Gilad Atzmon’s insight into the organism created by the Zionist movement in his book, The Wandering Who, is explosive; it tears the veil off of Israel’s apparent civility, its apparent friendship with the United States, and its expressed solicitude for western powers—Britain, Canada, Australia, France and Germany—exposing behind the veil, the assassin ready to slay any and all that interfere with its tribally focused ends...

  This is a rare and important debate between infamous ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane and the caricature Harvard Prof Alan Dershowitz. In the debate, that took place in 1985, Rabbi Kahane explores a thoroughly coherent and consistent notion of Jewishness derived from self love, Jewish orthodoxy and the Torah. He grasps the true (and rather obvious) supremacist meaning of the Jewish state having to be primarily Jewish. Kahane’s views were not popular in Israel at the time, (he insisted that Arabs and Palestinians had no future in Israel so, he wanted them gone) but today, Kahane’s views are widely accepted in Israel...

  One wonders what Syrians are thinking as “rebels” vowing to “free Syria” take the country down the same road to destruction as “rebels” in Libya. Libya, under Gaddafi a well run country whose oil revenues were shared with the Libyan people instead of monopolized by a princely class as in Saudi Arabia, now has no government and is in disarray with contending factions vying for power. Just as no one knew who the Libyan “rebels” were, with elements of al Qaeda reportedly among them, no one knows who the Syrian “rebels” are...

...Israeli settlers vandalized the Palestinian cemetery, burned Palestinian cars, and attacked Palestinian houses. The escalation in such attacks came due to the arrival of thousands of illegal settlers in support of the squatters. They succeeded in fighting the eviction force. Israeli authorities simply refrained from further attempts to remove them and, as seen before, allowed the story to twist from that of property theft to a question of security (of the settlers). In recent years, Israel has even decided to erect a military checkpoint for Palestinian pedestrians in the interest of ‘protecting’ the settlers...

...How pathetic that a small group of right-wing Jews allied to right-wing Israeli parties, has buffaloed U.S. politicians and media. One former Congressman described the Israeli lobby as the equivalent of a pit bull that bites the Congressman’s leg in the morning and holds on during lunch and the afternoon. The Congressman sleeps with the bull’s teeth in his leg and wakes with it the next morning. No wonder Members don’t want to antagonize this angry dog!..

  I will be featuring several videos. I know that sitting through a video isn’t always considered worthwhile when more worthwhile pursuits are available. Thus, I will try to catch your attention with a “shortie” and hope you can find time for the others. What is at stake is your own ability to make rational judgements and simply making all of us more capable human beings...

...this is part of a destabilization campaign in the Middle East and I think there are two overall strategic reasons for this. One is that the US empire is trying to consolidate its position worldwide as it has been eclipsed by the fastest growing economies of the BRIC countries and secondly I think that the hard line like…Zionists in Israel are hoping to redraw the map of the Middle East in a way that is more favorable to them while they have the chance in their using American military power to do it...

...at least three major German newspapers - Die Welt, the FAZ, and the mass-market tabloid Bild - have published reports attributing responsibility for the massacre to anti-government rebel forces or treating this as the most probable scenario. Writing in Bild, longtime German war correspondent Jurgen Todenhofer accused the rebels of "deliberately killing civilians and then presenting them as victims of the government". He described this "massacre-marketing strategy" as being "among the most disgusting things that I have ever experienced in an armed conflict"..

What Dani Dayan Says and Why It Is Interesting | Richard Falk

...The moral and legal premises that underlie Dayan’s insistence that the settlers will never leave the West Bank are without substance, but the political arguments he puts forward are so strong as to be virtually irrefutable. It may also be worthwhile to speculate as to why Dayan decided to drop this bombshell into the midst of the American electoral maelstrom as a kind of trial balloon at this time and why the NY Times, so normally careful about such matters, opened up its opinion page to views so at odd with mainstream thinking that has prevailed for decades about how to resolve the conflict...

  Understanding master narratives can be the difference between analytic anticipation and unwanted surprise, as well as the difference between communications successes and messaging gaffes. Master narratives are the historically grounded stories that reflect a community’s identity and experiences, or explain its hopes, aspirations, and concerns. These narratives help groups understand who they are and where they come from, and how to make sense of unfolding developments around them. As they do in all countries, effective communicators in Syria invoke master narratives in order to move audiences in a preferred direction...

Romney’s Zionist Oath | Ro’i Tov

...Much has been written about the friendship between Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, which goes all the way back to 1976. Yet, nothing predicted the magnitude of Romney’s declarations while visiting the city which “its name burns the lips,” as the above mentioned song states. The allusion to these words is not casual; either Romney burned his lips and his career, or he knows something we still do not know and is about to win a major victory and lead the world into a religious war. “In the mountain’s caves, winds howl,” continues the song that predicted a war...

  Egyptian and Sudanese policy failures have lead to a looming strategic threat to both countries’ most important resources – the Nile. Israel has now signed an agreement with the South Sudanese authorities over rights to the country’s precious water source...

  Jonathan Cook exposes the complicity of the European Union and the United States in Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of the occupied Palestinian territories, showing how, as Israel accelerates its land grabs and colonizing of the West Bank, the EU and US have chosen to reward, not punish, the racist Zionist entity...

...July 1920: The World Zionist Organization meeting in London establishes a new financial arm to raise money called Keren Hayesod. Since then donations were collected from Jews around the world to help dispossess the native Palestinians to transform Palestine to a Jewish state.. July 2012: In pre-election maneuvering, US President Obama and the US congress decides to give more of US taxpayer's money to Israel and his main Republican Challenger declares illegally occupied Jerusalem as "capital of Israel". Both Republican and Democratic parties to receive each >$100 million in donations from Zionists (a cheap investment considering billions that go to Israel yearly)...

Israel retains its ability to control the Syrian ‘Islamist’ rebels. Netanyahu is not worried about Syria’s possible disintegration. Despite the received wisdom claiming that Israelis prefer a stable and familiar Assad to the great unknown of Islamic guerrillas, the new and sensational information we received points out to the opposite, namely: Israelis prefer the Somalisation of Syria, its break-up and the elimination of its army, as this will allow them to tackle Iran unopposed...

  Israel has barely put a foot right with the international community since its attack on Gaza more than three years ago provoked global revulsion. The right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu has serially defied and insulted foreign leaders, including US President Barack Obama; given the settlers virtual free rein; blocked peace talks with the Palestinians; intimidated and marginalised human rights groups, UN agencies and even the Israeli courts; and fuelled a popular wave of Jewish ethnic and religious chauvinism against the country's Palestinian minority, foreign workers and asylum seekers...
Read more...

  Last week, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah named Prince Bandar bin-Sultan as the new head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service. The announcement is not only a slap in the face to every family that was a victim of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The appointment signals an escalation on the part of the Kingdom of an Anglo-Saudi drive for a new hundred-year religious war to engulf all of Eurasia and beyond...
Read more...

  Though not yet announced by the Saudi authorities, the death of Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has been confirmed to Voltaire Network by unofficial souces. Prince Bandar had just been appointed head of Saudi intelligence on July 24: a promotion which was interpreted as a reward for having organized the attack in Damascus on July 18. The Saudi services, with logistical support from the CIA, had managed to blow up the headquarters of the Syrian National Security during a Crisis Cell meeting...
Read more...

...In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.”..

Massacre in Uzbekistan | Craig Murray

  This is a trailer for an extremely important documentary by Michael Andersen. The complicity of NATO and EU governments with the Karimov regime is one of the clearest glimpses of the evil motives that lurk behind the reasonable image that western politicians strive to portray. The complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring these facts is terrifying. As NATO intensifies its logistical transit through Uzbekistan, as Britain increases training for the Uzbek military and secret services and looks to further arms sales, please bring this documentary to the attention of everyone you can, in any way that you can...

...This leads us to mention the role of Israel and Zionism in the complexity of Arab Jewish life. On the one hand, Israel has maintained that Arab Jews are members of the Jewish nation and are part of Israel. That they were or were not expelled from Arab countries should then not be relevant to any peace negotiation. Beyond this.. the Zionists, prior to 1948, interfered in the lives of Arab Jews by sending emissaries to their communities to “encourage” them to emigrate to Palestine. It was this process that helped to accelerate the anti-Jewish sentiment in Arab countries and identify the native Jews exclusively with Israel and Zionism...

  Despite the close diplomatic ties between the US and Israel on the surface, the intelligence agencies of both countries are anything but friendly, according to former US officials. “The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency’s Near East Division” officials told the Associated Press. “Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that US national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.”..
Read more...

...According to a senior American official, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon briefed Netanyahu on the plans during Donilon’s visit to Israel two weeks ago. According to the official, who requested anonymity, Netanyahu hosted Donilon at a three-hour dinner. For part of the time, Israel’s national security adviser, Yaakov Amidror, was on hand. Donilon sought to make clear that the United States is seriously preparing for the possibility that negotiations will reach a dead end and military action will become necessary. He said reports of such preparations were not just a way to assuage Israel’s concerns...
Read more...

  The AP published a major story about breaches of U.S. security by Israeli intelligence over the past ten years. The report emphasized alleged tampering with CIA communications gear and intrusions into the private residence of CIA officers based in Israel. But it buried what is an even more interesting, previously unknown story...
Read more...

  The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in. The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel. It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the United States, the CIA was itself being watched...
Read more...

  Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive "regime change" in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west's oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures. Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria's pro-western neighbours, and then to "eliminate" the most influential triumvirate in Damascus...

  For many years prior to 9/11, two Americans were in unique positions to originate and frame the national conversation about terrorism. Those same two people, Brian Michael Jenkins and L. Paul Bremer, played extraordinary roles related to aviation security and World Trade Center (WTC) security in the few years before the 9/11 attacks. Could Bremer and Jenkins have been front men for a program that hyped the threat of terrorism while at the same time manufacturing terrorist events for political purposes?..
Read more...

  A senior Syrian government spokesman just confirmed his nation did indeed possess chemical weapons, and might employ them against a "foreign aggressor." The embattled regime of Bashar Asad just managed to shoot itself in both feet, provide ammunition to Syria’s enemies, and give them yet another excuse to intervene in its raging civil war. Western governments and media that have become cheerleaders for Syria’s rebels, went into full trumpet mode, issuing dire warnings of Syria’s "threat of weapons of mass destruction." Israeli and the US officials warned they might have to seize Syria’s chemical arsenal lest it fall into the hands of Lebanon’s Hezbullah. Shades of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s wmd’s...

  When it comes to praising President Obama’s foreign policy skill and Toughness (in the neocon sense of that term: i.e., a willingness to risk other people’s lives with the use of military force against foreigners), The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg has been one of the most reliable and vocal voices. Considered by Obama aides “as the ‘official therapist’ of the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Goldberg has been particularly important in vouching for Obama to Israelis and American Jews on the ground that nobody will be Tougher on Iran than Obama...
Read more...

...A lot has happened on the road from Baghdad to Damascus, but it seems that both Washington policymakers and the media still have much to learn. This time a Democrat administration is using the Arab Spring to get rid of an inconvenient leader. No need to invade Syria or risk American lives. Just use discrete American guidance and arms supplied by American allies in the region to make sure that a home-grown insurgency has enough of the right stuff to win an insurrection...

..A December 2011 al-Akhbar article fully elaborates on the Israeli attacks against the Islamic Waqf for the purpose of land grab which includes homes, shops, and even Moslem cemeteries. But there is another dimension to these attacks – a messianic aspect which is far more alarming than just stealing land from their rightful owners. The inherent danger from the Israeli obsession over the Temple Mount was first elaborated in an article dated June 2010 called “Nukes And Temples”..

Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street | Global Justice Clinic and the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic

  In January 2012, international human rights and U.S. civil liberties experts at seven law school clinics across the United States formed the Protest and Assembly Rights Project. This joint project investigated the United States response to Occupy Wall Street in light of the government’s international legal obligations...

