Palestine awarded first UNESCO World Heritage Site | Roy Tov

  Wars seldom limit themselves to violent attacks on military targets. Except for the shortest conflicts, wars often deteriorate into the cultural and social arenas. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has reached this stage a long time ago; the cultural repercussions of this war include topics that from outside may seem trivial and irrelevant in the context of a generations-long war. One such manifestation is the nomination of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. This UN program names sites of cultural or natural importance, granting them conservation funds and tourism prominence. Since it lists them on national parameters it has become part of several wars...
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  Don’t tell anyone, but in many a demonstration, when we were standing and proclaiming our message of peace and justice, knowing that not a word about it would appear in the media, I secretly wished for the police to come and beat us up. That would attract the media, who would convey our message to the general public – which was, after all, the whole purpose of the exercise. This happened last week...

  Jamal Kanj calls on the Palestinian National Authority to abandon its commitment to the pointless perpetual negotiations with the Israelis which while achieving peace for the Jews-only state of Israel are permanently eliminating the prospects of justice for the Palestinian people...
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..."Israeli schoolbooks correspond to all categories of racist discourse, both verbal and visual," said Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and author of Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. From negative, stereotypical portrayals of Palestinians in textbooks - if they are mentioned at all - and maps that don't illustrate Israel's correct borders, to strict censorship over what Palestinian citizens of Israel are allowed to teach and learn, Peled-Elhanan explained that virtually all subjects in the Israeli curriculum are imbued with some form of extreme nationalism...
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...How can such a tiny minority have such huge effects on the history of the West? This article is the first of a three-part series on Jewish influence which seeks to answer that question. This first paper in the series provides an introduction to Jewish ethnocentrism and other background traits that influence Jewish success. The second article discusses Zionism as the quintessential example of twentieth-century Jewish ethnocentrism and as an example of a highly influential Jewish intellectual/political movement. A broader aim will be to discuss a generalization about Jewish history: that in the long run the more extreme elements of the Jewish community win out and determine the direction of the entire group...
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  In CIA jargon, "Aardwolf" is a label for a special genre of intelligence report from field stations abroad to headquarters in Washington. An Aardwolf conveys the Chief of Station’s formal assessment regarding the direction events are taking in his or her country of assignment – and frequently the news is bad...
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  When President Reagan nominated me as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, he told me that we had to restore the US economy, to rescue it from stagflation, in order to bring the full weight of a powerful economy to bear on the Soviet leadership in order to convince them to negotiate the end of the cold war. Reagan said that there was no reason to live any longer under the threat of nuclear war...
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  I've been getting a variety of letters from President Barack Obama. The salutation is often: 'Dear Ralph.' One of them asks me for $25, adding 'Ralph, this is that moment. This is the time to be in with me.' He writes that 'I need your voice,' that America needs the 'dreams and the energy and the determination of people like you.'..
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...The complex situation in Syria includes two main struggles. The most obvious one is between the Syrian Army and the West-backed Free Syrian Army. In parallel, there is a violent conflict between the Alawi minority-closely related to Shia Islam-and Sunni Arabs. The Alawi comprise roughly 12% of the population and hold the power; the Assad dynasty is Alawi. The Sunni are 74% of the population and are attempting to use the ongoing mayhem in order to gain power. The ethnic conflict is conducted by paramilitary organizations trying to evict each other from their respective territories...
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  Stuart Littlewood recalls the horror of the 39-day Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in the occupied West Bank and asks why, 10 years on, the United States and the European Union have done nothing to reunite the Palestinian siege survivors – whose exile to Europe and Gaza they had facilitated – with their families...
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  Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, would be unemployed if he couldn’t demonstrate that the world is awash in anti-Semitism. In his latest foray in self-justification, he was interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on June 12...
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  What was that Turkish F-4 Phantom II up to when the Syrians shot it down? Ankara said the plane strayed into Syrian airspace but quickly left and was over international waters when it was attacked, a simple case of carelessness on the part of the Turkish pilot that Syrian paranoia turned deadly. But the Phantom — eyewitnesses told Turkish television that there were two aircraft, but there is no official confirmation of that observation — was hardly on a Sunday outing...
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  The American plutocratic revolution is now complete. The proof is: There are no criminal charges for the housing bust and financial meltdown of 2008. Starting with Reagan in the 1980s, as of today the Right has won their decades-long overthrow for complete control of America. An elite corps of wealthy now runs the country...
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  Israel’s daily Maariv reported yesterday that the long delayed war games between U.S. and Israeli forces will take place in October. It noted that some commentators are calling it a “dress rehearsal” for the aftermath of an Israeli attack on Iran. IDF sources quoted in the article called the exercises “of immense importance.” These will be the largest such military maneuvers in the history of the joint U.S.-Israel relationship...
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  There is a “spiral of injustice” and breaches of international law in Israel’s treatment of child detainees in military custody, according to an independent report by a delegation of British lawyers backed by the British Foreign Office.

