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July, 2013


Jul 31, 2013

That Most Charming of Couples: Nationalism and Hypocrisy, by William Blum | Dissident Voice
  It’s not easy being a flag-waving American nationalist. In addition to having to deal with the usual disillusion, anger, and scorn from around the world incited by Washington’s endless bombings and endless wars, the nationalist is assaulted by whistle blowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who have disclosed a steady stream of human-rights and civil-liberties scandals, atrocities, embarrassing lies, and embarrassing truths. Believers in “American exceptionalism” and “noble intentions” have been hard pressed to keep the rhetorical flag waving by the dawn’s early light and the twilight’s last gleaming...
 
No Reference to J*W allowed | Gilad Atzmon
...Tribune Media Services newspapers printed a crossword clue where the three-letter answer for Shakespeare's 'Shylock' was 'Jew.' In response the Anti-Defamation League asked the paper to print an apology and refrain from using clues that perpetuate negative Jewish stereotypes. The paper issued an apology and promised not to print the clue again. I would suggest to remove the word Jew from the English language in order to avoid future conflict with the powerful ADL...
 
How European courts are dismantling sanctions on Iran | Reuters
...with Israel brandishing threats against a nuclear program that Iran insists has no military purpose, Washington worries that any weakening of sanctions may raise the risk of war. At the heart of the issue is the refusal by EU governments to disclose evidence linking their targets to Iran's nuclear work. Doing so in court, they say, may expose confidential intelligence, undermining efforts to combat the program. The courts have effectively rejected that argument, saying that if a case is to be made, evidence must be presented...
 
Why President Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran are Winning in Syria: Flynt Leverett on Al Mayadeen | Going to Tehran
...President Assad and his government retain—this is borne out by polling data, by other evidence—they retain the support of significant parts of Syrian society.  I would estimate that at least half of Syrian society continues to support the Assad government…and that’s probably increasing.  On the other hand, there is no hard evidence—no polls or any other data—that anywhere close to a majority of Syrians supports (let’s call it) the opposition...
 
Arabs, Beware the "Small States" Option, by Sharmine Narwani | Al Akhbar
  At the heart of all politics lies cold, hard opportunism. New circumstances, changed alliances and unexpected events will always conspire to alter one’s calculations to benefit a core agenda. In the Middle East today, those calculations are being adjusted with a frequency unseen for decades...
 
Israel freezes EU ties in retaliation for cash cut | Presseurope
...Israel is sending Europe a very simple message: “Pay up and shut up.” Naturally, this is unacceptable. We should pay homage instead to the European Union and its executive in Brussels, so often criticised for their diplomatic spinelessness, now that they’ve finally matched their actions to their words. Israel, for its part, is playing a very dangerous game. Through such reactions, the Jewish State is furnishing new proof of the contempt in which it holds any laws which do not help it...
 
Don't force an irresponsible vote on Iran sanctions, by Gen. Joseph Hoar, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Trita Parsi | The Hill
  The House of Representatives is under pressure to vote on a new Iran sanctions bill, H.R. 850, before members leave town for August recess. Scheduling such a vote would be irresponsible and highly counterproductive to U.S. strategy on Iran...
 
Cousins of Israel Pay Higher Fees | Roi Tov
  Most people considerate racism negative. They fastidiously embed this understanding into their books of law. It is even forbidden by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Few have evolved enough to understand its sophistication, its worldliness and refinement, which allow the better to enjoy the best. Few have evolved enough to understand that behind its falseness, speciousness, perversion, and adulteration, hide huge financial profits...
 
Human rights groups to DM Ya’alon: Respect Gaza residents’ right to freedom of movement | Gaza's Ark
  Recent turmoil in Egypt has brought new restrictions on passage via Rafah Crossing. Since July 1, exit via Rafah has been reduced to less than one third its usual scope. As a result, more than 10,000 people are stranded in Gaza. An unknown number of others cannot exercise their basic human right to return to their homes, and they are unduly paying for involuntary stays in airports and hotels in foreign countries. Currently, only medical patients with referrals from the Palestinian Ministry of Health and holders of a foreign citizenship or residence are allowed to enter Egypt from Gaza...
 
Israeli/Palestinian Peace: Illusion Substitutes for Reality | Stephen Lendman
...Israel doesn't negotiate. It never did. It won't now. It demands. It yields nothing. It's all take and no give. Its promises are made to be broken. Its track record is unblemished. Hamas is right calling talks a "disaster." Previous ones resulted in unconditional Palestinian surrender. Abbas is an illegitimate leader. He's deplorable. He's a longtime Israeli collaborator...
 
What the appointment of Martin Indyk as US special envoy tells us, by Richard Falk | Al Jazeera
  It was to be expected. It was signalled in advance. And yet it is revealing. The only other candidates considered for the job were equally known as Israeli partisans: Daniel Kurtzer, former ambassador to Israel before becoming Commissioner of Israel's Baseball League and Dennis Ross, co-founder in the 1980s (with Indyk) of the AIPAC-backed Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy who handled the 2000 Camp David negotiations on behalf of Clinton...
[The actions of the United States of Israel (USI) are depressingly predictable]
 
Mighty Morphin' Power Brokers, by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh | Media Monitors Network
...Senator William Fulbright once wrote: "The fundamental problem for us is that we have lost our freedom of action in the Middle East and are committed to policies that promote neither our own national interest nor the cause of peace. AIPAC and its allied organizations have effective working control of the electoral process"..
 
Palestinian Israelis convicted in gunman case | Al Jazeera
  An Israeli court has convicted seven Palestinian Israeli citizens in connection with the death in 2005 of a Jewish gunman after he went on a lethal shooting rampage on a bus in their town. While none of the men were found guilty on Monday of directly causing the death of Eden Nathan-Zaada, a 19-year-old army deserter and far-right West Bank settler, some members of Israel's Palestinian minority deplored the verdict as a sign of discrimination. Wearing a military uniform and Jewish skullcap, Nathan-Zaada opened fire aboard a bus in the northern town of Shfaram, killing four Palestinian Israelis...
[Israel routinely breeds such genocidal fanatics, and who act in the reasonable expectation of complete impunity]
 
Puppet “Conspiracy Theory Detector,” by Michael Shermer | Veterans Today
  This  original cartoon by Abel emerges from one of Michael Shermer’s regular columns in Scientific American. Dr. Shermer, founder of Skeptic Magazine, spoke in the autumn of 2010 at my home University where gave a version of his canned lecture, “Why People Believe Weird Things.” The University of Lethbridge advertised Dr. Shermer as “Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University.” Claremont is the home school of Professor David Ray Griffin. With his ten erudite books on various aspects of 9/11, Prof. Griffin is widely acknowledged as the Dean of 9/11 Studies...
 
Truth, Truthiness, and the National Security State’s Culture of Concealment, by Anthony Hall | Veterans Today
  Abel has some fun in this original cartoon playing on the word “truthiness,” a very useful term in this era when pseudo-reality and actual reality are so jumbled. The presentation of fictional mythology as if it was “the truth” has become especially endemic in this era when media echo chambers put out barrages of disinformation to justify the  fraudulent Global War on Terror. The replacement of truth with “truthiness” takes place in the factories of advertising and other mass communications where popular imagination is manufactured on an industrial scale. The same process is also taking place in the post-modernist branches of the academy...
 
Explaining Canada’s unconditional support of Israel, by Yves Engler | Redress Information & Analysis
  Pro-Israel politicians regularly claim their position is a defence of the Jewish community. It’s rare when they say their goal is to mobilize those who believe a Jewish “return” to the Middle East will hasten end times or that Israel is a prized ally as a heavily militarized “white” outpost near much of the world’s oil...



Jul 30, 2013

Remembering Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 - 1972) | Stephen Lendman
  He was special. He mattered. He's called a prophet's prophet. He tried to shock people out of complacency into understanding and compassion. He grew up in Poland. He came from a family of noted rabbis. His world was hasidic ("pious ones") "rebbeim." Rebbes are more than rabbis. They're the closest Jews come to experiencing prophecy. They taught him. They inspired him. They tested his convictions. They expanded his worldview. He matured into one of them. He surpassed them. He became an important figure...
[It’s helpful to be reminded that not all Jews are just useful idiots working for the Kosher Nostra. On the contrary, there are quite a few of us doing as Rebbe Heschel would have wished, working to undo perhaps the greatest mistake that Jews have ever made, the establishment of the colonialist, racist, apartheid, fascist, genocidal State of Israel.]
 
Morsi ousted with US blessing, by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich | My Catbird Seat
...Morsi presented Washington with many challenges. Not only was he reported to have called “Jews descendants of pigs and apes”,  but his election into office was warmly welcomed not only by HAMAS, but also by the U.S.-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who called Morsi “the choice of the great people of Egypt” while one of his senior aides, Saeb Erekat, said the democratic vote for Morsi “meant the Palestinian cause was the Number One priority for all Egyptians“. Washington was not in the business of making Palestinians jubilant, or contradicting Israel ’s demands...
 
PA police attack and arrest demonstrators against negotiations with occupation | Samidoun
  Palestinian Authority security forces attacked Palestinian protesters as they marched in Ramallah on Sunday, July 28, 2013, injuring dozens and arresting a number of protesters. The marchers were protesting the PA’s return to negotiations with Israel, warning that the negotiations represent threats to Palestinian rights and a path to dangerous concessions...
 
123 martyrs in Khan al-Assal massacre | SANA
...The majority of the victims are unarmed civilians, the source pointed out. The armed terrorist groups committed a genocide against a number of civilians and military personnel in Khan al-Assal town in the countryside of Aleppo. Gang of the so-called Ansar al-Khilafa Brigade admitted committing the terrorist massacre in Khan al-Assal, mutilating the bodies of the martyrs and throwing them in a big hole on the outskirts of the town, in addition to incinerating a number of the martyrs' bodies. Khan al-Assal area was last March the target of a chemical weapons attack when terrorists launched a rocket containing chemical materials, killing 25 citizens and injuring 110 others...
 
UN schemers screw up Middle East peace prospects, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
  Why, after 65 years, is the Palestinian homeland still under foreign military occupation and total blockade when international law and the United Nations say it shouldn’t be? And why have the Palestinians been pressured – yet again – to submit to “direct negotiations”, lamb versus voracious wolf, to haggle and plead for their freedom?..
 
In clear sight of Yad Vashem - Jews and Deir Yassin
  On April 9th 1948, the massacre of more than 100 Palestinian civilians was carried out by Jewish terrorists at the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. There are few memorials for Palestinians who died in 1948. Their history, in which the massacre at Deir Yassin is a very significant event, has been largely buried and forgotten. And yet, like the descendants of the victims in Armenia (1915-17), in the Soviet Union (1929-53), in Nazi Germany (1933-45), in China (1949-52, 1957-60, and 1966-76), and in Cambodia (1975-79), the descendants of Palestinians want the world to remember what they suffered, what they lost and why they died...
 
The assassination of Julian Assange, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth
...there is probably a good case to make that anyone who takes on the might of the modern surveillance and security empire the US has become must to some degree mirror its moral failings. How is it possible to remain transparent, open, honest — even sane — when every electronic device you possess is probably bugged, when your every move is recorded, when your loved ones are under threat, when the best legal minds are plotting your downfall, when your words are distorted and spun by the media to turn you into an official enemy? Assange is not alone in this plight...
[The sheeple meekly swallow the propaganda, but history will have a different tale to tell]
 
Detroit, New York | Roi Tov
...During the second American attack on Iraq, I was fascinated by the American administration's rhetoric. We all remember the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" lies, but there was much more than that. "Financing the war" was also a key phrase said by frenzied politicians while looking for juice to run their toys of mass destruction. There was no better testimony to the fact that this was a war of choice, and thus unacceptable, aimed to create financial profits through cheap oil and the revival of American military industries than this mantra. The phrase also reflected the American mindset as a world financial center and the main printer of a fiat money known as the American dollar...
 
The morning after blacklisting Hezbollah, by Franklin Lamb | MWC News
  It may well have seemed like a fine idea at the European Union’s Foreign Ministers cocktail reception in Brussels, where ample alcohol freely flowed the night before last week’s vote to blacklist the “military wing” of Hezbollah. But shortly after the vote the EU appeared to be experiencing a severe hangover as the stark reality of its impetuous decision began to soak in. After periodical discussion of the US-Israel demand for blacklisting Hezbollah for more than a year, and adding its name to the EU list of 26 organizations and 11 individuals currently being designated as ‘terrorists’ is in becoming clearer by the day the EU actions may not have been in anyone’s interest except possibly Israel’s...
 
Ready for World War III with China? by Sartre Batr | Veterans Today
..The prospects that definite weapons of mass destruction will engulf the planet in a nuclear winter are upon us once again. After the collapse of the Soviet evil empire, the Reagan – Gorbachev détente provided the world with one of its last hopes for restoring rational international relations. Regretfully, the last superpower used the defeat of the Marxist model of tyranny to impose their Pax American version of a global New World Order. The military machine of NATO, furnished with DARPA technology, would implement the NeoCon policy based upon the interest of the true masters behind the kosher approved empire...


Jul 29, 2013

Remembering Helen Thomas | Richard Forer
...More than once, Helen told me that Abe Foxman of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) and Ari Fleischer (George W. Bush’s Press Secretary) had been “after her” for many years. Like others who are incapable of rational thinking when it comes to Israel-Palestine, these men were unrelenting in their eagerness to label Helen’s criticisms of Israel’s violations of international law as expressions of anti-Semitism. Slandering Helen was far easier than asking why she, or anyone, would voice such criticisms. So frightened were these men of what the criticisms revealed about them, they could not see the humanity at the heart of the criticism...
[Along with Gilad Atzmon’s The Wandering Who?, Rich’s book, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion, is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Israel, Zionism and 'Jewishness' are all about.]
 
Flashback to 1921: Political Zionism, by Albert T. Clay | The Atlantic
...Political Zionism was launched by Herzl, in 1896, in a monograph on 'The Jewish State’; and since that time this has become the dominant note in the whole movement. He and others have claimed that the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would become an active force, by bringing diplomatic pressure to bear upon the nations, to secure protection for Jews in all lands. A clannish sense of pride in the Jewish race, however, seems to be uppermost in their minds. They apparently think that their status in society will be enhanced everywhere if a Jewish nation exists in Palestine. This phase of Zionism is the crux of the whole Palestine problem...
[Little or nothing has really changed in upwards of 100 years of arrogant, genocidal tribal fascism]
 
Natives and Israel: Manipulating Genocide, by Eric Walberg | Palestine Chronicle
  This month, Canada’s media solemnly related “the sad truth that the country engaged in a deliberate policy of attempted genocide against First Nations people”, referring to government-sponsored abuse of Native children a century ago, which Canada’s Chief Medical .. exposed in 1907, but which was hushed up. Bryce was fired and the post of chief medical officer abolished in 1919.. anyone with even a slight awareness of how Natives in Canada were dispossessed and abused by colonial settlers can easily see the parallel between Canada’s Natives and the Palestinians, who have suffered a century of identical treatment by Jews immigrating to Palestine...

Conspiracy theorists OK – Government Dupes Clueless, Humorless, by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today
...a recent study showing that people who reject “conspiracy theories” are more hostile, and more ardently convinced that they know the truth about disputed events, than the more open-minded people who question official wisdom. These findings overturn received mainstream opinion. The mainstream media and academy have promoted a CIA-engineered negative stereotype of “conspiracy theorists” (a term coined by CIA psychological warfare experts). According to the CIA-fabricated pejorative stereotype, the “conspiracy theorist” is a hostile crank adamantly wedded to his own interpretation of a disputed event, such as the JFK assassination or 9/11. In reality, it turns out that the opposite is the case...
 
International Campaign for “Safer World” | NNC
NNC sent me this message: “We decide to make and expand a virtual campaign to say the words of Iran to the world.. all Iranian people want and seek peace and welfare for all people in the world and we don't want any challenge and sth like this in relation with the other countries. In this way, we need your help as a known and scientific person to the peace activists in order to expand more and more this campaign. So, i request that help us and send this link for all person you know to sign it and join to this campaign.” I don’t know who they are, but their stated goals are admirable...
 
Netanyahu on negotiations, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
...President Abu Mazen whose term in office has long expired is not willing to respond to this letter to explain to us why he lied to us (about not going back to negotiations without a colonial settlement freeze). He will not explain to us why he will not have real elections for the PLO National Council.  He will not explain to us why he put his position and large entourage ahead of the interests of 7 million Palestinian refugees and the sacrifices of 70,000 martyrs. But he and his media are busy now taking a side in Egypt and Syria repeating the same mistake...
[The craven collaborators of Vichy/Ramallah aren’t about to change their ways]
 
Kerry Uses Arabs to Bully Palestinians, by Nicola Nasser | Palestine Chronicle
  A new tactic by US Secretary of State John Kerry is causing a split within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) ranks regarding further talks with Israel. Kerry is apparently using the Arab League’s Follow-Up Committee on the Arab Peace Initiative (FCAPI) to bully the Palestinians into accepting new ground rules for the talks to which they had objected in the past...

Filmmaking as resistance: Hany Abu Assad’s dream of a new Palestinian cinema, by Jonathan Cook: | The View from Nazareth
  “I want my films to put fear into Israelis. My job is to disturb their dreams, to wake them from the fantasy that there is no occupation,” says Hany Abu-Assad, a Palestinian filmmaker whose new movie, Omar, won the Jury Prize at Cannes. It is a surprising assertion from a director who says he considers only the human drama, not politics, when he makes films. But when the drama is inspired by Palestinian experiences under Israel’s occupation, the political is always close at hand...
 
Bolshevism and Zionism Are Ideologically Indistinguishable (Part II), by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today
..Bolshevism was indeed responsible for millions upon millions of deaths around the globe. It spread through Asia and subtly and indirectly in America through the work of Jewish revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai and Louis Wirth. Some commentators have objected to the idea that Bolshevism has taken a different form and been reincarnated in Zionism, which I call neo-Bolshevism. Yet the evidence clearly indicates that this is the case...
[Tribal Jewish revolutionaries, whether knowingly or not, have always been obeying the Chosen People meme, 'if it's good for the Jews..' It rarely is.]
 
The boycott of Israel eight years in, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis
..At first the BDS movement appeared to be a long shot. Israel, with its worldwide coterie of Zionist supporters, both Jewish and Christian, seemed invincible. Particularly in the Western world, the belief in Israel’s legitimacy had reached the status of sacred tradition. The Zionists worked very hard to achieve this status by controlling the historical interpretation of events that had led from World War I and the Balfour Declaration to the creation of Israel in 1948, and beyond. They might well have been able to maintain control of Israel’s past, present and future if the Zionist leadership had not succumbed to the sin of hubris...
 


Jul 28, 2013

The United States Is Awash in Public Stupidity, and Critical Thought Is Under Assault, by Henry A. Giroux | Veterans Today
 America has become amnesiac – a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed...
 
Reflections on CAMERA’s Efforts to Silence Critics of Israel, by by William A. Cook | My Catbird Seat
  Since January of this year, CAMERA has launched a no holds barred campaign to discredit, denigrate and damn those who criticize the beleaguered state of Israel, including British MPs David Ward and Robert Russell, and most recently James Wall, former Editor of The Christian Century. Dexter Van Zile, Christian media analyst, chastised The Christian Century for retaining Wall’s name on its masthead and demanded its removal...
 
The Age of Regression, by John Pilger | CounterPunch
...Surveillance is normal in the Age of Regression — as Edward Snowden revealed. Ubiquitous cameras are normal. Subverted freedoms are normal. Effective public dissent is now controlled by police, whose intimidation is normal. The traducing of noble words like “democracy”, “reform”, “welfare” and “public service” is normal. Prime ministers who lie openly about lobbyists and war aims are normal...
 
Recalling America’s Founders: Honor and Duty in a Dark Age: A talk by Mark Weber | Paul Eisen
  Many times over the years I’ve been asked a question that’s been put in many different ways – a question that comes down to this: “What’s the use?” I’m asked: “How can you still have hope for America? I don’t see any reason for optimism, so why carry on? The forces we’re fighting are just too powerful. Compared to the vast wealth, power and influence of our enemies, our resources are pitiful. Everywhere you look in America, things are getting steadily worse. The situation is hopeless, so why bother?”..
 
Prison Guard, by Samih Al-Qasim | Snordster/YouTube.
  One of the finest modern poems that always reminds me that the zionazis are building a wall that imprisons themselves, not the Palestinians...
 
Israel Declares Sanctions on Europe | Roi Tov
...Israel's strategy is changing rapidly. For many years, the official viewpoint was "two countries for two peoples," attempting to create a two-states solution of the conflict with Palestine. Yet, three out of three Prime Ministers who attempted to sign a permanent agreement ended their terms violently. Rabin was assassinated with the Court-proven help from the Shin Beth secret police, Sharon suffered a sudden stroke and was clumsily evacuated to the hospital by ambulance during the rush hour while administered a wrong drug. Olmert was wrongly impeached. Lucky coincidences? The Shin Beth knows that this is not the case..
 
A Coiled Viper, Waiting to Strike: The NSA is the Spearhead for American Fascism, by Norman Pollack | CounterPunch
...Think of it, POTUS identified closely with the most alarming violation of American civil liberties in recent history, placing him in the same crowd with Joe McCarthy, A. Mitchell Palmer, the Alien-and-Sedition forces going back to the late 18th century, a dishonorable pantheon of those contemptuous of freedom of thought, privacy of the individual, safeguards inherent in the Constitution for protection against unlawful searches and seizures...
 
EU probes reports that Israel blocked aid | MCW News
  The European Union has raised concerns over media reports that Israel has blocked the EU from aiding tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank in retaliation to a ban on financial assistance to Israeli organisations in the occupied territories. The EU imposed its restrictions last week, citing its frustration over the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in territory captured by Israeli forces in the 1967 Middle East War. The new guidelines render Israeli entities operating there ineligible for EU grants, prizes or loans, beginning next year...
 
The Trial of Bradley Manning as Seen by a Career Soldier, by Timothy Gatto | OpEd News
...It must have taken a supreme act if courage for Bradley Manning to finally release his information to the only people that seemed to care what was happening in Iraq, Wikileaks. Now he finds himself in front of a Court Martial after being tortured for months by the military by being forced to remain in solitary confinement for months, while remaining naked, in a cold dark cell, being treated like an animal in direct violation to all military law and the Geneva Conventions in regard to treatment of prisoners. Most of his defense has been deemed by the people in charge of his Court Martial to be inadmissible, and this leaves him defenseless against the power of the United States military...
 
No Peace Process Til U.S. Becomes “Honest Broker” Not “Israel’s Lawyer” | MJ Rosenberg
...The Palestinians cannot trust the United States to be an impartial mediator, far from it. Even beyond the fact that the U.S. official expected to be chosen as mediator, Ambassador Martin Indyk, was long affiliated with AIPAC and then with the think-tank it created, the Washington Institute For Near East Policy, is the simple fact that the United States has unambiguously taken Israel’s side for decades. The Palestinians understand the role of the Israel lobby in keeping Congress in line behind Israel, with Congress doing the job of making sure the administration doesn’t stray...
 
Edward Snowden’s Disclosures Have Put a Target on the Patriot Act, by Matthew Fleischer | Take Part
...More than a month after the initial Snowden-mania, more-nuanced perspectives have come into focus, and the implications of the former contractor’s whistleblowing have begun to receive serious consideration. For seemingly the first time in recent memory, lawmakers—rather than progressive media usual suspects—are seriously challenging the security and surveillance practices of the United States...
 
Religion, trickery and the propagation of falsehoods | Redress Information & Analysis
  The propagation of falsehoods is the weapon of the ignorant and the bankrupt. Those who fight for genuine causes need not resort to deception to win support. They have one big weapon on their side: the truth. Consequently, when a protagonist resorts to falsehoods and deception as a weapon, this casts a huge shadow on the legitimacy of their cause. One such group of pretenders is Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood...
 
What basic logic suggests to me about the situation in Egypt | The Vineyard of the Saker
  I was just listening to the latest news out of Egypt about the hundred or so people killed today and I kept wondering what kind of convoluted logic would be used to blame it on the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  And, sure enough, I heard one pundit saying that the demonstrators were responsible because they were not peaceful but armed.  Another commentator then admitted that holding the democratically elected president in jail was not an option and that new elections should be organized in which Morsi should be allowed to participate. Does any of that look totally crazy to you or is that only me?..
 
The Role of Powerful Political Lobbies and Moneyed Interests in America: Kourosh Ziabari interviews Michael Parenti | Global Research
..The mainstream media in the United States is owned and controlled by a few corporate conglomerates. This pattern of ownership and its resulting control leaves very little room for critical and challenging journalism of the kind that exposes the hypocrisies and duplicities of the ruling moneyed interests. These moneyed interests claim to bring us prosperity when in fact they bring us poverty. They claim a dedication to democracy when in fact they propagate oligarchic dominance in this country and in many others. They profess a dedication to peace while bombing and invading various countries that dare to step out of line...
 
Elias Harb Interviews Archbishop Theodosios Hanna: Israel seeks to control the Middle East | Intifada Palestine
  Archbishop Theodosios Hanna of Sebastia, Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem said in a new statement that all those people who bear arms against the Syrian people and the Army are only tools who serve the Israeli project , their aim is to divide and control the Arab states in the Middle East. Archbishop Hanna also said that it does not matter who these people are, and what are the names and affiliations of those, who bear weapons against the Syrian Army and the Syrian people, they all are just mere pawns that serve Israel and its plan to divide and conquer the control above the Arab region...
 
Saudi Arabia signs deal with Israeli army to buy weapons for militants fighting Syria govt | PressTV
  Israeli Radio reported that Saudi Arabia signed a 50-million-dollar deal with Israeli army to supply the foreign-backed militants with old Israeli military equipment and arms. The reports added that the weapons include different kinds of anti-tank missiles, military vehicles, artillery equipment, and night vision devices. Other sources have quoted Takfiri sources as saying that the Israeli weapons will be used to maintain control over Aleppo and its surrounding areas in northern Syria. The report came as The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported last month that Saudi Arabia has provided the Takfiri militants with Russian-made Konkurs anti-tank missiles...



Jul 27, 2013
Prometheus Among the Cannibals: A Letter to Edward Snowden, from Rebecca Solnit | Huffington Post
  Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you. I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety - if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served...
 
Test your Holocaust knowledge | Paul Eisen
  A clever educational tool. See how you do...
 
Golan Height Druzes: When Oranges become Apples | Roi Tov
...A long time passed since. The beautiful and peaceful villages are growing and need new houses. They are Syrians. Israel doesn't give them construction permits. In despair, they entered lands illegitimately confiscated from them and now are being sued for that. Where is United Nations Security Council? Why is it controlled by Western regimes supportive of Zionism? Why can Syria be attacked by the West and Israel not? Why can Iraq, and Mali, and Libya be attacked by the West and Israel not? Why do Western governments claim that Justice is relative?
 