...This striking new transparency, the official acknowledgment for the first time of a broad-based US assassination and targeted killing program, has resulted from the unprecedented and controversial visibility of drone warfare. Drones now make news every day, and those of us who have been protesting their use for years have heightened their visibility in the public eye, forcing official acknowledgment and fostering worldwide scrutiny. This new scrutiny focuses not only on drone use but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the targeted killing itself – and the “kill lists” that make them possible...
Read more...

...Today, Zionism is firmly in the hands of the extreme Right, a mixture of nationalists, religious fanatics and the settlers, supported by very rich Jews in Israel and outside. They govern the news, both directly (they own all the TV networks and the newspapers) and metaphorically. Every day, the news contains many items figuring “Zionism”..
Read more...

  For many months, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has depicted the militants creating havoc across his nation as "armed gangs," "foreign terrorists," and simply just, "terrorists." During a 2011 interview in Damascus with Barbra Walters, Walters feigned indignation when hearing these labels, insisting that these were people simply seeking "democracy" and "freedom." It turns out months later, it was President Assad who has been vindicated, and Walters' disrespectful, curt condemnation exposed as the same brand of war propaganda that has mired the West in over a decade of ceaseless, bloody, bankrupting wars and interventions...
Read more...

..This film is about Ernst Zundel, in my view, the greatest dissident of our time. While Noam Chomsky was in MIT complaining that he wasn’t getting enough op-ed pieces in the New York Times, Ernst Zundel was defending the indefensible in a Toronto courthouse and clearing the rubble in his firebombed house. While Aung San Suu Kyi was giving press conferences to a breathlessly waiting world, Ernst Zundel was serving five years in a German prison. Truth is, it’s one thing to be a feted and admired Nelson Mandela, it’s quite another to be an isolated and despised Ernst Zundel...

...Israel is enjoying unprecedented Western government support. The US Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is making his pilgrimage here to pay homage to those who will help elect him. This has become a ritual among US presidential candidates hoping to live in the White House in Israeli-occupied Washington. Not to be out-staged, President Obama signed an enhanced "security" arrangement with Apartheid Israel the day before Romney lands here...

...iVoteIsrael is a subsidiary of a US registered, non-profit organisation established to register dual Israeli-US citizens living in Israel to vote in the 2012 US election. It is funded by US tax-deductible contributions from wealthy Jewish Americans. Asked about the source of iVoteIsrael funding, Shaviv told +972 magazine: "Much of the donated money comes from the (Sheldon) Adelsons of the world"..

...The task before the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Islamist president is daunting beyond description. He begins office in a political and economic straight jacket bequeathed to him by interim prime minister Kamal Al-Ghanzuri and acting head of state Field Marshall Mohamed Tantawi — a budget already approved by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, without a parliament, with the military supreme council holding almost all the cards. But so far, these road blocks haven’t stopped the forces of the new Egypt...

...Deeply steeped in history with impressive cultural legacies, naturally endowed with fertile lands, sophisticated urban classes, talented elites, geostrategic locations, countries such as Syria and Iraq could have become, by now, regional economic powerhouses and perhaps models of political stability and institutional democracy but the overbearing burden of narrow-minded ideologies, compounded with the scourge of shortsighted leaders and pervasive foreign intermingling, led them to a catastrophic standstill. Sometimes, it seems as though plain misfortune constitutes in itself a modern Arab curse...

  The uprising which erupted in Syria in March last year has become the most protracted and destabilizing of all the revolutions now sweeping the Arab world. The Baath Party-led government of President Bashar al-Assad has been severely weakened by popular protest and international isolation, but the regime and its military might have remained largely intact. With their hopes for a split in the regime fundament unfulfilled after more than a year of conflict, the opposition has little hope of defeating Assad on its own. He, in turn, seems equally unable to extinguish the protests...

  If you needed any further proof that Amnesty International is to the 21st century what rum-swigging bearers of the White Man's Burden were to the 19th, look no further than its current campaign for a global arms trade treaty. Amnesty is basically agitating for the West, which it considers civilised and responsible, to prevent the rest, or what Amnesty euphemistically refers to as the "wrong" people, from getting their hands on guns and bombs...

...Gen. Hillary, Amazonian warrior-goddess, directing her Hellions to take this town, seize that territory, and get on with "further actions" – such an inspiring sight for feminists and warmongers the world over! At last, a woman who can muster as much blood-lust as any man! So what are these "further actions" our Secretary of State anticipates with ill-concealed glee?..

  A growing refrain out of Syria is that widespread rape is taking place—and sanctioned by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. But when WhoWhatWhy examined the allegations, it found that well-intentioned women’s groups trying to document and prevent such abuses may be falling victim to a deliberate disinformation campaign intent on rallying public support for toppling Assad...

...When Syria began to descend into extreme violence, Turkey gave shelter to the Syrian rebel fighters and eventually provided them with lethal and non-lethal aid, despite their having ties to terrorist groups and having committed serious crimes themselves. That Turkey would complain about Syria committing to the mirror image of its own policies is embarrassing...

...the "future leaders" of the most powerful and aggressive military on the planet have been taught "that a 'total war' against the world's 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists" and that "using the lessons of 'Hiroshima' to wipe out whole cities at once" and "targeting the 'civilian population wherever necessary'" may be required. It's a country whose secretary of defense hand-delivered to the former president a daily report of critical, classified military intelligence with cover sheets featuring Biblical quotes to emphasise the Crusades-like effort of US soldiers in the Middle East...

...After many years of close work with American administrations, Israel has become very efficient in its act through what is known as the “Israeli Lobby in Washington,” an informal network of semi-independent agents representing Israeli interests at the American administration. The ADL—the Anti-Defamation League—is probably its better known arm; public sources openly claim that every political figure and candidate in the US must actually be interviewed and approved by the ADL. Candidates promoting Israel will subsequently get generous donations to their campaigns from third parties, not officially linked to the “interviewers.” However, Israeli intervention goes much deeper than that...

...on Sunday, Israeli daily Maariv published an interview with Interior Minister Eli Yishai, in which he stated that most of the "Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man. I will continue the struggle until the end of my term, with no compromises," Yishai continued, stating that he would use "all the tools to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains."..

  Writing in Tablet, a daily online Jewish magazine, Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow Lee Smith provocatively compares Syria’s increasingly imperiled Alawite minority to the most reviled group in modern history. In a piece revealingly entitled “Cause for Celebration in Syria,” the senior editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard advises:..

...The present situation is a recipe for disaster. This means more and continued oppression of Palestinians followed at some point with increased human resistance, including violence, from Palestinians, resulting in more killing and wounding of Palestinians and Israeli Jews. I suggest finally that in this situation and atmosphere those who are concerned with this severe human problem should, to the extent that they can, do the following: Realize that in reality there is and will likely continue to be one state of Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine, containing with but a few exceptions, two people: Palestinians and Jews...
Read more...

...the U.S. continues to rain death and destruction across the planet—via ecological damage and climate change, wars, and imperialist-driven impoverishment and dislocation. And with their system facing new challenges and stresses, the U.S. rulers—whether Democrats or Republicans—are even more stridently promoting America No. 1 exceptionalism and the baseless notion that American lives are worth more than others...
Read more...

..."In these armed actions and in this suffering - the nun continues - religion has nothing to do with it. With Muslims we have always lived side by side and we will continue to do so. The Syrian government has hitherto been secular, has guaranteed security and stability to Syria . Today we have only chaos, insecurity, and suffering. And what will happen tomorrow?”..

...why am I giving the Palestinians so much more attention and psychic energy than the Kurds, Tibetans, or Kashmiris, and a host of other worthy causes? And how do I explain to myself a preoccupation with the unlawful, immoral, and imprudent foreign policy of the U.S. Government, the sovereign state of my residence upon whose governmental resources I depend upon for security and a range of rights?..

..Syria may be different from Iraq and Libya in method but not in objective. Western leaders are insisting on Assad's departure and warning that his days are numbered. They are supporting the armed opposition groups; their media has launched an information war against Syria; for ostensible humanitarian reasons they are creating conditions for a large scale human disaster there...
Read more...

...The Netanyahu claim in interviews on Fox News Sunday and CBS’s Face the Nation of “rock solid” intelligence on the bombing was accompanied by an announcement that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman would travel to Brussels Monday to meet with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and foreign ministers of nine EU member states to persuade them to put Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations...

...This is the occupier’s solution to the problem of preventing everything everywhere: the army has to make Palestinians believe that nothing escapes Israel’s fist. The soldiers demonstrate presence in order to make Palestinians fear that they are present even when they are not. Thus, the Israeli army’s unofficial yet unavoidable tactic is to instill constant fear through arbitrary acts of force...
Read more...

...The Resistance is bigger than Hezbollah and has now become truly international as has its project of supporting the Palestinian cause. Daily, the Resistance gains strength and support as Israel weakens and US and Western regional implantations and hegemony fades into the pages of history books...
Read more...

..the New York Times published an article named “Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role in Syria Conflict.” The article comments on an interview with an al-Qaeda operative in Iraq and on a video posted in YouTube by al-Qaeda. In the latter, masked men speak with two flags of al-Qaeda in their background; they claim to be fighting against the Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad. This is relatively credible, and actually fits claims by Bashar al-Assad that the violence in the country is being driven by non-Syrians. The article cites also senior Iraqi officials claiming that the same al-Qaeda cells are active in Iraq and Syria. Yet, in a careless whisper, the New York Times also disclosed that these cells seem to be true foreigners to Islam and the Middle East...
Read more...

...On 21st September 2001, George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation. He stated: “Americans are asking ‘Why do they hate us?’ “He gave the nation the answer: “They hate us for our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech …” By “they” of course, he meant the vast, great ancient Muslim diaspora, wherever they were...
Read more...

...Recent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the first military coup in Syrian postwar history indicates that CIA agents Miles Copeland and Stephen Meade, who acted as U.S. military attache in Damascus, were directly involved in the coup in which Syrian colonel Husni Za'im seized power. According to then former CIA agent Wilbur Eveland, the coup was carried out in order to obtain Syrian ratification of TAPLINE...
Read more...

  What has been going on in Syria, especially during the past week, represents a kind of borderline situation. The dominant view on the Syrian situation in Western circles is that the game is near the end: the incumbent President Bashar al-Assad will step down or will be forced to do so. However, this is not a factual explanation of the situation. In other words, this is part of a heavy psychological war which is supposed to expound the entire political situation in Syria. This is why realities are carefully picked up by Western media and only those realities which are in line with the above explanation are reflected...
Read more...

...The role of the Syrian regime has changed over the years and to paint it as either an entirely positive or negative one is counterfactual. To invoke what the regime did over thirty years ago, like some leftists do, is polemical and I would argue inaccurate. For the purpose of understanding the current crisis, what counts is its more recent history...
Read more...

  Recent remarks by Sir John Sawers, who heads Britain’s MI6 (the secret intelligence service that is Britain’s CIA counterpart), leave us wondering if Sawers is preparing to “fix” intelligence on Iran, as his immediate predecessor, Sir John Scarlett, did on Iraq. Scarlett’s pre–Iraq War role in creating “dodgy dossiers” hyping the threat of nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” is relatively well known. On July 4, the red warning light for politicization was again flashing brightly in London, as Sawers told British senior civil servants that Iran is “two years away” from becoming a “nuclear-weapons state.” How did Sawers come up with “two years?”..
Read more...

  Speaking today in an interview with CNN, Israeli President Shimon Peres claimed that Iran is in a state of “open war” against his country, citing last week’s Bulgarian bombing, which officials have tried to blame Iran for. Peres, as with other Israeli officials, declined to provide any evidence for the allegation, but did claim that Israel had “enough” evidence of its own to feel comfortable blaming Iran for the attack...
Read more...