The report found that “undisputed facts” indicated at least six violations of the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Israel is a signatory. It also found Israel to be violating the fourth Geneva convention by transferring child detainees from the West Bank to Israeli prisons. Between 500 and 700 Palestinian children are arrested by Israeli soldiers each year...
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  On June 27, 2012, a Knesset Member finally acknowledged the seriousness of the unending social protests in Israel. Miriam Regev—who was the IDF Spokesperson before joining the Likud party—said “the far left activists want to transform Rabin Square into Tahrir Square, and to throw out the government.” The activists couldn’t hear that, because they left the building as soon as she climbed the podium. Frustrated at the futility of her speech, at its end she shouted at her peer Haneen Zoabi “traitor, go back to Gaza.” This was strange, because the latter is a Palestinian Knesset Member from Nazareth...
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  Julian Assange has a few tricks left up his sleeve after his 16-month battle to avoid extradition to Sweden, and seeking asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London has been one of them. He has managed to throw an assortment of spanners into the works of state since becoming a figure of notoriety. He has, for instance, made a threat to run for a seat in the Australian Senate, an apt riposte to Australia’s indifference in mounting consular interventions on his behalf. He has been given his own program on the Russian network RT...
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  Days after coming just a hair’s breadth from being elected the president of Egypt, Air Marshal Ahmed Shafiq is now under investigation for corruption during his term as Aviation Minister and has fled the country with his immediate family...
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  Alan Harts speculates on whether a planned US-Israeli exercise simulating an Iranian missile strike on Israel is intended to pull the rug from under the “I’m-more-Israeli-than-you” Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, or to prepare US forces for a doomsday situation in the Middle East triggered by an Israeli strike on Iran...
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  The International Crisis Group does not deserve to be taken seriously. For a large part of its 15-year history, this Brussels-based “think tank” was led by Gareth Evans, previously Australia’s foreign minister. Evans is a promoter of the concept of “responsibility to protect” civilians from atrocities and was appointed by Kofi Annan to sit on a UN committee on genocide prevention in 2006. The same Evans was a staunch ally of the Indonesian military ruler Suharto...

...By now, drones have well-developed personalities, with the more immoral and ruthless rising up the hierarchy. The nastiest, a drone that can kill thousands at a time while schmoozing, charming and joking, is declared the President of the United States of America, except that the country he leads, so to speak, is just a smoldering ruins after so many decades of war and misrule. People, real people, weep tears of joy as the drone gives his inaugural speech, and intellectuals rush to be the first to compare this sophisticated airborne weapon to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR or Kennedy. Even in dream, I’m annoyed to not be mentioned as an illustrious precursor to this drone...

..War, as General Sherman once said, is hell. It is also widely perceived to be a failure of diplomacy. Which would explain why it is that when war-promoting lobbyists want to generate congressional enthusiasm for the next war, all short-term congressional memories must be wiped out. Wiped out, that is, with the efficiency of that “cricket clicker” used by Agents Kay and Jay, played by Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith (shown here), in the Men in Black film series. In the films, one click aimed at a targeted subject erases all recent memory; the clicker also works amazingly well in US elections...

...the Jewish Independent has failed to notice that the Zionism and the ‘Jews-only state’ have been celebrating Jewish choseness at the expense of the Palestinians and Arabs for more than a century. However, In case independent Canadian Jews fail to notice, I must remind them that seven million Palestinian refugees are still waiting for the Jewish state to allow them to return to their homes, villages, cities and land. The Jewish outlet doesn’t even attempt any new or original analysis of choseness. Instead, it offers the same, old, recycled explanation - everybody is equally bad, but the Goyim always ‘pick on us’, the Jews...

  It's one of America most popular cartoon shows - "Family Guy" has been a ratings block-buster for the Fox television network. But here in Los Angeles, its producers stand accused of angering the city's Jewish residents, in the programme's eagerness to win an Emmy. In a bid to secure support for the cartoon to be named "Outstanding Comedy" at this year's award, Family Guy producers sent mailers to residents in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Brentwood, where many members of the Academy live...

  In those great days of January and February, Egyptians taught the world what courage is. Before then, it was thought obvious that if you were up against live fire, you ran like hell. No one so much as conceived the possibility that you should stand and fight, let alone win. In this alone, the Egyptian revolution has changed not only Egypt but the world, and no one can take that away...