The Turkey Under the Table, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom
...If you have a conflict between two parties who are like a wolf and a lamb, you must have a third party in the room, just to make sure that Party 1 does not have Party 2 for dinner while the talks are going on. The balance of power between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is like that between a wolf and a lamb. In almost every respect – economic, military, political - Israel has a vast advantage...
[The old warhorse, a progressive Zionist (never mind that it’s an oxymoron), still thinks it’s possible for a Jewish State – a “democracy” no less – to exist in Palestine for the long term without the virtual destruction of the Palestinian people, or, eventually, the destruction of Israel and yet another expulsion - well deserved in this case. The Dalai Lama has spent most of his life trying to convince the Chinese that that the Tibetans have a right to an autonomous province within China. Two very good people on a  fool’s errand – they both underestimated the extent of the pathology they were dealing with. The best parable to apply in both cases is the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog]
 
Peace Talks: New Chapter, Old Book, by Robert Jensen | CounterPunch
...the situation in Palestine and Israel is as grim as ever. Decades of Israeli expansion and the Palestinian leadership’s failure to build a vibrant movement to challenge that expansion (or, perhaps, to let such a movement emerge on its own) have narrowed the prospects for a just peace. And in the background lurks the United States, still the major impediment to progress as long as it offers Israel nearly unconditional support for the occupation. More than ever, the case for international law and human rights needs to be made clearly, but the conditions for that dialogue deteriorate...
 
US and allied spying and control vs freedom, by Graham Peebles | Redress Information & Analysis
...Ellsberg expresses the widespread view that “there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago”. While Snowden may well have technically committed a criminal act, justice and the law are often unrelated terms. As Martin Luther King says in “Letter from a Birmingham jail”, “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law”..
 
Ex-IMF chief to be tried for pimping | MCW News
  Former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn will face trial on pimping charges along with 12 others in connection with an alleged prostitution ring at a Lille hotel, the local prosecutors' office said. Investigation judges had determined on Friday that Strauss-Kahn should be judged by a criminal court in the case involving sex parties which he has acknowledged attending. Prosecutors had in June called for the charges of "aggravated pimping as part of an organised gang" against Strauss-Kahn, 64, who has been under investigation in the case since 2012, to be dropped, but investigating magistrates have decided he should face trial.
[Strauss-Kahn is such a perfect poster boy for the powers that be. But he got caught with his fingers in the pussy jar.]
 
Flashback: Netanyahu On ‘The Jew’, Herzl and Tikkun Olam | Gilad Atzmon
  Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a fascinating speech yesterday at the memorial ceremony of Theodor Herzl in Jerusalem (27.6.2013). ‘The Jew’, stated Netanyahu, is the saver and the liberator of humanity. He and she are the true meaning of progress as conveyed by the notion of ‘Tikkun Olam’ (fixing the world).  ‘The Jew’, according to the Israeli PM, is the emblem of philosophical, ideological, spiritual, scientific and aesthetic innovation...
 
Obama Falsely Asserts He Is Mandela Follower, by Sherwood Ross | OpEd News
  Just as President Obama disgracefully used Martin Luther King's Bible at his Inauguration to tie himself to the great pacifist civil rights leader, so this totalitarian-minded, warmonger president claimed in South Africa Sunday to have been inspired by Nelson Mandela, whose legacy  he said "we must all honor in our own lives."  Coming from an American president linked so intimately to the CIA as is Mr. Obama, this declaration is laughable. It was the CIA, after all, that fingered Mr. Mandela, then head of the African National Congress, to BOSS, the country's secret police...
[Black man speak with forked tongue]
 
Hoax exposed: Gen. Dempsey rebuffs speculations he called for Syria raids | PressTV
...Thousands of news and conspiracy sites misquote General Dempsey as advocating “brute force” against Syria and favoring use of “kinetic strikes.” In truth, the calls for such strikes came from Senator John McCain of Arizona, a member of the Israeli lobby who met with Al Qaeda leaders in Syria in late May, 2013...
[To put it quite simply, McCain is a psychopath, or sociopath, like so many of them. That might seem like hyperbole, but they do tend to rise to the top in this upside down world.]
 
Egyptians did what Germans should’ve done long ago, by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat | Pyramidion
...Dissatisfied by the incompetent Muslim Brotherhood ‘MB’ governance and alarmed by their blatant agenda to turn Egypt into another Somalia or Afghanistan, Egyptians revolted again. But this time they rallied in millions across the country not against a failing president or government, but against a fascist group that peddles religion, feeds on ignorance and prejudice and craves authoritarian power and in doing that the MB respects no civil norms and leaves nothing behind except chaos, violence and ruins of a nation. I really don’t care much if the whole world called it a military coup, though it’s not, as long as Egypt rids itself of the nightmare of the Islamists and the MB rule...
 
Syrian rebellion devours itself – literally! by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today
  What happened to the “Syrian rebels” ? Even the Western media, no friend of Bashar al-Assad, admits that more and more rebels are accepting Assad’s offer of amnesty and turning in their guns. So what went wrong? The Syrian rebellion devoured itself – literally. According to informed sources, the Syrian rebels have been eating each other...
 
What John Kerry Really Did in Vietnam, by Jeffrey St. Clair | CounterPunch
...“The fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, told me –30 years ago when he was still CNO [chief naval officer in Vietnam] that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass, by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets. “We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control”, the admiral said...
 
Another Journalist with Children in the Israeli Military, by Alison Weir | CounterPunch
...It would appear from this pervasive pattern that many of the owners, editors, and journalists who determine U.S. reporting on Israel-Palestine believe that normal ethics requirements don’t apply in regard to Israel. This situation holds serious consequences for the American public. American taxpayers give Israel over $8 million per day (more than to any other country) and, as a result, most of the world views Americans as responsible for Israeli actions, exposing us to escalating risks...
[Hey, dey don’t call it the Jew York Times for nuttin]
 
Thousands of Syrian police who joined the rebels are on U.S. payroll | World Tribune
  The United States has been paying thousands of Syrian police officers who deserted the regime of President Bashar Assad. Officials said the administration of President Barack Obama has approved tens of millions of dollars to pay the salaries of police officers who joined the rebels. They said the officers were working to maintain order in rebel-controlled territory, mostly in northern Syria...


Jul 26, 2013

Bolshevism and Zionism Are Ideologically Indistinguishable, by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today
  In his 1920 essay “Zionism vs. Bolshevism: The Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Winston Churchill made the statement that Bolshevism both ideologically and politically “gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads” and slowly led them to the slaughter house, where more than ten million innocent peasants eventually lost their precious lives in less than five years. Zionism ideologically and politically seeks to complete the work that Bolshevism had started...
[As always, a superb piece from Jonas. Read the comments too, also Zionism and Nazism: Is there a difference that makes a difference?]
 
Syria: disillusioned rebels drift back to take Assad amnesty | Intifada Palestine
  The Daily Telegraph newspaper published an article today talked about the disillusionment that “FSA” fighters faced; they yearn for safety in army-held areas as Extremists seized their own “revolution”. Disillusioned by the Islamist twist that the “revolution” in Syria has taken, exhausted after more than two years of conflict and feeling that they are losing, growing numbers of rebels are signing up to a negotiated amnesty offered by President  Assad...
 
Egypt: a Friend's View | Shamireaders
  Our friends stand on both sides of the Egyptian divide, some condemn and some support the coup/revolution. This is a view of Egyptian developments by my friend and my Swedish publisher Hesham Bahari, of Christian Egyptian origin, an enlightened man, who wholeheartedly supports the revolution. Some of his arguments appear almost incredible, but not all...
[A good read for those trying to follow what's happening in Egypt]
 
National Security State, Advent of Fascism: Obama’s Fanaticism Over Secrecy, Surveillance and Repression, by Norman Pollack | CounterPunch
  If the US were not engaged in actions and policies that are illegal, immoral, aggressive, war-provoking, and therefore, it is fair to say, evil, the issue of leaks would never arise, there being no rhyme or reason for them and the increasingly widening effects of government’s stringent, escalating, and still counting,  countermeasures,  for  suffocating a public consciousness of wrongdoing through a campaign of massive surveillance in order to prevent further revelations and ensure continued societal blindness to...
 
Nasrallah: EU giving "legal cover" for an Israeli war on Lebanon | Al Akhbar
  The European Union is paving the way for Israel to justify a war on Lebanon, Hezbollah’s secretary general said late Wednesday, two days after the 28 member states issued a decision to put Hezbollah’s military wing on its terror list. "EU countries should know they are giving legal cover for Israel to launch any war on Lebanon because Israel can claim it is waging war on terrorists,”..
 
The Lobby Never Sleeps, by Philip Giraldi | Intifada Palestine
  Developments in Syria and Egypt have been a godsend for Israel. The bloodshed and political turmoil have meant that Netanyahu can continue with business as usual, with no one paying much attention to what is going on as he dismembers Palestine. Amidst all the fun and games, Israel launched a new air attack on Syria, the fourth such incident this year and an act of war, which was scarcely reported in the media while Netanyahu characteristically signaled his contempt for the Obama Administration by announcing a new settlement expansion just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived to jump start a new round of pointless peace talks with the Palestinians...
 
The Epic Fail of the Israeli State, by Yukon Jack | Veterans Today
  Israel is many things to many people, but it is a failed state. It can not exist unless it shamelessly wages war on everyone not Jewish inside and outside her borders, she has failed because she was stopped in the autumn of 2012, she reached a limit, where her military enforcement arm, the United States refused to wage war against Iran...
 
The Insanity of Anti-Iran Propaganda, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America
..The same out-of-context, demonization propaganda is now in full swing with regard to the recent tragic terrorist bombing in the coastal Bulgarian town of Burgas that targeted Israeli tourists. The difference is that such propaganda, unlike that of U.S. presidential campaign mudslinging, is a matter of life and death and establishes disgusting falsehoods as facts that race around the internet and the world, forever defining the narrative, obscuring the truth, and perpetuating pervasive mythologies that permeate our already skewed discourse on the issues of Iran, Israel, U.S. foreign policy and, now, the Burgas bus bombing...
 
The Deceptive Appeal of the Responsibility to Protect, by John Allen Gay | The National Interest
  The Working Group on the Responsibility to Protect.. has just released its final report to much fanfare. The document.. is a robust long-form exegesis and defense of the R2P concept; given the rise of R2P proponents within the Obama administration of late, it is well timed and deserves examination. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former presidential envoy to Sudan Richard Williamson attempt to ease critics’ worries that R2P is a recipe for endless American “police actions” divorced from core U.S. interests. Yet this is a straw man, and they fail to address R2P’s real problem—its disregard for national sovereignty, which gives it potential to create, rather than ease, instability...
 
Roger Waters, The Pig & The Star of David | Gilad Atzmon
  Once again a pig-shaped balloon with Star of David alongside other ‘horrid’ symbols was integrated into Roger Water’s concert. Some Jews are very upset...
[The comments make good reading]
 
The Wizard of Shas Returns | Roi Tov
  Following a four-month delay in the elections of the Chief Rabbis, those were elected hurriedly on July 24, 2013. For the second time in 2013, Prime Minister Netanyahu emerged from an electoral process battered and weakened. This time he took down with him The Jewish Home, the Religious Zionists, a party that is a key coalition partner...
 
By Abandoning Our Faith and Knowledge — We Muslims Are Responsible for the Implosion of Our World, by Mohamed Khodr | Veterans Today
...We as Muslims have only ourselves to blame for the state of chaos, anarchy, violence, terrorism, civil wars, assassinations, wide corruption, intolerance of others, and wide acceptance.. of the most greedy, self serving tyrants in the world who’ve sold themselves, our land, our resources to the enemies of Islam so that they may preserve their rule. While like spoiled children they splurge and waste our wealth on worldly pleasures and invest in western economies, the Muslim world lives in poverty, hunger, illiteracy, sickness, corruption, injustice, vast unemployment, lack of housing, desperation, hopelessness, and the largest proportion of world refugees in need of the most basic necessities of life...  
[One doesn’t have to be a Muslim to see the essential truth here]
 
Daniel McGowan: Victimized by US Injustice | Stephen Lendman
..."actions were not those of a terrorist but of a concerned young man who was deeply troubled by the destruction of Oregon's beautiful old-growth forests and the dangers of genetically modified trees." He should have gotten nothing more than a reprimand, perhaps a suspended sentence, probation, and an appropriate fine. Not in America. Police states don't operate that way. For sure not this one. Cruel and unusual punishment is standard practice...
[Ever since the ZioNazis took over the Empire this sort of thing has become routine]
 
The Two Faux Democracies Threaten Life On Earth | Paul Craig Roberts
  Amitai Etzioni has raised an important question: “Who authorized preparations for war with China?” Etzioni says that the war plan is not the sort of contingency plan that might be on hand for an improbable event. Etzioni also reports that the Pentagon’s war plan was not ordered by, and has not been reviewed by, US civilian authorities. We are confronted with a neoconized US military out of control endangering Americans and the rest of the world...
 
Ex-US commander: “I paid a military security price” for American support of Israel | Redress Information & Analysis
  The United States establishment is waking up to the fact that Israel is bad for America and bad for the American people’s security. Just over three years General David Petraeus, then commander of the US Central Command, whose area of responsibility covers the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, shocked Israel and its lobbyists and underlings in Washington when he told the US Senate Armed Services Committee that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.. Now Petraeus’s assessment has been echoed almost word for word by his successor...
 


Jul 25, 2013

Dempsey Offers Menu, Prices, Caveats: Syrian Regime Change A-La-Carte, by Jason Hirthler | CounterPunch
  After committing a half dozen acts of war across the Middle East in recent years, we’re now treated to the absurd spectacle of an American general warning us of the dangers of committing an act of war. On Monday, U.S. General Martin Dempsey starkly outlined options for military action in Syria in a letter to the Senate, ruefully adding a few caveats about costs and collateral damage that triggered some chest-thumping histrionics in the Senate...
 
US Military Plans Direct Intervention in Syria, by Alex Lantier | Global Research
  The original justification for the Syrian war—that it was a humanitarian struggle to defend a democratic uprising of the Syrian people—is so nakedly exposed that the US and its European allies barely bother to repeat it. They recklessly armed Al Qaeda-linked forces like the Al Nusra Front and promoted a “moderate” stable of CIA assets and regime turncoats, hoping to topple Assad. While the Syrian people faced an onslaught of US-backed gangs and militias, the media and bourgeois “left” praised these forces as revolutionary fighters for democracy. This criminal policy is now in shambles...
 
The best idea humanity has ever had | Charter for Compassion
  The Charter for Compassion is a document that transcends religious, ideological, and national differences. Supported by leading thinkers from many traditions, the Charter activates the Golden Rule around the world. The Charter for Compassion is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems...
[This may seem naïve, utopian, even a bit silly to our jaded minds, but it's initiatives like this that may yet help bring about a sane society in which wisdom and compassion are the norm rather than the rare exception. Despite appearances, it's not that far a stretch.]
 
Just come with me, by Nahida | Poetry for Palestine
  I want to take you out...
[This is the way we naturally are, before being corrupted by our families and societies]
 
House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk surveillance, by Spencer Ackerman | The Guardian
  Congressional opposition to the NSA's bulk surveillance on Americans swelled on Tuesday as the US House prepared to vote on restricting the collection of US phone records and a leading Senate critic blasted a "culture of misinformation" around government surveillance...
 
So, Russia is thinking of banning World War II revisionism | Paul Eisen
  Well, before the Jewish power-merchants get too excited they might reflect on recent Russian history - and its Jewish dimension...
[Excellent video by David Duke. He's very good on the Jewish question.]
 
Hezbollah gets “terrorist” label for fighting al-Qaeda, by Kevin Barrett | PressTV
  On Monday, the European Union formally labeled Hezbollah a “terrorist” group. Why? Because Hezbollah has gone to war with al-Qaeda. But wait a minute - wasn't al-Qaeda supposed to be the worst terrorist group in the world? Isn't the West leading a “global war on terror” whose main target is al-Qaeda? Shouldn't the West be thanking Hezbollah, and showering it with rewards, for turning against global terrorist enemy number one? Apparently not. Al-Qaeda is now the West's darling in Syria. So anybody who resists al-Qaeda - as Hezbollah recently decided to do - is a “terrorist.” The irony doesn't get any thicker than that...
 
Netanyahu, Abbas to Resume ‘Peace Process’ that Never Was, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
...Since the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2010, the US has suffered many blows. Its status as the uncontended superpower is in shambles, and its allies have been caught in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. Despite attempts at meddling, enticing some parties with money, and inciting violence against others, there are no tangible outcomes that promise to take the region back to an era of ‘political stability’, as in the same old status quo, that of political stagnation under US stewardship. To repair its image, the US has to get reengaged in the Middle East...
 
Fearlessness in Pursuit of the Truth: The Betrayal of Helen Thomas, by Barbara Lubin and Danny Muller | CounterPunch
...In a world where politicians like George Bush, Dick Cheney and Rahm Emmanuel are celebrated for their reputations for expletive laden tirades, can we really pretend that Helen’s comments were so shocking or offensive that they were worthy of forced retirement?  In a world where we hear the daily drivel from presidents promoting wars of madness with lies and straight faces, how did we let such vitriol rain down on her?..
 
Kafka’s America: Secret Courts, Secret Laws, and Total Surveillance, by John W. Whitehead | Antiwar
  In a bizarre and ludicrous attempt at “transparency,” the Obama administration has announced that it asked a secret court to approve a secret order to allow the government to keep spying on millions of Americans, and the secret court has granted its request. Late on Friday, July 19, 2013, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) – a secret court which operates out of an undisclosed federal building in Washington, DC – quietly renewed an order from the National Security Agency to have Verizon Communications hand over hundreds of millions of Americans’ telephone records to government officials...
 
Wyden on NSA Domestic Surveillance at Center for American Progress | U.S. Senator Ron Wyden
  On July 23, 2013, Senator Wyden's gave remarks on NSA domestic surveillance and the PATRIOT Act at the Center for American Progress. In his speech Wyden warns that "if we don't seize this unique moment in history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will all live to regret it."..
[Politicians in Congress like Senator Wyden are like rare tropical birds flying through a firing range. They tend to have short life spans, politically or otherwise.]
 
Al-Qaeda-linked extremists hold 200 Kurdish civilians hostage as ‘live shield’ in Syria | RT News
...Syrian Kurd fighters captured a rebel leader, or emir, identified as Abu Musab. In response, Al-Qaeda extremists abducted 500 civilians, including woman and children. “They started to kill innocent people by cutting off their heads,” the statement read. “Kurds had to free Abu Musab in exchange for an agreement to release hostages.” Despite the Kurdish fighters agreed to release Abu Musab in exchange for people, about 200 people are still in the hands of extremists. The commander was freed as agreed...
[Our brave, freedom loving allies acting in their usual fashion] 
 
Political Assassination and the Crimes of War: The “Unnatural Death” of Dr. David Kelly, by Dr. David Halpin | Global Research
  A bearded man of avuncular appearance had started early in replying to e-mails on the 17th July 2003.  He was in the office of his pretty cottage, with the scent of roses telling of an English summer.  The little village of Southmoor was stirring. He was to send over 80 via one of five hard drives and mostly in reply.  Some would be encrypted because he was writing to friends and colleagues who like him shared secrets in the  field of “WMDs”.  And some would be human and ordinary as from a father of three daughters.  He had delighted in seeing a new born foal and arranged to take his daughter Rachel down the village that Thursday evening to see young life together...
 
The Deeper Meaning of Mass Spying in America, by James Petras | The OtherSite
...The issues raised by this vast secret police apparatus and its penetration into and control over civil society, infringing on the citizens freedom of expression, go far beyond mere ‘violations of privacy’, as raised by many legal experts. Most civil libertarians focus on the violations of individual rights, constitutional guarantees and the citizen’s privacy rights. These are important legal issues and the critics are right in raising them. However, these constitutional–legal critiques do not go far enough; they fail to raise even more fundamental issues; they avoid basic political questions...
 
Say Hello To The Jewish world lobby | Gilad Atzmon
  Ynet reports today that the Knesset is about to form a “Jewish world lobby”..
[It would be nice to think that eventually such efforts would bankrupt them, but alas they have trillions. And soon they’ll have all that money and no place to go.]
 
Syria’s Assad seeks Israeli permission to set up sectarian rump state | Redress Information & Analysis
...There is much that is ugly about the Syrian armed opposition – Salafis, Wahhabis, jihadists, Muslim Brotherhood. It is an ugliness that has been allowed to grow thanks to the United States and Europe whose prevarication has allowed the Islamists to build up their dominance and whom one suspects are not averse to the Syrian civil war lingering on endlessly, as long as it doesn’t spill over into neighbouring states or threaten Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights...
 
Jim Dean Debates Choudary – Radical Salafist Cleric | Veterans Today
  I got a call Sunday morning about doing this Press TV show, debating Choudary on Syria. So it was a Christmas in July for me with Santa coming early.. The longer commentary format gave me room to get some needed licks on the Salafist Jihadi crazies and their international supporters, which incredibly include us as our Gulf proxies are funding and arming these religious thugs...
[Zionism gave rise to Salafism, which only existed in the form of the Wahhabi crazies of Saudi Arabia until a few decades ago – it’s just good old action, reaction.]
 


Jul 24, 2013

In Defense of 21st Century Judaism and Israel, by Johnny Punish | Veterans News
...if one challenges the policy of the nation state of Israel, one is branded an anti-Semite. Yes, it’s non-sense. And yes there are millions of well-intentioned uninformed Americans who buy in to this weird disposition. It’s batshit crazy, I know. But that’s how powerful the main stream media can be over time when it sells an agenda dominated by a ruling elite who have an interest in perpetuating bigotry, racism, hate, war, and more war. It’s a game of global money power politics at the highest level with an extreme dose of contempt for humanity...
[Kudos - an excellent summation of transcendental common sense on the subject]
 
Letter to John Kerry – dishonest “peace” broker, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
  Well John-boy, how do you think history will judge you? The whole world has heard about your brilliant breakthrough – persuading trigger-happy US-subsidized Israel and the strangulated, unarmed Palestinians to agree “in principle” to resume the one-sided negotiations abandoned three years ago. The reason they were abandoned, you’ll remember, was simple. The talks were fundamentally bogus, pursued in bad faith and going nowhere, just like all the other talks over the last 20 years. It was talk, talk, talk while the Israelis build, build, build their illegal settlements, illegal annexation wall and Jews-only highways...
Read more...
 
Caving to White House Pressure: Livni Squeals, Kerry Deals and the EU Picks Up the Tab, by Franklin Lamb | ICH
  It was reportedly a hectic and intense past weekend in Washington and London according to an emailed report from a Capitol Hill source, as the Obama and Cameron administrations tracked down and button-holed the leaders of the 28 European Union delegations gathering in Brussels to finally vote on whether Hezbollah’s ‘military wing’ should be sanctioned, by labeling it a “terrorist” organization. Several conversations took peace between Israel’s Tzipi Livni and the US State Department. As of last Thursday the project was by no means a done deal...
[Who’s your daddy?]
 
War against Iran, Iraq AND Syria? by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
  Amidst the incessant rumble in the (Washington) jungle about a possible Obama administration military adventure in Syria, new information has come to light. And what a piece of Pipelineistan information that is. Picture Iraqi Oil Minister Abdelkarim al-Luaybi, Syrian Oil Minister Sufian Allaw, and the current Iranian caretaker Oil Minister Mohammad Aliabadi getting together in the port of Assalouyeh, southern Iran, to sign a memorandum of understanding for the construction of the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, no less...
 
Look who is training terrorists! |  SHOAH
 
Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War, by Cory Morningstar | Wrong Kind of Green
  The Ivy League bourgeoisie who sit at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex will one day be known simply as charismatic architects of death. Funded by the ruling class oligarchy, the role they serve for their funders is not unlike that of corporate media. Yet, it appears that global society is paralyzed in a collective hypnosis – rejecting universal social interests, thus rejecting reason, to instead fall in line with the position of the powerful minority that has seized control, a minority that systematically favours corporate interests...
 
Should the EU designate Hezbollah a terrorist organisation? Tzipi Livni vs. Sami Ramadani | The Guardian
...Attempts to brand Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation are not only futile, but fly in the face of the facts of this movement and its history. Like all genuine resistance movements, the Lebanese resistance, led by Hezbollah, was born as a reaction to occupation. And like all successful resistance movements, it draws its strength from the backing of the overwhelming majority of the occupied people...
[On the one side an exercise in hasbara drenched in hypocrisy; on the other a straightforward and honest analysis. Unfortunately, most people have been so brainwashed by the Masters of Deception they can’t tell which is which.]
 
From Postmodernism to Postsecularism by Eric Walberg | Clarity Press
  This work is a logical continuation of Walberg's earlier book, Postmodern Imperialism, looking more closely at the Islamic project since the founding of Islam in the seventh century. It addresses the parallels with past crises in Islamic civilization, which gave impetus to reforms and renewal from within, relying on the Quran and hadiths, and interprets recent history from the viewpoint of the Muslim world, how it sees the imposition on it of western systems and beliefs, and how it views the new shift in forces that the Iranian revolution and Arab Spring portend...
 
The Israeli media’s Judaeo-centric syndrome | Redress Information & Analysis
...Skimming through other Israeli and Jewish media, from the Ynet news website, through the repulsive Israel Hayom newspaper, to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, you’ll find one consistent theme: Jews are at the centre of almost everything and are virtually the only people who suffer from discrimination and prejudice. What’s even sadder is the fact that these Israeli and Jewish media are touting this line in English, presumably believing that English-speaking peoples are blind, deaf, dumb and stupid and, therefore, can’t see for themselves that the reality is very different...
 
Sabotaging the Egyptian Revolution, by Dr. Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine
  The June 30th Egyptian revolution had been over-analyzed, scrutinized, criticized, mislabeled, and distorted by many writers, analysts, politicians, and governments. This was a national Intifada (uprising) through which Egyptians had expressed their will in purely democratic means. Despite the military interference, in response to popular calls, to preserve peace and to prevent bloodshed, calling this revolution a military coup, and accusing the American administration of orchestrating it, is a great distortion of facts and is an insult to the 37 million Egyptians who demonstrated in every city against the Muslim Brotherhood’s semi-dictatorial power grabbing rule...
 
What's sauce for the goose... | Paul Eisen
...Joe Lecorbeau, already known – and prosecuted – for his anti-conformist and pro-revisionist productions of re-worked popular culture images (taken from the cinema, advertising and... Charlie Hebdo), has come out with a parody of the current Charlie Hebdo cover: his "Shoah Hebdo" presents the Talmud, the sacred book of the Jews, as "magical", capable, in the context of a "miracle at Auschwitz", of transforming water into gas and gas into gold...
 