  German intelligence estimates that "around 90" terror attacks that "can be attributed to organizations that are close to al-Qaeda or jihadist groups" were carried out in Syria between the end of December and the beginning of July, as reported by the German daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung...
Read more...

  For more than a month, NATO watchers have been aware that the aggressive imperialists of the Atlantic alliance have been preparing an attack on Syria which, they hope, would serve to destroy not just the Ba’ath party government of President Bashar Assad, but also the structures of the Syrian state. The manager for this campaign is widely reputed to be Ben Rhodes, a former political operative for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York City and adviser to Congressman Lee Hamilton of 9/11 cover-up fame, who is now the “deputy national security adviser for strategic communication” in the Obama White House...
Read more...

  For blocking a UN resolution that could have led to military intervention in Syria, Russia has been accused by the Orwellian West of putting its national interests ahead of the lives of millions of Syrians. By scrutinizing Vladimir Putin’s actions since his reelection, William Engdahl shows that Russia is indeed pursuing her national interests which are best served by fostering a just and peaceful world environment and by thwarting the US-Israeli agenda for a Greater Middle East...
Read more...

...A kamikaze, who evidently served in the defense ministry, delivered a bomb to the building which is sited across the street from the US embassy, and detonated it in the office where the Syrian administration was holding a meeting with the security chiefs. Two groups of insurgents - the Free Syrian Army and Allah's Brigades – claimed responsibility for the terrorist act which prompted an outpouring of positive emotions from the Istanbul-based Syrian National Council...
Read more...

  In January, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz said that Israel is preparing to absorb Alawite refugees once the Assad regime falls, but President Shimon Peres, in an interview on CNN today, wanted to make it absolutely clear that not a single Syrian is welcome in the Jewish state...
Read more...

  Will the Alawites try to establish an Alawite State centered in the Coastal Mountains? Many opposition figures and journalists insist that the Alawites are planning to fall back to the Alawite Mountains in an attempt to establish a separate state. This is unconvincing. Here are the top five reasons why there will not be an Alawite State...
Read more...

---

 

  The arguments in favor of circumcision are familiar and readily available. Previous writing on Jewish circumcision has been totally supportive of the practice. It has been rare that writing on Jewish circumcision has mentioned, let alone elaborated on, arguments against the practice. Because the reasons to question circumcision are not well known, they are the focus here...

  In his Complete Diaries, Vol. II. p. 711, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, says that the area of the Jewish State stretches: "From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates." Rabbi Fischmann, member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared in his testimony to the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry on 9 July 1947: "The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon."..

  While Iran, Russia, and China are all pretty scary, the ominous word “sequestration” is what is keeping right-wing hawks and their friends in the defense industry up at night. While they have been rallying their forces for most of the past year, their campaign to avoid the “spectre of sequestration”, as they often refer to it, shifted into high gear on Capitol Hill this week, as top industry executives were summoned to testify to the urgency of the threat...

...Alex was a scourge of the capitalist elites and their fawning apologists in the corporate media, of course, but he also played an important role as a merciless critic of those so-called progressive journalists who lost their courage, sold out or were simply wrong on an issue...

...On July 11, a so-called Olympics evening, “a coming together of the Labor tribe,” declared the Labor Party leader Ed Miliband, celebrated its “star guest” Tony Blair and his 2005 “gift” of the Games and “provided the perfect opportunity for Blair’s return to frontline politics,” reported the Guardian. The organizer of this contrivance was Alastair Campbell, chief spinner of the bloodbath Blair and he gifted to the Iraqi people. And just as the victims of Dow Chemical are of no interest to the Olympic elite, so the epic criminality of Labor’s star guest was unmentionable...

...Alex shared Tom Paine’s faith in the necessity of information and insight, of speaking truth to power; this, he knew, to be the essential element for building the activism that would begin the world over again. He was a radical democrat who believed ultimately in the power of the people to overturn the corruptions of empire that politicians and the corporate media would otherwise keep in place...

Five years of full-scale blockade of the Gaza Strip may have finally come to an end in the wee hours of Monday morning, with Egyptian officials announcing that they are opening the border unilaterally and completely to all Palestinians, including those stuck in the strip...

  Immediately after the terror bombing of a busload of Israeli youth in Burgas, Bulgaria, both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a “senior U.S. official” expressed certainty about Iran’s responsibility. Since then, the White House has backed away from that position, after Bulgarian investigators warned against that assumption before the investigation is complete...

  "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." So begins U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler's 1935 pamphlet War is a Racket. Butler, who had participated in many military interventions, came to realize that war allowed elites to gain while less powerful citizens and foreigners bore the conflict's financial, physical, and emotional costs...

...not only Netanyahu deductive powers are defective, but also that the evidence doesn’t follow the Israeli narrative. Supporting this, Bulgarian Foreign Minister said “We’re not pointing the finger in any direction until we know what happened and complete our investigation.” Obsessive in his attempts to incriminate Iran, Netanyahu has triggered a different event. In fact, recent declarations of Israeli officials can be considered as an Israeli declaration of war on Iran...

..there has emerged with increasing frequency the charge that because it failed to bomb the Germans' concentration camps, the United States bears a significant share of the blame for the Holocaust. There are even those who insist that American officials were well aware of Hitler's crimes during World War Two, yet chose purposely not to stop them. Documentation made available only during the past decade, however, amply demonstrates that the volatile accusations of American indifference - even collusion - are unwarranted. That the Roosevelt administration (and, it is also charged, American Jews) did not act with dispatch to effect the rescue of European Jewry, shows essentially that the tales of extermination were not believed...

  Lawrence Davidson argues that the Colorado massacre highlights the poisonous influence of lobby groups on US politics, in this case the gun lobby but also, in foreign policy, the Zionist lobby. He calls for a rational rethinking of the meaning of “freedom”, so that, in essence, it does not mean the freedom to kill others or to blow one’s own brains out...

...Asked to provide a succinct summary paragraph for the IOPS site about his involvement, Noam Chomsky wrote: "Hardly a day goes by when we do not hear appeals – often laments – from people deeply concerned about the travails of human existence and the fate of the world, desperately eager to do something about what they rightly perceive to be intolerable and ominous, feeling helpless because each individual effort, however dedicated, seems to merely chip away at a mountain, placing band-aids on a cancer, never reaching to the sources of needless suffering and the threats of much worse...

...He leaves a huge void in our lives. But he taught at least two generations how to think, how to look at the world, how to live a life of joyful and creative resistance. So, the struggle continues and we’re going to remain engaged. He wouldn’t have it any other way...
Read more...

  Yesterday, Deanna Spingola - Republic Broadcasting Network - published an interview with Ken Freeland, speaking for Roy Tov...

...The Times of Israel, the same "news" outfit that was quick to identify former Guantanamo detainee Mehdi Ghezali as the bomber based on half-baked Bulgarian media reports (a claim immediately denied by all intelligence agencies involved in the case) is back at it, this time with a report declaring that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has revealed (and reveled in) Iran's culpability for the attack in Bulgaria...
Read more...

  The recent political and military turmoil in the region is following a predictable pattern, which starts with so-called activism and ends with military intervention to topple sovereign governments. Following is a brief scenario of the chain of the events:..
Read more...

  Progressive-left media persist in acting as propaganda outlets for the US-NATO destabilization of Syria, thus placating a politically conscious audience that might otherwise be mobilized against acts of imperialism and violence. The historical record suggests how this is not the first time "Progressive publicists" were used to sell a war...
Read more...

  Circumcision is seen as the central mitzvah (or commandment) of Judaism. Even for nonreligious Jews, circumcision continues to be perceived as the sine qua non of Jewish identity. And yet, unlike any other controversial topic that we Jews address, the subject of circumcision is not to be challenged. We can calmly discuss whether there is a G-d or no G-d, if G-d is masculine, feminine or neuter, or whether homosexuals should become rabbis. Yet, questioning circumcision has been out of bounds. This taboo, in and of itself, is indicative of how strong the feelings are that surround this ancient rite, and how much is below the surface, in the dark silence, where powerful forces have coalesced for thousands of years...
Read more...

  The Russian government has finally caught on that its political opposition is being financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA/State Department fronts in an attempt to subvert the Russian government and install an American puppet state in the geographically largest country on earth, the one country with a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter Washington’s aggression...
Read more...

  Insurgents are Washington proxies. Key NATO partners, rogue Arab League states, and Israel are very much involved. The same dirty game repeats. Independent states are targeted for regime change. All options are used. They include full-scale war, mass killing, and turning nations into charnel houses on the pretext of liberating them...
Read more...

  As documented in the book The First Holocaust, the Zionists have continuously and hysterically attempted to claim that six million Jews were dead, dying or in grave danger in Europe and Russia since the late 1800's. Any time there was turmoil in Europe, albeit turmoil often instigated by Jews in the first place, prominent Zionist figures and Jewish-controlled media organizations world wide continuously whipped up a frenzy with phony sob stories to get people to feel sorry for Europe's Jews and donate money to Jewish charities...
Read more...

  The familiar menace of U.S. war drums have resumed at a fevered pitch, as Iran finds itself once again firmly within the Pentagon’s cross hairs. According to multiple reports, the U.S. is currently in the midst of a massive military build-up in the Persian Gulf on a scale not seen in the region since prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The military surge reportedly includes an influx of air and naval forces, ground troops, and even sea drones. Lest one forgets, the U.S. already has two aircraft carriers and their accompanying striker groups in the region...
Read more...

...Long before the Palestinians themselves understood what was the essence of the Israeli master plan to expel them, and the far-reaching implications of the country’s ethnic cleansing, the perpetrators themselves found an adequate term in Arabic to describe it: Nakba (catastrophe). The term was mentioned for the first time not in Arab or Palestinian sources but in Israeli military intelligence sources. It appeared in leaflets the Israeli air force distributed during those ten days in July on the eve of a very singular attack on a village or a town...
Read more...

..Award-winning journalist John Pilger’s documentary The War You Don’t See, while a very important piece of work, will never be treated as seriously as mainstream journalism. It will never be seen as honest, as courageous and as brutal in projecting the truth as traditional journalism. It will be viewed by only a handful of people though millions continue to be bombarded with contrived images and manipulated news about the Arab world day after day. The media motto is to convert a lie into truth by repeating it over and over. It works as international, and of course national, stereotypes are created and reinforced this way, completely suffocating the tiny voices of truth...
Read more...

...During March and early April, up until the Kofi Annan peace plan was announced in mid-April, the Syrian government forces had made significant gains in routing the armed groups from strongholds in Homs and other northern towns. Since the Annan initiative was attempted, however, there has been a sea-change in military capability among the so-called rebels groups. These groups never even pretended to implement the Annan six-point plan and were given strident support by American, British and French leaders in their rejection of any political process to find a peace settlement...
Read more...

...Mr. Assange’s only crime is he cared enough about people to respect their right to truth, had the courage and bravery to print the truth and in the process embarrassed powerful Governments. The Wikileaks release of thousands of US State Department Cables, and of the video footage from an Apache helicopter of a 2007 incident in which the US military appears to have deliberately killed Civilians, including two Reuters Employees, revealed USA’s crimes against Humanity. For this ‘truth telling’ he has inherited the wrath of the US Government, and has been targeted in a most vindictive way...
Read more...

...What we must look is who is profiting politically from the event; obviously, neither Iran nor Hezbollah enter this category. The initial statement by Netanyahu was followed by truly odd declarations. Yoav Limor told to Yisrael Hayom that the attack is “another reason, along with the steady collapse of the Assad government, to justify an Israeli offensive in Lebanon to stop Syrian chemical weapons falling into Hezbollah's hands.” Government Minister Yaakov Katz told the Jerusalem Post that he thinks the government will take its time before deciding how to retaliate: “Above all, it will first work to create an intelligence dossier to prove to the world that Iran really was behind the bombing.”..
Read more...