  In a traditional cowboy movie, we know what to do: we look for the guy wearing the white hat to be sure who to cheer, and for the one wearing the black hat to know who deserves to die, preferably gruesomely, before the credits roll. If Hollywood learnt early to play on these most tribal of emotions, do we doubt that Washington’s political script-writers are any less sophisticated?..

“First we take Paraguay, then we take Bolivia” | Roy Tov

...The USA attempt to control the central part of South America is not new. During the above mentioned 2008 coup d’état, it was published that the American army was planning to use an air force base in Paraguay as part of its assault on Bolivia. In June 2012, one of the affairs filling Argentinean media is the establishment of an American army base in the Chaco Province. The Argentinean Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged that the Argentinean government had sanctioned its presence...

Syria and Turkey's phantom war, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online

   Everyone knows - but nobody talks about - NATO's command and control center in Iskenderun, in Turkey's Hatay province, near the Syrian border, set up months ago to organize, train and weaponize the motley crew known as the Free Syrian Army. Everyone knows Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the CIA are advising and weaponizing these Syrian NATOGCC "rebels" with essential Turkish help in the logistics/safe haven front. Everyone knows Washington will settle for nothing less than regime change in Syria...

  Lawrence Davidson argues that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be treated as a hero, not hunted as a criminal, because he has exposed US violations of domestic and international law, noting that if Assange had instead exposed the sins of Russia in Chechnya or China in Tibet, he would have been praised within the halls of the US Congress...

  Many years ago, I started to state in my lectures and in conversations and in my writings that we have only two paths going forward: the path of "might makes right" (those with the bigger stick get what they want right or wrong) OR the path of justice and human rights and international law. I stated that we Palestinians wanted the second path but it was full of land mines laid by people who chose the first path. I predicted that Zionism, which chose the first path, will lose anyway...

  The North Carolina Supreme Court won’t consider a petition of discretionary review by professor Terri Ginsberg, who was denied tenure several years ago after her outspoken criticism of Israeli policies. Ginsberg, a film scholar, has said that following her public criticism of Israeli policies, she endured immediate retaliation from the administration of North Carolina State University, where she was a professor of film studies.. she was “punished with partial removal from — and interference in — duty, non-renewal of contract and rejection from a tenure-track position” in 2008...

...Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues...

...The West is haunted by medieval ideas about the horrible Saracens. The Muslim Brotherhood inspires terror. It is conceived as a fearsome, murderous, secret sect, out to destroy Israel and the West. Of course, practically no one has taken the trouble to study the history of this movement in Egypt and elsewhere. Actually, it could not be further removed from this parody...

  Divide et impera – a strategy employed by empires since ancient times, and perfected by the British – has been the leitmotif of American foreign policy in the Middle East since the Bush administration’s “Arab Awakening” in Iraq and the supposed success of the “surge.”..

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...The Right of Return is an essential component of Palestinian national rights. This needs to be reaffirmed, since it has been forgotten after 20 years of the fake and senseless “peace process” through which imperialism and Zionism gave legitimacy to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine...

  Syria has become dangerous. Syrians get killed and wounded almost daily. Their neighbors have also felt the impacts of violence: refuges in Turkey and outbreaks of fighting in Tripoli’s streets in Lebanon where peace depends on a nuanced arrangement between Christians and Sunni and Shia Muslims...

  The killings of three Palestinian refugees this past week including Ahmad Qassim from Nahr al Bared ( ‘cold river’) camp near Tripoli and 15 year old Khaled al-Youssef from Ein el Helwe (‘ the beautiful eye’) 30 miles south of Beirut in Saida, and the wounding of more than a dozen others by the Lebanese army were not, as some Lebanese politicians are claiming, “ accidental security incidents”. They were avoidable negligent homicides as much so as Zionist occupation forces and settler/colonists in Palestine regularly commit...

...Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.” When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president. As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers...

..If you were planning to conquer the world, or at least a broad swath of it, the war would necessarily start at home. After all, no general worth his salt would rush into battle with his rear exposed. You’d have to muzzle the media, severely curtail political choice and dissent, while preaching to the world about democracy and human rights to cover your tracks. You’d have to construct the mother of all propaganda machines, which proclaims over every available wavelength that it’s the best darn civilization since Atlantis sunk to its watery grave three thousands years ago. It would be a bit like decorating the halls of a mental asylum with idyllic nature scenes...

  The ill-omened, inauspicious plots of the terrorist gang Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization against Iran seem to have no end. The recent letter signed by 44 U.S. Senators addressed to President Obama in which it was implied that time for diplomacy with Iran is over and other options to deal with Iran’s nuclear program is said to be a magnum opus of MKO...