Detroit bankruptcy: American dream demise, by Kevin Barrett | PressTV
...Detroit was the epicenter of the biggest social earthquake in history: The creation of an empowered, educated middle class that included the majority of the population, even manual laborers. Ironically, the man behind that social earthquake, Henry Ford, has in recent decades been reviled in the mainstream media and academy as an anti-Semite.. most of Ford’s claims about Jewish power in America were at least roughly accurate.. Henry Ford correctly claimed that global investment banking was largely run by a few outlandishly rich Jewish families. These plutocrats, he believed, were a threat to the general prosperity his new model of automobile factory had unleashed...
 
Indyk Returns as Kerry’s Chief Negotiator | Wallwritings
  Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to name Martin Indyk as the U.S. Representative to the Israel-Palestinian peace negotiation. Indyk has been around this peace talk track before. He belongs to a small group of Jewish diplomats who have specialized in Middle East negotiations. The same names come up with every new effort to reconcile Israel and the Palestinian Authority...
[Well, the Palestinians never stood a chance, not for the last 100 years or so. But the worm turns. As Rebbe Yeshua of Nazareth put it, the meek shall inherit the earth, maybe sooner than we think.]
 
Arafat vs. Chief Rabbis | Roi Tov
  On July 23, 2013, the candidates to Israel's Chief Rabbi woke up with a surprise. Advocate Loei Arafat, from Nazareth Illit, sent a letter to the Attorney General of Israel complaining about one of the candidates and demanding to know the Attorney General’s position on the racist words of the candidate. He also demanded this be imposed on the other candidates. This was wise; he put the Attorney General between a rock and a hard place. He must decide between accepting racism and declaring most candidacies illegitimate...
[Religious establishments do have a tendency to evolve into a theater of the absurd. It’s just politics. But when it comes to the goings on in Israel, oy weh iss mir.]
 
The Spotlight On Iran Darkens The World, by Dan Lieberman | Eurasia Review
  Iran has its political limitations, human rights violations, governance failures and domestic problems – all indefensible. Not a rational for excuse, but qualify each of the contemporary rights violations with case stories and quantify them with statistics, and Iran, in year 2013, is much less repressive compared to other nations whom the United States favors...
 
The Pentagon and the CIA Were Responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation
  One of the enduring U.S. myths from the Cold War is that communist Cuba, headed by Fidel Castro, and the Soviet Union were responsible for bringing the world to the brink of all-out nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The myth holds that the Soviets and Cubans were responsible for the crisis by basing Soviet offensive nuclear missiles 90 miles away from American shores, thereby precipitating the crisis that almost led to all-out nuclear war. The truth, however, is different from the myth...
 
The boycott Israel noose tightens | Redress Information & Analysis
  It’s been a bad month for Israel and a good month for justice – and there’s more to come...
 


Jul 23, 2013

On Leaks and Pseudo-Reality: The US’ Futile Search for ‘World Domination,’ by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
...While Al Jazeera’s leak translated into media debates regarding Pakistan’s own failures and its odd alliance with the US – which unabashedly continues to violate the country’s sovereignty – Snowden’s leaks are generating a global debate regarding the US’s persistent attempts at global meddling and domination despite its repeated setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its diminishing, once unchallenged role as a superpower...
 
Obama's arrest, Bush's trial | RT/YouTube
  "We'll get Bush in the US" the world's top war crimes prosecutor tells The Truthseeker after Dubya's deputies warn him against travel, lawyers file for Obama's arrest tomorrow when he hits South Africa, huge secret wars in America's name being masked from the folks funding them...
 
Israel’s doomed new international TV channel | Redress Information & Analysis
  In a desperate attempt to salvage what remains of its tarnished and rapidly deteriorating international reputation, Israel, together with its Zionist allies in Europe, has launched an international television channel broadcasting simultaneously in Arabic, English and French.. Israel can fool some people sometime but it can’t fool all the people all the time. The world has changed and it won’t buy Israel’s lies anymore, no matter how they are packaged...
 
Kerry’s Breakthrough: A Psychodrama | MJ Rosenberg
  Secretary of State Kerry is desperate to make an announcement of renewed talks, any talks. As ever, his #1 concern is looking good (literally and figuratively).  Prime Minister Netanyahu just wants Kerry off his back because he is anguished over the just-announced EU sanctions which will penalize Israeli institutions that support the settlement enterprise.  If the sanctions actually take effect, he will look weak and, even worse, he could be viewed as having produced the “delegitimization” of the occupation...
 
Legal status of the OPT | Diakonia
  According to article 42 of the Hague Regulations, a territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of a hostile army. In 1967, the Israeli army invaded the Palestinian territory and gained effective control over it. Since then, the West bank - including East Jerusalem - and the Gaza Strip constitute occupied territory...
 
Otherwise Occupied: EU’s guidelines for boycotting the settlements, by Amira Hass | Haaretz
  The Europeans can't figure out why Israel keeps confiscating Bedouin latrines...
 
Advocates of Iran Engagement Get Unexpected Boost, by Jim Lobe | Inter Press Service
  For the first time in many months, supporters of intensified diplomatic engagement with Iran appear to be gaining strength here. Following last month’s surprise election of Hassan Rouhani – widely considered the most moderate of a field of six candidates – as the Islamic Republic’s next president, the possibility of a deal over Iran’s nuclear programme has become more widely accepted. That was reflected most dramatically this week by the fact that 131 members of the hawkish, Republican-led House of Representatives – including a majority of House Democrats – signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to “reinvigorate U.S. efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement”..
 
European Jews have failed their duty, by Anshel Pfeffer | Haaretz
  The government is frantically grasping at straws to avert the European Union's decision that the West Bank and East Jerusalem must be recognized as occupied territories, rather than part of sovereign Israel, in every new agreement it signs with Israel. The only question that still remains is why anyone was even surprised. There was no shortage of warning signs about the EU's growing frustration at Israel's intransigence on the occupation issue, while the anti-settlement policy of all the significant EU members has been clear for years...
[You ain’t seen nothin’ yet – wait until the hammerlock the ZioNazis have on the West is fully broken and the situation flips]
 
America No Longer Has a Functioning Judicial System, by Washington's Blog | Global Research
...the Obama administration has previously claimed the power to be judge, jury and executioner in both drone and cyber-attacks.  This violates Anglo-Saxon laws which have been on the books in England and America for 800 years. The Executive Branch also presents “secret evidence” in many court cases.. sometimes even hiding the evidence from the judge who is deciding the case. Bush destroyed much of the separation of powers which made our country great.  But under Obama, it’s gotten worse...
 
From Turkey with Love: Another Israeli attack on Syria? by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | Global Research
...What has to be understood is that countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia conceal their collaboration with Tel Aviv due to the heavy opposition against the Israeli occupation of Palestine among their respective societies. What is also important to note is that a Turkish jet was downed in 2012 by Syria when it was following a route that was used by Israeli jets near the Syrian-Turkish border. The use of this aerial route by Tel Aviv has never really been challenged by Turkey. It is also part of an important pattern that shows how close the tactics used by Israel and Turkey against Syria are...
 
No Bed for History Revisionists | Gilad Atzmon
...it is pretty amusing to witness the political and cultural continuum between hard core Zionists and the so-called ‘liberals’. For more than a while, this unified lobby has been fighting freedom of speech and other elementary and precious rights. The anti-free speech call " Give no quarter" has been transformed now from a metaphor into a literal directive: no quarter, no room, no bed. This campaign against Irving’s ‘right for a bed’ is nothing short of hysteria...
 
Dome of the Rock Virtually Destroyed | Roi Tov
...On the evening before the fast, a press release was published by Har Kodesh, announcing its 3D virtual tour of the Temple Mount. The company's name means "Holy Mount." Out of respect to Muslim readers I won't quote the Hebrew reports except one that shows the trend: "In the tour, you will be able to tour Har HaBait ("Mount of the House," the Hebrew name of the Temple Mount) from nearby and see what those evil Muslims have done to our beautiful place, and what we can do to them now." A superb example of the charming Jewish interpretation of thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Lev 19:18)...
[One thing that I have discovered about the tribe to which I nominally belong is that Jewish morality applies only to relationships among Jews. This is particularly obvious in the Talmud, but is also apparent in their hypocritical rhetoric and behavior in nearly all matters. According to scripture, tradition and embedded in Jewish culture is the notion that only Jews are fully human – others exist only to serve them, and that's why they are routinely "victimized."]
 
As The Arabs See The Jews (1947) | Paul Eisen
  As ever, I am grateful to the Institute of Historical Review for this. Apart from its importance as a historical document and its relevance even today to a full understanding of the situation in Israel/Palestine, I love it for its beautiful writing - something I often notice in the Arab world...
 
On the death of Helen Thomas, by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis
  Helen Thomas was the most respected of the White House press corps. However, she made the mistake of wearing her feelings on her sleeve, so to speak, on a topic of deadly political sensitivity. She said out loud that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Europe. Palestine is “not German, its not Polish” she added. Unfortunately, the whole thing ended up on a YouTube video. Predictably, the American Zionists jumped all over her...
[The ZioNazis, of all people, frequently complain of being "offended." And they have the money and the clout to destroy the “offender,” which they predictably set out to do.]



Jul 22, 2013

How to Be a Rogue Superpower: A Manual for the Twenty-First Century, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch
...An employee of a private contractor working for the National Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America’s developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers, and jumps the nearest plane to Hong Kong.  His goal: to expose a vast surveillance structure built in the shadows in the post-9/11 years and significantly aimed at Americans.  He leaks some of the documents..  The response is unprecedented: an “international manhunt” (or more politely but less accurately, “a diplomatic full court press”) conducted not by Interpol or the United Nations but by the planet’s sole superpower, the very government whose practices the leaker was so intent on exposing...
 
The Last Fearless Reporter: There Will Never Be Another Helen Thomas, by Ralph Nader | CounterPunch
  Helen Thomas asked the toughest questions of Presidents and White House press secretaries and over her sixty-two year career took on sexism, racism and ageism. She endured prejudice against her ethnicity — Arab-American — and her breaking the taboo regarding the rights of dispossessed Palestinians. Her tenacious, forthright approach to journalism stands as a stark contrast to the patsy journalism of too many of her former self-censoring White House press colleagues. The remarkable combination of skills and perseverance will distinguish Helen Thomas as one of the giants of American journalistic history...
 
Syria, Insurgents attempt starving Aleppo into Surrender, by Christof Lehmann | NSNBC
  Overall military activities by foreign-backed insurgents in Syria have been relatively low in July, as they prepare a major campaign in August and September. However, insurgents have been trying to lay siege on Aleppo and are attempting to cut off the supply of food to its citizen. The attempt to create a humanitarian crisis to justify intervention is failing, as the Syrian Armed Forces continue making progress at weeding out arms caches and terrorist hideouts, and the government implements relief plans...
 
Helen Thomas, in Memorium, by Sami Jamil Jadallah | Veterans Today
  I wrote this essay back in 2011 immediately after Helen Thomas left the AP as senior White House correspondence and after the entire Washington jumped on the bandwagon to destroy an illustrious career of a very brave woman, who dared to ask difficult questions of presidents. Farewell Ms. Thomas, you are the bravest of them all… there are NO brave souls in corrupt, cowardly Washington. Rest in Peace, God Bless...
 
The Looting of Syria: Organ Trafficking, Women for Sex trade, Oil theft & more | YouTube
 
Netanyahu: This is how I broke the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians | YouTube
  "Americans are easy to maneuver" - Mr. Abbas agreed to go back to public negotiations with a pathological liar Private negotiations have been ongoing behind the scenes.  Public and private negotiations for the past 20 years produced
nothing tangible except increasing the number of colonial Jewish settlers in the West Bank from 200,000 in 1992 to 650,000 today and subcontracting Israeli security to Palestinian security officials...
 
The Clintons and the Rich Women, by Jeffrey St. Clair | CounterPunch
  President-in-waiting Hillary Clinton has never addressed her role in the midnight pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, who died this week. In fact, she’s rarely been asked her opinion on the free pass given to one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, a man who violated embargoes against Iran and South Africa and fled the country rather than face trial in what was billed as “the biggest tax evasion case in history.” The senator has variously said that she was “unaware” of the decision and “surprised” by it. When pressed, she merely cackles.
[I wonder if HRC tried out for the role of Lady MacBeth while she was at Wellesley – she would’ve been a shoo-in]
 
Netanyahu's crying wolf on Iran, by Gary Sick | CNN
  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not a subtle man. When he has an objective in mind, he is not above resorting to hyperbole, exaggeration, or apocalyptic scenarios to make his point. He has been crying wolf nearly as long as he has been in politics. For a very good reason: It works. And it works. And it works...
 
Why the U.S. Executive Branch Is a Clear and Present Danger to Our Democracy, by Fred Branfman | Alternet
  Edward Snowden's revelations have illuminated the most critical political issue facing America today: how an authoritarian U.S. Executive Branch which has focused on war abroad for the last 50 years now devotes increasing resources to surveillance, information management, and population control at home, posing a far greater threat to Americans' liberties than any conceivable foreign foe. Snowden's view of the basic issue is that "I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship,is recorded. That's not something I'm willing to live under."..
 
US Flouts the Rule of Law while Demanding That Other Countries Honor It, by Dave Lindorff | CounterPunch
  Ah, the rule of law. How often we hear our government leaders angrily demand that the rest of the world adhere to this sacred stricture, most recently as it demands that countries — even countries with which the US has signed no extradition treaty like Russia or China — honor the US charges leveled against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and send him to the US for trial. But the rule of law, in truth, means little to the US, which routinely thumbs its nose at the whole notion...



Jul 21, 2013

Breaking free, by Nahida | Poetry for Palestine
  Those who robbed Palestine have NO moral or ethical argument whatsoever, so they got into the habit of using two fig leaves to cover their nude morality: Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial. Accusing Palestinians or human right activists of being hateful, racist and antisemites because they EXPOSE and DETEST the ideology of SUPREMACY rampant amongst the occupiers of Palestine, yet simultaneously keeping MUTE about such supremacy within, is hypocrisy at best, and active deception at worst...
 
The Grand Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup, by Kevin Barrett/Esam Al-Amin | Veterans Today
...As the dust settles and the fog over the events unfolding across Egypt dissipates, the political scene becomes much clearer. Regardless of how one dresses the situation on the ground, the political and ideological battle that has been raging for over a year between the Islamist parties and their liberal and secular counterparts was decided because of a single decisive factor: military intervention by Egypt’s generals on behalf of the latter.. there is no doubt that President Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood committed political miscalculations and made numerous mistakes.. But in any civilized and democratic society, the price of incompetence or narcissism is exacted politically at the ballot box...
 
West to see backlash over its support for Takfiris, by Prof. Rodney Shakespeare | PressTV
  There are indications that, on the first day of Eid al-Fitr after the fasting of Ramadan has ended, Al-Qaeda and associated Al-Nusra Front elements will declare an independent Islamic state in the north of Syria. A black flag will be raised, checkpoints set up, and patrols will be everywhere. Anybody who by an item of dress or facial expression indicates disagreement with the regime will be whipped on the spot...
 
'New' document shows how US forces carriers to allow snooping, by Simon Sharwood | The Register
  Post-Snowden sensitivities to American spookery have been further inflamed after Australian website Crikey revealed a document that it says is a contract between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Department of Justice and submarine cable operator Reach that allows the US entities to tap Reach's cables for national security purposes...
 
80% Black Detroit Under Attack: Mr. Obama, Whose Side Are You On? by John Spritzler | New Democracy World
..The conflict over what will be the future of the mostly black, and almost entirely working class, people who live in Detroit is not hard to understand. It is a conflict between the few haves versus the many have-nots. They are the plutocracy that controls the United States.. They are the people to whom, directly or indirectly, the debts of the City of Detroit are owed. They are the people who own the banks and who bought the bonds talked about in the article cited above--in other words they are the people who loaned money to the City of Detroit in the expectation that the City would pay them back with interest by taking the money from Detroit's taxpayers...
 
How Whites Took Over America | Gilad Atzmon
  Watch this short cartoon and listen to the Hasbara Neocon projection expressed by the British colonial officers. 'Humanism' seems to be a pretext for genocide. Eventually, the indigenous  people are destroyed in the name of 'liberal ethics' and even 'anti racism.' It is obviously there to remind us of the Zionist crime in Palestine...
 
Strategic Sewage | Roi Tov
  The chances that the sewage system of Tel Aviv would be featured here a third time were slim.. Hebrew media are suspiciously obsessed with the topic; suspiciously so, until one remembers Prime Minister Netanyahu's nickname.. Having grown up in the USA and being more Republican than Israeli, he probably failed to see that most Hebrew speakers would analyze the word differently. "Bib" is a hole in the ground, "bib shofchin" is a sewage hole, though the second word is usually skipped. "Bibi" can be understood as "my sewage." Humbly, Hebrew media are secretly laughing at the stained, stinky leader...
 
Israel Hit with EU War Crimes Sanctions, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today
...The real impetus for increased pressure on Israel has been the failure of western economies and their disastrous currencies. The real subtext for scaling back support for Israel has been seen in the strangely unreported change in America’s deficits. During the last fiscal quarter, the United States has shown a net budget surplus for the first time in decades.  Two of the last three months have yielded surpluses in excess of $100 billion. The message has been clear to EU leaders, as America has drawn down its role as “policeman of the world,” the real security issue, potential economic collapse, has become less of a threat...
 
Helen Thomas: Dead at 92 | Stephen Lendman
  On July 20, headlines reported the news. The doyen of the White House House press corps was gone. After a long illness, the Gridiron Club and Foundation announced her passing. She ended decades covering presidential press conferences saying, "Thank you, Mr. President." She was special. She'll be sorely missed. She spoke truth to power. Too few like her remain. Washington targets those who do...
 
Enough Oz-Economics… Let’s Get Back To Kansas-Reality, by Ben Tanosborn | Zero Hedge
...Rampant predatory business and limitless unrestrained greed have made our free enterprise system during the past three decades nothing but a joke in bad taste… for our system is neither free, nor does it reward enterprise.  Ours has become a system of maximized spoils serving exclusively those who hold what has become the primordial factor of production or wealth creation: capital...
 
President Jimmy Carter: America Does not have a Functioning Democracy, by Timothy Gatto | OpEd News
  Today, former President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that the United States has ceased to be a Democratic nation. "America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time." Carter said speaking at a closed-door event in Atlanta.. The question of the 21st Century is when will the American people realize that their government that they portray as a shining example for the rest of the planet has morphed into an oligarchy that is run by the wealthy on the backs of its citizens?..
 
The Language of Power: Obama's "Humanitarian Hawk" & Israel's New Gladiator at the UN, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America
..Samantha Power, Obama's pick for next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, made clear that she will spend her time in the role much as her predecessor Susan Rice did: acting as Israel's consummate defender, fear-mongering about Iran, and opposing any move to champion Palestinian human rights or self-determination.. It is no surprise Washington hawks, Zionist ideologues and even the Israeli government are falling over themselves to sing her praises...
Read more...
 
The easy part, by Adam Keller | MCW News
  So it seems that he did it, after all. After so many mocked his mission and  prematurely proclaimed its demise (as did I in one of these blogs). The Israeli media accorded John Kerry the ultimate insult of hardly bothering to report on his repeated visits. And for their part, the settlers and their representatives in the cabinet and the Knesset did not regard Kerry and the prospect of  negotiations with the Palestinians as a threat. "So, let there be some talks. Nothing will come of it, anyway" said Naftali Bennett and his friends hardly more than a week ago...
 


Jul 20, 2013

Supporters of One Democratic State from both sides of the Green Line Meet in Ramallah | Yaffa ODS
  At the invitation of “The Popular Movement for One Democratic State on the Historic Land of Palestine,” some 25 of the activists of the Jaffa Group for One Democratic State came to Ramallah on Saturday, July 13, to a joint meeting. It was the first meeting of this kind bringing together supporters of a comprehensive democratic solution to the Palestinian cause from both sides of the Green Line. Members of the constituent body of The Popular Movement hosted the meeting, while the visiting delegation included political and social activists, veterans and youth, artists, academics, Arab and Jewish opponents of Zionism...
[Mighty oaks from little acorns grow]
 

Are Palestinian Students in Lebanon Being Pressured to Choose Kalashnikovs Over College? by Franklin Lamb | CounterPunch
...The choice for many Palestinian young men in Lebanon has come down to guns or education.  By force of Lebanese law and under threat of prison for violators, Palestinians are denied the elementary civil rights to work in more than 50 professions and are barred by a 2001 racist law from them or their families, more than six decades living as refugees in Lebanon, from even owning a home. Among Palestinian youth, unemployment rates hover around 70%, while refugee students are also discriminated against in admission to Lebanese state institutions of higher education, including the relatively low-tuition fees at a Lebanese University...
 
Convicted ex-CIA chief arrested in Panama | MCW News
  A former CIA station chief, convicted in Italy of kidnapping an Egyptian Muslim cleric, has been arrested in Panama, Italian and Panamanian officials have said. Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA chief in Milan, entered Panama, crossed the border into Costa Rica and was sent back to Panama where he was detained, according to an Italian official. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Panamanian police official said Seldon Lady had been arrested by Panama's border authorities and handed over to Interpol. The CIA declined to comment...
 
A Gift from Europe, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom
  On my 70th birthday, I received a gift from Yitzhak Rabin: he signed the document recognizing the existence of the Palestinian people, after many decades of denial. He also recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as its representative. I had demanded this, almost alone, for many years. Three days later, the Oslo agreement was signed on the White House lawn. This week I received another gift of similar magnitude, obviously in anticipation of my 90th birthday, which is due in less than two months...
[Hats off to a unique kind of individual – a righteous Zionist]

ProPublica and the Fear Campaign Against Iran, by Jim Lobe | LobeLog
  Last Thursday, the highly respected, non-profit investigative news agency ProPublica featured a 2,400-word article, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America”, by its award-winning senior reporter, Sebastian Rotella, who.. quotes the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Lt. Gen. James Clapper (ret.), as telling a Senate hearing last year that Iran’s alliances with Venezuela and other “leftist, populist, anti-U.S. government” could pose “an immediate threat by giving Iran – directly through the IRGC, the Quds Force or its proxies like Hezbollah – a platform in the region to carry out attacks against the United States.. Now, there is a serious problem with that quotation: Clapper never said any such thing...
 
The EU Directive on the Occupied Territories, by John V. Whitbeck | CounterPunch
...In light of the clear and unambiguous EU position that Israel’s borders are exclusively those existing prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, there is no legal or logical reason for those EU states which are not yet among the 132 UN member states which have already extended diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine within its full pre-1967 borders to continue to refrain from doing so.. If all or almost all EU states were to recognize the State of Palestine within its full pre-1967 borders.. the writing would be clearly on the wall and the end of the occupation and the transformation of the current two-state legality under international law into a decent two-state reality on the ground would become only a question of when...
[Not the best outcome, but perhaps a stepping stone to one democratic state]
 
Why the Prawer Plan Is Just a Continuation of the Nakba,  by Yousef Munayyer | The Daily Beast
  The Nakba is not a moment in time. The Nakba is an ongoing process. The Nakba is an experience of dispossession that transcends both time and space. Indeed the depopulation of Palestine of most of its native inhabitants from 1947-1949 did not merely become dispossession when an individual was forced from his home or his land. Rather, the dispossession became cemented when, after hostilities, a new state—the state of Israel—enforced this dispossession by preventing the return of refugees and razing their houses to the ground so that they would have no homes to return to...
 
EU: Reinforcing the Green Line? | Al Jazeera
  “I think the time has come for the end of a two-state solution and now a beginning of discussion of a one-state solution, where Arabs live with freedoms and equalities in the state of Israel ... all of us are tired of foreigners trying to tell the Middle East what to do. ~ Yishai Fleisher, a radio show host.. "The settlements are war crimes, people who aid and abet the settlements are and should be treated as war criminals. In that context, this European move is very small, very little and very late." ~ Ali Abunimah, founder of The Electronic Intifada...
 
Israel: EU Moves Against Illegal Settlements Threaten U.S.-Led ‘Peace Process,’ by Jeremy Hammond | Antiwar
...This new development in Europe has presumably been prompted by the fear that Palestine might submit claims against Israel or other entities complicit in its violations of international law to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Palestine acquired the status at the UN of a non-member observer state in November 2012, which means it now has recourse to the ICC and International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its relations with Israel and other countries.bnVerter added that if "the Palestinians make good on their threat" to go to the ICC, it would be "a move that would have serious implications for Israel’s judicial status in the world, to put it mildly."..
 
Netanyahu Cries 'Wolf'...Again, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America
  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the Sunday morning airwaves to spout tired talking points about the non-existent threat Iran's safeguarded, civilian nuclear program poses to Israel, the United States, and presumably Neptune and Krypton. In a renewed propaganda blitz, Netanyahu told CBS' Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation" that Iran is getting "closer and closer to the bomb," and resurrected a number of embarrassing phrases including "red line," "credible military threat" and something about ticking clocks...
[The point of the story, of course, is that if you keep it up, people will begin to ignore you - and the wolf will surely come]
 
Documents Show Undersea Cable Firms Provide Surveillance Access to US Secret State, by Tom Burghardt | Dissident Voice
  Documents published last week by the Australian web site Crikey revealed that the US government “compelled Telstra and Hong Kong-based PCCW to give it access to their undersea cables for spying on communications traffic entering and leaving the US.” The significance of the disclosure is obvious; today, more than 99 percent of the world’s internet and telephone traffic is now carried by undersea fiber optic cables...
 
Debate: Is Spielberg Guilty of Falsifying the Talmud in his movie, "Schindler's List"? | Revisionist History
...The Jewish religion is based upon the Talmud, one of the most racist and chauvinist works ever committed to writing. Of course Spielberg.. cannot reveal the fact of the Talmud's racism to his audience. Instead, he portrays it as a sort of manual for universal love. Hence, toward the end of the film in a key tear-jerking scene, Schindler's Jews present Schindler with a ring upon which is inscribed a quotation attributed to the Talmud, "He who saves a single life, saves the entire world.".. However, the actual Talmud verse referred to in the movie says no such thing. Here is what the Talmud really says, "Whosoever preserves a single soul of Israel, Scripture ascribes to him as if he had preserved a complete world")...
 
Arming Armageddon | Roi Tov
  Away from the headlines, Israel is carrying out a series of projects in Megiddo and its surroundings. The projects are opening a large area, creating an eerie reminder that this would be the site of the Biblical Battle of Armageddon. Is this Israeli sarcasm or real preparations for war? Armageddon is the Greek rendering of Har Megiddo, Mount Megiddo. The low hill is located southeast of the Haifa Bay, at the strategic exit of Wadi Ara, offering magnificent views of the Jezreel Valley. The site where the cataclysmic battle between good and evil will unfold...
 
Hellerstein to Silverstein: No more money for you, schmuck! by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today
  Judge Alvin Hellerstein has ruled that Larry Silverstein cannot keep double-dipping for billions of extra dollars in World Trade Center insurance money. Silverstein, who bought the condemned-for-asbestos World Trade Center two months before it was struck by “Zionist lightning” in 2001, was asking for an extra 11 billion dollars, on top of the roughly five billion dollars he has already extorted from insurers, despite his public confession to demolishing WTC-7 himself...
[Hey, shut up! Enough is enough! People are going to figure out what we've been up to!]
 