...How pathetic that a small group of right-wing Jews allied to right-wing Israeli parties, has buffaloed U.S. politicians and media. One former Congressman described the Israeli lobby as the equivalent of a pit bull that bites the Congressman’s leg in the morning and holds on during lunch and the afternoon. The Congressman sleeps with the bull’s teeth in his leg and wakes with it the next morning. No wonder Members don’t want to antagonize this angry dog!..
Read more...

  As Israel continues to build walls and fences along virtually each of its borders, analysts say the country’s isolationist policies and unwillingness to deal with the Palestinians and other Arab neighbors through anything other than forceful means spells disaster. "On the one hand we’re walling the Palestinians in but on the other hand if you kind of zoom out and look at the Middle East, you’ll see that Israel is the one that’s walled in. It’s this island that is losing touch with its neighbors," says Israeli academic and author Neve Gordon...
Read more...

  Gilad Atzmon warns that Israel’s eagerness to attack Iran in “retaliation” for the unsubstantiated claim that Iran is behind the attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria is driven by a collective self-annihilation complex that is inherent in Israeli culture and threatens to engulf the world in war...
Read more...

..By July 31, the Knesset must pass a new law on the conscription issue, after the “Tal Law” was nullified by the Supreme Court this February. Netanyahu had offered Kadima a compromise on the new law; 50% of ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim and Hasidim) between the ages of 18 and 23 would be drafted by the IDF, while the others would be drafted into civil service between the ages of 23 and 26. “It is with deep regret that I say that there is no choice but to decide to leave the government,” Shaul Mofaz—Kadima’s leader—said afterwards. In this trivial way ended Kadima and Likud’s 70-day partnership. In this trivial way, Zionism may have reached the point-of-no-return towards its end...

  So a bomb exploded on a bus in Bulgaria killing a certain number of people who were apparently visitors from Israel. About 20 minutes later, Israeli PM Netanyahu is accusing Iran of carrying out the bombing. Speculation is rife. Pundits feel a need to opine, even though they didn't know any facts about the incident either. A few more hours pass, and Trita Parsi writes that it is plausible that Iran was indeed behind the bombing, as a sort of retaliation against Israel for the murders of Iranian nuclear scientists. I guess "plausible" is all that things need be in order to implicate Iran.)..

  Terrorism in any form and for whatever cause is unpardonable. The use of deadly violence against innocents, which is what terrorism implies, is morally completely at variance with the tenets that are enshrined in the Holy Qur’an. Because there were more than 120,000 prophets before Prophet Mohammad [PBUH], several faiths other than Islam contain tenets that are similar to that enunciated more their fifteen centuries ago, all of which stress the need for compassion, mercy and tolerance, qualities that were best practiced during the golden age of Islam . In contrast, the use of terror has never in a single instance delivered anything other than temporary success to the perpetrator...

  The motto of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, translates as “By way of deception you shall make war.” As every intelligence officer knows, covert actions aimed at deception are force multipliers, enabling a weaker party to create confusion and uncertainty in a stronger opponent. Sun Tzu called deception in military campaigns the key to victory...

  The US government's growing reliance on aerial drones to pursue its war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere is proving controversial. As governments are increasingly relying on drones, what are the consequences for civil liberties and the future of war?..

...As the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are themselves fixing interest rates at historic lows in order to mask the insolvency of their respective banking systems, they naturally do not object that the banks themselves contribute to the success of this policy by fixing the LIbor rate and by selling massive amounts of interest rate swaps, a way of shorting interest rates and driving them down or preventing them from rising. The lower is Libor, the higher is the price or evaluations of floating-rate debt instruments, such as CDOs, and thus the stronger the banks’ balance sheets appear...

...In his essay Truth from Eretz Yisrael, written after his 1891 trip, he declared that, far from departing in a state of euphoria, he was demoralized by what he saw on the part of his fellow Jews, particularly their attitude toward the local Arab population. He enjoined them to learn from both past and present experience: “How much we must be cautious in our conduct toward a gentile people in whose midst we now live, how we must walk together with that people in love and honor and, needless to say, in justice and righteousness. And what do our brothers in Eretz Yisrael do? Exactly the opposite. They were slaves in Exile and suddenly they find themselves in a state of unrestrained freedom ... This sudden change had planted in their hearts a tendency toward despotism, as always happens ‘when a servant comes to reign.’”..

Read more (an excellent essay from a civilized Jewish, rather than Zionist, perspective)...

..Turkey’s desire to champion human rights in the region is a welcome development, but Mr. Erdogan’s condemnation of Syria is remarkably hypocritical. As long as Turkey continues to deny crimes committed against non-Turks in the early 1900s, during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, its calls for freedom, justice and humanitarian values will ring false...

  Almost immediately after a suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on Wednesday, Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blamed Iran, an accusation uncritically repeated by most Western media outlets even as Bulgarian investigators warned it would be a “mistake” to assign blame before the attack could be investigated. Now, Israel, along with the U.S., is blaming Hezbollah and, therefore, Iran for the attack. Today’s New York Times article by Nicholas Kulish and Eric Schmitt – headlined “Hezbollah Is Blamed for Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria” – uncritically treats those accusations as confirmed fact despite no evidence being offered for it...

  The West wages a war of sanctions, sabotage and assassinations against the Iranian people. The sanctions are not 'smart' but murderous. There is also a psychological and cyber war going on against the country's nuclear scientists and installations, led by the US Empire and its client state Israel. According to international law, both countries engage in illegal occupation, which represents a regional and global threat to the peace. Currently, we are witnessing a remake of the prologue that led to the attack on Iraq...

...today, in exchange for the highest office in the world’s sole remaining (and rapidly declining) superpower, the man who used to organize the poor in Chicago and “pal around” with liberals and radicals and even former fugitives from the Weather Underground in Hyde Park has morphed into a Wall Street flunky and enabler of corporate malfeasance. Not coincidentally, he has also taken it upon himself to engineer extrajudicial assassinations and, as President Drone, to promote wanton violations of international law. He and his Justice Department have also taken it upon themselves to protect Bush era war criminals, undermine privacy rights, and continue each and every departure from the rule of law broached since 9/11...

  The recently published report by an Israeli judge concluding that Israel is not in fact occupying the Palestinian territories – despite a well-established international consensus to the contrary – has provoked mostly incredulity or mirth in Israel and abroad. Leftwing websites in Israel used comically captioned photographs to highlight Justice Edmond Levy’s preposterous finding. One shows an Israeli soldier pressing the barrel of a rifle to the forehead of a Palestinian pinned to the ground, saying: “You see – I told you there’s no occupation.”..

  To be a prominent Muslim means suffering a daily diet of bigotry and even outright hatred. This week, Mehdi Hasan – who, other than my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, is Britain's only prominent Muslim journalist – wrote of how, every day, he is attacked as a "jihadist" and a "terrorist". He has been described as a "dangerous Muslim shithead", a "moderate cockroach", and worse. The message from his critics is clear: Muslims have no legitimate place in public life...

  A new video of Gaddafi's murderers having a great time playing with his dead body has recently emerged. Look at the faces of these folks, their attitude, their "playful" joy at having fun with the body of a dead man. These are the exact same crazed Wahabi thugs who are now trying to overthrow Assad in Syria and whom the West, and some terminally stupid Arabs, is now arming and supporting in the hope that they will repeat their "success" in Libya. This time, nobody will be able to say that he/she "did not know"..

  On Monday, student activists examined the remains of a Palestinian cemetery that had been uprooted and mostly destroyed to make space for a shopping center and new student dorms for Tel Aviv University (TAU). A large part of TAU is built on land that used to be a Palestinian village, al-Sheikh Muwanniz, before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. According Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, the village’s 1948 population exceeded 2,000...

...The reality, as Herman and Brodhead noted way back in 1984, is that the US government uses the symbolic value of a client state election ‘to mobilize home support for its preferred policies… to mislead the home populace about both the situation in the occupied country and the intentions of the US government’ and is thus ‘designed to win approval of external policy by deception’. This applies equally to the UK government, of course, and is unlikely to change any time soon...

  Late last week, CNN’s The Situation Room, starring Wolf Blitzer, reported on what Blitzer described as “an ominous new warning coming in from the Pentagon: Iran’s missiles are getting more accurate, apparently getting more deadly as well.”..

...I can see the looming crisis in Jewish identity. What will Jewish mean if there is no Jewish state? How will Jews insure a Jewish future without this bulwark?.. I work for this website because I believe the destruction of Palestinian human rights and the corruption of American political values are more important issues than Jewish continuity, I will not put religious community over my progressive principles...

...In this high stakes of international power play the U.S. strategy in the region is to prefer a managed transition to civilian rule and democratic governance as long as the American major strategic objectives are not challenged. In short, the strategy is to give the Islamic rising powers a chance to govern as long as they agree to: keep the Americans in, the Chinese and Russians out, the Iranians down, and the Israelis safe...

Carnival Deception: While Mitt and Barry Posture, the Imperial Beast Plods On | Chris Floyd

  Behind the all-consuming, overheated hypermania of the presidential campaign – Romney! Taxes! Swiss banks! Bain, Bain, Bain! – the dull-lidded behemoth of empire continues to trudge its way back and forth across the earth, knee-deep in human blood. Those who pray and pump and polemicize for the re-election of the behemoth’s current commander have to repeatedly gouge out their own eyes to avoid seeing the rank corruption and carnage their champion empowers and inflicts on the vulnerable and the defenseless...

  Americans have been protesting and getting arrested at U.S. drone bases and research institutions for years, and some members of Congress are starting to respond to the pressure. But it’s not that drones are being used to extrajudicially execute people, including Americans, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia that has U.S. lawmakers concerned. Rather it’s the possible and probable violation of Americans’ privacy in the United States by unlawful drone surveillance that has caught the attention of legislators...

...To the extent that our own national security policy begins to resemble Israel’s, we come to resemble everything Israel has become. We become exemplars of the moral shortcuts and the sophistries used to justify the indefensible. We start down the slippery slope that has led Israel to 45 years of occupation and to a deadening corruption of values. Israel is not something we want to become...

...In this high stakes of international power play the U.S. strategy in the region is to prefer a managed transition to civilian rule and democratic governance as long as the American major strategic objectives are not challenged. In short, the strategy is to give the Islamic rising powers a chance to govern as long as they agree to: keep the Americans in, the Chinese and Russians out, the Iranians down, and the Israelis safe...

..Written by one of America’s most influential international-relations theorists, Waltz’s article makes a strong case for Iranian nuclear proliferation. He argues that this would bring more stability to the Middle East by ending Israel’s destabilizing nuclear monopoly and introducing a much-needed nuclear balance in the turbulent region...

  It’s probably a good sign that Israel’s apologists are increasingly resorting to a sideways defense: What’s with you and Israel? I don’t hear you complaining about China or Syria or North Korea. Implicit in this mantra is an admission that any coherent defense of Israel is in short supply—the only “defense” left is to question why this particular bully is targeted from among the various nefarious bullies on the block...

  A number of links covering Israeli spying in the US...

  Miriam Pollack speaks frankly about her experiences and studies on circumcision...

  The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state, linked to the most developed technological innovations. The ‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized by the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the direction of the Executive and his National Security Council...

...However unjust, Iran will continue to lose every pending case and every future case by default unless it decides to use the judicial remedies available to it and take the initiative, for example, in the US organized economic sanctions case which is becoming extremely dangerous given US, UK, and French plans to use them to achieve regime change in Tehran...

  On July 13, 2012, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said that Germany’s Jews and Muslims will not be punished for breaking the law if they carry out circumcisions on young boys. This unusual phrasing recognized the legality of an earlier court ruling. In May, the court of Cologne ruled that circumcision inflicts bodily harm and should not be carried out on young boys, but could be practiced on older males who give consent. The ruling followed a case of a badly hurt boy taken to hospital after an attempt to circumcise him...