  The recent coup against Paraguay's democratically elected president is not only a blow to democracy, but an attack against the working and poor population that supported and elected President Fernando Lugo, whom they see as a bulwark against the wealthy elite who've dominated the country for decades. The U.S. mainstream media and politicians are not calling the events in Paraguay a coup, since the president is being "legally impeached" by the elite-dominated Paraguayan Congress. But as economist Mark Weisbrot explains in the Guardian: "The Congress of Paraguay is trying to oust the president, Fernando Lugo, by means of an impeachment proceeding for which he was given less than 24 hours to prepare and only two hours to present a defense. It appears that a decision to convict him has already been written..”

..Vanunu pointed the way to Israel’s clandestine weapons of mass destruction program underground in the Negev desert in 1986. To this day the Dimona remains un-inspected by IAEA inspectors and many consider Vanunu a traitor, but all he did was TELL THE TRUTH 26 years ago! Vanunu also puts me mind of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah who spent much of his life under house arrest in Jerusalem, for being a truth teller...

  As everyone with an IQ above room temperature knows, six million is the number of Jews supposedly killed by the nazis in 'gas chambers' during WW2. As it happens, this is false, and not merely false, but a deliberate lie. The falsity of the claim has been so thoroughly proved by historical and forensic investigation as to barely deserve mention; but for those who are interested, copious discussion of virtually every aspect of this matter is found in the several collections of articles on the Holocaust posted on this website, particularly in the Articles of Others section under Jews. But the Six Million number, besides being wrong, is also a deliberate lie (or at least began that way).. Beyond this, we shall show that the origin of this number is probably scriptural, and in fact was chosen as a way of seeming to fulfill a prophecy of the Jewish scriptures in order to justify the existence of Israel...

  Following Soviet Russia's dissolution, everything changed but stayed the same. US aims remained hard-wired. Today it's back to the future. Cold War politics were reinvented. Russia's again the Evil Empire. Today's stakes are much greater. World peace is threatened. Preemptive aggression is official US policy. America's duopoly power wages permanent wars. Israeli Lobby and Christian Right extremists support them. The fuse is lit for trouble. Beating up on Russia is relentless. Putin is fast emerging as public enemy number one. Intense propaganda vilifies him...

  Egypt is back in the new version of the Great Game; in this century the race is not after the vast territories of Central Asia, but after the rich gas fields discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean. On Sunday, June 24, 2012, Mohamed Morsi was declared Egypt’s first Islamist president in the freest elections in the country’s history. Morsi won with 51.7% of last weekend’s run-off vote versus 48.3 for Shafiq; the latter was the last Prime Minister of President’s Mubarak corrupt regime. A new Egypt has been born and is ready to return to its central role in the Arab and Muslim worlds… just a sec, not so fast...

  Stuart Littlewood exposes the lies peddled by Israel’s foreign pimps, most recently in a Wall Street Journal article by David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, and shows how Israeli public relations fail the simple test of decency, honesty and truthfulness...

..A Turkish fighter entered Syrian airspace uninvited and was shot down by an almost automatic air defense system. Syria owns one of the most sophisticated such systems in the Middle East; it regularly upgrades it with Russian equipment. All its neighbors know that; thus such a deep incursion by a single fighter without previous notice can only be defined as a wild provocation. Mr. Gul and the Turkish Army wanted a downed aircraft. Technically, now they have an excuse to reciprocate. Overall, this is a slight variation on a classical false flag attack; call it “clumsy flag attack” if you want...
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  The War of 1812 matters because it was America’s first war of choice. The United States did not have to declare war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812, to survive as a nation and indeed President James Madison did not want to. The newly founded United States was growing westward but the “war hawks” in Congress pressed for a conflict with America’s former colonial masters in the hopes of gaining even more territory to the north. The term “hawk” was coined in the run-up to the War of 1812 and the hawks of U.S. foreign policy have been with us ever since...
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...it is just as vital that fighters for social emancipation, human freedom and ecological sanity, recognize that capitalism represents the annihilation of nature and, thus, humanity. A system based on cooperation, real democracy, long-term planning, and production for need not profit, i.e., socialism, represents the reconciliation of humanity with nature. And its achievement will, as Marx pointed out, of necessity be much less violent than the process by which capitalism was born in the first place:..
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  The creators of Debtocracy, a documentary with two million views broadcasted from Japan to Latin America, analyze the shifting of state assets to private hands. They travel round the world gathering data on privatization in developed countries and search for clues on the day after Greece’s massive privatization program...

