatred of Jews is a calumny. I have long been a critic of American foreign policy but that does not make me anti-American; it is freedom of conscience that is the core defining reality of a genuinely democratic society...
[Falk, an honest, compassionate Jew with wide credibility, is high on the ZioNazi's hate list]

Practical Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse | American Palestine Public Affairs Forum
A step in the right direction, albeit an awkward one, full of critical ifs...

Oh, how I wish I could stop posting David Duke | Paul Eisen
  Oh, how I wish I could stop posting David Duke (it gets me into no end of trouble). Trouble is, he just will not stop telling the truth. Come on David, give a Jew a break!..
[I'm with you on that one, Paul. I do the same.]
Finkelstein renews attack on BDS “cult,” calls Palestinians who pursue their rights “criminal,” by Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada
  Earlier this year Norman Finkelstein gave a notorious interview to Frank Barat in which Finkelstein attacked the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as a “cult,” accused prominent Palestinians of lying about their goals – which he characterized as the destruction of Israel – and demanded that Palestinians recognize Israel, effectively, as a Jewish state...
[It’s just Finkelstein’s Inner Zionist, his shadow self, coming out. See ‘Open Letter to Uri Avnery, Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter’. I could just as well have added Finkelstein and a host of other good people who make the fatal mistake of legitimizing the very notion of a Jewish state in Palestine. We could compromise a bit, and say that there might be some justification for a Jewish State in Lower Slobbovia, where the founders of Zionism came from, as long as they didn’t try to subvert and dominate their neighbors in Greater Slobbovia. But of course they would, so even that is probably out of the question.]

US Attempting “Regime Change” in Malaysia: Fact or Fiction? by Nile Bowie | Global Research
...In 2005, Ibrahim chaired the Washington-based Foundation for the Future, established and funded by the US Department of State at the behest of Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, thanks in large part to his cozy relationship with Paul Wolfowitz.. Wolfowitz and former US Vice-President Al Gore authored a joint opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in support of Ibrahim, while the Washington Post published an editorial calling for consequences that would affect Malaysia’s relations with Washington if Ibrahim was to be found guilty. Ibrahim enraged many when he stated that he would support policy to protect the security of Israel...

Who Killed Our Children? by Elias Akleh | Sabbah Report
...The whole US was shocked when armed with automatic assault weapons 20 years old Adam Lanza murdered 20 first grade students in Newtown, Connecticut, yet very few, if any, Americans get shocked when their presidents murder thousands of similar children of other nations but call them heroes and defenders of freedom and democracy...

Israel's Elections Degenerate into Religious War | Roi Tov
  Nowadays, pictures and videos are not credible; they are easily faked. Probably, this is the case with the Shas elections poster shown above. It looks wrong. It reads "Only a strong Shas will prevent assimilation;" the picture shows Avigdor Lieberman with a black "kipah" skullcap, Haredi-style. Knowing the people involved, one can't but laugh at the sting. Shas is an Israeli ultra-orthodox religious political party representing Sephardic and Mizrahi Haredi Jews; Avigdor Lieberman represents Russian immigrants.. He is unlikely to put a kipah upon his head unless threatened with a weapon...