  Who’s buying our democracy? Wall Street financiers, the Koch brothers, and casino magnates Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn. And they’re doing much of it in secret. It’s a perfect storm: The greatest concentration of wealth in more than a century — courtesy “trickle-down” economics, Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and the demise of organized labor...

  Stanley A. McChrystal, bounced out of his job for revels in Paris as witnessed by Rolling Stone, has recycled a perennial chestnut: Bring back the draft — i.e., a conscripted military, not the volunteer military of today...

  In the past the label self-hating Jew, though rarely used, was associated with Jews who were ashamed of or who hid their religious and cultural heritage. But as the debate over Israeli policy toward the Palestinian people has intensified, self-hating Jew, like anti-Semite, has become a routinely brandished and emotionally charged retaliatory weapon. The idea that a three-word label can encapsulate the character of a person is problematic. A human being is far more than what a single phrase can say about him, and self-hating Jew is so divisive that it makes tolerance and cooperation impossible; and it eradicates the possibility for real understanding...

  There is a moment, just before a pendulum changes direction, when it is perfectly still. It is precisely that moment that marks the end of an old way and the beginning of a new one. That is what happened for divestment at the 2012 Presbyterian Church USA General Assembly in Pittsburgh...

  A purported massacre by the Syrian army near Hama on Thursday has turned out to be a battle between government forces and armed rebel militias, in another example of Western leaders hyping Syrian rebel propaganda...

...To dehumanize someone is to deprive them of essential human qualities such as compassion, individuality, love, and social contact. Making a family line up in the sun for hours to cross a checkpoint is a form of dehumanizing. It is dehumanizing to deny medical care, to destroy means of livelihood, to take someone's land, to put someone in solitary confinement in jail for months and years, or to tell someone that she is not of God's chosen people so she has less rights...
Read more...

  On July 13, 2012, the British Telegraph published remarks made by Sir John Sawers, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, the MI6. He spoke at the Civil Service Live event in Olympia, where 100 senior civil servants and journalists were present. The meeting was named “Unclassified chat: Sir John Sawers CMG” and was reported in Civil Service World, a publication dedicated to senior British officials. The article looked so much as the archetypal piece of disinformation that I almost dismissed it even before finishing reading; it was just mental diarrhea...
Read more...

  Uri Avnery views two former Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir, the recently-deceased terrorist leader, and Ehud Olmert, architect of the 2006 Lebanon war and the 2008/09 Gaza massacre, noting that whereas Shamir, “the dead honest fanatic, has many followers” Olmert, “the living corrupt pragmatist, has very few” – and that the current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, “has the vices of both and the virtues of neither”..
Read more...

...indications are that government agencies like the Bank of England and the British treasury also may have been involved, or at least looked the other way, raising questions whether other government agencies – including our own Federal Reserve — may have played a role. That remains for the investigators to find out but according to The Washington Post, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said “it had received word as early as 2007 from the British bank Barclays about problems” with Libor...
Read more...

...In spite of its economic and military might, there is one exception to American exceptionalism. And that is tiny Israel. In the eyes of the US government, only Israel stands above the United Nations, the World Court, international law, and global public opinion. It is free to inflict harm on any of its neighbors anytime it feels inclined to do so, regardless of the consequences, and regardless of the validity of its rationale for aggression. To Israel the Empire pledges its unconditional economic and military support...

...Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it’s one of the least “brave” or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It’s one thing to call it just, but to pretend it’s “brave” is Orwellian in the extreme. Indeed, the whole point of it is to allow large numbers of human beings to be killed without the slightest physical risk to those doing the killing. Killing while sheltering yourself from all risk is the definitional opposite of bravery. This is why the rapid proliferation of drones, beyond their own ethical and legal quandaries, makes violence and aggression so much easier (and cheaper) to perpetrate and therefore so much more likely...
Read more...

...To look at oppression and suffering and say that it’s complex is a damnable lie. It’s a terrible rationalization – a way of absolving ourselves of our responsibility to seek justice in our lives. Politics, including the politics of war, is often time-consuming and difficult, but I don’t believe it’s ever morally complicated...
Read more...

  The media have been too passive when it comes to Syrian opposition sources, without scrutinising their backgrounds and their political connections. Time for a closer look...
Read more...

  Once the mainstream media is digested, the alternative view may provide some balance. The article at the link proposes that the killings fields of Syria is conducted in stealth by NATO sponsored FSA (Free Syrian Army) death squads and is casually blamed on Bashar's government by the mainstream with a view to justify an R2P (Responsibility To Protect) military intervention...

Watch video...

...we support a U.S. foreign policy that promotes the creation of one secular, democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan as the national home of both peoples, with Jerusalem as its capital. We encourage a new U.S. diplomatic initiative to begin the long process of negotiation, laying the groundwork for such a single-state constitution...

  William A. Cook’s ‘Decade of Deceit’ is a collection of spectacular articles written by a man who has gradually awakened to the disastrous meaning of the Zionification of our universe. Being an authentic and unique poetic voice, Cook manages, layer by layer, of to unravel the hypocrisy that has contaminated every aspect of our life – morally, culturally, spiritually and politically...

Israel Admits War Causes Were Fabricated | Roy Tov

  Being absolved of a long list of crimes doesn’t give one the right to incriminate oneself on other crimes. Yet, that is exactly what former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did today. On July 12, 2012, two days after being acquitted, he spoke at a conference in Tel Aviv, which was devoted to the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. While the media recorded his astonishing words, he admitted that Israel’s main excuse for its brutal attack on Lebanon—the retrieval of two captured soldiers—was false. “The war had one objective which we did not achieve, and knew in advance that we couldn't achieve.. Openly deceiving the entire world, they attacked for the sake of achieving a different objective...

  Israel has condemned UNESCO's decision to establish a chair at the Islamic University of Gaza, calling the institution "a breeding ground for terrorists." Israel's foreign ministry said Thursday that "(Palestinian militant group) Hamas uses Gaza University laboratories to develop and produce explosives and rockets and has even run a course on explosive making."..

...To instigate war one needs propaganda and here is a very typical piece of such: The Ultimate Assault: Charting Syria's Use of Rape to Terrorize Its People. The piece is simply fake news based on very dubious third hand tales and propagated by one of the U.S. government sponsored fake humanitarian endeavors. In the comments thereto Don Bacon points out that the piece was commissioned by Joe Lieberman, the neocon Senator for Israel. That fact as well as the trails in the first linked piece tells us where this whole operation against Syria was thought up and is coming from...

...on July 9, 2005, Palestinian Civil Society itself called for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, but they can’t blow this humanitarian campaign off the map. After every Israeli massacre, more boycotts are launched against Israel...

...The committee was flawed from its creation, given that its purpose was to find ways of legalizing violations of the law. After years in which all organs of the government permitted the establishment of settlements without official government approval, without land having been allocated or master plans approved for them, the government appoints a committee to find ways of making these acts legal...

  This is odd, strange, and weird. This was supposed to be a debate between Noam Chomsky, Jeff Blankfort and Ali Abunimah. But Chomsky has always been scared of debating Blankfort and he had always declined any debates with Blankfort. Therefore, the way this 'debate' took place was the recorded voice of Chomsky when he had an interview with the host Khalil Bendib on December 2, 2009, and another interview by the same host took place on January 13, 2010 this time with Blankfort and Abunimah addressing Chomsky's prior interview of December 2, 2009...

  Today, in a lawsuit brought against current and former members of the Olympia Food Co-op board of directors for their decision to boycott Israeli goods, a Washington State court ruled that plaintiffs are liable for the costs and fees of the suit and $160,000 in statutory damages. The court had previously determined the lawsuit was a SLAPP, Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation, and upheld the constitutionality of the anti-SLAPP law against plaintiffs’ challenge...

...More than a quarter of what Washington spends money on every year is spent on the warfare state. That’s about 65% of all discretionary spending. “The United States spent $728 billion on its military in 2010,” according to the Mercatus Center, ”about 45% of the world’s $1.6 trillion total. US spending amounts to more than the next fourteen largest military spending countries combined. In fact, the US spends nearly 6 times more than the next largest military spender, China.”..

  The British Jewish community’s efforts to stop the Church of England from officially bolstering its ties with a group accused of being anti-Israel may have backfired, says the Bishop of Manchester. “A few people said that all the lobbying from the Jewish side led us to vote the other way,” said the Rt. Revd. Nigel McCulloch, who is chair of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ), the UK’s oldest Jewish-Christian interfaith group. “There was over-lobbying by some members of the Jewish community. The CCJ actually warned against this, as we know how the Synod works and it’s not a good way to get things done.”..

  As soon as the news about the Levy committee findings hit the web, social media networks in Israel were swamped with memes making fun of the fact that apparently there was no occupation to begin with. Here are a select few...

  On July 10, 2012, Nicaragua announced a bid for investors on the Nicaragua Canal; the government will keep 51% of the shares in the newly established Grand Canal Authority. This followed the approval on July 2, of new laws regulating the proposed 200-kilometer (125-mile) canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. China and India are interested in the project; Venezuela and Brazil also expressed interest. Yet, this is not a new idea. The colonial administration of New Spain conducted preliminary surveys, as did the French, the Americans and even the defunct Federal Republic of Central America...

  "'Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they must first make mad’ - and that was how the western powers and corporate media portrayed Muammar Qaddafi for decades as he nationalized Libyan oil, raised the Libyan standard of living to one recognized by the UN as among the highest in Africa, and began promoting an African currency and development bank to free the continent from the IMF. When the ragtag group of “Islamist” fighters from Ben Ghazi given diplomatic cover as the Transitional Council began their NATO-supported assault, one of the first things they did was to seize the Libyan central bank, until then one of the few still controlled by a government...”

...Now that capitalism is universal, the population of the world sees its effects in unison rather than individually by nation-state, but the problem is not capitalism per se. The problem is abuse of the capitalist system by capitalists. What is the evidence of this abuse? The evidence is tens and hundreds of thousands of people in the streets chanting, sloganeering,..

  On 11 August 2011, Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, delivered the BBC Today Programme business lecture. In it he declared that "culture" was the critical element in responsible banking, and the best test of it is "how people behave while no one is watching." We now know that banking failed the test and so must ask why, in Sir Mervyn King's words, "excessive compensation", "shoddy treatment of customers", "mis-selling" and "the deceitful manipulation of a key interest rate", flourished in the banking sector. Cognitive neuroscience can point to some answers...

  Writing in Foreign Affairs, Christopher Swift attempts to show that cause-and-effect is not a concept applicable to foreign policy in “The Drone Blowback Fallacy.” What he ends up doing only reinforces the idea that a government can’t continue butchering children and not expect the parents to one day retaliate...

...This is only one of the many stories of how ordinary Iranians are bearing the brunt of the West's economic war against the Islamic Republic. Since Iran came under scrutiny over its nuclear energy programme in 2002, it has come under several sets of UN Security Council sanctions, and life has become progressively more difficult for all but the wealthy. In Tehran, the dominant perception is that the aim of the sanctions is to create pressure from below so the leadership will back down on the nuclear issue. In this context, how are Iranians to interpret the US and the EU's move to target oil exports and shipping; the main artery of Iran’s economy?..

  On 7 May 2012 Vladimir Putin was inaugurated, again, as the President of Russia having successfully completed what is called a "castling move" in Russia - he exchanged positions with (now) former President Medvedev. Even though only two months have passed since his inauguration, it is already possible to make a preliminary assessment of his first 60 days in power. I will take a look at his performance issue by issue:..

...The economy is already the lead issue in the upcoming US election between the presumptive Republican candidate Mitt Romney, and the unopposed Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama. Despite the long and rigorous primary process, American voters' choice is limited to two candidates who have already surrendered their worth to large campaign contributors. On Election Day, a sizable number of American electors do not vote for the candidate they agree with, but against the contestant they do not like. Or else, many end up casting a protest vote, like this writer, for a third party candidate with no credible chance of winning...