  For the first time in Greece a documentary produced by the audience. "Debtocracy" seeks the causes of the debt crisis and proposes solutions, hidden by the government and the dominant media...

  On June 14, fifty international organizations marked the fifth anniversary of the Israeli siege on Gaza by calling on Israel to end its blockade of the small, impoverished strip. “For over five years in Gaza, more than 1.6 million people have been under blockade in violation of international law. More than half of these people are children. We the undersigned say with one voice: ‘end the blockade now,’”..
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..History is buried with the dead and deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal. And history is the new enemy. On 28 May, President Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free-fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society. It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey, "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history."..
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...Let us look at two famous instances of blowback. One concerns the United States. In the 1980s, the United States wished to push the Soviet Union's military forces out of Afghanistan. They therefore supported the mujahidin. One of the most famous leaders of the groups they supported was Osama bin Laden. Once the Soviet troops withdrew, Osama bin Laden created Al-Qaeda and began to attack the United States. A second famous instance concerns Israel...
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  An antiwar libertarian and a principled critic of Jewish nationalism, Jack Ross seems the ideal author to have undertaken a biography of Elmer Berger (1908-1996), the Reform rabbi who pursued a rearguard action against the Zionist movement for more than 50 years. An increasingly marginalized figure after the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, Berger spent the remainder of his life fighting through various organizations—particularly the American Council of Judaism, which he cofounded in 1942—against the inevitable victory of his enemies. It is now almost impossible to recall that there was a time when a large, influential body of Jewish leaders vehemently opposed the creation of a Jewish national state...
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...Despite credible reports that the US has a secret sealed spying indictment prepared against Assange, currently facing deportation from Britain to Sweden on questionable and probably politically motivated charges of rape, and concerns that the US is prepared to seek to extradite him to the US to face potential capital charges if he is extradited to Sweden, Australia has not done anything to defend its own citizen against such threats...

  In the battle of wills between Iran and the west that has been waged for the past decade there are many players and interests. Some are self-evident including nations like Israel, Iran, the U.S. and others. But these legitimate players in this drama have created all sorts of phantoms in order to provide just that added bit of leverage in the public debate...

  Back in 2002, a group of influential neoconservatives convinced President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that it was a really smart idea to invade Iraq. With help from AIPAC and other groups in the Israel lobby, and an assist from Israeli politicians like Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the neocons and the Bush administration then persuaded the U.S. Congress to authorize the use of force by an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Most of the top figures in the Obama administration (including then-Senators Joseph Biden and Hillary Clinton) supported the war...

  If one asks current or former WikiLeaks associates what their greatest fear is, almost none cites prosecution by their own country. Most trust their own nation's justice system to recognize that they have committed no crime. The primary fear is being turned over to the US. That is the crucial context for understanding Julian Assange's 16-month fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, a fight that led him to seek asylum, Tuesday, in the London Embassy of Ecuador...

...the most generous hosts to Afghan and Iraqi refugees, according to UNHCR are three countries now in the sights of Americas bombs, missiles, drones and destabilizing mercenaries, spooks and varying paid and murderous meddlers. They are: Pakistan, Iran, and Syria who have the largest refugee populations at: 1.9 million, 1.07 million, and 1.005 million respectively...

  Iranian distrust of the United States is rooted in a legacy of arrogant, belligerent US policy. During World War II, British and Soviet military forces invaded neutral Iran. The country’s leader, Reza Shah Pahlavi, trustingly appealed to President Franklin Roosevelt, who had solemnly proclaimed devotion to the principles of freedom and respect for national sovereignty. But Roosevelt rejected the plea and sought to justify the aggression, which he backed to help the Soviet Union against Germany and to support British imperial interests...

"... At this time, the war began to extract a toll on civilians. Widespread famine began to devastate the local populations in Persia in early 1917. Local crops withered and the import of foodstuffs from India, Mesopotamia and the United States became nonexistent, due to the use of the local transportation means for war supplies by both sides.. Between 1917 and 1919, it is estimated that nearly one-half (9-11 million people) of the Persian population died of starvation or disease brought on by malnutrition ."

  Old Lebanese Song...

  When Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne -- issued by the IHR as The Founding Myths of Modern Israel -- was first published in France at the end of 1995, it unleashed a nationwide sound and fury unmatched by any other revisionist book on the Holocaust, before or since. No book by Paul Rassinier, by Arthur Butz, or by Robert Faurisson has precipitated anything approaching the tempest among intellectuals and the uproar in the media that accompanied the appearance of this work by well-known French scholar Roger Garaudy...