Liberal Democrats suspend Israel critic David Ward, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
...David Ward had tweeted: “Am I wrong or are am I right? At long last the Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the apartheid state of Israel last?” As to the punishment, Ward condemned it as “disproportionate”, saying his views were widely shared. “I will not apologise for describing the state of Israel as an apartheid state. I don’t know how you can describe it as anything else,” he said. “I am genuinely quite shocked at the reaction to the kind of thing many people say.”..
 


Jul 19, 2013

Consensus wisdom: The boycott of Israel is working, by Larry Derfner | +972 Magazine
...The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman, probably the best-known foreign affairs columnist in the world, wrote on June 4 that the BDS movement “is creating a powerful surge of international opinion, particularly in Europe and on college campuses, that Israel is a pariah state because of its West Bank occupation.” The No. 1 reason why Israel must end the occupation, Friedman wrote, was “to reverse the trend of international delegitimization closing in on Israel.”..
[Trending up - time to buy in]
 
'The era of sanctions against Israel has started': Official BDS movement statement on new EU regulations against settlements | Mondoweiss
  New European Union guidelines will prevent Israeli ministries, public bodies and businesses that operate in occupied Palestinian territory from receiving loans worth hundreds of millions of Euros each year from the European Investment Bank, it emerged today. The EU will also stop awarding grant funding to Israeli ministries, public bodies or private businesses for activities that take place in occupied Palestinian territory, even if they are headquartered inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders...

Worldwide Social Activism: Demanding Change, by Graham Peebles | Brave New World
  Change is afoot. Confronted with state corruption and corporate greed, abuse of human rights, environmental chaos and extreme levels of economic and social injustice, the people, overwhelmingly the young are taking to the streets demanding change, and a new political/economic system, that is inclusive and just...
 
What is Hamas afraid of? | Redress Information & Analysis
...According to Mohammed Suliman, a Palestinian writer and human rights worker in the Gaza Strip, the Prawer Plan generated a public outcry among all Palestinians in the territories occupied before and after the 1967 war. But a plan for a mass protest in Gaza came to nothing, thanks to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas.. The reason given by Hamas – failure by the protest organizers to obtain a license from the Ministry of Interior – is rather unconvincing...
 
Saudis’ Unprecedented Break with Washington over Egypt, by F. William Engdahl | Global Research
  One of the least commented aspects of ousting Egypt’s Morsi is the defiant act of the Saudi Royal House in backing the ouster of the Brotherhood and supporting the military restoration. The Saudi move is unprecedented in its open defiance of White House declared backing for the Muslim Brotherhood. The implications of the split are huge...
 
How Much does Israel Cost the Average American? by Alcibiades Bilzeria | Veterans Today
...If the American government took the $15-$20 billion it gives Israel every year and put it into a savings account for the 4.5 million babies born p/yr, every American would receive $8,000-$10,500 upon turning 18 years old. In another option, the US government could give the money away in a lottery and make 15k-20k Americans millionaires every year. Either of these options would provide an incredible boost to the US economy. But the truth is that $15-$20 billion per year is probably just scratching the surface when we look at the cost of America’s relationship with Israel...
 
Attacking Syria: Israeli/Turkish Denials Ring Hollow | Stephen Lendman
...Prime Minister Erdogan's very unpopular. It's for good reason. He heads a hugely repressive regime. He force-feeds neoliberal harshness. He does so when millions need help. Nationwide protesters want new elections. They want him replaced. He's playing with fire. If clear evidence shows he let Israel attack a Muslim country from Turkish territory, popular anger might swell enough to oust him...
 
Hamas and Iran have vowed 'to wipe out the Jews' just as Nazis did, AIPAC says, by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss
  AIPAC sent out a fundraising letter today saying that Hamas and Iran "are vowing to wipe out the Jews" and are no different from Nazis. The only difference between then and now is that now AIPAC is standing up for the Jews and it can get meetings with the president and Congress, as Jews could not do during the Holocaust...
[Selling snake oil the good old fashioned way]
 
Dalit Baum: Who Profits from the Israeli Occupation? | YouTube
  Israeli feminist scholar, activist and co-founder of Who Profits from the Occupation discusses lessons for the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) campaign to end the Israeli occupation...
 
Former Officials Call on Obama to Reinvigorate Iran Diplomacy | National Iranian American Council
  Twenty-nine prominent former government officials, diplomats, military officers, and national security experts are calling on the White House to pursue direct negotiations with Iran once the country's new president, Hassan Rouhani, is inaugurated. In a letter to President Obama today, the group called the election of Iran's new president "a major potential opportunity to reinvigorate diplomatic efforts to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program." The letter comes as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has called for ratcheting up sanctions and threats of military action, and Congress is reportedly mulling a new round of sanctions...
 
Iran: The Embargoed Hotel | YouTube
  Battling against international sanctions and the challenges of creating a hotel locally and sustainably in Iran, Ameriha House is a recipe for disaster. Or is it?..
 
Has the EU really caused an "earthquake" for Israel? by David Cronin | The Electronic Intifada
  Israel has been plunged into a new existential crisis, if newspaper headlines are to be taken seriously. A new set of European Union guidelines on barring firms based in illegal settlements from receiving subsidies has hit Israel like an “earthquake,” according to an unnamed official quoted in Haaretz. Having read the new guidelines, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about...
 
Shock, horror!: MP smacked for anti-Israel comments | Paul Eisen
..My feeling is that by now, every MP must know exactly what will happen when they express any anti-Israel sentiment but, like rowdy schoolkids with an inept teacher they seem to be queuing up for the lark. Perhaps they'll form a new fringe group "Naughty MPs against Jewish power"..
 
From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization, by Eric Walberg | Amazon
  The Arab Spring is really an Islamic one and the logical result of a century and a half of imperialist intrigues to incorporate the Middle East and Central Asia into the imperial project. How did this come about? What are the chances of the Muslim world asserting an independent position in the face of American empire and the rising non-imperial world bloc.. This book views Islam is a way of life as opposed to western post-Enlightenment secularism where the separation of church and state shunts religion off to the periphery of modern life. It reviews and critiques the long historical rivalry between Islam and Christianity/ Judaism that has resulted in a distorted understanding of Islam in the West...
 
Humor Dept: Jewish Snakes and Kosher Sharks | Gilad Atzmon
  The Jewish Chronicle reported yesterday that an Israeli man was rushed to hospital after a snake bit his penis during a visit to the toilet. The 35-year-old received medical treatment after feeling “a sharp burning sensation” on his penis last Friday.The man was sitting on the toilet at his family’s home in Nofit, northern Israel. But then Oy vey, completely out the blue, a small snake came out of the toilet through the pipe and latched onto the end of his penis...
 
How much can they endure?: Coup in Egypt Tests Palestinians in Gaza | Gaza's Ark
  Our friends in Gaza tell us stories every day about Palestinians doing their best to survive under the incredible hardships of the Israeli blockade: cuts in power, lack of water supplies, and almost no ability to export, including no ability to trade by sea. Actions taken by the Egyptian government following the recent coup are now exacerbating an already desperate situation...
 


Jul 18, 2013

September 11: Inside Job or Mossad Job? by Laurent Guyénot | Voltaire Net
  While Israel’s role in the destabilization of the world post-September 11 is becoming increasingly clear, the idea that a faction of Likudniks, aided by their allies embedded in the U.S. State apparatus, are responsible for the false flag operation of September 11 is becoming more difficult to suppress, and some individuals have the courage to state so publicly...
 
The Light on Iran Darkens the World | Alternative Insight
...western media give the impression that Iran is an aggressor nation. Although the Islamic Republic fought a defensive war against Saddam Hussein's aggression, it received no assistance from a western world that responded strongly to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait - just the opposite - the United States supplied Iraq with credits, intelligence, dual-use weapons and military advice. Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies exported chemicals to Iraq, which were used to manufacture poison gas. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf states provided Iraq with an average of $60 billion in subsidies per year...
 
Egypt’s ‘Democratic’ Coup, by Deepak Tripathi | CounterPunch
...The military is back in power, and the most significant political movement, with grassroots support, is the target of repression. Leading opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood are collaborating with the military. This draconian political experiment has failed decade after decade in Egypt, and the record of military coups leading to a smooth transition to real democracy is poor. The same educated liberal-secular middle classes that were in opposition to Morsi’s rule will soon be opposing the military regime. It is only a matter of time...
 
Snowden’s Russian Sojourn: A Moral Failure? by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
  Edward Snowden’s flight to freedom is being watched the world over as a contest of wills between one very determined person and the mightiest empire in world history: so far, Snowden is winning. His personal victory, however, may be short-lived, as he runs up against what may be an insuperable wall: Vladimir Putin’s Russia... from a historical perspective, Russia is moving in the direction of more freedom. Contrast this with the US and Britain, both of which are moving away from their own liberal political tradition and toward a more authoritarian model...
 
Edward Snowden Is No Traitor, by Philip Giraldi | The American Conservative
  There are a number of narratives being floated by the usual suspects to attempt to demonstrate that Edward Snowden is a traitor who has betrayed secrets vital to the security of the United States. All the arguments being made are essentially without merit. Snowden has undeniably violated his agreement to protect classified information, which is a crime. But in reality, he has revealed only one actual secret that matters, which is the United States government’s serial violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution through its collection of personal information on millions of innocent American citizens without any probable cause or search warrant. That makes Snowden a whistleblower...
 
Washington's Long History in Syria, by Ernesto J. Sanchez | The National Interest
...the pipeline’s opponents in parliament simply could not get over U.S. recognition of the state of Israel. Ignoring more benign options, Truman consequently authorized the CIA’s very first coup.. Deane Hinton said of the planned coup: “I want to go on record as saying that this is the stupidest, most irresponsible action a diplomatic mission like ours could get itself involved in, and that we've started a series of these things that will never end.”..
 
Obama’s Praetorian Guard of Capitalism, by Norman Pollack | CounterPunch
...Obama’s legacy—it’s too late for him to worry about this now—will be defined by his treachery as a leader and putative tribune of the people.  In retrospect, Nixon and Bush 2 appear as mere choirboys in comparison, not because of Obama’s “smarts” (he has the brashness of a hustler, which passes in our day for intelligence), but because he can use liberalism as a backdrop for the pursuit of consistently reactionary policies, domestic as well as foreign.  Liberals and progressives, especially, have been taken in, the latest enormous crime being massive surveillance which, once revealed, is allowed to become yesterday’s news, attention shifting instead to Snowden’s apprehension...
 
The Case for Abolishing the DHS, by Charles Kenny | Businessweek
  On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned to take up a post running California’s university system. With her departure, there are now 15 vacant positions at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit that creating it was a mistake...
[What, close down the Gestapo, now that we finally have our own? All those good jobs down the drain? Heaven forfend.]
 
Attending Israel's Film Festival: An interview with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, by Nooshabeh Amiri | Payvand
...We live on one planet, but we do not see each other as people living on the same planet. We have divided ourselves with political, ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic borders. Instead of considering ourselves and everyone else who lives on this planet as human beings, we first think whether we are men or women, American, Iranian or Israeli; or if I am in Afghanistan, the question is whether I am Hazara or Pashto or Tajik... We keep dividing ourselves. It was the same divisions that in Hitler’s time created the most absurd tragedy, not only for the Jews, but for all of humanity. Now, after 60 years, do we still need to resolve our issues with war, enmity and continuous and growing hatred?..
[Perhaps he is somewhat naïve, like the Dalai Lama, relying on basis human decency, trying to deal sensibly with the Chinese, but their basic message – that we must all learn how to get along – is indisputably true. Are we getting there? I don’t know.]
 
Russia breaks into top 5 world economies, displacing Germany | The Vineyard of the Saker
  Russia has overtaken Germany as the fifth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, according to the latest World Bank ranking that measures 214 economies based on their 2012 GDP performance. Russia's oil and export driven economy, ranked fifth amongst the top ten economies in the world with $3.4 trillion in GDP. In 2011, Germany surpassed Russia in GDP with $3.227 trillion compared to Russia’s $3.203 trillion. In 2005, Russia was in eighth place...
 
The United States Should Quit Meddling in Egypt, by Ivan Eland | MCW News
  Both the Muslim Brotherhood and its liberal opponents are using U.S. policy toward Egypt as a whipping boy to rally support for their respective causes during the current turmoil in that country. Liberal demonstrations have claimed that the Obama administration had supported the Brotherhood and its former President Mohamed Morsi. Yet the Brotherhood has claimed that despite the U.S. government’s neutral rhetoric during the latest crisis—calling on all sides to rein in violence from their supporters—American diplomats secretly pressured the Brotherhood to resign itself to Morsi’s ouster by the Egyptian military, re-enter the political process, and thus legitimate the coup. Both sides are correct...
 
Netanyahu & the Lobby Cowboy Up For War With Iran, by MJ Rosenberg | Huffington Post
  Speaking on CBS News' Face The Nation on Sunday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned that Iran is about to cross the nuclear red line he set down last September and that the United States had better do something about it. Netanyahu was in full Halloween mode. It is not just Israel that is in dire peril; it's the United States too...
 
The Paranoid Obsession over Cuba, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation
  The U.S. government’s belligerence toward Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador for sympathizing with Edward Snowden’s request for asylum brings to mind the U.S. national-security state’s Cold War mindset toward communism, a mindset characterized by deception, delusion, and paranoia, a mindset that did immeasurable harm to the American people as well as people in Latin America and that continues to do so to the present date...
 
Where the Z Stands for Zionism, by Matt Cornell | Al Jazeera
  Ever since George Romero popularised zombies in his landmark 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, the undead have been a durable symbol in the cinematic imagination. As many critics have observed since the movie's initial shock subsided, he had much more on his mind than brain-eating ghouls. Romero's ultra-low budget vision of the dead rising from their graves to feast on the living played on America's still unfolding nightmare in Vietnam, and the traumatic violence of domestic racial and social unrest. In his subsequent films, the zombie apocalypse was a means for social commentary...
[Good old Hollywood, an integral, reliable and powerful phalanx of the ZioNazi fifth column]
 
Netanyahu Upset That the Goyim Aren’t Getting It! by Bob Johnson | Veterans Today
  Benjamin Netanyahu is angry with the Europeans. It must be very frustrating for him when the goys are resisting and dare to confront the superior Jewish state in its illegal occupation of Palestine. Netanyahu is used to compliant political whores like they have in the US. Both the Democrats and the Republicans all bow down to the King of Israel. They not only bow down themselves, they also betray their own people and take billions of dollars from American tax payers every year and hand it over to the Jewish state. And even worse than that...
 


Jul 17, 2013

Huge news out of Europe: New EU rules effective Friday; No funding settlements, by Annie Robbins | Mondoweiss
  Haaretz is reporting a "hasty and urgent" meeting took place at the Israeli Prime Minister's office today, and a statement was released "blasting the European Union over its decision to condition future agreements with Israel on the latter's recognition of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as occupied territories." "We will not accept any external edicts on our borders," Netanyahu said in a scathing response.” Dani Dayan compares EU move to death camp selection!..
[How dare they! Doesn’t the EU realize it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of USrael? Heads will roll. LOL]
 
Coup d’etat | Paul Craig Roberts
  The American people have suffered a coup d’etat, but they are hesitant to acknowledge it. The regime ruling in Washington today lacks constitutional and legal legitimacy. Americans are ruled by usurpers who claim that the executive branch is above the law and that the US Constitution is a mere “scrap of paper.” An unconstitutional government is an illegitimate government. The oath of allegiance requires defense of the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As the Founding Fathers made clear, the main enemy of the Constitution is the government itself. Power does not like to be bound and tied down and constantly works to free itself from constraints.
 
 9/11 is the Litmus Test | Smoking Mirrors
...It all comes down to 9/11. Everything that has happened has happened based on a lie. Everyone in government; in the media, in entertainment, in organized religion, in the public eye and in the public who accepts and promotes the official story is either a traitor or a tool. Everyone who does not stand forth and speak truth to power is a coward, a liar and complicit in mass murder. Everyone- everywhere can be measured according to this litmus test. I have included here only a very small portion of the damning evidence that runs counter to the official lies. The preponderance of evidence that refute the official lies is overwhelming...
 
9/11 could be insurance fraud as “trial” of conspiring duo begins in NY today, by Dr. Kevin Barrett | PressTV
  Is this the world's worst case of insurance fraud...ever? That's what many are saying, as the world's biggest real-estate swindler and the world's most corrupt judge meet in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. At issue: billions of dollars in loot from the demolition of the World Trade Center complex on September 11th, 2001. World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein - who confessed on national television to “pulling” World Trade Center Building 7 - will appear in the courtroom of Judge Alvin Hellerstein at 500 Pearl St. in New York City...
Read more...
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/07/15/313839/911-incident-insurance-fraud/
 
Snowden in Moscow, by Israel Shamir | Dissident Voice
..In a few days, perhaps even tomorrow, the charms and  dangers of the city will be available to Edward Snowden, who is about to receive a refugee ID,  allowing him to roam freely the whole length and breadth of Russia and to socialise with its folk. It will be a nice change from Sheremetyevo International Airport, where he was marooned for quite a while...

The Zionist Regime and the Israeli-Run NSA Busted–Again! by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today
...this covert and Mephistophelian operation was largely mapped out by two Jewish neocons, Pipes and Horing. Once again, Bill Kristol was right when he said that Obama is “a born-again neocon.” This “born-again neocon” always ends up following the dictates of the Jewish neoconservative movement in the Middle East, despite the fact that Obama’s own lawyers have advised him time and again that aiding the Syrian rebels/terrorists is a violation of international law.. Recently, protesters all over Egypt have cried out that Obama has been supporting terrorism, which is true. The reason is simple: Obama, like Bush before him, is just a Zionist puppet...
 
The Psychotic Militarization of Law Enforcement, by Sartre Batr | Veterans Today
..“These increasingly frequent raids… are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.” John W. Whitehead writes in the Huffington Post that “it appears to have less to do with increases in violent crime and more to do with law enforcement bureaucracy and a police state mentality.” Unfortunately, few other constitutional conservatives seem to have the courage to criticize the thin blue line of establishment regulators...
 
Israel lobby tries (and fails) to intimidate another UK MP, by Stuart Littlwood | Intifada Palestine
...Although the Holocaust Education Trust and Zionists generally would like exclusive use of the H-word for Jewish victims, they must understand that there have been other holocausts besides the ‘Big One’ of World War 2. If there is such a thing as a Palestinian holocaust it is a slow motion one. The extermination may be on a smaller scale but is nevertheless of towering significance because it has been carried out in the Holy Land – of all places – and against Christians and Muslims...
 
The House of Rothschild, by Dean Henderson | Veterans Today
  The Rothschild family combined with the Dutch House of Orange to found Bank of Amsterdam in the early 1600’s as the world’s first private central bank.  Prince William of Orange married into the English House of Windsor, taking King James II’s daughter Mary as his bride.  The Orange Order Brotherhood, which more recently fomented Northern Ireland Protestant violence, put William III on the English throne where he ruled both Holland and Britain.  In 1694 William III teamed up with the Rothschilds to launch the Bank of England...
 
"Hasbara" courses at Israeli universities exposed in new report, by Yara Sa'di | The Electronic Intifada
  Various Israeli academic institutions have introduced courses and programs on hasbara — the Hebrew-language term used to describe Israel’s attempts to re-brand its image as its occupation and military aggression makes it increasingly unpopular worldwide. A new report from the Academic Watch Project shows that instead of promoting critical thought and inquiry, these courses at academic institutions serve to promote the policies of the State of Israel and the whitewashing of its crimes. The Academic Watch Project is a group of Palestinian students at Israeli academic institutions dedicated to exposing discrimination within Israeli academia and its connection with Israel’s military occupation and apartheid policies...
 
NSA accused of violating French privacy laws, by Peter Snyder | Jurist
  Two French human rights groups filed a lawsuit in Paris Thursday calling for an investigation into whether the US National Security Agency violated French privacy laws. The lawsuit, filed by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Human Rights League (LDH), is based on articles.. of the French Criminal Code. Crimes under article 226 are considered "offenses against privacy," and "violations of personal rights resulting from computer files or processes.".. "this blatant intrusion into individuals' lives represents a serious threat to individual liberties and, if not stopped, may lead to the end of the rule of law."..
 
‘Heroic effort at great personal cost’: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel Peace Prize | RT News
  A Swedish sociology professor has nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize. He says the NSA whistleblower could help “save the prize from the disrepute incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision” to give the 2009 award to Barack Obama. In his letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Stefan Svallfors praised Snowden for his “heroic effort at great personal cost.” He stated that by revealing the existence and the scale of the US surveillance programs, Snowden showed “individuals can stand up for fundamental rights and freedoms.”..
[Unfortunately, he’s not eligible. Judging by most awards going back some 40 years or so the recipient must be a war criminal] 
 
IDF Offensive Redeployment Amid Syrian Fire | Roi Tov
...Division 366 will take over the strongholds line and Division 36 while the IDF heaviest and largest regular division will become one of the five multi-theatre division of the army. Division 36 is an armoured one; it has many tanks on the Golan. Yet, I have spent over two years in the area, know all the IDF strongholds and never, but absolutely never, have seen a tank within a stronghold in an attack position. Its cannon can easily reach Quneitra. IDF redeployed into an offensive pattern...
 
Lawlessness Is Official US Policy | Stephen Lendman
  Sweeping mass surveillance continues. It won't stop. It's intensifying. It reflects rogue state governance. It has nothing to do with national security. Claiming it's a red herring. It's about control. It's to advance America's imperium. It's political and corporate espionage. It's monitoring truth-tellers. It's targeting constitutional rights. It's eliminating freedom altogether. It's institutionalizing tyranny. It made America a police state. It's coup d'etat authority. Too few Americans understand. Too few who do challenge it responsibly...
 
A US national debate about government spying? by Lawrence Davidson | Redress Information & Analysis
  On 8 July 2013 the New York Times published an editorial on the issue of NSA spying on Americans. The editorial described the issue as one of “overwhelming importance” and worthy of national debate, and noted that President Obama said that he welcomed such a debate. Then the NYT pointed to a core problem: “This is a debate in which almost none of us know what we’re talking about.” It turns out that everything about the NSA surveillance operation is “classified” and therefore done in secret. As a result there is no public access to the information needed for a debate. That is, until the “leaker” Edward Snowden risked all to tell the American public and, indeed, the whole world, about it...
 
Top 10 Reasons Americans should Dismiss Israel's Netanyahu on Attacking Iran, by Juan Cole | Informed Comment
  The Iranian electorate did about the most cruel thing possible to uber-hawk Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. It replaced former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with an eminently reasonable and personable successor, Hasan Rouhani. The Israeli and American politicians who desperately want to fall on Iran the way a hungry lion does on a lamb had made hay with Ahmadinejad’s quirkiness and foot in the mouth disease. They also deliberately mistranslated him to make him seem menacing, even as he kept saying Iran would never launch a first strike...
 
Interview with Paul Eisen: Historically, it is the Palestinians who have the right to Palestine | NNC
...Israel is of course vastly more powerful than the Palestinians but they have some terrible weaknesses: Firstly, unlike the Palestinians, they simply cannot take pain. One only has to look at the sheer panic that takes over Israelis whenever one or two rockets land in their country and compare this with the stoic steadfastness that Palestinians show under the most terrible bombardments to appreciate this difference. And this is only going to get worse. Hamas in Gaza have demonstrated the seemingly inexhaustible capacity on the part of Palestinians to soak up pain and Hezbollah have demonstrated the ability of fellow Arabs to inflict pain on the Israelis...



Jul 16, 2013

The Death Merchants of Tel Aviv | Gilad Atzmon
..Apparently some 6,684 Israelis are making a living selling death around the world.  They are serving an industry that produces more than 150,000 jobs. However, the most crucial question here is how did the Jewish State become a death factory?  Early Zionism  promised, indeed, to bring to the world a ‘new Jew’ – a productive, proletarian authentic human being driven by ethics and humanism. But, it didn’t take long for the Jewish State to reveal its real supremacist inclinations and plunderous pragmatism.. Is it a coincidence that the Jewish State’s economy is based on weapon dealing, organ harvesting and blood diamonds? I will let you judge...
[He left out organized crime, white slavery, the drug trade and a few other such trifles]
 
A Shahnameh Fit for the Ages: The Epic of the Persian Kings, by Omid Memarian | Huffington Post
  A thousand years ago, Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings, was written, capturing the tragedies and joys of the human existence with its wonderful tales of love, loss, deception, adventure, heroes, and anti-heroes. The story has lived on as an undeniable classic throughout the centuries, but how many people today own a copy of the book -- or have actually read it? With the publication of Hamid Rahmanian's magnificently illustrated Shahmaneh, now is the time to bring this classic into the home. This edition is simply breathtaking: 600 illustrations dance across every page, each telling a story in a thousand intricate and beautiful artistic flourishes...
 
Iranian film-maker Makhmalbaf calls for peace from Jerusalem | Al Arabiya
  Acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf on Wednesday (July 10) called for peace in the Middle East as his recent film, "The Gardener" was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival. It was the first time that Makhmalbaf, director of films including "Kandahar" and "Boycott" presented a film at an Israeli film festival. The film, a documentary, investigates faith and religion and was filmed mainly in Israel...
 
Diskin: Israel nears point of no return on two-state solution | Jerusalem Post
...As for the Palestinians, I believe that in the long term they will not lose from the disintegration of the two-state option and the shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality – a state “from the sea to the river,” in other words, “one state for two nations.” When we get there, we will face an immediate existential threat of the erasure of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and in a few years, the reality of the country’s demographics will lead to a Palestinian-Arab majority and a Jewish minority, with all that entails...
 
New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile, by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today
  Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.. Additionally, it turned out that the anti-conspiracy people were not only hostile, but fanatically attached to their own conspiracy theories as well. According to them, their own theory of 9/11 – a conspiracy theory holding that 19 Arabs, none of whom could fly planes with any proficiency, pulled off the crime of the century under the direction of a guy on dialysis in a cave in Afghanistan – was indisputably true...
 
A Blanket of Fear, by Paul Balles | Veterans Today
  Netanyahu (N) and Obama (O) are on the phone: N: I want you to catch that schmuck Snowden, lock him up and silence him. O: Why Ben? He’s another whistle blower like Manning and Assange. How does he affect you? N: He’s almost as dangerous to us as Vanunu who gave away our nuclear secrets at Dimona. O: What makes Snowden as dangerous to Israel as Vanunu? N: Only a very few people know that Israeli companies Amdocs, Narus and Verint in America designed and provided the digital equipment and tracking programmes to your NSA...
 