...in the 21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the “war on terror.” As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction...

  Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:..

  Let’s review how B’nai Brith’s Frank Dimant and ol’ Beryl Wajsman reacted to the apology student groups offered following a group of protesters who used the “Nazi” salute in the general direction of Montreal’s finest...

  A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the "Great Famine" committed in the 1930s. The nation's security service is pressing the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the list were Jewish. Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandr Feldman, leader of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said last week that it was "a farce" to press the case. “All organizers of the Great Famine are dead," he said...

  Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship...

  British and U.S. authorities are both now investigating Barclays and other banks for manipulating the London InterBank Offered Rate, an interest rate that is a benchmark for a host of financial products around the world. Regulators charge that the banks rigged the interest rate’s movements in order to profit and to make themselves look healthier during the financial crisis of 2008 than they actually were...

...Olmert was in good relations with the Palestinian Authority and was about to achieve advances in the negotiations towards a permanent agreement between Israel and Palestine. The Shin Beth traditionally ruins the careers of people attempting to do that; Olmert was the third one on this exclusive list. He was declared “not guilty,” but the Shin Beth doesn’t care about justice. The Israeli secret police opposes the peace process, since it profits from ongoing war. Even after his absolution, Olmert is not the Prime Minister and is in no position to sign an agreement that would bring the fearsome peace. The Shin Beth is happy...

  I remember the day when I held John C. Ball’s seminal 120pp. oversize book Air Photo Evidence (1992) in my hands. It blew my mind. Who could possibly resist the convincing power of air photos mainly taken by Allied war planes over sites claimed to have been the locations of Nazi mass murders? After the Leuchter Report, I think it was this very work which struck the most fatal blow to the orthodox Holocaust narrative. For the first time this work made accessible for the general public numerous photos taken by Allied and German reconnaissance airplanes during the war...

  The discovery of a rare aerial photo of Jerusalem in the 1930s, taken by a Zeppelin, has provided the long-sought after proof that when Israel occupied the Old City in 1967 it secretly destroyed an important mosque that dated from the time of Saladin close to the al-Aqsa mosque. The destruction of the Sheikh Eid mosque – in an area widely considered to be the most sensitive site in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – revives questions about Israel’s continuing abuse of Islamic holy places under its control...

...ADL can "educate" through lies and misinformation. As long as we can educate through facts, truth will prevail. Historically, when truth is allowed to exist in the sunshine of open unrestrained scrutiny by mankind, it will eventually dispel lies.. the internet now provides global resistance to the greatest threat civilization has ever encountered: international Jewish supremacism...

  Omid Memarian considers an online poll which was removed by the authorites in Iran as some sort of valid evidence that Iranians don't really support their nuclear program. This has been a sort of "holy grail" talking point by the hardliners in Washington who have tried very hard to portray the Iranian government as being isolated on the issue and pressing the matter contrary to the wishes of the people of Iran. So naturally they're bound to play-up this poll...

...Annan asked his host, “How long do you think this crisis will continue?” “As long as the [...] regime funds it,” Assad replied. But Annan was not surprised by the answer. “Do you think they are behind all the funding?” he inquired. “They are behind many things that happen in our region. They believe they will be able to lead the whole Arab world today and in the future,” Assad said. The international envoy concluded by remarking, “But it seems to me that they lack the population needed for such an ambition.” This made everyone laugh...

  Despite early assurances by Egypt's new President Mohammed Morsi regarding his 'commitment to international treaties and agreements,' one can already foretell a likely confrontation between Egypt and Israel. A chaotic transition notwithstanding, a new, post-revolution Egypt is emerging. It is is more self-assertive, emphasizing issues of national dignity and respect. In fact, the world ‘Karama’ - dignity in Arabic - is now paramount in the budding discourse. The key to understanding post-January 2011 Egypt is to appreciate the inferred but real transformation of the collective psyche or Egyptian society, one that is unequivocally challenging the denigrating stereotype of Egyptians as docile and submissive...

..Washington has been at war since October, 2001, when President George W. Bush concocted an excuse to order the US invasion of Afghanistan. This war took a back seat when Bush concocted another excuse to order the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that went on without significant success for 8 years and has left Iraq in chaos with dozens more killed and wounded every day, a new strong man in place of the illegally executed former strongman, and the likelihood of the ongoing violence becoming civil war. Upon his election, President Obama foolishly sent more troops to Afghanistan and renewed the intensity of that war, now in its eleventh year, to no successful effect...

..”Channel 2, you are the garbage of the state, all respect to the Border Police officer and it’s a shame he didn’t put a bullet in the head of the son of a bitch videographer who documented it.” This posting from a high schooler was one of hundreds by Israeli Facebook users reacting with pride and joy, and incitement to violence and murder...

  The Barclays Libor scandal may have shocked the British public, but Joseph Stiglitz saw it coming decades ago. And he's convinced that jailing bankers is the best way to curb market abuses. A towering genius of economics, Stiglitz wrote a series of papers in the 1970s and 1980s explaining how when some individuals have access to privileged knowledge that others don't, free markets yield bad outcomes for wider society...

  One of the most striking socio-economic features of the past two decades is the reversal of the previous half-century of welfare legislation in Europe and North America. Unprecedented cuts in social services, severance pay, public employment, pensions, health programs, educational stipends, vacation time, and job security are matched by increases in tuition, regressive taxation, and the age of retirement as well as increased inequalities, job insecurity and workplace speed-up...

  The United States and its Western allies are behaving increasingly like the doomed emperors of the late Roman Empire: decadent, self-indulgent and supremely arrogant. There seems to be a reckless presumption of boundless, unilateral power. While the US and its left lieutenants, Britain and France, can claim to command the world’s fiercest military machine in the form of NATO, there is nevertheless, paradoxically, a growing sense of fragile, impotence in the face of a fast-changing world. This past week we have seen yet another manifestation of this Roman Empire syndrome with the astoundingly arrogant conduct of the US, Britain and France at the Geneva conference on Syria...

...Mossad is a master at false-flag terrorist attacks designed to alter perceptions and punish opponents of Israeli policy. The fingerprints of Israeli intelligence are all over the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the 3/22 train bombings in Madrid, the 7/7 transit bombings in London, and, now, the 7/22 attacks in Norway… While the Israeli-influenced corporate media has droned on and on about the dangers of Islamist terrorism, it is now obvious that the major threat to public safety comes from the State of Israel, a rogue nation that does not hesitate to murder the innocent to achieve its sordid political aims...

..Sixty years after Truman’s recognition of Israel, the 44th President Elect of the United States, Barack Obama, in true allegiance to the Flag of Israel, continues the expected, no, the demanded subservience and pandering to America’s Zionists. Four Examples of Obama’s Allegiance to Israel at the expense of our national interest in the Middle East. This man of “hope” is nevertheless “hopelessly” devoted to Israel...

...Has the mainstream press largely ignored the chilling story that, pushed by the alarmist warnings of national leaders since the September 11, 2001 attacks, we have become overly fearful, willing to surrender many core freedoms for the illusion of absolute security against what we are told is a never-ending terrorism threat? Never mind reality, we’re scared, as polls show: Do whatever you need to do to keep us safe, please, no questions asked...

  The meeting of the enemies of Bashar Al-Assad in Paris: the final statement for President Assad to stand down, to massively boost aid to opposition and for crippling sanctions against the govt. The calls are in sharp contrast to an agreement they made in Geneva a week ago. But do any of these actions take into account the Syrian people? Would a Chapter 7 of the UN charter, ranging from economic measures to military force, if necessary, aid the transformation for Syrians, who are experiencing reforms coming from Assad, including a new govt.? Russia and China don't think so...

...all this is for money, for these so called revolutionaries who are going to bring democracy to Syria have no conviction of their own, or ideology that they want to live and experience, because all they want is money, and when they demonstrate, or when they assault, it is for money, and when they abduct or slaughter it is for money as well, and when they smuggle weapons they do so for money...

  Just when you thought Wall Street couldn’t sink any lower – when its myriad abuses of public trust have already spread a miasma of cynicism over the entire economic system, giving birth to Tea Partiers and Occupiers and all manner of conspiracy theories; when its excesses have already wrought havoc with the lives of millions of Americans, causing taxpayers to shell out billions (of which only a portion has been repaid) even as its top executives are back to making more money than ever; when its vast political power (via campaign contributions) has already eviscerated much of the Dodd-Frank law that was supposed to rein it in, including the so-called “Volker” Rule that was sold as a milder version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment from commercial banking – yes, just when you thought the Street had hit bottom, an even deeper level of public-be-damned greed and corruption is revealed...

  Away from the headlines, a revolution is taking place in the Middle East. On the last two days of August 2012, the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement will take place in Tehran, Iran. The encounter, which happens once every three years, will bring together key figures from Palestine, Egypt and Iran. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was invited today, July 8, by Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s behalf. The meeting took place in Jordan, and Abbas agreed to participate...

  Israel's international isolation and the hatred of Jews worldwide are the punishment for the demolition of three houses in the Migron outpost two weeks ago, Kiryat Arba Rabbi Dov Lior ruled Monday during a conference held at the Binyamin region community. "We all saw that on the day the buildings were destroyed the diplomats were expelled from Turkey, and the Egyptians were next and later the Jordanians," the prominent right-wing rabbi stated. "The waves of anti-Semitism in Europe are a punishment for this as well."..

  A recurrent theme here is the contrast between the moral universalism of the West versus Jewish moral particularism. Moral universalism is a corrollary of individualism: Groups have no moral standing. Stealing doesn’t become right depending on what group the victim belongs to. But Jewish ethics is based fundamentally on the group status of perpetrator and victim. It’s okay if the victim is from a different group. And within the group, ethics is structured so that the group as a whole benefits: What’s good for the Jews...

  “Iran is not seeking to have the atomic bomb, possession of which is pointless, dangerous and is a great sin from an intellectual and a religious point of view.” Thus did supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declare in February that Iran’s possession of atomic weapons would be a mortal sin against Allah. It is also the unanimous judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, declared in 2007 and affirmed in 2011, that Iran has abandoned any program to build nuclear weapons. Is the Ayatollah lying? Is the entire U.S. intel community wrong?..

  Israeli Mossad agents are themselves the ones that have been assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, not Iranian dissidents working for Israel, according to a new book by veteran US and Israeli journalists...

  A small AAAS delegation led by Nobel laureate Peter Agre returned from a week-long visit to Iran deeply impressed by the nation’s commitment to research and education and by the warm welcome they received from science leaders, researchers, and students...

  The tension and likelihood of a world war because of the conflict in Syria is currently on the cards because certain countries are behaving like arsonists, especially Turkey, in continuing to offer a logistical base for mercenaries from "liberated" Libya. Saudi Arabia’s ruling House of Saud will keep providing the money to buy them weapons. As for Washington, London and Paris, they will continue to calibrate their tactics in the protracted anticipation of a NATO attack against Damascus...

  An article by two well-known Israeli writers’ details state-sponsored terrorism by a secret unit of the MOSSAD called 'The Kidon' that operates inside of Iran...

...On June 28, I was surprised when the IDF evicted 15 families from Ulpana to a nearby improvised neighborhood; two families were left behind. Had Netanyahu decided to follow court rulings? Yet, the date itself carried an important hint that Israel didn’t mean to comply with the court ruling. After all, since Netanyahu didn’t plan to bomb the settlers’ houses, there was no time to destroy them until July 1, the date set by the Supreme Court. Accordingly, the government approached the court and asked for time, since the houses needed to be sawed; apparently no faster destruction way was kosher enough...