  Violent, so-called "price tag" attacks by Jewish settlers have become a staple of life for Palestinian communities over the past few months. The latest is the torching this week of a mosque in the village of Jaba, close to the city of Ramallah. Palestinians in areas of the West Bank under Israeli control live with settler neighbours who beat and shoot them, set alight fields, poison wells, kill livestock and steal crops. These acts of terror have begun to spread elsewhere: homes, cars, cemeteries, mosques and churches are now targets in East Jerusalem and Israel too...

...Haaretz is known in Israel as the Voice of the Shin Beth. In other words, the interview was a thinly disguised exposition of the official American-Israeli policy. Expectedly, the Israeli newspaper—for reasons to be explained—emphasized Croatia. The encounter took place during the President's Conference in Jerusalem; despite the Croatian President being also present, Haaretz found an excuse to avoid an interview with the current expiatory goat of Israel. Even the Israeli journalist was aware of the atrocity he and the distinguished American gentleman had committed...

Earlier this month, at a private meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his security advisers, a group of Middle East experts and former intelligence officers warned that a third Palestinian intifada was imminent...
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...never underestimate the cost of humiliation. For in war victory is never clean, because it empowers the vanquished or their successors to struggle in the future. Recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world confirm this, often unheeded, lesson of history. From Alexander the Great, king of the Macedonian Empire, nearly two-and-a-half millennia ago to date, imperial powers far afield have sent their rampaging armies to conquer and to humiliate the populations of vast fertile lands, cradles of civilization, close to the four great rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus and the Hwang He. What has transpired forms a pattern...
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  A timely article in the Jerusalem Post last month brings to the forefront the unspoken objective of US foreign policy, namely the breaking up of Syria as a sovereign nation state - along ethnic and religious lines - into several separate and "independent" political entities. The article also confirms the role of Israel in the process of political destabilization of Syria. The JP article is titled: "Veteran Kurdish politician calls on Israel to support the break-up of Syria.' The objective of the US sponsored armed insurgency is - with the help of Israel - to "Break Syria into Pieces"...
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...It sure looks like the USA's "poodle" is fancying itself as a fierce Rottweiler who will courageously protect the world from the Russian bear. And you got the admire the macho language of the foreign secretary who "made it clear" to Lavrov that "all defense shipments to Syria must stop". The fact that the British poodle is growling only because it has Uncle Sam to protect him from the Russian bear is apparently lost on the BBC. As is the fact that no UNSC resolutions have banned the fulfillment of military maintenance contracts with Syria...
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...I thought I would tell the history of how Counterinsurgency was invented, why it was discredited in America, and how it returned in 2007 to dominate and brutalise the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a fascinating and weird story that is far odder than anything Jack Idema could have dreamt up - it involves Mao Zedong, John F Kennedy, French fascists, the attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle, and strange Potemkin-style villages in Vietnam where women get pregnant for no discernible reason...
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..The plight of Susiya is indicative of the larger dialectic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli officials will continue to accuse the Palestinians of being unprepared for peace negotiations, while its military and settlement enterprise employ the force of arms to wrangle the West Bank from its native inhabitants. Western governments and the international community will continue to portray the situation in an absurd light: a fragile democracy attempting to quell restive “terrorists.”..
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  It turns out that the settlers of the illegal colony of Susya who regularly attack the native Palestinian population of the South Hebron hills are not Ashkenazi Europeans. They are Afrikaaners who, after the end of apartheid in South Africa, moved to the last apartheid state on earth and converted to Judaism to settle Palestinian land so that they can continue to practice their racist ideologies. ~ Mazin Qumsiyeh