Chemicals and Weapons seized from Insurgents in Damascus, by Christof Lehmann | NSNBC
...The seizure of chemicals from the foreign-backed insurgents came after intelligence reports indicated that a new major campaign against Syria is planned.. the election of the Saudi Arabia backed Ahmed Assi Jaber as head of the political opposition, as well as the relative military calm in July, were part of the preparations for the campaign. Insurgents, so the intelligence source, were busy establishing arms caches throughout the country. The major military campaign in August and September, and the use of chemical weapons during the campaign, would be used as a pretext for renewed calls for a no-fly-zone, humanitarian corridors and a foreign military intervention in Syria...
 
Turkey's Role in Syria's Insurgency | Intifada Palestine
  This investigative report by PressTV’s “In Focus” reporter Serena Shim tries to uncover the pivotal role that the Turkish government is playing in the armed terrorist uprising against the Syrian government and its people. From opening its borders so Sunni hardline religious extremists from all over the world can illegally cross into Syria, to supplying them with weapons, funding, food, and shelter, Turkey’s Erdogan-led government has been acting as a rogue state, a state-sponsor of terror in every sense of the word...
 
Israel’s stooges in Britain’s Labour Party | Redress Information & Analysis
  With Agent Cameron and his “Torah” Party at the helm of British politics, it’s easy to forget the Israel flag wavers on the other side, in the Labour Party. Writing in Mondoweiss, British journalist James Elliott reminds us of the Israel pimps-in-waiting, the Zionist elite running Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a preposterous misnomer given primary loyalty to the state of Israel...
 
War Propaganda: Pentagon Accuses Iran of Developing ICBM Missiles, by Timothy Guzman | Silent Crow News
  Washington’s war machine is now claiming that Iran is capable of developing ICBMs that can reach the United Sates mainland by 2015.  The Pentagon just released a report that is rather an alarming development within the Obama administration.  The report is a step closer to their long ambitious plan to attack the Iranian republic although more than 16 intelligence agencies declared that it had ceased to develop a nuclear weapons program many years ago.. The new Pentagon study can be used against the American people to instill fear that a nuclear armed Iran can strike the United States territory if the US, NATO and Israel do not act immediately to prevent such a disaster...
 
A Conversation with Abdullah Al-Arian: The Coup in Egypt, by Paul Gottinger | CounterPunch
...one thing that Morsi seemed unable or unwilling to do was to take on the power of what’s called the “deep state”.. institutions that are deeply rooted enough to weather the storm of accountability and the calls for reform and complete overhaul. The most obvious example of this is.. the police, the internal security service of the state, the military, but it also includes things like the state bureaucracy, the state media, and the judiciary. The judiciary blocked a number of attempts at reform that Morsi tried to put through. These reforms would have started to peel back some of the layers of old regime power that continued to exercise itself long after Mubarak had left the scene...
 
Iran’s Water Crisis: A Bigger Threat Than Israel? | The Diplomat
  A former agriculture minister has said Iran’s water shortage is a bigger threat to the country than either Israel or the United States.. if the water issue is not addressed, Iran could become “inhabitable.” “If this situation is not reformed, in 30 years Iran will be a ghost town. Even if there is precipitation in the desert, there will be no yield, because the area for groundwater will be dried and water will remain at ground level and evaporate.”..
 
The question is...why? | Paul Eisen
..As well has having no doubt that this is a propaganda film, I also have no doubt that large sections (perhaps the majority) of the populations of many Eastern European countries did welcome the National Socialists as liberators. It's also clear that many among these populations enthusiastically welcomed the National Socialists' brutal anti-Jewish measures. The question is...why?..
 
Dirty Laundry: MEK Re-Ups 3 Year Old Nuclear Propaganda; Terror Group is Sounding Board for Dubious US Intel | Wide Asleep in America
  Embracing its recent removal from the U.S. State Department's list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian terror cult with deep pockets and close ties to the Washington establishment, is attempting to ramp up the fear-mongering and propaganda over Iran's nuclear program following last month's election of moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani as the Islamic Republic's next president...
 
ElBaradei’s Democracy: How Egypt’s ‘Revolution’ Betrayed Itself, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
...Mohamed ElBaradei, a liberal elitist with a dismal track record in service of western powers during his glamorous career as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a stark example of the moral and political crisis that has befallen Egypt since the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. ElBaradei played a most detrimental role in this sad saga, from his uneventful return to Egypt during the Jan. 2011 revolution – being casted as the sensible, western-educated liberator – to the ousting of the only democratically-elected president this popular Arab country has ever seen...
 


Jul 15, 2013

King Tut has Returned to Egypt and We Found Him, by Jim W. Dean | Veterans Today
  Has King Tut the boy King been reincarnated to save Egypt from political religious fratricide? Let us hope so. I was suspicious that it was too good to be true and maybe a translation spoof, so I had two Arab friends confirm the transcription. It’s real. There is hope for the world if we can figure out how to manufacture more 12 year olds like this. I can’t wait to hear him debating the other presidential candidates. I suggest we pass the hat to get him on a speaking tour over here to also debate Abe Foxman, the NeoCons and our other great minds. We will give past president Bush a pass on this one...
 
Israel Governs Lawlessly | Stephen Lendman
  Israel reflects the worst of rogue state lawlessness. Netanyahu's a world class thug. Knesset members reflect fascist rule. Ethnic cleansing is official policy. So is slow-motion genocide...
 
UK government still won’t come clean on Israel’s nukes, by Stuart Littlewood | Intifada Palestine
  While the British government leads the charge to impose and tighten sanctions on Iran and makes other dire threats on the mere suspicion that the Islamic Republic may have nuclear weapons ambitions, its ministers continue to sidestep simple questions about Israel’s unsafeguarded nukes. Here is a recent example...
 
Half of Iranians Lack Adequate Money for Food, Shelter | Gallup Poll
  Iranian residents' election of moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani to the presidency has been widely interpreted as evidence of their desire for meaningful change in the country. Rouhani will preside over an increasingly distressed population: Half of Iranians say there have been times in the past year when they have had trouble paying for adequate shelter and for food their families needed. In each case, the 50% figure is the highest among 19 populations in the Middle East and North Africa region that Gallup surveyed in 2012 and 2013...
[Uncle Shmuel must be proud]
 
The Shadow War Against Syria’s Christians, by Nina Shea | National Review
  On June 23, Catholic Syrian priest Fr. François Murad was murdered in Idlib by rebel militias.  How he was killed is not yet known and his superiors “vigorously deny” that he was a victim of beheading, as some news sources are claiming.  It is apparent,  however, that he was a victim of the shadow war against Christians that is being fought by jihadists alongside the larger Syrian conflict. This is a religious cleansing that has been all but ignored by our policymakers, as they strengthen support for the rebellion...
 
Kevin MacDonald's 'The Culture of Critique': Reviewed by Stanley Hornbeck | Heretical
  Kevin MacDonald advances a carefully researched but extremely controversial thesis: that certain 20th century intellectual movements – largely established and led by Jews – have changed European societies in fundamental ways and destroyed the confidence of Western man. He claims that these movements were designed, consciously or unconsciously, to advance Jewish interests even though they were presented to non-Jews as universalistic and even utopian. He concludes that the increasing dominance of these ideas has had profound political and social consequences that benefited Jews but caused great harm to gentile societies...
 
When Zionism is racism: Ron Dermer and Bibi Netanyahu, on the record, by Larry Derfner | +972 Magazine
  Imagine if a politician in another country had bragged about lowering a minority group’s birthrate – like Netanyahu and his new ambassador to the U.S. did. Ron Dermer, who was named by Netanyahu yesterday to be Israel’s new ambassador to the United States, is known as an even more right-wing Republican version of his boss.. Dermer is also a proud champion of about the ugliest possible anti-Arab views, having defended Bibi publicly when his mentor made the single most offensively racist remark of his career, which is going some...
 
Israel’s fictions: notes on a myth democracy, by Rifat Odeh Kassis | AIC
  The importance of the CRC observations is multi-faceted. Not only do they expose Israel’s colonial tactics, racist policies and violation of human rights, but they also expose the ways in which Israel falsely claims an exceptional status in the Middle East. Israel claims to be exceptionally progressive, democratic and advanced in social, religious, political, and economic matters. The CRC observations, however, unmask these myths...
 
Canadian writers urge halt to evictions of Palestinians, Bedouins | CJPME
  Seventy of Canada’s top writers have signed a joint letter urging Israeli authorities to halt the evictions of 1000 Palestinians in the Southern Hebron Hills (West Bank). They are also urging Israeli leaders to reject the Prawer Plan, under which an estimated 20,000 – 70,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel will be forcibly relocated, with about 35 of their communities in the Negev being destroyed...
 
Einhorn on Getting to Yes with Iran, by Dan Joyner | Arms Control Law
  I just read Robert Einhorn’s new article over at Foreign Policy entitled “Getting to ‘Yes’ with Iran.”.. It’s honestly hard to know where to begin to criticize this piece. There’s so very much to criticize. I think the most maddening aspect to it is simply the tone throughout – the paternalistic, arrogant tone that drives most of the world crazy about US “diplomacy,” and makes them want to collectively scream at us “who the f#&*! do you think you are!?!”  Here are a few jewels:..
 
Amalek Hits Israel | Roi Tov
  What is the worst insult a religious Jew may use? What is the most violent act permitted to a religious Jew? Is rabbinical Judaism related to the Biblical one? The answer to these three questions is related. Unsurprisingly, they will kill to hide the hideous fact. On July 14, 2013, the worst insult was uttered by the Head of the Porat Yosef Yeshiva, towards Netanyahu's Zionist-Religious partners, initiating the next stage in what until now had been a slow and tired war. Not anymore. "Amalek," the Jewish Weapon of Mass Destruction has been deployed...



Jul 14, 2013
Egypt Still on the Front Page
 
Mubarakism Without Mubarak: The Struggle for Egypt, by Joseph Massad | CounterPunch
...The Americans are allies of all parties in Egypt and they are willing to let Egyptians choose who will rule them so that the US can then give them their marching orders as they did with Mubarak and the MB. All the Americans care about is that their interests are protected, and no member of the current anti- or pro-Mursi coalitions has dared threaten those interests. They are all vying to serve American interests if the Americans would only support them...
 
Falling Off a Cliff in Egypt, by Paul Pillar | The National Interest
  The most important consequences of the Egyptian military's ouster of President Mohamed Morsi will become clear only over a long term. But for anyone who believes the coup was on balance a favorable event, an awful lot of favorable news will have to come out in the months ahead to offset what has already happened in the first few days after the generals moved. The most visible disturbing developments have occurred on two fronts, neither of which should have been altogether surprising...
 
Neocons and Democracy: Egypt as a Case Study, by Jim Lobe | LobeLog
  If one thing has become clear in the wake of last week’s military coup d’etat against Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, it’s that democracy promotion is not a core principle of neoconservatism. Unlike protecting Israeli security and preserving its military superiority over any and all possible regional challenges (which is a core neoconservative tenet), democracy promotion is something that neoconservatives disagree among themselves about — a conclusion that is quite inescapable after reviewing the reactions of prominent neoconservatives to last week’s coup in Cairo...
 
You Are the Enemy!: Democracy and Empire, by Rob Urie | CounterPunch
  If NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden can find his way to political asylum in Venezuela, as current rumor has it, the local issue of an American democratic activist (Snowden) finding refuge in a democratic country is solved. But the larger problem of the citizens of the U.S. passively accepting the increasingly oppressive terms of empire remains. To the extent the peoples of South and Central America live in functioning democracies and we in the U.S. don’t, this has come at the cost of a century or more of blood, expropriation and humiliation at the hands of American empire...
 
In Syria, U.S. Arms Go To Pro-Assad Militias and Jihadists, by John Glaser | Washington Times
...Washington gets ahead of itself in its imperial ambitions. The crafters of U.S. foreign policy have an insatiable craving to intervene in every corner of the planet. With military bases spanning the world, every single president goes to war, covertly or overtly, and usually several times each. But after nearly 12 years of constant war, perhaps Washington should listen to the American people. About 60 percent of American voters oppose sending weapons to Syrian rebels and think it is not in the national interest to be involved in Syria at all...
 
PRISM’s Controversial Forerunner, by Richard L. Fricker | Consortium News
  Using a powerful computer program known as PRISM, the U.S. government has been downloading vast amounts of communications data and mining it for counterterrorism purposes. But these capabilities began more than three decades ago with the controversial PROMIS software...
 
Latin American states to recall ambassadors from Europe over Bolivian plane incident and Snowden asks for political asylum in Russia | The Vineyard of the Saker
  Plenty more good news this Friday. First, all the members of the MERCOSUR trading alliance have decided to recall their ambassadors from the European countries involved in the grounding of the Bolivian president’s plane...
 
Iraq: Between Drug Dealers and Death Squads, by Hussein Al-alak | Palestine Chronicle
  As a result of nationalized oil, during the 1980’s the Government of Saddam Hussain had run literacy campaigns, which saw illiteracy drop to less than 10% of Iraq’s entire population. UNESCO applauded the fact that Iraqi’s were able to access free education and come out with qualifications and employment on the other side. It was stated in 1998; “UNESCO said that Iraq was one of the only countries in the world where, even if you were born in absolute poverty, with illiterate parents you could come out of the education system either a brain surgeon, archaeologist or whatever you wished to become.”..
 
Minister: Israel Ready to Build 10,000 New Settler Homes | Palestine Chronicle
  Israel is ready to “immediately” build 10,000 homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to lower housing costs, Housing Minister Uri Ariel was quoted as saying on Thursday. “To immediately alleviate the housing crisis we must massively build in (East) Jerusalem and the settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria,” the Yediot Aharonot newspaper quoted Ariel as telling a parliamentary committee...
 
Should Iran Withdraw from the NPT? by Peter Jenkins | LobeLog
  I had the pleasure of talking to Ambassador Hossein Mousavian around the time when the thoughts that underlie his controversial article, “Five Options for Iran’s New President”, were forming in his mind. His mood, it seemed to me, was more pessimistic than I had known it before. He was starting to despair of the Obama administration finding the political courage to square up to Congress and Israel, and clear a path to the resolution of the nuclear dispute by offering Iran toleration of a peaceful nuclear program and meaningful sanctions relief...
 
Israeli Settler explains Zionism to Palestinian farmers | Gilad Atzmon
 
Simon Wiesenthal Center Attacks Thailand | Roi Tov
...The Simon Wiesenthal Center was established in 1977 as "an international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to repairing the world one step at a time. The Center’s multifaceted mission generates changes through the Snider Social Action Institute and education by confronting antisemitism, hate and terrorism, promoting human rights and dignity, standing with Israel, defending the safety of Jews worldwide, and teaching the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations." As an example of its "humanitarian principles based on tolerance," the center decided to destroy the Muslim Cemetery in Mamilla and to build on its location "The Center for Human Dignity" and the "Museum of Tolerance."..
 
Care Tactics: “Humanitarian Intervention”, by Chase Madar | The American Conservative
  American liberals rejoiced at Samantha Power’s appointment to the National Security Council. After so many dreary Clintonites were stacked into top State Department positions—Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke, Hillary herself—here was new blood: a dynamic idealist, an inspiring public intellectual, a bestselling author of a book against genocide, a professor at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. And she hasn’t even turned 40. The blogosphere buzzed. Surely Samantha Power was the paladin, the conscience, the senior director for multilateral affairs to bring human rights back into U.S. foreign policy. Don’t count on it...
 
Open Letter to Filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf: Please be a messenger of freedom for Iranian and Palestinian people, by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss
The following is an open letter from Iranian scholars, activists, and artists asking filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to boycott the Jerusalem International Film Festival and reject an award from the festival. According to organizers, the letter is the first ever grassroots Iranian BDS statement...
[I'd give this guy a pass – he’s outside the box, any box]
 
Zbig: Israelis “bought influence” and outmaneuvered Obama, by Jordan Michael Smith | Salon
...He thinks the Obama administration “should have stuck to its guns in promoting a fair settlement” in the Middle East. A longtime foe of Israel’s partisans in the United States, he says the Obama team “fumbled by getting outmaneuvered by the Israelis.” Then he gets blunter: “Domestic politics interceded: The Israelis have a lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence.”..
 
Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II | Internet Archive
  This is a collection of 120 radio speeches by the noted American poet Ezra Pound. These controversial radio speeches were given while Pound was an expatriate in Italy during World War Two...
Read more...



Jul 13, 2013

AIPAC & OFAC Ratchet-Up US Sanctions Targeting Syria and Iran’s Populations, by Franklin Lamb | CounterPunch
  The US Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Assets Control, since March of 2012, is directed  by Mr. Adam J. Szubin who more than once has boasted on the sidelines of  a Congressional Hearing on Iran and Syria and at last March’s  AIPAC’s  national conference, that he fancies himself  a modern day Inspector Javert.  Choosing [Hugo's] character, according to one Congressional source, as a kind of role model because of Javert’s focused and relentless obsession...
[The ZioNazis run the show in Washington and far too few seem to notice, or care]
 
Shocker: Only 1% of So Called Terrorists Nabbed by the FBI Were Real, by Joshua Holland | Alternet
...there has yet to be a case of some Al-Qaeda operative providing the means for a wannabe terrorist to do an act of terrorism. It’s only the FBI that’s providing the means through these sting operations. What this has done is really inflate the threat of terrorism within the United States—particularly from Muslim terrorists—because in almost all of these cases sting operations target men on the fringes of Muslim communities who might be mentally ill, economically desperate or otherwise very easily manipulated by an informant who can make a lot of money in these sting operations...
 
Egypt: Staging a “Democratic” Military Coup, by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich | Global Research
...Morsi forced NGO’s out of Egypt, raising the ire of Freedom House (NGOs were referred to as force-multipliers by Colin Powell, and have been instrumental in executing US policies around the globe). Additionally, Morsi forced out powerful military figures in order to reclaim the military power.. However,  Morsi made the mistake of appointing Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi as military chief – a man with close ties to the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps his most serious offense was his opposition to a dam which both Israel and Saudi Arabia favored as they had plans to divert water from the Nile . In 2012, it was reported that Saudi Arabia had claimed a stake in the Nile. Israel ’s ambitions went much further back...
 
No Evidence for Charge Iran Linked to JFK Terror Plot, by Gareth Porter | Inter Press Service
  Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor who was prevented by Argentine President Cristina Kirchner from testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee investigating alleged Iranian terrorist networks in the Americas here this week, claimed in a recent report that Tehran was involved in a 2007 plot to blow up fuel tanks at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. But his report offers no actual evidence that Iran was ever even aware of the airport plot, and the official documents in the case indicate that the U.S. government found no such evidence either...
 
Obama gives himself control of all communication systems in America | RT
  US President Barack Obama quietly signed his name to an Executive Order on Friday, allowing the White House to control all private communications in the country in the name of national security. President Obama released his latest Executive Order on Friday, July 6, a 2,205-word statement offered as the “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions.” And although the president chose not to commemorate the signing with much fanfare, the powers he provides to himself and the federal government under the latest order are among the most far-reaching yet of any of his executive decisions...
 
The Yemenite Baby Affair: What if this was your child? by Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber | +972 Magazine
..Bill Moyers paraphrased George Orwell: “Journalism is about what people want to keep hidden, everything else is publicity.” Case in point: famed Israeli television journalist Yaron London’s recent article in Haaretz, “Maybe the kids didn’t disappear?” London’s tone and perspective perfectly illustrate Moyers’ assertion; it is a textbook example of how the Zionist hegemonic machine constructs a public discourse to maintain the status quo. At the same time, opposing claims, however legitimate, are silenced...
 
Jericho Ballistic Test, Saudi Missiles, and an IDF Brave New Plan | Roi Tov
...On July 12, 2013, Channel 7 reported that the IDF carried out successfully a test flight of a new ballistic engine. The only additional details provided were that it can carry a warhead of one metric tone for 5,000km. To put this in proportion, the distance between Tel Aviv and London is just 3,500km. The new engine belongs to the Jericho missiles series, capable of carrying warheads far away from Tel Aviv. Honorable Queen of London and its Most Immediate Surroundings, please don't worry, friendly Netanyahu even participated in Margaret's Thatcher slightly disguised State funeral. You are safe; after all where else can Sarah Netanyahu purchase trendy fascinator hats?..
 
And Now They Want The Temple Rebuilt | Gilad Atzmon
...Secular Jews have indeed managed to drop God, they shunned the Torah and the Talmud, but they clearly believe in Choseness. In fact Jewish secular thought has very little to do with humanism or universalism.  As such Jewish secularism can be realised as just another Jewish religion - it may proclaim to be righteous, rational or enlightened, but it in practice it is dedicated to a primal, insular and Judeo centric worldview driven by a total dismissal of Otherness... 
 
Free Syrian Army commander killed by rivals | MCW News
  Fighters from an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria have killed a leader of the Western- and Arab-backed Free Syrian Army after stopping him at a checkpoint, an FSA spokesman said, underlining growing rifts between Syrian opposition groups...
 
Vilifying Alice Walker Irresponsibly | Stephen Lendman
...Walker supports justice. So do other people of conscience. Palestinians are systematically denied. Israel deplores peace and stability. It prioritizes conflict and violence. It denies Palestinians self-determination. Don't expect Dershowitz to explain. He disgracefully supports the worst of Israeli lawlessness. He does so shamelessly and unapologetically...
 
The grand dilemma in Syria and Egypt, by Uri Avnery | Saudi Gazette
  Let's take Syria first. When it started, the choice for me was clear. There was this evil dictator, whose family had mistreated their people for decades. It was a tyranny with fascist overtones. A small minority, based on a religious sect, oppressed the vast majority.. Yet here I am, more than two years later, and I am full of doubts. It’s no longer a clear choice between black and white, but between different shades of grey, or, if that is possible, different shades of black. A civil war is raging. The misery of the population is indescribable. The number of dead terrifying...
 
Israel's indigenous invaders, by Neve Gordon and by Nicola Perugini | Al Jazeera
  Israel justifies the immanent relocation of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin by characterizing them as invaders. On June 24th the "Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev" passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute "the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s", expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings...
 
Jewish squatter paints “slaughter Jews” on own car to smear Palestinians | Redress Information & Analysis
  For decades Israelis and their Zionist lackeys around the world have used the label of “anti-Semitism” to brand Palestinians seeking freedom, justice and self-determination as racists bent on driving Jews into the sea. This is despite the fact that most of the racism in the Holy Land, from attacks on Palestinian schoolchildren to the growing phenomena of “price tag” attacks – acts of property damage, arson and graffiti – are committed by Jewish squatters against Palestinian civilians...
 


Jul 12, 2013

Syrian Army seizes Massive Chemical Stockpile from Insurgents, by Christof Lehmann | nsnbc
  While Russian experts have issued a report about an investigation into chemical weapons use in Syria, the Syrian Armed Forces seized a massive chemical depot from foreign backed insurgents after a heavy gunfight. The seized chemicals would, according to Syrian sources, have been sufficient to cause mass death on an unprecedented scale...
[Why haven't I seen this in "the news"?]
 
Russia gives UN forensic proof rebels used chemical weapons in Syria | CCTV News
  A day after Syria invited United Nations chemical weapons investigators to talks in Damascus, Russia said on Tuesday it had forensic proof that rebels have used a "lethal" sarin compound and handed its evidence to the UN team for inquiry. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, permanent representative of Russia to the United Nations, told reporters he submitted an analysis, " certified by chemical weapons organizations," in "80 pages of photographs, formulas and graphs" to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon...
 
Israeli Army Clears Soldiers Who Detained Child for Throwing Rock at Settler's Car | NYT
  Seven Israeli soldiers who detained a 5-year-old Palestinian boy for rock-throwing this week in the West Bank city of Hebron have been cleared of any wrongdoing by their superiors, after a review of video of the incident published on Thursday by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem...
 
The journalistic practices of the Washington Post and Walter Pincus, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  On Monday night - roughly 36 hours ago from this moment - the Washington Post published an article by its long-time reporter Walter Pincus. The article concocted a frenzied and inane conspiracy theory: that it was WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, working in secret with myself and Laura Poitras, who masterminded the Snowden leaks ahead of time and directed Snowden's behavior, and then Assange, rather than have WikiLeaks publish the documents itself, generously directed them to the Guardian...
[Just what one has come to expect from one of the Big Three Zionist rags (the WSJ and the NYT being the other two)]
 
Did Israel Attack Syria? by Phil Greaves | Global Research
  In a recent report from investigative journalist Richard Silverstein at the Tikun Olam blog, confidential sources within the Israeli military establishment revealed to him that the alleged bombing of a weapons depot in the Syrian town of Latakia, – which sits beside the Russian controlled seaport at Tartous – was an Israeli operation, targeting advanced Russian-supplied defensive missile systems (S-300 or Yakhont), an operation that included the direct assistance of opposition militants inside Syria. Silverstein’s Israeli source specifically states that members of the FSA coordinated with the IDF and engaged in a diversionary rocket attack at the time of the Israeli airstrike...
 
EU Official Stresses Importance of Ayatollah Khamenei's Fatwa against Nuclear Weapons | Fars
  A senior European official described the Fatwa (religious decree) issued by Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei against the production and use of nuclear weapons as a confidence-building measure in talks between Iran and the world powers...
 
Flashback: Austrian parliament bars Holocaust song by Theodorakis | Jerusalem Post
...“Everything that happens today in the world has to do with the Zionists,” the composer said. He asserted that “American Jews are behind the world economic crisis that has hit Greece also.” Theodorakis also slammed Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou for establishing closer relations with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was guilty, he said, of “war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza.”..
[Zorba vs. Sabra; Life vs. Death]
 
Snipers' Video Reveals IDF Crimes | Roi Tov
..Four years ago, a recruiting video was produced by the IDF snipers' training unit, which is part of Lotar, the Anti-Terrorism School. Originally it was shown at the infantry and paratroopers units from where most recruits arrive. It is impossible to join the IDF as a sniper, it is seen as a military profession derived from a more basic training; in this case infantry. Against all odds, it reached the internet. In the day this article is being written, July 11, 2013, the shocking video has reached almost a quarter million views...
 
Summer versus Stupid | Greg Palast
  We all have bad habits. And the worst, besides yelling at our kids when we're hung-over or just generally disappointed, is the daily deal we make with Evil. Every day we are thrown head first into that dog fight between What is Right, What is Horrible and, our third way, Just-Don't-Give-a-Shit-ism. We know we are not Bradley Manning, nor Edward Snowden.  We know we'd better just shut the fuck up. And that’s the conflict at the core of civilization's corrosion: not between national security and freedom, but between courage and complicity...
 
Rising above, by Nahida | Poetry for Palestine
  Soaked in humiliation / Standing in the corner / Of the security-check cubical / All alone / No mum to hold my hand / Or calm down my fear / No dad to hide my shame / And wipe my tears away / No shoes, no socks, no clothes / Not even underwear / After being stripped / By her…
 
The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty of humiliation | Redress Information & Analysis
  Someone recently asked how can any reasonable person in Egypt or elsewhere be against the 1979 peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, especially when Egypt is so unstable politically and close to bankruptcy economically? It’s a valid question, but also one that betrays some ignorance about what this peace agreement actually entails. Many Egyptians find it obscene having to make peace with a racist, fascist, expansionist state that is built on the homes and bones of an entire people and is busy ethnically cleansing its non-Jewish population...
 