  'We, the undersigned, Palestinians and Israelis, believe that the historic land of Palestine should be shared by all those who now live in it and its natives who have been expelled or exiled from it since 1948, and their descendants, regardless of religion, ethnicity, national origin or current citizenship status. Cognisant of the great changes in the Middle East including the recent Arab uprisings, we conceive of our movement as part of the drive towards democracy, accountability, transparency, equality and economic and social justice in the region. We intend to build a model state in the region, rooted in equal citizenship, popular democracy and institutional justice...'
Read more...

...During the 9/11 Vancouver Hearings, 19 expert witnesses gave sworn testimony as to names, titles, and implicating evidence for individuals, each of whom is alleged to have acted as part of a common plan as a leading co-conspirator in the events of 9/11 and for whom they are aware of prima facie evidence that is sufficient to raise a presumption of fact...
Read more...

  I’m sure most Americans are mighty proud of the fact that Julian Assange is so frightened of falling into the custody of the United States that he had to seek sanctuary in the embassy of Ecuador, a tiny and poor Third World country, without any way of knowing how it would turn out. He might be forced to be there for years. “That’ll teach him to mess with the most powerful country in the world! All you other terrorists and anti-Americans out there — Take Note! When you fuck around with God’s country you pay a price!”..
Read more...

...Not heeding the aftermath of the 1950’s, the American-led Western allies have once again imposed an oil embargo on Iran. In retaliation, Iran has drafted a bill to stop the flow of oil through its territorial waters – the Strait of Hormuz, to countries which have imposed sanctions against it. This bill is not without merit and contrary to the previous oil embargo, it would appear that Tehran has the upper hand and the heavy cost associated with the embargo will not be borne by Iran alone...
Read more...

  Israel controls the access to water from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its disproportionate allocation of water, the settlements’ takeover of natural springs, and the prohibition against maintaining and constructing water cisterns in the West Bank without Israeli permits make water a sparse commodity for Palestinians. This illustration is the sixth in a series of infographics on Palestinian civilian life under occupation...
Read more...

  There is no settled consensus in elite US circles about to handle the Iran problem. Several powerful voices, including within the Pentagon, argue that the best option is to continue the mix of sanctions and sustained cyber-warfare (the latter in collaboration with Israel). Others, however, argue that there is a need to plan for war, with the question of optimum timing a central issue...
Read more...

  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.. We have, for example, AIPAC, which was essentially constructed just to drive agenda in Washington DC. And it succeeds admirably. And we brag about it. Again, it’s just what we do...

...We are working on a movement for one democratic state. All of us here believe it is inevitable. In fact a survey of Israeli Jews a few years ago showed that nearly 70% believe there will not be a Jewish state by 2048. Palestine was and continues to be one country from the past few thousand years. Only for very brief periods it was divided for example between 1948-1967. Since 1967, we had one political system but it is a system of apartheid.. All of us in this room are convinced that we can do better than that: we can have democracy, justice, human rights. How to go from here to there.. is why we are gathered here. We hope to build on the movement for one democratic state...
Read more...

...Putin repeatedly warned Israeli officials that the very existence of Israel was at risk if it attacked Iran and that Israel should not delude itself that Russia will ever sanction an attack on Iran or that Russia will get involved with Israel’s attack in anyway. Putin emphasized that Israel should think twice before taking any action on Iran and should learn lessons from the United States’ experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan...

Relative of Raoul Wallenber likens W. Bank to Syria | Jerusalem Post

  Grand-nephew of Swedish diplomat famous for rescuing 100,000 Jews during Holocaust visits Israel, says "silence in the face of evil is evil."..
Read more...

"...today, America reacted to the European declaration by giving Afghanistan the status of Major Non-NATO Ally, apparently in order to assure control on its rare earth elements. There is no need to be a professional prophet in order to outguess the invariably violent moves of empires.."
Read more...

  They call them the ‘screaming eagles’; their courage is the stuff of legends. Men of the 101st Airborne are never daunted by impossible odds — especially if the odds are in their favour. They show a jaunty nonchalance in combat, a complete indifference to danger — especially if it’s danger that they have themselves created, to which only their enemies are exposed. As the following gun camera footage shows, they exhibit absolutely no sign of fear sitting in their AH64 Apache gunship while confronted with the real and present threat of destitute farmers armed with poppy seeds. They even sing before dispatching their fearsome adversaries with a Hellfire missile...

  France, the nation whose 1789 Revolution gave the world the ideals of Equality, Fraternity and Liberty especially freedom of speech and of the press, jumps to attention (as a docile marionette does) when its Zionist manipulators such as the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism(BNCVA) the France Israel Chamber of Commerce, International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, get a whiff of criticism of Israel's war crimes and crimes against humanity...
Read more...

  In a new interview, by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Finkelstein repeated the accusation that "BDS is a cult," this time in a measured and composed way, not as an "outburst". Parenthetically, the interview itself, in its structure and the kind of questions asked and not asked, suggests that Finkelstein himself is fashioning his own persona as a cult leader...
Read more...

  Western sanctions on Iran and heated policy debate on Tehran's nuclear program go hand and hand, but the latest foray into the latter by Kenneth Waltz, a prominent international relations theorist, is emerging as one of the most controversial. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, in a brief but weighty article in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine, Waltz defends Iranian nuclear proliferation as a stabilizing factor in the turbulent Middle East, citing the regional imbalances and insecurities wrought by Israel's nuclear monopoly and the rationality of Iranian regime...

  An article by Scott McConnell “The Special Relationship with Israel: Is it worth the cost?” which appeared in the Spring 2012 Middle East Policy Council Journal, reviews an interesting analysis attributed to Professor Ariel Roth of John Hopkins University. Roth accepts that the only US strategic interest in the Middle East is to maintain relative stability to keep the oil flowing. Because the greatest threat to stability is Israel, which is paranoid about its own security, he argues that it is therefore in America’s interest to be bound tightly to the Jewish state so it will not do something stupid, like lashing out with its nuclear arsenal to start a war against a neighbor...

  Stuart Littlewood assesses whether UK Labour leader Ed Miliband is worthy of the praise heaped upon him by the Palestinian Authority’s UK representative, Manuel Hassassian, and urges Palestinians to beware of false “friends”, such as the Miliband brothers and other Labour leaders, who are unconditionally committed to Israel...

  Why couldn’t Neo-Nazis or Arabs have been the ones to deface Israel's official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, last month? It would have been so much easier to condemn the usual suspects for spewing their undying animus against Jews, especially during a time in which Israelis were treated to the first "Miss Holocaust Survivor" Beauty Pageant, an event that was attended by two of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's Cabinet members. Instead, in an attack described by Yad Vashem’s Chairman Avner Shalev as a “callous expression of burning hatred” the culprits turned out to be several Israeli Jews and their hatred was directed instead, in Shalev’s words “against Zionists and Zionism.”..

  If the Democrats in Congress were all drinking water from the same faucet, there might be a clue to their chronic fear of the craven and cruel corporatist Republicans who dominate them. But they don’t, so we have to ask why their fear, defeatism, and cowering behavior continues in the face of the outrageous GOP actions as the November election approaches...

...the Palestinian Authority must seriously consider its options and put an end to international indifference, or risk being seen as an unwilling accessory to a hideous occupation. The peace process has created an ensconced new class of VIP and privileged Palestinians who seem to be more interested in maintaining their gains rather than jeopardising them by exploring alternatives. Collective Palestinian destiny should not be determined by individual gain, nor by the electoral politics of who occupies the White House...

  I recently read a fascinating article by Scott McConnell, “The Special Relationship With Israel: Is It Worth the Cost?,” which appeared in the spring 2012 Middle East Policy Council Journal. Even for those of us who have closely followed the issue of Israel’s asymmetrical relationship with the United States, Scott provides some unique insights. He observes, for example, that the result of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel has been the wholesale adoption of Israeli policies and viewpoints by Washington’s policymakers and pundits...
Read more...

  One of our longstanding arguments about the folly of American policy on Iran-related sanctions is that it is incentivizing rising powers like China and the other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa, along with China) to develop alternatives to U.S.-controlled mechanisms for conducting, financing, and settling the international exchange of goods, services, and capital...
Read more...

JTA: U.S. college heads visit Israel, seek collaboration opportunities | Alison Weir Journal

...Targeting academics for pro-Israel propaganda began in the 1940s, if not earlier: With its extraordinary funding, AZEC embarked on a campaign to target every sector of American society, ordering that local committees be set up in every Jewish community in the nation. In the words of AZEC organizer Sy Kenen, it launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labor.”..

...from a Russian policy perspective, Syria – much like Libya, Iraq or Yugoslavia previously – is primarily about the world order. It is about who decides: Who decides whether to use military force? Who decides the actors for use of that force? And who decides under what rules, conditions and oversight military force is to be used?..
Read more...

  Al-Akhbar will work with WikiLeaks over coming weeks to release a large number of emails detailing the inner workings of Syria's political and business elite, the two organizations confirmed on Thursday. WikiLeaks announced in a statement on Thursday it will publish more than 2 million emails "from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012."..

...The Associated Press, on June 28, reported on the meeting: “Jordan’s King has met with top Hamas leaders as part of an about-face effort to engage with Islamists, who have been gaining ground all over the Mideast.” The Jordanian people also seem fed up with the rigid political system and long-standing corruption in their country. The sensitivities that often governed popular politics in Jordan — due to the fact that a large portion of Jordanians are of Palestinian descent — were hardly relevant. Cries for change this time arose from the heart of Jordanian society and Islamic parties were the most visible players in this social mobilisation...
Read more...

  Lawrence Davidson considers the hard choices facing American voters as they ponder who to cast their ballot in the upcoming presidential elections, and offers some guidelines on how potential but wavering voters might make up their minds...

..The revolution we honor each year on July 4th was in part sparked by unreasonable government intrusions into individual liberty. In 1761, Boston lawyer James Otis spoke against overly-broad warrants issued by the British government. These Writs of Assistance allowed the crown's agents to search any house or ship they wished, without any specific reason. John Adams - signer of the Declaration of Independence and our nation's second president - said of Otis' speech, "Then and there, the child Independence was born."..

  On June 27, 2012, the FBI partially declassified and released seven additional pages from a 1985–2002 investigation into how a network of front companies connected to the Israeli Ministry of Defense illegally smuggled nuclear triggers out of the U.S. The newly released FBI files detail how Richard Kelly Smyth — who was convicted of running a U.S. front company — met with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel during the smuggling operation...

  Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004, of a mysterious ailment. His enemies spread the rumor he had AIDS: David Frum, with typical classiness, claimed he had contracted AIDS as a consequence of having sex with his bodyguards. Now, however, it has been revealed Arafat was poisoned: the cause of his death was exposure to very high levels of polonium-210, a rare radioactive substance...

  The unconstrained power of bankers acts like a drug on their brains' reward systems, creating insatiable appetites...

The Neocons... They're Back, by John Mahoney | AMEU

  Between June 5 - 6, 2007, an international gathering called the Democracy & Security Conference took place in Prague, the Czech Republic. Sponsored, in part, by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, its List of Participants included Sheldon Adelson, the casino and hotel magnate, worth an estimated $21.5 billion, who, with his wife Miriam, recently gave $22 million to Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, a campaign in which the former speaker referred to Palestinians as “an invented people.”..

EU sanctions on Iran violate intl. law, French lawyer says | PressTV

  A French international lawyer says the European Union sanctions agreed in early 2012 against Iran raise many specific issues regarding their lawfulness under international law...

  Jon Snow of Channel 4 News argues it is time for the US to lead a change in the relationship of it and the UK with Iran, in the Lord Garden Memorial Lecture at Chatham House on 21 June 2012...

  The Journal of Hate Studies asks for "cutting-edge essays, theory, and research that deepen the understanding of the development and expression of hate". The following submission for the 2012 issue of the journal (Call for Papers, Tsai, R.L., 2012) is all of the above. It argues that Zionism generates hate, and that hate studies writers have neglected it...