  The fifth anniversary of the Israeli siege on Gaza was commemorated on June 14 with a barrage of statements, urging Israel to end the blockade and allow Gazans long-denied humanitarian assistance, freedom of movement and access to trade routes. The punitive siege has turned into yet another protracted crisis, brazenly imposed by Israel and widely accepted by the international community...
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  For decades, Amnesty International has been a respected name in the cause of human rights, but its recent hiring of Suzanne Nossel, a longtime U.S. “humanitarian interventionist,” has swung the organization more behind the Afghan War and the use of U.S. military force...
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...The conquest of Canada was torpedoed by the stubborn refusal of American state and county militias to countenance the invasion. The defense of the country was one thing, but the conquest of a foreign land – why, it was un-American! They simply refused the order to invade. Oh, but that we had such a militia today! A standing army is a curse: a military priesthood with more than a few would-be Caesars in its higher ranks. Exactly what the Founders feared...
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  The United States is planning to maintain significant military presence in the Middle East going forward, including 13,500 US troops in Kuwait, to help maintain hegemony over the region, according to a new congressional report released Tuesday. The study by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examined the US relationship with the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – and followed up on earlier stated plans to surge the US presence in the region after Washington was forced out of a remaining military force in Iraq in December of last year...
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...The U.S. sanctions against Iran are a moral abomination, just as they were against Iraq and just as they are against Cuba and just as they are against every other country in the world. In actuality, they are an act of war, one that is waged against the civilian population of another country. They target the innocent in the hope that the citizenry will influence the direction of their government. They are the perfect embodiment of the adage, “The end justifies the means.”..
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...a process under the control of ruling minorities cannot pass the test of democracy and must be dealt with before we can have elections that bring people and parties to power which represent the changes we desperately need, in Wisconsin, America, Egypt and all over the world...
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...in June 2012, the Cabinet—the Israeli government senior ministers’ committee—approved a feasibility study on the construction of several artificial islands in front of Israel.. these islands would contain airports, large industrial facilities, power stations, and military bases. Unsurprisingly, they would ease Israeli military control of the gas fields disputed between this country and Lebanon. It is safe to assume the islands would also be the preferred location for the inevitable desalination plants that Israel will need in the near future. With such a preamble, there is little doubt this project will move forward, changing the shape of the Eastern Mediterranean...
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  In a cliffhanger move John Le Carre would be proud of, WikiLeaks superstar Julian Assange stepped into the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge, central London, on Tuesday, requested political asylum invoking the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and unleashed yet another international storm. Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino confirmed that the Rafael Correa government in Quito is considering the application; meanwhile Assange will remain "under the protection of the Ecuadorean government"..
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...“We applaud this decision,” said Rabbi Alissa Wise, Director of Campaigns at Jewish Voice for Peace and National Coordinator of the We Divest Campaign. “It’s long past time that TIAA-CREF began living up to its motto of ‘Financial Services for the Greater Good’ when it comes to the people of Israel and Palestine.”..

..The US is akin to a dead body which has been penetrated by a virus; in this case, Israel. Have you seen those vivid Hollywood flicks which have zombies roaming around? Exactly the same. You shoot them, hit them, they are not affected at all. This is, hence, not a normal situation. That virus (Israel) can even use the US to carry out a nuclear attack thereby triggering a global inferno where millions will be massacred...

  Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Spanish bank bailout as “voodoo economics” that is certain “to “fail.” New York Times economic analyst Andrew Ross Sorkin agrees: “By now it should be apparent that the bailout has failed—or at least on its way to failing.” And columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman bemoans that Europe (and the U.S.) “are repeating ancient mistakes” and asks, “why does no one learn from them?”..

..The prolonged and unending downward spiral of the Greek economy and living standards, the disastrous and destructive policies pursued by the formerly dominant two parties (PASOK and New Democracy) has conclusively demonstrated that Greek “capitalism” and EEC integration has been an unmitigated disaster; tried tested and failed to meet the minimum standards of human existence...

  President Obama wanted to showcase his adopted hometown of Chicago to the leaders of 60 NATO members and partnership countries. Instead, with his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel holding the political reins as mayor of Chicago, Obama showed the foreign heads of state and the international media a city in total police state lockdown...

Three new reports conclude a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear sites would have disastrous results...

...The belief among journalists and academics that Tahrir Square would fill once again with the young of last year's rebellion, that a new protest movement in its millions would end this state of affairs, has – so far – proved unrealistic. Over the weekend, Egyptians wanted to vote rather than demonstrate – even if the country's security apparatus would end up running the show as usual – and if this is democracy, then it's going to be of the Algerian rather than the Tunisian variety. Maybe I just don't like armies, while Egyptians do...

  In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a “surprise.”..

"You have to be asleep to believe it."..

  Gilad Atzmon on Lauren Booth's Remembering Palestine (Press TV) talking about BDS & Integrity. We spoke about the boycott movement and its crucial role but also about the corrosive impact of liberal Zionist support. The question here is how to be consistent and coherent while still bringing change about...

Watch video...

  Syria is not Libya; it is neither Egypt nor Tunisia. Despite the Western thinly-disguised attempt to destabilize the Syrian regime, the latter is still in power after roughly a year and a half. Neither the USA nor Israel had developed yet a computer virus capable of destroying a human government. Yet, despite the Syrian government holding on, violence rules the ground, with violent explosions rocking this society daily, including sites located near stockpiles of chemical weapons. Far from the mainstream media eyes, there is a silent chemical-deterrence race between Israel and Syria...

  The New York Times has decided to deny the French philosopher Roger Garaudy, who died June 15, an obituary notice, even though he was mentioned in the Times 45 times during his lifetime. We shall indeed note his passing here, however, and commemorate his life. He was the author of The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics for which the French government fined him thousands of dollars and imposed a suspended prison sentence...