God and the Intellectuals, by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today
...The fact is that science itself is based on fundamental assumptions that cannot be proven by the scientific method—assumptions like the universe is rational, that it obeys mathematical and scientific laws, and that the rationality of the universe can be understood and can correspond to the rational human mind. These assumptions are essential to science and yet they have not been proven by the scientific method. Moreover, these assumptions are perfectly congruent with the Christian and Muslim understanding...
 
Mandela’s Tarnished Legacy, by John Pilger | CounterPunch
...With democratic elections in 1994, racial apartheid was ended, and economic apartheid had a new face.  During the 1980s, the Botha regime had offered black businessmen generous loans, allowing them set up companies outside the Bantustans. A new black bourgeoisie emerged quickly, along with a rampant cronyism. ANC chieftains moved into mansions in “golf and country estates”.  As disparities between white and black narrowed, they widened between black and black...
 
Snowden a Hero to Americans, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
...This poll tracks several interesting trends, the most arresting of which is the utter unanimity with which the American people are rejecting the Official Narrative on Snowden – that Snowden is a traitor who committed espionage and deserves to be punished for his "crime." Weeks and weeks of relentless smearing, accusing him of collusion with America’s enemies, and worse, have simply had no effect – other than, perhaps, to increase his approval ratings!..
 
US senator calls for strikes on Syria | PressTV
  A prominent U.S. senator has called on the administration of President Barack Obama to attack Syrian “airfields, airplanes and massed artillery.” The influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-Mich.) who has returned from a fact-finding trip to the Middle East, also expressed support for arming the militant groups fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad...
[I have a better idea – easier, cheaper and even more fun – let’s make gefilte fish out of the Senator. Easy to find a rabbi who’ll pronounce it kosher – for the right price.]



Jul 11, 2013
Egypt above the fold: Chaos in the Middle East is just what the Jewish Doctor prescribed
 
...their going public supporting the US subsidy to the Egyptian army was totally unnecessary. It was not needed since the Obama administration had already worked out a way to avoid cutting off aid through the interim government being set up right away with a call for early elections. But the Israelis would never do something like this for no reason,  and that reason would never be for anyone else's benefit but theirs. So I must assume that they wanted to taint the Egyptian military as pro-Israeli to stoke the probability of more Muslim Brotherhood violence against them to crank up another Syrian style blood letting and destabilization...
[The Israelis have been playing the Egyptians like Tinker Toys for a long time, so this analysis is likely to be correct.]

  President Barack Obama recently stated the United States was not taking sides as Egypt's crisis came to a head with the military overthrow of the democratically elected president. But a review of dozens of US federal government documents shows Washington has quietly funded senior Egyptian opposition figures who called for toppling of the country's now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi. Documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley show the US channeled funding through a State Department programme to promote democracy in the Middle East region...
 
  The recent repression of Islamists by the army appears to be a deliberate attempt to sabotage a genuine “people’s coup,” as though all along the military used the people cynically in order to depose Morse and then itself remain as usual the power behind the throne.  The US could not be more pleased, because confirmation of military power in Egypt pertains to a favorable relationship with Israel, the military elites of both continuing their two-to-tango dance of death...
 
  The U.S. government has long been a hypocritical champion of democratic governance, claiming to honor free elections but historically attempting to subvert their outcomes when the result is not to our liking. But the rank betrayals of our commitment to the principles of representative democracy, from Guatemala to Iran to South Vietnam, among the scores of nations where we undermined duly elected leaders, reached a nadir with the coup by a U.S.-financed military in Egypt against that country’s first democratically elected government...
 
...Those in the West who have contended that some Muslims are not capable of democracy have been proven right, although the proof lies in the behavior of those pro-democracy Egyptians the West praises and supports. Egypt’s Islamists, on the other hand, played by the political game’s rules and—if the military’s diktat holds—they have lost and war is now their main option...
 
  For any American tempted to support the violent uprising against the Egyptian military coup, you might want to think twice because if you exhort Egyptians to violently overthrow the military tyranny under which they are suffering, you will be arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated at the hands of the U.S. government. That’s what happened to a New York lawyer named Lynne Stewart. She read a note to the press that was construed as exhorting Egyptian radicals to rise up and violently overthrow the Egyptian military dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak. She is now living the rest of her life in a federal penitentiary...
 
...President Morsi is the first democratically-elected head of state in Egypt’s 5,000-year history. The way things are going, he could also be the last. The army’s demolition of democracy, and its massacre of peaceful, unarmed protestors, seem likely to spark a civil war in Egypt. And civil wars do not end in democracy. Why would Egypt’s fascist military leaders and the “deep state” they represent want civil war? The Egyptian “deep state” consists of comprador billionaires and a corrupt military elite that lives on US aid. These people take orders from the global powers that be...
 
Syria: Nobel Peace Laureate Tells Her Account of What She Witnessed | YouTube
  Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire tells her account of her visit to Syria. While Maguire was in Syria, she discovered that the people the U.S. is funding are violent groups and do not want peace in Syria. Her her view is that Syria is being used as a proxy war by the U.S., Great Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar...
 
The Bomb in My Neighborhood: Syrian War Hits Beirut, by Franklin Lamb | CounterPunch
  This observer’s neighbors seemed to believe, especially over the past year, as most of us did, that the war in Syria would, in one form or another, spill into our neighborhood, Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut near the Shatila and Burj el Barajeh Palestinian refugee camps. And now it has with a vengeance...
 
Five Options for Iran’s New President, by Seyed Hossein Mousavian | Cairo Review of Global Affairs
..There is.. a risk that if the current American/Western policy of pressure politics continues, we will inch toward a military confrontation. In a broader sense, the outcome of the nuclear negotiations will have a profound impact on vital issues such as global nuclear non-proliferation, and the Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (NWFZ) and Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone (WMDFZ) in the Middle East. Publicly, the U.S. and other Western officials blame the failure of nuclear talks on Iran. The key question, however, is whether talks have failed because of the perceived Iranian intention to build a nuclear bomb, or due to the West’s unwillingness to recognize Iran’s right to enrich uranium...
 
The Hague weighs criminal probe of Israel over 2010 Marmara raid | Australians for Palestine
  The president of the International Criminal Court, Song Sang-Hyun, appointed a three-judge panel this week to consider preliminary procedural hurdles to opening a criminal investigation against Israel. The request for the criminal probe, filed by the African country Comoros, stems from Israel’s raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza in May 2010...
 
Notes on status of our world, by Prof Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
...Citizens of Western Countries must demand that their governments stop supporting this sick game of divide and conquer that also fosters Christian, Islamic and Jewish fanaticism. Long-term, there will be separation of religion from state politics whether in Palestine (Israel as a “Jewish state”) or in Egypt or elsewhere.  We will have our own renaissance.  But for now, perhaps it is important that all forces (left, Islamic etc.) join hands against the real enemy and gain true sovereignty of our countries...
 
Interview: Ilan Pappe on One State, Unity, and ‘Peace Process’ | Palestine Chronicle
..I think the US has no strategy for Israel/Palestine – only tactics. The strategy, if that is what it were, was formulated around 1968 with the Johnson administration, and that was a policy of an intentional ignorance about the Israeli unilateral actions – in particular in the West Bank. Since successive Israeli governments were willing to call the part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip they did not wish to rule directly an autonomy or a state, the American and Israeli discourse on two states became one: allowing the Palestinians, pending their “good behaviour”, self-rule in the densely populated Palestinian areas. Behaving well meant giving up any future demands...
 
Why Miliband Will Do Little for Middle East Peace or Palestinian Liberation: The British Labour/Israel Dinner Date, by James Elliott | CounterPunch
...There is in fact a very long history of collusion between Zionists and the Labour party, and one that shames the working-class origins and socialist sentiments of the latter, whilst making a mockery of the humane pretensions and ‘Jewish democracy’ of the former.  For many years Zionist mythology held that Britain, and foreign secretary Ernie Bevin in particular had conspired to destroy Israel during its war of independence. Oxford-based Israeli professor of international relations, Avi Shlaim has demonstrated otherwise, writing, ‘Bevin indirectly helped to ensure that the Palestinian state envisaged in the U.N. partition plan would be stillborn.’..
[Reminds me of Truman and the Democrats]
 
Death by 'security': Israel's services in Latin America, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera
...The Israeli embassy in Mexico has reportedly denied military machinations in the southeast, but not even Fox News Latino is convinced: "The Israeli Embassy's denial of its government working in Chiapas is puzzling, given the long history that Israel's government has of working with Mexico. Since the early 1970s, the Mexican government has purchased airplanes, helicopters, missile boats, small arms and other weapons from either the Israeli army or Israeli military contractors." Mexico's indigenous Mayans are not the only group to have found themselves on the receiving end of Israel's arsenal...
 
40 human beings are force-fed everyday in Guantánamo Bay | The Vineyard of the Saker
  As Ramadan begins, more than 100 hunger-strikers in Guantánamo Bay continue their protest. More than 40 of them are being force-fed. A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees. In this four-minute film made by Human Rights organization Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), experiences the procedure:..
 
Palestine’s Anne Franks, by Vacy Vlazna | Palestine Chronicle
...Professor Nurid Peled-Elhanan has made a thorough analysis of Zionist education resources: “When images of Arabs do figure they are often negatively depicted as less human or sub human, subservient, deviant, criminal and evil… [Palestinians] are seen as cockroaches, vermins, creatures who should be stamped out…” In the context here of youthful suffering, let us view the similarities of the Nazi victimizing, traumatizing and slaughtering of Anne Frank to the victimizing, traumatizing, mutilating and slaughtering of the teenagers and children of Gaza trapped, or as Anne may have put it, “chained in one spot, without any rights” for 7 years in the largest concentration camp in the world...
 
What am I missing in the Snowden affair? by Richard Falk | Al Jazeera
  I would have thought that there was a clear set of principles that make the American diplomatic pursuit of Edward Snowden as a fugitive from justice a rather empty and futile gesture. As far as I can tell, there is not even a need for asylum as governments should have been prepared to grant Snowden residence status because his alleged criminal acts in the United States were without question political crimes , without violence or monetary motivation. I had thought it was as clear as law can be that any person who has committed a political crime should be exempted from mandatory extradition even if a treaty existed imposed a duty on its parties to hand over individuals accused of serious criminal activity...
 
 
Jul 10, 2013

Treatment of Palestinians is apartheid by any other name, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth
...Israeli human rights lawyers, tired of the international community’s formulaic criticisms, say it is time to be more forthright. They call these “ethnic cleansing” zones – intended to drive off Palestinians irrespective of the provisions of international law and whether or not the Palestinians in question hold Israeli citizenship. In the occupied South Hebron Hills, a dozen traditional communities – long ago denied by Israel the right to enjoy modern amenities such as electricity and running water – are struggling to remain in the cave-homes that sheltered them for centuries...
 
12% of Israelis admit paying bribes | Gilad Atzmon
...12% of the respondents said that they paid a bribe in the past year. Almost one in ten Israelis (9%) who came in contact with government real estate services said that they paid a bribe. In ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’, 89% of the population believe that personal connections or the use of power are essential for promoting their interests vis-à-vis the authorities. This is the highest percentage of all the countries covered by the Global Corruption Barometer; the global average is 63%...
 
International Day of Action for the Prisoner Hunger Strikers | IJAN
  From Palestine to California, prisoners are organizing to end torture in prison and prison as a form repression of popular movements and poor communities of color. Included in this action alert are three opportunities to support prisoners in fighting for dignity and justice - in Palestine, in California and for political prisoner Lynne Stewart. Members of IJAN have been following and supporting the organizing of California prisoners, who are prepared to go on indefinite hunger strike starting July 8 to demand an end to long–term solitary confinement and other abuses...
 
Egypt’s deniable coup: Another anti-Islam psy-op, by Dr. Kevin Barrett | PressTV
  American law bans “any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d’etat or decree.” So what just happened in Egypt? Democratically-elected President Morsi was overthrown and arrested by the military. The Constitution was suspended. Ruling party leaders were rounded up and imprisoned. The military seized TV and radio studios. But it wasn’t a coup, the coup plotters insist...
 
The Real Egyptian Spring, by Dr. Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine
..This revolution is different from that of January 25th 2011 that toppled the rule of previous President, Husni Mubarak. The 2011 revolution was planned, initiated, financed and mainly orchestrated by the CIA sponsored Freedom House Organization, whose 43 members, then, were held by Egyptian police for trial, but under the pressure of 17 Foreign Ministers of Western countries, were allowed to be smuggled to Israel and then back to the USA. Still, on June 4th 2013 the Egyptian court convicted all of them in absentia. We just need to remember that such American NGOs had toppled many Latin American governments in the past...
 
Guess Who Killed America? Hal Lindsey! Say it Isn’t So! by Yukon Jack | Veterans Today
..I like Hal Lindsey but being a truth teller I have to say, he killed America. “Say it’s not so” you say! Let me explain why Hal Lindsey steered the US Titanic straight into the Zionist iceberg and now America is sinking fast, glug, glug, glug, she’s keeled over just about ready to go under. How influential was this man? He is considered the “the most influential of all Christian Zionists of the 20th century“. Hal Lindsey single-handedly killed America because he delivered tens of millions of Christians into the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist, pro-Neocon fold. Satan, himself, could not have done a better job...
[The recent spate of tales of zombies and vampires is a mass cultural response to the public's intuitive perception of the Zionists, Christian and Jewish respectively - think about it. When this largely unconsciousness awareness becomes conscious, it'll be deja vu all over again. Some people just never learn.]
 
The “Israel Lobby” and the Nixon Administration | Duck of Minerva
..This volume is enormously interesting for the Israel lobby argument, in part, because it showcases Nixon and Kissinger’s fears of the lobby. I’ve read a lot of cooky Nixon and Kissinger shenanigans over the years, but these do stand out, in part because they emphasize Nixon and Kissinger’s concerns about the Lobby over strategic considerations. My reading of the volume is that it provides some direct evidence of the influence of pressure from the Israel lobby on US policy, bearing out not only the Israel Lobby argument but more generally the importance of domestic politics to Nixon’s foreign policy...
 
Full Disclosure: What the Media Isn’t Telling You About War in Syria | Intifada Palestine
...The west is absolutely engaging in mass propaganda by portraying the Syrian conflict as a fight for democracy when many of the rebels want anything but. They pledge allegiance to Al-Qaeda, explicitly call for Sharia law, kill thousands of Christians, use terrorist tactics yet our corrupt media and political class pretend arming them will produce democracy...
[The Israeli strategy has always been to sow chaos in the Muslim countries they are unable to coopt, while they help prop up medieval dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, or a military dictatorship in Egypt.]
 
Deir Yassin Remembered
  Early on the morning of Friday April 9th 1948, the beautiful Arab village of Deir Yassin on the west side of Jerusalem was attacked by commandos of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. More than 100 men, women and children were systematically killed. Within a year the village had been repopulated with orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Its cemetery was bulldozed and its name wiped off the map. The massacre at Deir Yassin marked the beginning of the depopulation of more than 400 Arab villages and the exile of more than 700,000 Palestinians...
 
Shocking Revelations on Muhammad al-Durrah Assassination | Roi Tov
  The assassination of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah in the Netzarim Junction, Gaza Strip, on September 30, 2000, refuses to die. Even if not remembering the boy's name, no human heart will forget the images of the terrified boy hiding behind his father in a futile attempt to avoid the flying bullets. Seconds later, the boy is seen slumped across his father's legs. Filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, the event was reported by Charles Enderlin of France 2 Channel, and reached worldwide resonance, becoming a key event of the Second Intifada...
 
Prof. James H. Fetzer: Washington Overtly Supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria, Interview by Kourosh Ziabari | Fars
..That Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both involved when they are both allies of the United States yet support diverse objectives reflects the complexity of the situation. Qatar supports the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, which came to power in Egypt and Tunisia, but where the Egyptian military coup has now stemmed that ascent. The U.S.-Saudi alliance appears to be intended to minimize the influence of the Brotherhood, while creating a counter-balance to the influence of Iran in the Middle East, which Israel also supports...
 
Stasi's New Incarnation | Stephen Lendman
  Stasi was East Germany's secret police. It suppressed opposition to Stalinist power. It was one of the most repressive state apparatuses in modern times. When East Germany collapsed in 1989, Stasi had over 90,000 full-time employees. Another 300,000 were paid informants. They spied on East German citizens. Thousands of West German collaborators did so on theirs. Stasi infiltrated NATO headquarters. Legendary spymaster Markus (Mischa) Wolf ran things...
 


Jul 9, 2013

After Morsi, the geopolitical fallout, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online
...Henceforth, a post-Morsi Egypt will likely embed itself more firmly in the Saudi-led conservative camp, take a more assertive role vis-a-vis the crisis in Syria, provide greater assurance to Israel and put to rest the US and Israeli concerns about any regional realignment, in other words, a "thermidorian" restoration of status quo foreign policy approach favored by the unreconstructed Egyptian armed forces...
 
Morsi the Man – Guilty, with Honor, by Julie Webb-Pullman | Palestine Chronicle
...Morsi the Muslim man, who did not seek, but was propelled to, the presidency of Egypt – by his party and by the majority of the Egyptian people. Most of whom are still behind him. Morsi the Muslim man –  deposed and detained. or what? For being democratically elected by the people of Egypt? What greater disincentive could there be for future presidential hopefuls… if indeed there were to be another free and fair electoral process now that Egyptian democracy has been so ignominiously usurped. or failing to do in one year what no leader anywhere or any time has ever achieved – a complete 12 month turnaround of a decades-old corrupt and embedded system?..
 
None Dare Call It Tyranny, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation
  While the Obama administration dithers over whether the Egyptian regime-change operation constitutes a coup or not, one thing is certain: The Egyptian people are suffering under tyranny. After all, that’s what military rule is: tyranny. Our American ancestors understood this. That’s why they steadfastly opposed standing armies. They understood that standing armies constituted a grave threat to the freedom and well-being of a society. That’s why the American people lived without standing armies for more than a century of our nation’s existence...
 
Reductio ad Hitlerum as a Social Evil , by K.R. Bolton | Inconvenient History
  Third Reich “scholarship” is measured against a de facto axiom that it must be centered around the Holocaust, with concomitant discussions on medical experiments, and other aspects of a supposedly uniquely “Nazi” brutality. Anything less is branded by watchdog “scholars” such as Deborah Lipstadt as “relativizing the Holocaust,” which is apparently even worse than “Holocaust revisionism.” Reductio ad Hitlerum is the technique of undermining a debate by accusing the opponent of being a Nazi...
[The latter part of this monograph, on usury and debt, is of particular interest]
 
U.S. Invents New Foreign Policy "Principle" That Contradicts Law | Moon of Alabama
  Leslie H. Gelb and Dimitri K. Simes, foreign policy honchos in Washington, ask in an NYT op-ed if there is A New Anti-American Axis? They seem to believe that any cooperation between Russia and China is somewhat anti-American.. there is this rather weird passage in their writing: “Both Moscow and Beijing oppose the principle of international action to interfere in a country’s sovereign affairs, much less overthrow a government, as happened in Libya in 2011. After all, that principle could always backfire on them.” Since when is there a principle of interference in other countries business? There is none. The principle in international law is NOT to interfere in any sovereign state's local business...
 
MSNBC Won’t Tell You: How Do You Know When President Obama is Lying? by Jeff Cohen | CounterPunch
  I was a young person when I first heard the quip: “How do you know when the President is lying? His lips are moving.” At the time, President Nixon was expanding the war in Vietnam to other countries and deploying the White House “plumbers” to commit crimes against antiwar leakers. Forty years have passed. Sadly, these days, often when I see President Obama moving his lips, I assume he’s lying...
 
The Lust for Washington's Money: Lawlessness is the New Normal, by Paul Craig Roberts | CounterPunch
...the European sovereign debt crisis is being used to terminate the sovereignty of the countries that are members of the EU. There is no doubt that this is true, but the sovereignty of the EU member states is only nominal. Although the individual countries still retain some sovereignty from the EU government, they are all under Washington’s thumb, as demonstrated by the recent illegal and hostile action taken on Washington’s orders by France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Austria against the airliner carrying Bolivia’s President Evo Morales...
 
Evo Morales: Plane-grounding debacle will never be forgotten in South America | RT
...“My first thought when I was forced to land was: how can European countries obey the will of the US? I imagined these nations were defenders of democracy.” Morales confirmed that officials did not attempt to search the French-made Dassault jet, which would have been “illegal” under diplomatic conventions, but still attempted to find their way on-board. “I said to the airport officials, ‘You can’t search the President’s plane. They said ‘We can’t unless you invite us for a cup of coffee’. They wanted me to invite them for coffee!” recalled a still-seething Morales...
 
Mark Twain: America’s Spirit of Independence Day, by Allen L Roland | Veterans Today
..“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” …The Mysterious Stranger...

New Egyptian War: Americans Lose, Again, by Rep. Ron Paul | Antiwar
  Looking at the banners in the massive Egyptian protests last week, we saw many anti-American slogans. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government that was deposed by the military last week was very critical of what it saw as US support for the coup. Why is it that all sides in this Egyptian civil war seem so angry with the United States? Because the United States has at one point or another supported each side, which means also that at some point the US has also opposed each side. It is the constant meddling in Egyptian affairs that has turned Egyptians against us, as we would resent foreign intervention in our own affairs...
 
The Snags, Snares, and Snafus of Covering the U.S. Military, by Nick Turse | TomDispatch
...The 30-year-old history of U.S. foreign policy: now, there’s a dynamite issue!  Explosive, in fact.  Far too dangerous, it turns out, for Americans to be informed about or have access to basic documents about.. Whether I’m trying to figure out what the U.S. military is doing in Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably uniform  - obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances.. on my return to the United States, I was detained at Kennedy Airport in New York by agents of the Department of Homeland Security.  Their question for me: Was I planning to fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan?..
 
Secret Meeting to Plan Renewed Rebel Offensive against Syria, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research
..senior intelligence officials from US-NATO and allied countries including the US, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar met on June 7, behind closed door at the residence of the British Ambassador in Ankara. The topic for discussion was the defeat of the US-NATO sponsored Al Nusrah rebels following the battle of Al Qusseir which led to the victory of Syrian forces. The planning of a renewed rebel offensive was envisaged...
 
Excess Reserves at the Federal Reserve: One of The Biggest Financial Scams In History, A Whopping US$1.794 Trillion, by Matthias Chang | Global Research
...The banks are allowed to survive in spite of their massive frauds and other financial hanky-pankies. The banks are allowed to use digital technology (e.g. high-frequency trading) to corner the market and destroy Joe-Six-Packs. But, Joe-Six-Packs have to suffer the indignity of unemployment, foreclosures, reduced unemployment benefits, survive on food-stamps, and other austerity measures. Additionally, and to prevent any opposition to the financial and ruling elites, Joe-Six-Packs are now under intense surveillance by NSA’s Prism Program that tracks every move, phone calls, emails, etc...
 
Records of “bin Laden raid” buried by the CIA, by Jim Fetzer and by Richard Lardner | Veterans Today
  For those who missed the memo, Osama bin Laden actually died on or about 15 December 2001 in Afghanistan and was buried in an unmarked grave there in accordance with Islamic practice. Barack Obama found it so useful to clear the front page of questions about his birth certificate, having troops stationed in Pakistan and having failed to close Guantanamo that he resurrected Osama and had him die for the second time...
 
Conquering the Narrow Valley of the Giant Ghosts | Roi Tov
...The Biblical Refaim Valley is difficult to find nowadays.. Unluckily this area is of double strategic importance. It is within the area designed for a park enveloping Jerusalem, a slightly camouflaged military deployment area, vital for a possible future attack on Palestine. It is also part of Israel's attempt to create a Jewish settlement continuity between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. The Zionist idea behind the move is to bisect the West Bank, an attempt to transform Palestine into a non-viable state. Their being robbed of their homes by the State of Israel was just a matter of time...
 
Oy Vey - Brazilian Jews Take to The Streets To Push for Change | Gilad Atzmon
..I think that time is ripe to launch a fund for Tikun Olam's victims - those who were destroyed in the name of Jewish progressive ideology. As I have mentioned many times in the past, before those Tikun Olam enthusiasts 'repair the world' they may want to consider fixing their Jewish State and dismantling its forceful Lobby...
[Among tribal Jews, Tikun Olam, in practice, means making the world safe for the Jews, while everybody else.. works for the Jews]
 
Two Letters That Changed the Course of Middle East and World History Forever, by Mohamed Khodr | Veterans Today
  The two letters separated by 824 years that changed the course of Arab and world history till this day emanated from Christian Europe. Both letters in their own way and time were written in search of monetary and military assistance from powerful forces, the Catholic Church and Europe’s Zionist movement...
 


Jul 8, 2013

On Questioning the Jewish State, by Joseph Levine | NYT
  I was raised in a religious Jewish environment, and though we were not strongly Zionist, I always took it to be self-evident that “Israel has a right to exist.”.. Defenders of Israeli policies routinely accuse Israel’s critics of denying her right to exist, while the critics (outside of a small group on the left, where I now find myself) bend over backward to insist that, despite their criticisms, of course they affirm it. The general mainstream consensus seems to be that to deny Israel’s right to exist is a clear indication of anti-Semitism (a charge Jews like myself are not immune to), and therefore not an option for people of conscience...
[Stating the truth about Israel in the MSM is a dangerous act – this was published in March - I wonder if he still has his job]
 
Egypt’s All-Or-Nothing Politics, by Lawrence Davidson | Intifada Palestine
  The cultural situation in much of the Middle East resembles a volcanic landscape. On the surface there is a layer of Westernization. Within the confines of this layer dwell that portion of the population that has, in terms of lifestyle, come to favor Western ways. This is not an unexpected phenomenon. After all, imperial European powers controlled much of North Africa from the early nineteenth century onward as well as most of the rest of the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century...
 
FreedumbAndDemocrazy, by Sharmine Narwani | Al Akhbar
  Freedom and democracy. How I have come to loathe this phrase. Two-lofty-words-and-a-conjunction bandied around by handmaidens of Empire: verbal grenades that can gut entire nations. When I hear “freedom and democracy” I instinctively look for cover - just as “Allahu Akbar” yelled loudly enough can now make Arabs and Muslims hit the ground fast. “Freedom and democracy” is the battle cry for every single western regime-change operation I can remember. Operations that leave innocent civilians dead, cities destroyed - anarchy, corruption and criminality in their wake...
 