  Israeli president Shimon Peres is calling the late Yitzhak Shamir, dead at 96, a "brave warrior." What does that mean? It means he used terrorism with very important political consequences. As head of the Stern Gang, Shamir authorized the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British minister in Palestine, in 1944, and Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. envoy (and Swedish count) in 1948. The Bernadotte murder is particularly important:..

..Creatures of no observable skills or special talents amass billions of dollars and perform no useful work at all but actually bring about cultural and ecological devastation for which they are rewarded with more tax payer dollars. Economists too dumb to see the crisis predicted by many critics still wisely advise with ancient notions of a free market religion, supply and demand curves, and the “creative destruction” which does away with what they find useless - jobs for working people – and produces more profits for what they find divine – capitalists...

  On July 3, 2012, the death of Yasser Arafat on November 11, 2004, returned to the headlines of international media. Arafat was in good health until he suddenly fell ill on October 12, 2004. At the time he was besieged by Israeli tanks in the Palestinian Authority Ramallah headquarters. When his condition deteriorated, he traveled to Paris, where he died in a military hospital. The cause of his death remained mysterious...

..The interview explores intersecting paradigms and predicaments of racism and colonialism for a post-war German nation. Specifically, it touches upon some of the historical roots and contemporary debates in Germany, concerning anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism and the way both phenomena have played out in modern German politics until today...

  The recent controversy about Jewish-Israeli writer, Shani Boianjiu, reminds me of an encounter I had nine years ago after reading a novel by the then-novice Jewish-American author Risa Miller. Miller’s book, like Boianjiu’s New Yorker short story, is set in the West Bank. Both works portray Palestinians negatively. And both are successful less on the literary merits than because they appeal to and have been supported by members of a Jewish-American subculture that is devoted to the promotion of the State of Israel...

  Most U.S., European, and Israeli commentators and policymakers warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would be the worst possible outcome of the current standoff. In fact, it would probably be the best possible result: the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.. The crisis over Iran's nuclear program could end in three different ways...

  For many months, the most dramatic media storyline on Iran’s nuclear program has been an explosives-containment cylinder that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says was installed at Iran’s Parchin military base a decade ago to test nuclear weapons. The coverage of the initial IAEA account of the cylinder in its report last November has been followed by a steady drip of reports about Iran refusing to allow the agency’s inspectors to visit the site at Parchin and satellite photos showing what are said to be Iranian efforts to “sanitize” the site...

  America's favorite pastime isn't baseball. It's war, permanent imperial wars that won't end in our lifetime Dick Cheney said earlier. America is addicted to war. One nation after another is ravaged and plundered. Unchallenged global dominance is sought. Who's next? Syria? Iran? Washington's long knives target both countries...

...“Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.” One judge hearing a “terrorism” case, Colleen McMahon, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here” and criticized the FBI for sending informants “trolling along the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity.”..

...By US officials' own admissions, since 2007 a combined US-Israeli-Saudi effort to assemble and deploy against Syria and Iran an army of sectarian extremists drawn from the ranks of Al Qaeda and its affiliates has been underway. In Seymour Hersh's 2007 New Yorker article, "The Redirection," he reported, "The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."..

  Two stories this week prove once again that the big banks are literally criminal enterprises. Initially, all of the big banks have engaged in Mafia-style “bid-rigging” of municipal bonds, to bilk money from every city in the nation … to the collective tune of tens billions of dollars. And Barclays and other large banks – including Citigroup, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lloyds, Bank of America, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland – manipulated the world’s primary interest rate (Libor) which virtually every adjustable-rate investment globally is pegged to...

...Kucinich has viewed America’s targeted killings programme against alleged terrorists with alarm for some years. Recently he has agitated for the United States to be open about its covert wars, and for Congress to assert its right to declare war – or not – in places like Pakistan and Yemen. And Kucinich, twice a Presidential primary contender, is also trying to introduce a Bill that would outlaw the assassination of American citizens by US agencies like the CIA...

  The intricate, sprawling architecture of deception that shapes understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America is probably unique in history. For over six decades, the U.S. Congress, successive presidents, media, public opinion, all have supported a story which portrays Israel as wholly good and innocent, while painting those resisting its violence and injustice as anti-Semites, Nazis, and terrorists...

...Without the conversion of the Khazar population it is doubtful if "Talmudism", or "Judaism" as "Talmudism" is known today, could have survived. "Talmudism", the civil and religious code of the Pharisees, most likely would have passed out of existence like the many other creeds and cults practiced by the peoples in that area before, during and after "Pharisaism" assumed its prominent position among these creeds and cults in the time of Jesus. "Talmudism", as "Pharisaism" was called later, would have disappeared with all its contemporary creeds and cults but for the conversion of the Khazars to "Talmudism" in the 7th century. At that time "Talmudism" was well on its way towards complete oblivion...

  A well-known proverb states that the enemy of your enemy is your friend; yet, sometimes, the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. In the Middle East, your enemy may even be your best friend. A less-known, but more accurate, Bedouin adage claims “I against my brother, my brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and me against strangers,” stating a clear hierarchy of loyalties...

..Jewish media ownership and control is a major arena for Jewish ethnic networking, especially noticeable at high-prestige, influential publications such as The New Yorker. Just as Rothko was successfully promoted to be part of the Western canon of high art, these writers are being promoted not as Israeli writers, but as part of the Western literary canon. Soon to be featured in college courses and made into movies...

  This Military Intel Study was triggered by the discovery of the Protocols of Zion back in the early 1900's due to its blatant intent to take over nations and undermine their sovereignty and the US was concerned about their own after having WWI. Europe was also concerned as was the US about Russian Bolshevism and its threat to the world, and the rumor was it was run by International Jewry (Zionists). This is a beginning of the historical account of that study...

  Now that Obamacare has been ruled a tax by the U.S. Supreme Court, reality is starting to sink in for all those who emotionally supported it. Promoted as a way to provide either free health care or low-cost health care to the masses, the sobering reality is that under Obamacare, health insurance prices keep rising, not falling. That's no surprise, of course, since the Obamacare legislation was practically written by the health insurance companies, and they sure didn't put their weight behind a sweeping new law that would earn them less profit...

  Neve Gordon considers how an artist’s work can evoke the possibility and the necessity of imagining a different reality in a war zone...
Read more...

  Writing an obituary about a terrorist? I couldn’t degrade myself into that; yet, the topic was amusing to the extent of irresistible. “The Digger” had died. Yesterday, June 30, 2012, Israel's seventh Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir died in Tel Aviv. He was 96 years old and had suffered a severe case of Alzheimer for more than a decade. In 1947, he earned his peculiar nickname after having escaping a British prison in Palestine through a 200 foot tunnel he had allegedly dug with a spoon. Even these colorful details weren’t enough to justify an obituary. Oddly, he is being praised by all Zionist leaders, even those belonging to the left...
Read more...

...Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes...
Read more...

...We know from the diaries of Lord Halifax, the British foreign minister, that Hitler offered terms that did not involve German control of Britain. Churchill refused to allow these terms to be read to the cabinet, and they remain prudently concealed under the 100-year rule. Instead, Churchill's determination to keep Britain at war turned what had been merely a continental defeat of its army into the enduring myth that in 1940, Britain faced a war for national survival...

  World powers agreed on a plan for a political transition in Syria in a meeting in Geneva on Saturday called by UN envoy Kofi Annan. A unity government will be formed according to a democratic process and can include members of the present regime as well as opposition...
Read more...

  Internet search giant Google has reached a deal under legal mediation with French anti-racism groups which objected to the search engine suggesting users add "Jew" to searches for prominent names. Both sides confirmed the deal had been reached for the groups to drop a legal complaint against Google but refused to comment on its specifics...

  As Julian Assange evades arrest by taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge to escape extradition to Sweden, and possibly the US, British commentators have targeted him with shrill abuse. They almost froth with rage as they cite petty examples of his supposed gaucheness, egotism and appearance, as if these were criminal faults...
Read more...

  Over the last year, there has been a torrent of articles on neoconservatism raising (usually implicitly) some difficult issues: Are neoconservatives different from other conservatives? Is neoconservatism a Jewish movement? Is it “anti-Semitic” to say so? The thesis presented here is that neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement. This paper is the final installment in a three-part series on Jewish activism and reflects many of the themes of the first two articles. The first paper in this series focused on the traits of ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness...
Read more...

  We celebrate the fourth of July with fireworks, memorializing the American colonists’ struggle against the British empire by reenacting, in symbolic fashion, what was a war for independence – that is, an assertion of American sovereignty. As we’ve built an empire of our own, however, the celebration has naturally degenerated into an orgy of nationalist vaunting, with the original conception obscured and mostly lost. Indeed, the US government disdains the very concept of national independence, routinely violating the sovereignty of others – and even denying its own...
Read more...

  The United States is a sovereign country. That is sometimes hard to remember.. All the big money and Israeli interference is coming at a time when US neoconservatives are pushing hard for a new war. And they can only push as hard as they do because they have successfully purged the Republican Party of whatever sanity it possessed...
Read more...

...This rabbi was apparently carefully chosen by the establishment to deliver this very unusual message; rabbis seldom incite wars. As a Hasidic rabbi affiliated to the Bratzlev Hasidic movement (often spelled Breslov by Yiddish speakers) Rabbi Eliezer Berland is in a unique position to perform exactly that...
Read more...

  Graham Peebles charts the horrendous abuse faced by Ethiopian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Lebanon where they are traded by unscrupulous traffickers – “not brokers/agents in any recognizable, legitimate sense of the word, but common criminals engaged in human trafficking and the destruction of lives”..
Read more...

  Millions of American families lost their homes to foreclosure over the past five years. According some reports, close to 9 million homes entered the foreclosure process between January 2007 and last month. Out of those, 4-point-3 million properties ended up foreclosed-upon...

...By US officials' own admissions, since 2007 a combined US-Israeli-Saudi effort to assemble and deploy against Syria and Iran an army of sectarian extremists drawn from the ranks of Al Qaeda and its affiliates has been underway. In Seymour Hersh's 2007 New Yorker article, "The Redirection," he reported, "The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."..
Read more...

  The history of Zionism illustrates a dynamic within the Jewish community in which the most radical elements end up pulling the entire community in their direction. Zionism began among the most ethnocentric Eastern European Jews and had explicitly racialist and nationalist overtones. However, Zionism was viewed as dangerous among the wider Jewish community, especially the partially assimilated Jews in Western countries, because it opened Jews up to charges of disloyalty and because the Zionists’ open racialism and ethnocentric nationalism conflicted with the assimilationist strategy then dominant among Western Jews...
Read more...

  The term ritual defamation was coined by Laird Wilcox to describe the destruction of the reputation of a person by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. The defamation is in retaliation for opinions expressed by the victim, with the intention of silencing that person’s influence, and making an example of him so as to discourage similar "insensitivity" to subjects currently ruled as taboo. It is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by a representative of a special interest group, such as, ironically, the Anti-Defamation League...
Read more...

  On June 29, 2012, Venezuela was accepted as full member of MERCOSUR, while Paraguay was formally suspended due to the June 22 putsch. MERCOSUR is an EU-styled agreement between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay; Venezuela had signed a membership agreement in 2006, but was unable to join since the extremist, right-wing Paraguayan Congress refused to ratify the agreement. Yesterday, Paraguay was suspended until democratic elections take place; these are planned for next year. After the suspension, the remaining MERCOSUR members had ratified Venezuela’s joining agreement...
Read more...

  An American Christian committee has called on Christians to stop being cowed by fears of being labelled anti-Semites and speak out about human rights violations in Palestine. "Enough!" the report says. "The time has come for us to do some shouting." The US Kairos committee issued its report last week. It is a response to the famous Kairos Palestine document of 2009 that was called, "Christian Palestinians’ word to the world about what is happening in Palestine."..
Read more...