Israel Destroyed Syrian Weapons Depot Containing Advanced Russian Arms, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam
  A massive explosion last Thursday at a major Syrian weapons depot in Latakia, not far from the main port of Tartous, completely destroyed the facility and munitions stored there.  Tartous is Syria’s main port.  It is largely controlled by the Russian military, and the route by which all weapons transported by sea would enter Syria.  As such, any advanced Russian weaponry would enter via Tartous and might be stored in the Latakia depot. Though the Free Syrian Army took immediate credit for the attack, it was not the responsible party.  A confidential Israeli source informs me that Israeli forces attacked the site...
 
The NSA's mass and indiscriminate spying on Brazilians, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  I've written an article on NSA surveillance for the front page of the Sunday edition of O Globo, the large Brazilian newspaper based in Rio de Janeiro. The article is headlined (translated) "US spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilians", and I co-wrote it with Globo reporters Roberto Kaz and Jose Casado.. As the headline suggests, the crux of the main article details how the NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians...
 
The Hero's Reward and the Judgment of History: The Emperor Strikes Back, by Andrew Levine | CounterPunch
...Because governments cultivate secrecy, they have always abhorred (unauthorized) leakers, and they have always gone after them to the degree that political circumstances allow.  The Obama Administration is the most recent in a long line. There is a difference however: Obama has ratcheted up the level of repression – enough to make a mockery of formerly sacrosanct Constitutional constraints on government intrusions into individuals’ lives and behaviors, including First Amendment protections for freedom of the press and Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable” searches and seizures...
 
Downing the Bolivian Presidential Plane: Air Piracy Over Europe, by John Pilger | CounterPunch
  Imagine the aircraft of the President of France being forced down in Latin America on “suspicion” that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale. Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the “international community”, as the governments of the West call themselves...
 
US Egypt Policies Don’t Pass the Laugh Test, by Rep. Ron Paul | Antiwar
  A military coup in Egypt yesterday resulted in the removal and imprisonment of the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a closure of media outlets sympathetic to him, the house arrest of his advisors, and the suspension of the constitution. The military that overthrew Morsi is the main recipient of the $1.3 billion yearly US aid package to Egypt. You could say that the US “owns” the Egyptian military that just overthrew its democratically-elected leader. The hypocrisy of the US administration on these events in Egypt is stunning...
 
What Would the Founding Fathers Think of Edward Snowden? | Stephen M. Walt
  Every year on the Fourth of July I sit down and read the Declaration of Independence. It's a habit I got into some years ago, but I take a peculiar pleasure in reading through the founding principles of the American Revolution, archaic language and all. In these days of creeping executive power, supine journalism, and reflexive threat-inflation, it's a valuable reminder that governments exist to serve the people -- and not the other way around.  On this Independence Day, I am wondering what the Founding Fathers would have made of Edward Snowden...
 
Egypt's revolution betrayed: Fuel for al-Qaeda fires | Eric Walberg
  During the past few months, dozens of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) members have been murdered and their offices sacked and burned. The police openly refuse to protect them. Rather than ordering the opposition to drop their demand that Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, resign, and negotiate reasonably with his government, the army gave him a Hobson's Choice: resign or be ousted. As General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi announced the army's coup Wednesday, President Mohammed Morsi released a video on the president’s website denouncing the ouster. “I am the elected president of Egypt. The revolution is being stolen from us...”
 
Gzerot Ramadan | Roi Tov
  Few languages are better equipped than Hebrew to deal with pain and institutional abuse. It differentiates between a regular scream (tze'aka) and a painful one (ze'aka), creating a linguistic paradise for torturers. It even has a special word for unjustified collective punishment, "gzera," the result of the people's need to deal linguistically with the intrinsic injustice of their despotic leaders.In July 2013, the Zionist leadership imposed "gzerot"—the plural of gzera—on its Palestinian population ahead of Ramadan...
 
Tony Blair hired ex Israeli army intelligence officer | Gilad Atzmon
  The Telegraph reported today that “Tony Blair has hired a former Israeli army intelligence officer to work in his private office, despite his role as Middle East peace envoy.” Lianne Pollak, who has led intelligence teams in the Israel Defence Forces, was recruited as a private consultant between October 2012 and April this year. The 30-year-old Israel was previously a policy adviser to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, working with security agencies and senior officials...
 
Who is the tyrant in Syria?  by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today
  Who is responsible for the killing in Syria? The neocons. It was they who drafted Netanyahu’s  1996 “Clean Break” plan to use the US military to get rid of Israel’s enemies. It was they who published the PNAC document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” on September 11th, 2000, re-phrasing the Clean Break plan for America’s defense establishment, and calling for a “New Pearl Harbor” to make it possible. It was they who murdered almost 3,000 Americans exactly one year later, to put the “Clean Break” into operation. Immediately after 9/11, the neocon “Clean Break” plan went operational..
 
My life at Guantanamo, by Moath al-Alwi | MCW News
  A month ago, the guards here at Guantanamo Bay gave me an orange jumpsuit. After years in white and brown, the colours of compliant prisoners, I am very proud to wear my new clothes. The colour orange is Guantanamo’s banner. Anyone who knows the truth about this place knows that orange is its only true colour.. I was never charged with any crime and I have not received a fair trial in US courts. To protest this injustice, I began a hunger strike in February. Now, twice a day, the US military straps me down to a chair and pushes a thick tube down my nose to force-feed me...
 


Jul 8, 2013

On Questioning the Jewish State, by Joseph Levine | NYT
  I was raised in a religious Jewish environment, and though we were not strongly Zionist, I always took it to be self-evident that “Israel has a right to exist.”.. Defenders of Israeli policies routinely accuse Israel’s critics of denying her right to exist, while the critics (outside of a small group on the left, where I now find myself) bend over backward to insist that, despite their criticisms, of course they affirm it. The general mainstream consensus seems to be that to deny Israel’s right to exist is a clear indication of anti-Semitism (a charge Jews like myself are not immune to), and therefore not an option for people of conscience...
[Stating the truth about Israel in the MSM is a dangerous act – this was published in March - I wonder if he still has his job]
 
Egypt’s All-Or-Nothing Politics, by Lawrence Davidson | Intifada Palestine
  The cultural situation in much of the Middle East resembles a volcanic landscape. On the surface there is a layer of Westernization. Within the confines of this layer dwell that portion of the population that has, in terms of lifestyle, come to favor Western ways. This is not an unexpected phenomenon. After all, imperial European powers controlled much of North Africa from the early nineteenth century onward as well as most of the rest of the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century...
 
FreedumbAndDemocrazy, by Sharmine Narwani | Al Akhbar
  Freedom and democracy. How I have come to loathe this phrase. Two-lofty-words-and-a-conjunction bandied around by handmaidens of Empire: verbal grenades that can gut entire nations. When I hear “freedom and democracy” I instinctively look for cover - just as “Allahu Akbar” yelled loudly enough can now make Arabs and Muslims hit the ground fast. “Freedom and democracy” is the battle cry for every single western regime-change operation I can remember. Operations that leave innocent civilians dead, cities destroyed - anarchy, corruption and criminality in their wake...
 
Israel Destroyed Syrian Weapons Depot Containing Advanced Russian Arms, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam
  A massive explosion last Thursday at a major Syrian weapons depot in Latakia, not far from the main port of Tartous, completely destroyed the facility and munitions stored there.  Tartous is Syria’s main port.  It is largely controlled by the Russian military, and the route by which all weapons transported by sea would enter Syria.  As such, any advanced Russian weaponry would enter via Tartous and might be stored in the Latakia depot. Though the Free Syrian Army took immediate credit for the attack, it was not the responsible party.  A confidential Israeli source informs me that Israeli forces attacked the site...
 
The NSA's mass and indiscriminate spying on Brazilians, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  I've written an article on NSA surveillance for the front page of the Sunday edition of O Globo, the large Brazilian newspaper based in Rio de Janeiro. The article is headlined (translated) "US spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilians", and I co-wrote it with Globo reporters Roberto Kaz and Jose Casado.. As the headline suggests, the crux of the main article details how the NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians...
 
The Hero's Reward and the Judgment of History: The Emperor Strikes Back, by Andrew Levine | CounterPunch
...Because governments cultivate secrecy, they have always abhorred (unauthorized) leakers, and they have always gone after them to the degree that political circumstances allow.  The Obama Administration is the most recent in a long line. There is a difference however: Obama has ratcheted up the level of repression – enough to make a mockery of formerly sacrosanct Constitutional constraints on government intrusions into individuals’ lives and behaviors, including First Amendment protections for freedom of the press and Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable” searches and seizures...
 
Downing the Bolivian Presidential Plane: Air Piracy Over Europe, by John Pilger | CounterPunch
  Imagine the aircraft of the President of France being forced down in Latin America on “suspicion” that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale. Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the “international community”, as the governments of the West call themselves...
 
US Egypt Policies Don’t Pass the Laugh Test, by Rep. Ron Paul | Antiwar
  A military coup in Egypt yesterday resulted in the removal and imprisonment of the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a closure of media outlets sympathetic to him, the house arrest of his advisors, and the suspension of the constitution. The military that overthrew Morsi is the main recipient of the $1.3 billion yearly US aid package to Egypt. You could say that the US “owns” the Egyptian military that just overthrew its democratically-elected leader. The hypocrisy of the US administration on these events in Egypt is stunning...
 
What Would the Founding Fathers Think of Edward Snowden? | Stephen M. Walt
  Every year on the Fourth of July I sit down and read the Declaration of Independence. It's a habit I got into some years ago, but I take a peculiar pleasure in reading through the founding principles of the American Revolution, archaic language and all. In these days of creeping executive power, supine journalism, and reflexive threat-inflation, it's a valuable reminder that governments exist to serve the people -- and not the other way around.  On this Independence Day, I am wondering what the Founding Fathers would have made of Edward Snowden...
 
Egypt's revolution betrayed: Fuel for al-Qaeda fires | Eric Walberg
  During the past few months, dozens of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) members have been murdered and their offices sacked and burned. The police openly refuse to protect them. Rather than ordering the opposition to drop their demand that Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, resign, and negotiate reasonably with his government, the army gave him a Hobson's Choice: resign or be ousted. As General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi announced the army's coup Wednesday, President Mohammed Morsi released a video on the president’s website denouncing the ouster. “I am the elected president of Egypt. The revolution is being stolen from us...”
 
Gzerot Ramadan | Roi Tov
  Few languages are better equipped than Hebrew to deal with pain and institutional abuse. It differentiates between a regular scream (tze'aka) and a painful one (ze'aka), creating a linguistic paradise for torturers. It even has a special word for unjustified collective punishment, "gzera," the result of the people's need to deal linguistically with the intrinsic injustice of their despotic leaders.In July 2013, the Zionist leadership imposed "gzerot"—the plural of gzera—on its Palestinian population ahead of Ramadan...
 
Tony Blair hired ex Israeli army intelligence officer | Gilad Atzmon
  The Telegraph reported today that “Tony Blair has hired a former Israeli army intelligence officer to work in his private office, despite his role as Middle East peace envoy.” Lianne Pollak, who has led intelligence teams in the Israel Defence Forces, was recruited as a private consultant between October 2012 and April this year. The 30-year-old Israel was previously a policy adviser to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, working with security agencies and senior officials...
 
Who is the tyrant in Syria?  by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today
  Who is responsible for the killing in Syria? The neocons. It was they who drafted Netanyahu’s  1996 “Clean Break” plan to use the US military to get rid of Israel’s enemies. It was they who published the PNAC document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” on September 11th, 2000, re-phrasing the Clean Break plan for America’s defense establishment, and calling for a “New Pearl Harbor” to make it possible. It was they who murdered almost 3,000 Americans exactly one year later, to put the “Clean Break” into operation. Immediately after 9/11, the neocon “Clean Break” plan went operational..
 
My life at Guantanamo, by Moath al-Alwi | MCW News
  A month ago, the guards here at Guantanamo Bay gave me an orange jumpsuit. After years in white and brown, the colours of compliant prisoners, I am very proud to wear my new clothes. The colour orange is Guantanamo’s banner. Anyone who knows the truth about this place knows that orange is its only true colour.. I was never charged with any crime and I have not received a fair trial in US courts. To protest this injustice, I began a hunger strike in February. Now, twice a day, the US military straps me down to a chair and pushes a thick tube down my nose to force-feed me...
 


Jul 7, 2013
The Morality of Meditation | NYT
...As Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another...
[Sometimes I feel that what I do on this website, chronicling the confusion and suffering caused by ignorance, is futile - perhaps I should instead return to devoting the bulk of my time to the study and practice of the path of wisdom and compassion. If enough people did so, the world could be transformed and healed. What the Abrahamical theists call the kingdom of heaven is our natural state, but it takes a lot of work (the Six Paramitas) to really grow up. In the meantime I feel that those of us who see the danger must do our best to prevent Zionism and its motivating factors (the Three Poisons) from bringing about premature and total darkness.]
 
Israel: Curse of the Jews, by Barry Chamish | Veterans Today
  Less than a year ago, Barry Chamish – one of several Zionists I can’t help admiring – admitted that Christopher Bollyn was right, Israel WAS behind 9/11. I like people who don’t let a good ideology blind them to the truth. In this essay, Barry takes another step toward noticing the elephant in the living room: Zionism is the product of monsters; and the wealthy monsters behind it will undoubtedly save themselves, and let the poor suckers perish, when the whole thing goes up in flames...
 
The Achilles’ heel of the peoples’ revolutions, by Uri Avnery | Redress Information & Analysis
...When you see a group of demonstrators in a newspaper picture, you do not know at first glance whether they are Egyptians, Israelis, Turks, Iranians or Americans. They all belong to the same social class. Young people alienated by a heartless globalization, confronted by a labour market that no longer offers the bright prospects they expect, university students for whose skills there is little demand. People with jobs, but who find it hard to “finish the month”’ as we say in Hebrew...
 
The Arab Spring and Israel, by Adam Keller | MCW News
  The term "Arab Spring" was inspired by the historic 1848 events known as the “Spring of Nations". When it became known throughout Europe that in Paris the monarchy was overthrown and a republic established, the masses in many different countries took to the streets to make their own revolutions. Some were oppressed peoples suffering under foreign rule, others lived under Kings and tyrannical rulers of their own nationality. In some places there were relatively peaceful revolutions, others burst into bloody civil wars and the intervention of foreign powers...
 
Four million Syrians could starve as aid delivery lags | Al Akhbar
  Four million Syrians, a fifth of the population, are unable to produce or buy enough food to survive, the United Nations said on Friday. The statement comes as donations to Syrian civilians has been lagging far behind the levels of financial assistance initially pledged by member states and called for by the UN...
 
Egypt After the Coup: Is Obama Backing ElBaradei? by Franklin Lamb | Intifada Palestine
...What ElBaradei’s representatives are reportedly offering the White House in exchange for Obama’s discrete assistance, is that the 1979 Camp David Accord, including all its elements will be observed and that in addition,  additional guarantees will be given to Israel with the Zionist regime occupying Palestine will be given prime estate for its Embassy. In addition, Egypt under ElBaradei can be expected to toughen its stance on Iran’s nuclear program with altering and adjusting publicly some of his pre-2012 comments on Iran that the White House and Israel criticized as being “soft on the Islamic Republic.”..
 
NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong, by Bim Adewunmi | The Guardian
  On Tuesday, the National Security Agency called at the University of Wisconsin on a recruitment drive. Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be "adversaries", and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA...
 
Edward Snowden offered asylum by Venezuelan president | The Guardian
  Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro said on Friday he had decided to offer asylum to former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has petitioned several countries to avoid capture by Washington...
 
In Egypt the Military is Supreme, by Esam Al-Amin | CounterPunch
...Either the West stands for democratic principles and the rule of law or it does not. When President Obama called Morsi on June 30, he admonished him that “democracy is about more than elections.” But what is equally essential to recognize is that there is no democracy without respecting and protecting the legitimacy of its results regardless of its outcome...
 
America’s Plan B in Egypt: Bring Back the Old Regime, by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | Srategic Culture Foundation
  The road that has been taken in Egypt is a dangerous one. A military coup has taken place in Egypt while millions of Egyptians have cheered it on with little thought about what is replacing the Muslim Brotherhood and the ramifications it will have for their society. Many people in cheering crowds have treated the Egyptian military’s coup like it was some sort of democratic act. Little do many of them remember who the generals of the Egyptian military work for...
 
"We knew the Lord was German"... | Paul Eisen
  I recommend this film and urge you to watch it to the end. It will tell you about a person and a history that the world has not known but ought to know...
 
The Rise of the Iranian Moderates, by Seyed Hossein Mousavian | Al-Monitor
  Political infighting and factionalism has become a cynical characteristic of Iranian politics since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, specifically in the last 16 years. This phenomenon escalated with the sweeping victory of the traditional left wing of the revolution relabeled as Islahtalaban, or “Reformists,” in the presidential election of 1997. During the eight years of President Mohammad Khatami’s administration from 1997 to 2005, the right wing of the revolution.. was progressively sidelined and replaced by Reformists...
 
Un-Branding Israel | Roi Tov
  Branding is a discipline within Marketing, which attempts to identify one seller's product against all others, mainly by a careful design of its name, design, and symbol. Nation Branding is essentially the same but applied to the buildup of a country's reputation. In the violent Zionist saga, Jaffa Orange was a cornerstone event in their building of a Nation Zio-Branding...
 
The Servility of the Satellites, by Diana Johnstone | CounterPunch
  The Snowden affair has revealed even more about Europe than about the United States. Certainly, the facts of NSA spying are significant. But many people suspected that something of the sort was going on.  The refusal of France, Italy and Portugal to allow the private aircraft of the President of Bolivia to cross their airspace on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden might be aboard is rather more astonishing. Together, these revelations confirm the completion of the transformation of the “Western democracies” into something else, an entity that as yet has no recognized name...
 
“Diversity” and “Multiculturalism” Busted (3), by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today
...If “diversity” means that people should be cherished for who they are, regardless of color or creed, then it is reasonable, logical, and displays common sense. If “diversity” means lowering test scores or implementing affirmative action in order to bring in a “diversity” of people, then it is irrational, unreasonable, and should be rejected. Moreover, if “diversity” is used as a means to irrationally deconstruct Western culture and elevate demonstrably false ideas, then cultural conflict is not far behind...



Jul 6, 2013

US has invaded 70 nations: Make July 4th Independence From America Day, by Gideon Polya | MCW News
..American racism has grossly violated the proposition that “all men are created equal” and the worst form of racism involves invasion of other countries. The US has invaded about 70 countries since its inception and has invaded a total of about 50 countries since 1945. The World needs to declare a transition from the 4th of July as Independence for America Day to the 4th of July as Independence from America Day...
 
Cameron’s ‘Torah’ government, by Stuart Littlewood | My Catbird Seat
  Ten years ago Tam Dalyell, the 'Father of the House' (i.e. the most senior member of the House of Commons in the British Parliament), sparked a huge row by accusing the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, of "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers" .. to make the Prime Minister feel thoroughly at home in his Torah party a Jewish scholar, after tracing Cameron’s ancestry, claimed he could be “a direct descendant of Moses or, at least, a cousin”... 
 
On Hamas, Fatah and the Squandered Years: When ‘Unity’ Loses Its Meaning, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
  When Hamas and Fatah representatives met in Gaza on June 04, there was little media fanfare. In fact, neither party expected much attention to their ‘unity talks’ aside from the occasional references to ‘national reconciliation’, ‘building bridges’ and the ‘obstacles’ along the way. And since then, there was yet more proof that the Gaza talks were another futile exercise to breathe unity between political factions that were never united to begin with, nor possess the minimal requirement of a shared political platform, let alone vision...
 
The Saudi-Qatari Clash Over Syria, by David B. Ottaway | The National Interest
  Saudi Arabia and the United States are now working closely together to bolster Syrian rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, reviving in the process an earlier model of covert military cooperation from the 1980s that successfully drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. This time their target is Russia’s last remaining Middle East Arab ally—the Assad regime, whose armed forces are equipped entirely with Russian weapons...
 
Is the US Playing With Gas in Syria? by Evan Taylor | CounterPunch
  Istanbul is rioting, Syria is enflamed, and the Palestinians still do not have a state, but it may be that the real catalyst for action in the Mediterranean is coming from miles under the sea.  Based on discoveries made in the last five years, Israel, Cyprus, and other states in the region are now flush in natural gas, and enamored by the possibility of finding more.  A new energy bonanza is taking place, with a new game of pipeline politics quick on its heels, and disturbingly, strange and horrific wars as well...
 
Palestinians sue US groups over support for settler attacks, by Charlotte Silver | The Electronic Intifada
  A recently-filed complaint in a New York district court has the potential to compensate and provide judicial recourse to a handful of Palestinians terrorized by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. The civil suit is filed under a law that until now has been used almost entirely to prosecute Muslim and Palestinian Americans...
 
Report details ill-treatment of Palestinian children by Israeli forces | Defence for Children International Palestine
  Physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation occurred in 74 percent of the 108 affidavits collected by DCI-Palestine during 2012 from Palestinian children...
 
Humor Dept? Jewish Gay Atheist on a Roll | Boldface News
  Turn down the volume for this one or your eardrums will hurt...
 
Western-Instigated Putsch in Egypt | Roi Tov
  "To fill one's mouth with water" is a Hebrew idiom meaning "refusing to comment." It successfully describes the reaction of the Israeli Administration and the Hebrew media to the ongoing putsch in Egypt. It was obvious that Israel supports the coup d'état that deposed President Mohamed Morsi, who is closely related to the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet, saying that openly was taboo. Endangering the Seven Seas, they filled their mouths with water. Thus, while preparing this article, I just browsed the Hebrew media for pictures of the event. Their chit-chat was irrelevant...
 
My friend Shelby | Paul Eisen
  Contains a small but useful bibliography re the Holycause...

Hypocrisy as Policy: Israel’s Invisible Nukes, the Latest Chapter, by Barry Lando | CounterPunch
  A new chapter has been revealed in the fascinating saga of Israel’s invisible nuclear weapon’s program. According to documents released by the National Security Archives, in 1963-64 Argentina played a major role in providing Israel with 80-100 tons of uranium oxide (“yellowcake”) vital for Israel’s clandestine nuclear program...
 
Egypt in Danger, 8 Reasons Why, by Abdelrahman Rashdan | Palestine Chronicle
  The military coup that took place in response to the mass demonstrations in Egypt which lasted for few days came in to mark a new fundamental change in the political life. It seems now that the streets have become the ballot box,  and military helicopters have now become the tool for  counting the vote,  while the results get announced by uniformed military personnel.. Here are the reasons why I think Egypt’s political future is in danger:..
 
God bless the 'United Stasi of America' by Pepe Escobar | RT
...Snowden’s revelations about metadata and cyber-spying were not exactly ground breaking. China and Russia knew – and complained – about it for years. But from Prism to the worldwide "Boundless Informant", what matters is the unveiling of the Empire’s cyberwar drive on a vast spectrum of global “targets” - including computers in the European Union and Japan (allies) and in China (strategic competitor). It should be repeated over and over again; this is the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine in action...
 
The West on Egypt: Hypocrisy on Steroids, by Jim W. Dean | Veterans Today
...I was aware that the original revolutionaries, the Egyptian young people had collected 22 million signatures against the Brotherhood rule. But I did not know, which I just learned today, that they have collected these in just a month !! It was an astounding accomplishment. And those wanting to tag Egypt Rev II as a coup are giving away their hand how scared to death they are of their own youth pulling of something similar and hooking up with their own army to make a few changes...
 


Jul 5, 2013

Washington Islamist Strategy in Crisis as Morsi Toppled: Egypt Protest directed against US, by F. William Engdahl | Global Research
  The swift action by Egypt’s military to arrest Mohamed Morsi and key leaders of his Muslim Brotherhood organization on July 3 marks a major setback for Washington’s “Arab Spring” strategy of using political Islam to spread chaos from China through Russia across the energy-rich Middle East. Morsi rejected the Defense Minister‘s demand that he quit to avert a bloodbath. He said he stood by his “constitutional dignity” and demanded the army’s withdrawal of its ultimatum.  It may become the major turning point of America’s decline as world Sole Superpower when future generations of historians view events...
 
15 Photos From the Tahrir Square Protests You'll Never See In Legacy Media | Director Blue
  Curiously, a massive wave of anti-Obama sentiment in Egypt has been utterly ignored by vintage media, even though the protests may be the largest in all of human history...
 
July 4: 51st State Adopts Sunday | Roi Tov
...Upper echelons of the Israeli society are economically dependent on the USA. The small oligarchy running the country got rich in dollars, trading wheat, oil and chemicals with Uncle Obama et al. Expectedly, they are indefatigably marketing "USA" to the people. The Americanization of Israel is a recurrent topic in Israeli media. Adding to this the fact that also the State of Israel is dependent on the USA in several strategic resources, and the fact that many Israelis consider Israel as the 51st State of the Union is not surprising...
 
The Arabs And Their Spring | Gilad Atzmon
...The study of Jewish culture explains Israeli barbarism, as it does the Israeli negligence of human rights, it throws light on the Neocon interventionist agenda and it also elucidates the spin at the heart of Jewish Left and Anti-Zionist Zionists (AZZ).  It clearly explains why Palestinians are still living in refugee camps while American and British soldiers are fighting Zionist wars...
 
The end of the Holocaust? I don't think so | Paul Eisen
...We've already seen how the disproving of key tenets of the Holocaust narrative  e.g. the official downgrading of the number of Auschwitz fatalities has had little or no effect on the Holocaust religion. Because the Holocaust is a religion, albeit a decidedly godless one. And this surely is the point: the Holocaust, like all ideologies, needs no proof, just faith...
 
Abby Martin interviews Susan Lindauer on “Breaking the Set”: Bush & Cheney Knew About 9/11 Months Before It Happened | Veterans Today
 
The Zionist Regime and Neoconservative Intellectuals Busted (2), by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today
  The idea that Iran is the biggest threat in the world has become a sort of political virus. The Zionist regime in Israel and some of the leading neoconservatives and public intellectuals in America have been infected by that virus...
 
Rowhani and the Iranian Elections: Dore Gold Debates Former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on BBC Radio 4 | JCPA
...Israel has a most extensive nuclear weapons capability, it has no territorial ambitions apart from stealing the land of the Palestinians and it’s not going to use nuclear weapons for that but it has (a) very extensive nuclear weapons programme, and along with India and Pakistan are the three countries in the world, plus North Korea more recently, which have refused any kind of International supervision of their nuclear programme...
 
Protecting Snowden | Richard Falke
  Such self-designated ‘wise men’ of our time as David Brooks and Tom Friedman, highly influential opinion and opinionated writers of the NYT, have been telling their readers that Edward Snowden was decent and intelligent, but overstepped the law by arrogating to himself the disclosure of the ‘total data’ surveillance programs of the National Security Agency of the U.S. Government. By deliberately releasing abundant evidence of the astonishing breadth and depth of surveillance, Snowden was clearly motivated by the concern that rights of privacy, the quality of democratic life, and respect for the sovereignty of foreign countries and the confidentiality of diplomatic events were being placed in jeopardy...
 
Who Were the Patriots and Traitors on the Fourth of July, 1776? by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation
...It is easy for a modern-day American to convince himself that those men in 1776 were taking a stand against the wrongful acts of some foreign regime. Not so. These were men who were taking a firm stand against the wrongdoing of their own government. That was a dangerous thing to do because their government—the British government–considered them to be terrorists and traitors. That’s the way most governments view citizens who take a stand against the wrongdoing of their own government...
 
Playing Politics With Religion, by Ussama Makdisi | NYT
...The strife that pits Sunnis against Shiites is a product of sustained internal and external pressures that have manipulated and made toxic what has long been one of the hallmarks of Levantine societies, their religious diversity. Neither the internal nor the external reasons are intelligible on their own. They reinforce each other...
 
Surveillance and the American Illusion of Freedom, by Robert Bolton | CounterPunch
...As an Irishman keeping track of American news, I have been appalled at senseless mass shootings, so much so my hostility towards the 2nd Amendment would incite wishes to have me emigrated. But recent revelations on American surveillance policies has forced me to realize that the purpose of the second amendment – to overcome government tyranny – makes perfect sense. But pro-gun advocates must be blind, for government tyranny is on America’s doorstep, and I’m not even seeing peaceful mass protests...



Jul 4, 2013

All Law is Gone: Naked Power Remains | Craig Murray
  The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission.  It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy, as their representatives only enjoy diplomatic immunity as cyphers for their Head of State.  But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law. To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence...
 
Obama Moves to Militarize and Exploit Africa, by John Glaser | Antiwar
  Obama’s trip to Africa is a propaganda crusade. As the president talks about growing economies and making electricity more available to the continent, he is all hush hush on what is actually happening in Africa with regard to U.S. policy. Namely, Obama has increased U.S. military presence and interventionism in Africa to unprecedented levels and is meanwhile trying to win a geo-political game with China to exploit the economic potential of the continent under the control of Washington...
 
Church dignitary likens NATO to "Fourth Reich" | B92 News
  SPC Metropolitan of Montenegro Amfilohije has referred to the western military alliance NATO as "the Fourth Reich." The media in Podgorica are quoting him as saying that NATO represented "a continuation of fascism and a desire to rule the whole world." This dignitary of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) also appraised that it was good that the region was uniting "with Europe" - but noted that this should not happen "as part of NATO."..
 
I hope you can make it to the end | Paul Eisen
  The rabbi of my childhood congregation was a dear man. He was a bit shy I think and when we were sent to him for misbehaving in Sunday Hebrew school, I always got the impression that he really didn't quite know what to do.. He's dead now of course as is pretty well everything that could ever be said to be decent about our Jewish life. So perhaps this is part of the reason why I found Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks so utterly nauseating - but not even Dr Sacks is quite as nauseating as this parade of arse-lickers queuing up to pay homage...
 
This week in history: July 1-7 | World Socialist Web Site
  25 years ago: US shoots down Iranian airliner.. All 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children, were killed on July 3, 1988 when a US guided-missile cruiser shot an Iranian airliner out of the sky over the Persian Gulf. Iran Air Flight 655 was a regularly scheduled 150-mile flight between Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai, crossing the Strait of Hormuz. The USS Vincennes, an AEGIS-equipped cruiser, was part of Operation Earnest Will, the provocative campaign which deployed the largest US fleet since World War II...
 
Israel's Nuclear Bid on Seaports | Roi Tov
  A few days ago, on June 25, 2013, the National Security Archive published an article entitled The Israel-Argentina Yellowcake Connection, describing "Previously Secret Documents Show That Canadian Intelligence Discovered That Israel Purchased Yellowcake from Argentines during 1963-1964.".. it provides official references to Israel's nuclear program. The main points of interest were that Argentina sold 80 metric tons of uranium oxide to Israel.. (Machon 2) was one of Israel's deepest nuclear secrets, which Mordecai Vanunu later revealed." The reprocessing unit is key for the production of plutonium...
 
Edward Snowden's digital 'misuse' has created problems, says Ban Ki-moon, by Ed Pilkington | The Guardian
...Birgitta Jónsdóttir.... said she was alarmed by Ban's intervention in the Snowden controversy. "I see it as wrong for the secretary general of the [UN] to condemn Snowden personally in front of our foreign affairs committee. He seemed entirely unconcerned about the invasion of privacy by governments around the world, and only concerned about how whistleblowers are misusing the system.".. The UN claims in its own internal procedures to respect and protect the rights of whistleblowers.. "Our Organization will not tolerate retaliation against anyone who reports misconduct or participates in an audit or internal investigation."..
 
Scandal in Nigeria over Israeli arms firm's Internet spying contract, by Jimmy Johnson | The Electronic Intifada
...The disclosure that Elbit’s Wise Intelligence telecommunications surveillance system will monitor all Nigerian Internet communications “sparked national outrage, with a lot of Nigerians now apprehensive that their country might be sliding back to dictatorship,” wrote Premium Times. The Abuja-based newspaper broke the story on 25 April with the warning: “Big brother, in the form of the Jonathan administration, is watching you, and your communication is no longer safe.”..
 
Americans’ 'Freedom to Flutter' in Their Gilded Cage, by Ben Tanosborn | MCW News
  Tomorrow I’ll be watching from my residential perch in Fort Vancouver – the cradle of a Europeanized Pacific Northwest – one of the nation’s top fireworks displays celebrating yet another Fourth of July. Today, as the enclave prepares for the welcoming of tens of thousands of celebrants, I ponder the meaning of freedom… and how my disgruntled mood when assessing our true lack of privacy will contrast with that of most picnickers waving the symbolic red-white-and-blue. And I will question whether in the US we tend to define truth as that which is heralded by our guardians in Washington...
 
Army Ousts Egypt’s President - Morsi Is Taken Into Military Custody | NYT
  Egypt’s military officers removed the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, on Wednesday, suspended the Constitution and installed an interim government presided over by a senior jurist. Tahrir Square, where tens of thousands of opponents of the government had gathered each night since Sunday to demand Mr. Morsi’s removal, erupted in fireworks and jubilation at news of the ouster...
 
Obama Falsely Tries To Link Himself To Mandela, by Sherwood Ross | MCW News
  Just as President Obama disgracefully used Martin Luther King’s Bible at his Inauguration to tie himself to the great pacifist civil rights leader, so this totalitarian-minded, warmonger president claimed in South Africa Sunday to have been inspired by Nelson Mandela, whose legacy  he said “we must all honor in our own lives.” Coming from an American president linked so intimately to the CIA as is Mr. Obama, this declaration is laughable...
 
Hypocrisy Of Pro-Apartheid Israel Obama Visiting Post-Apartheid South Africa, by Dr Gideon Polya | MCW News
  We all saw an awful display of hypocrisy and lying when US President Barack Obama visited Africa this week, giving lip-service to African “freedom” with US-backed military and demonstrators about to overthrow democracy in Egypt, US-backed French forces occupying Mali, US Alliance forces occupying Somalia.. and Libya devastated by the US Alliance.. However, the greatest dishonesty and hypocrisy was exhibited by pro-Apartheid Israel Obama on his visit to South Africa that emerged from rule by the US- , UK- , and Apartheid Israel-backed, White supremacist, anti-African, anti-Asian,  racist Apartheid  regime only 20 years ago...
 
Quo vadis, Palestine? ... as PLO prepares to get bogged down (again) in bogus US-Israel negotiations, by Stuart Littlewood | Intifada Palestine
...The idea of a two state solution is based on the Palestinians’ historic compromise of 1988 agreeing to a state on a measly 22% of historical Palestine for the sake of peace. This has not been enough for the Israelis, they want even more. Palestine has also joined other countries in the region in establishing the Arab Peace Initiative, which offers normalized relations for Israel with 57 Arab and Islamic countries if Israel fully withdraws from all the territories occupied since 1967, as required by international law, and complies with UNGA Resolution 194 in respect of the Palestinian refugee issue. [Palestinians should not feel obliged to offer anything. They simply want back what is theirs.]..
 


Jul 3, 2013

The price of truth, by Thierry Meyssan | Voltaire Net
  While the international press plays up the information leaked by Edward Snowden as a revelation concerning the PRISM surveillance program, feigning to have discovered what everyone should already have known for a long time, Thierry Meyssan is particularly curious about the meaning of this rebellion. From this perspective, he attaches more importance to the case of General Cartwright, who has also been indicted for espionage...
 
Secret Documents: NSA Targeted Germany and EU Buildings | Der Spiegel
...The facts, which are now a part of the public record thanks to Snowden, disprove the White House's line of defense up until now, which has been that the surveillance is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, as President Barack Obama said during his recent visit to Berlin. NSA chief Alexander has sought to justify himself by saying that the NSA has prevented 10 terrorist attacks in the United States alone. Globally, he says that 50 terrorist plots have been foiled with the NSA's help. That may be true, but it is difficult to verify and at best only part of the truth...
Read more...
 
An Introduction Programming Manual: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars | The Lawful Path
  This manuscript was delivered to our offices by an unknown person.. We feel that we are not endangering the "National Security" by reproducing this document, quite the contrary; it has been authenticated and we feel that we are not only within our rights to publish it, but morally bound to do so. Regarding the training manual, you may have detected that we had to block out the marginal notes made by the selectee at the C.I.A. Training Center, but I can assure you that the manual is authentic, and was printed for the purpose of introducing the selectee to the conspiracy...
 
Beyond Worst-Case Analysis: Iran's Likely Responses to an Israeli Preventive Strike | The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
  Although an Israeli preventive strike on Iran's nuclear program would be a high-risk endeavor carrying a potential for escalation in the Levant or the Persian Gulf, it would not be the apocalyptic event that some foresee. In this Policy Note, two Washington Institute military experts assess the likelihood of various Iranian responses based on the regime's past behavior and strategic culture. Cutting through Tehran's often-fiery rhetoric on the subject, they outline steps Washington can take to both impede reconstitution of the program and mitigate post-strike risks without appearing complicit in any Israeli decision to attack...
[WINEP is one of the principal neocon think tanks, bearing great culpability in the Empire’s War of Terror]
Read more...
 
Definitions for a New Age: The OED of the National Security State, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch
  In the months after September 11, 2001, it was regularly said that “everything” had changed.  It’s a claim long forgotten, buried in everyday American life.  Still, if you think about it, in the decade-plus that followed -- the years of the PATRIOT Act, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “black sites,” robot assassination campaigns, extraordinary renditions, the Abu Ghraib photos, the Global War on Terror, and the first cyberwar in history -- much did change in ways that should still stun us...
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From Bilderberg to Google-Berg: The Technocratic Restructuring of the Global Elite, by Olga Chetverikova | Strategic Culture Foundation
  World events are showing more and more clearly that the most important goals of the world elite are the total restructuring of human consciousness and even changing the essence of humans. In fact, this is both the end and the means of building a «new world order». The last meeting of the Bilderberg Group, which took place on June 6-9, 2013 at the Grove Hotel in a London suburb, was especially telling in this regard...
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Gentlemen, please take a few minutes and have a look at this video... | Paul Eisen
  Along with some others, I recently received this message. It comes from someone who identifies himself as an 'ex-Jew' and was written partially in response to my posting the work of David Duke. It prompted quite a flurry among a small circle of us. Do read it, watch the video and read the comment from Gilad Atzmon that follows. It's something to think about...
[Duke is a white supremacist (deplorable) and very good on the subjects of Zionism, Israel and Jewish power (commendable) - as they say, it takes one to know one.]
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Shin Beth: "Just Following Orders" | Roi Tov
  What better introduction to the crimes of Israeli intelligence services than checking out the legal situation of the Nazi Regime officials? Imagine that you were working for that government as one of its valued citizens. How should you behave? Lieutenant Karl Neumann was the captain of the U-Boat UC-67 responsible for the sinking with a torpedo of the Dover Castle hospital ship on May 26, 1917. During the subsequent German Military Trials, he claimed at the Leipzig Supreme Court (Germany's Supreme Court at the time) that he had followed orders. He was acquitted since: "all civilized nations recognize the principle that a subordinate is covered by the orders of his superiors."..
 
Kerry's Shuttle Diplomacy Excludes Peace in Our Time | Stephen Lendman
  America and Israel deplore peace. Claims otherwise are pretense. On June 27, Kerry arrived in Jerusalem. It was his fifth regional trip since February. He'll return. He met straightaway with Netanyahu. They talk peace. They plan war. They abhor diplomatic conflict resolution. They don't negotiate. They demand. They want Israeli/Palestinian peace talks resumed with no preconditions. They want unconditional Palestinian surrender. Don't bet Abbas won't agree. He's a longtime collaborator. He's Washington and Israel's man in Ramallah...
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The Zionist Regime and the Israeli-Run NSA Busted, by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today
v  The Washington Times declared at the end of last March that “The 2009 cyber-attack by the U.S. and Israel that crippled Iran’s nuclear program by sabotaging industrial equipment constituted ‘an act of force’ and was likely illegal under international law, according to a manual commissioned by NATO’s cyber defense center in Estonia.” What the Washington Times probably did not know or did not want to tell its readers was that the attack was indirectly mapped out by one of the leading neoconservative think tanks in the United States, the Brookings Institution...
 
Brain Death, Live on MSNBC, by Gary Leupp | CounterPunch
  Dear Melissa Harris-Perry, I watched your twelve-minute segment this morning concerning Edward Snowden. You were smiling throughout, confident, flippant, warmly communicative as always, as though you assumed your audience shared all your premises. It’s likely most in the crowd did, actually—given two weeks of constant media spinning of the Snowden revelations story, and  the media-wide abandonment, as if by fiat, of all examination of the revelations’ content. Do you not see that that content is way beyond merely troubling?..
 
Qatar's love affair with Syria, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
...It's also no secret that Qatar's foreign policy essentially takes its orders from Washington. There are nuances, of course; Qatar may have convinced the Obama administration to align its foreign policy with the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Obama administration may have taken this reckless decision by itself. Tamim may have convinced the Taliban to open an office in Doha by himself, or he may have followed a "suggestion" from the Obama administration. The fact remains that Tamim meets all the time with State Department and Pentagon stalwarts. And he is also in charge of those precious weapons contracts with the US and also France...
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Imperialists Explain How to Rule the Middle East Through Force and Coercion, by John Glaser | Antiwar
...If we don’t reinvigorate America’s political warfare in the Middle East, they advise, then we will “cede the Middle East to malign actors such as Iran, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” and “risk creating a situation that will require, at some point in the future another massive military intervention by the United States.” Notice the wording: if we don’t rule the Middle East by force and coercion, we will “cede” it to others. This of course implies the Middle East belongs to us. And of course those other bad guys that we’ll “cede” the region to are all “malign actors.”..
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The boy killed for an off-hand remark about God: Sharia spreads in rebel held Syria | Intifada Palestine
  The murder of a boy accused of blasphemy has come to symbolise concerns about the power of Islamist radicals in Syria’s armed uprising. Paul Wood reports from Aleppo on how Sharia is spreading in rebel-held areas.. One day last month, someone asked him for a free cup. “Not even if the Prophet himself returns,” he had replied, laughing. That remark was a death sentence...
[Our valiant allies going about their godly business]
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Jul 2, 2013

Millions marched against Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood - President left, by Christof Lehmann | NSNBC International
  On 30 June 2013, one year after President Mohammed Morsi came to power in Egypt, 14 million Egyptians took to the streets, filling Cairo´s Tahrir Square beyond capacity, and demanding, that Morsi steps down on Tuesday. A counter-demonstration of the Freedom and Justice Party and Muslim Brotherhood at a nearby mosque in Nasr City, was dwarfed by the number of opposition protesters...
 
Israel deliberately forgets its history, by Schlomo Sand | Le Monde diplomatique
...Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians.. did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz.. and others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis of national education...
 
The 'Promised Land' Is Not A 'Place': Intimidated By 'Jews' | Aangirfan
  During the 1980s there were new discoveries in archaeology. The story of the 13th century BC exodus from Egypt into the PROMISED LAND was shown to be a myth. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, because the Promised land was Egyptian territory at the time. The archaeologists say there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the Egyptian empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders. Nor is there any trace or memory of the Biblical kingdom of David and Solomon...
 
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story | Paul Eisen
...not once does The Daily Mail extrapolate from these falsifiers any questioning of the Holocaust itself. On the contrary, these storytellers are condemned precisely for desecrating the Holocaust and for leaving it liable to questioning by those evil Holocaust deniers.. Perhaps a new and appropriately revered genre of "Holocaust fiction" will emerge, enabling the Holocaust narrative, by then totally disproved as fact, to still survive and prosper as the latest and greatest episode in the eternal Jewish narrative of suffering...
 
Argentina to probe Jewish ex-minister over AMIA bombing | PressTV
  An Argentinean court has ordered the probe of the country's Jewish ex-interior minister for his alleged ties to the AMIA Jewish center bombing which left 85 people dead and hundreds wounded. The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday that the Federal Appeals Court in the Argentinean capital, Buenos Aires, last week ordered the investigation of Carlos Vladimir Corach for allegedly giving an illegal payment of 400,000 dollars to Carlos Telleldin, an auto mechanic who was among those charged in the 1994 bombing...
 
Holocaust Song Depicts Destruction of Eastern European Jewry–and Nakba, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam
...Once you understand the historical resonances, once you hear a Jewish lament sung in Arabic, you realize that Shapira has done something truly brilliant.  He’s made you understand that the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis and the destruction of Palestinian life in Israel by the Nakba are both acts of horrible injustice.  And that no Jew should stand for inflicting such suffering on another people, when it was inflicted on our ancestors by the Nazis...
['We have met the enemy, and he is us']
 
Israel Wars McDonald's | Roi Tov
...McDonald's Israel functions as a private company owned by Omri Padan. He was also among the founders of "Peace Now," which probably was one of the reasons why McDonald's chose him for its Zionist business. Years later, this trivial fact led to a declaration of war of the State of Israel against McDonald's. Giant burgers, McFalafel, premium coffee, donations to IDF foundations and children hospitals; McDonald's Israel did everything to be accepted by Israelis. Almost everything...
 
Why We Should Be Concerned About Christian Zionism | National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA
...Ideological Christian Zionists sometimes claim that they speak on behalf of all American evangelicals. This is not so. Many evangelicals in the US do not want to be identified as ideological Christian Zionists. Several prominent evangelical spokespersons have spoken out strongly against this ideology, recognizing how it contradicts the central commitments of Christianity to justice and peace-making...
 
Whistleblower Russell Tice Tells More | Stephen Lendman
  Edward Snowden hopes his revelations embolden others to come forward. Tice did years earlier. He's a former Office of Naval Intelligence/Defense Intelligence Agency/NSA analyst. His career spanned 20 years. In December 2005, he accused NSA and DIA of unconstitutionally wiretapping US citizens. He got national attention, saying: "Everyone at NSA knew what they were doing was illegal, because it’s drilled into our heads over and over that it’s against NSA policy, that you do not do that. The choice is to speak out and get fired."..
 
The Imaginary Trial of Dietrich Schmoller, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation
  ..The tribunal calls the case of The German National Socialist State vs. Dietrich Schmoller. The defendant will rise and enter his plea before the tribunal. - I plead Not Guilty. - What do you mean, “Not Guilty”? The facts are crystal clear and undisputed! You disclosed to a journalist for a foreign newspaper what we were doing to inmates inside the Auschwitz concentration camp.  As a camp guard at Auschwitz, you took a solemn oath to the German state to keep what we doing inside that concentration camp secret. You knew full well that everything we were doing inside that camp was classified “Top Secret.” You knew that German law required you to keep such matters secret. You are guilty, guilty, guilty!..
 
Whitewashing apartheid with Israel's dirty water, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera
..."Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford." For one thing, the glaring discrepancy in water allocation from West Bank supplies leaves Palestinian residents of the territory reliant on water from tankers that are "forced to take long detours to avoid Israeli military checkpoints and roads off-limits to Palestinians". According to a 2012 Oxfam briefing paper, tankered water is up to five times more costly...
[This is the Israeli version of the storied Chinese water torture. It’s also accurately called genocide.]
 
How are Takfiris, Zionists alike? by Kevin Barrett | PressTV
...Takfiris and Zionists are little Pharaohs. They think their tribe is right, and everyone else is wrong. They think they are so much better than other people that they are justified in killing them...sometimes even eating them. To be fair, most Zionists and Takfiris are not cannibals. But they are fanatics who commit atrocities in service to the tribal ego. Unlike Takfiris, Zionists are usually smart enough not to film themselves doing horrible things. But some of their atrocities are as bad as those of the Takfiris...
 
U.S. Bans Media That Exposes Lies To American Citizens | Veterans Today
  Several international satellite providers, including Eutelsat and Intelsat, have stopped the broadcast of a number of Iranian channels. On June 19, Intelsat said it would no longer provide services to Iranian channels, including Press TV, as of July 1. The decision has been made under the pretext that the company should be “abiding by” the sanctions against the president of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Ezatollah Zarghami. Press TV has learned that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – an agency of the US Treasury Department – is behind the pressure on Intelsat...
 


Jul 1, 2013

Israel and the peace delusion, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis
...while the world’s attention and efforts have been focused on starting, restarting and prolonging endless, futile talks between the PA and Israel, Israel has been busy creating facts on the ground: East Jerusalem has been disconnected from its natural hinterland by Jewish settlements and the Apartheid Wall, and the number of Jewish colonizers in the West Bank has grown from 222,000 on the eve of the Oslo Agreements to 550,000 in 2010, and doubtless lots more in the past three years. Still, the talks, the time wasting, the buying of time for Israel to complete the crime of the occupation, continue...
 
The Apotheosis of Chopped Liver: Netanyahu On ‘The Jew’, Herzl and Tikkun Olam, by Gilad Atzmon | Uprooted Palestinians
  Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a fascinating speech yesterday at the memorial ceremony of Theodor Herzl in Jerusalem (27.6.2013). ‘The Jew’, stated Netanyahu, is the saver and the liberator of humanity. He and she are the true meaning of progress as conveyed by the notion of ‘Tikkun Olam’ (fixing the world).  ‘The Jew’, according to the Israeli PM, is the emblem of philosophical, ideological, spiritual, scientific and aesthetic innovation...
[Among other pathologies, Jewish fascism is characterized by collective narcissism]
 
More encouraging news, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
  Last week I shared some good news and asked if any readers could share their good news. Many readers responded. Here are just a few examples of responses which remind us that millions of candles are lit in a sea of darkness...
 
Treason, by Rob Urie | CounterPunch
...Selling wars of economic conquest as ‘democracy’ and / or ‘freedom’ was an open joke amongst Washington elites for the bulk of recent decades. Presidents hired advertising agencies to devise ‘marketing’ schemes to sell their wars. The visible idiocy of these schemes fed on the psychological trauma fear-mongering and regular mass slaughters in the ‘national interest’ caused the purposely-misinformed populace. The Cold War was perpetuated by successive administrations because the contrived bogeyman of ‘communism’ had been so effectively sold in support of Western economic predation...
 
The Naked Empire, by Robert Koehler | Chicago Tribune
...From a genocidal war against the continent's original inhabitants to the institution of slavery to Jim Crow - to Vietnam, Agent Orange, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, shock and awe bombing, torture, ecocide, drone warfare - to the millions of people trapped in our prison gulag - the agenda of empire has been going on, with unquestioning public support, for far too long. What the empire fears most is the day that it can no longer take this support for granted. That day is coming...
 
Why a Government That Collects Everyone's Private Data Won't Let Its Employees Access Public Information, by Jesse Walker | Reason
...It's an established principle that the people at the top of a hierarchy tend to be woefully ignorant of what happens at the bottom. The people at the bottom, meanwhile, feel pressure to see the world in the manner prescribed by the people above them. As Robert Anton Wilson once put it, ‘Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on the top. This is the typical flow-chart of any government, any corporation, any Army, any bureaucracy, any mammalian pack.’..
 
From Taxman to Axeman | Roi Tov
..."What are you talking about, that can't be truth! They are Jews!" The West being the West, any answer was useless. State propaganda is the only truth. State corruption in Israel is pretty much the norm...
[It’s not for nothing that Israel is commonly referred to as ‘the Criminal State.’]
 
21st Century Wire TV: ‘A Conversation with Gilad Atzmon’ (4) | Gilad Atzmon
  Host Patrick Henningsen and special guest award-winning musician and author, Gilad Atzmon, discussing the power of the Israeli lobby in Europe and the US, and a deeper look into Jewish identity politics as detailed in Atzmon’s new book, ‘The Wandering Who?’..
 
Whither Turkey After Gezi Park? | Richard Falk
...Precisely when political reality explodes in unexpected ways, pundits come along suggesting comparisons, offering hastily constructed explanations, and cite influences and antecedents. Surprise is suppressed by most ‘experts’ who do all that they can to hide these awkward exposures of how little they knew about the explosive forces in society, which erupted without any advance notice. After the explosion these wannabe gurus step forth with undiminished confidence to tell us with learned demeanor why and how it happened, why it was almost inevitable to turn out as it did, and the most arrogant and often most influential even dare tell us what to expect next, and why it is good or bad...
 
The Bull, by Rand Clifford | Veterans News Now
  In the 1933 Paramount motion picture “Tillie and Gus”, W.C. Fields said: “There comes a time in the affairs of men, when we must take the bull by the tail, and face the situation.” The term “motion pictures” is rather archaic nowadays, but there’s nothing archaic about W.C.’s insightful wisdom—almost 80 years ago spinning a clear image of precisely where we are in 2010. Indeed, ours is a confusing time of wars over fossil energy, imperialism, secrecy, disinformation, massive upward transfer of wealth, economic collapse, environmental devastation and, well, bullshit. We’ve actually been deep in the stuff since even before Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, wrote a more sobering scenario:..
 
Obama’s Grave Threat to Democratic Governance, by Andrew Levine | CounterPunch
...Richard Nixon was still the most lawless American President ever.   But in his day, democracy was robust enough to correct for some of his major depredations – not in time to stop them, but eventually. Correcting for what Bush and Obama have done is going to be a lot harder because democracy, what little of it we had, was, from Day One, Casualty Number One in what Bush called the Global War on Terror – that perpetual war regime that Bush and Obama have settled upon us...
 
Unattainable peace in Palestine-Israel, by Jamal Kanj | Intifada Palestine
...at a time when both sides of the isle wrangled over how much more to cut from the defence budget, the US Congress was united in tripling Obama’s request to finance Israeli missile defence from $96 million to $284m. It is indisputable that this unqualified US subservient support is directly responsible for Israel’s intransigence and the failure of the peace process...

Are You Sure You Hold to the Philosophy of Nonviolence? by John Spritzler | New Democracy World
  Before you decide that you hold to the philosophy of nonviolence, you need to know some things about that philosphy that you probably did not learn from whatever pamphlet or training session made you think you follow that philosphy.. There is a huge difference between thinking that violence is inappropriate in a particular situation versus thinking it is a moral failure to ever use violence even in self defense, as the philosophy of nonviolence does...