  Israeli newspaper Yidioth Ahronot published today (June, 18th, 2012) about a tourist’s activity offered by Gush Etzion settlements, where visitors can practice how to shoot “terrorists”. Stories about such tours both in settlements and army bases are always published, but no serious attention given to such scary culture of hatred and violence...

...In times long gone, when a Chinese dynasty took over the “mandate of heaven,” one of the early ceremonies carried out by the new emperor was called “the rectification of names.” The thought was that the previous dynasty had fallen into ruin in part because the gap between reality and the names for it had grown so wide. We are, it seems, now in such a world. Some renaming is surely in order...

..The NYT continued by stating, "Mrs. Clinton’s claim about the helicopters, administration officials said, is part of a calculated effort to raise the pressure on Russia to abandon President Bashar al-Assad, its main ally in the Middle East," indicative of the campaign of propaganda and lies orchestrated by the US State Department, the British Foreign Office, and Western and Gulf State news outlets around the world to demonize both the Syrian government and its extensive allies around the world, contrary to the facts on the ground...

  The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Nayef Al-Saud died at age 78. Nayef was the Interior Minister known for his "efficient" crackdown on dissent and thus was praised by US administrators for dealing with "terrorism" (the same administrators who tortured and "rendered" subjects to be tortured). I will briefly write information that may be new to some of you about this ruling family...
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  “Every US citizen and taxpaying US resident should take 10 minutes to watch this Video made by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), and find more time to read the resources cited in the video, and get involved to change the direction in which the US is heading.. of course much of this debt is due to lavish funding for Israel and countless wars done at the behest of the Israel lobby including the $3 trillion Iraq war; watch for Iran now! The wonderful hard working Americans I met when I lived there do not deserve this.” ~ Mazin

...The worst enemy of the prophetic Jewish faith is the nationalist, racist and colonialist logic of tribal Zionism, born of the nationalism, racism and colonialism of 19th century Europe. This logic, which inspired all the colonialisms of the West and all its wars of one nationalism against another, is a suicidal logic. There is no future or security for Israel and no peace in the Middle East unless Israel becomes "dezionized" and returns to the faith of Abraham, which is the spiritual, fraternal and common heritage of the three revealed religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
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...Benjamin Netanyahu admitted through an “unnamed source in his office”—a Hebrew-media euphemism for the head of an institution—that Israel’s Prime Minister Bureau automatically rejects requests to convert to Judaism by African refugees. “Of course, all the requests were rejected,” the unnamed source told the Hebrew press, while stuffing yet another tasty tartlet in his massive mouth. The “of course” part of his elaborate claim revealed the hidden intents of his racist policies...
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  Lawrence Davidson argues that the corrupting influence of the Zionist lobbies in the USA has meant that American officials abroad routinely betray US citizens where Israel is involved...
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  The social disease that is capital’s political economics has become more dangerous as global demands for real democracy and an end to majority servitude puts ruling regimes in a near frenzy. Power of the few over the many has never been more threatened than at the present moment and rulers are moved to even more crazed behavior than usual. It’s as if rats on a sinking ship were all suffering terminal illness but were armed with nuclear weapons and convinced that rodents were superior to all other life forms and must survive for the ship to remain afloat. Humanity needs to be more critical and militant than ever before because the dangers we face are more serious than ever before...
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  Yesterday, Ynet reported that a recent exam question at the Bichat Hospital Faculty of Medicine in Paris' Diderot University has caused quite a controversy. The question asked student to determine whether operation Cast Lead was a genocide. According to the Zionist umbrella organization of French Jewry, CRIF, the question, drafted by Diderot’s Professor Christophe Oberlin wondered "To what extent does it constitute a perpetual crime (war crime, crime against humanity, genocide crime)?" – The question specifically referred to the cold blooded murder, during Operation Cast Lead, of 48 members of the Samouni family...
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..There are several pertinent examples illustrating how imperialism is still alive and well, and only cleverly disguised with updated nomenclatures. What we know today as "free trade" actually derives its origins from economic concessions the British frequently extorted from nations under its "gunboat diplomacy" strategy - that is, anchoring gunboats off the coast of a foreign capital, and threatening bombardment and military conquest if certain demands were not met...
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  Emissaries from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have held meetings with high level U.S. government officials in Washington, the Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday. The CIA, MI6 and Mossad supported rebels consulted with Obama’s National Security Council and presented a shopping list of heavy weapons, including surface-to-air missiles...
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  During the last forty years or so, Revisionism has become a fighting term. To so-called Revisionists, it implies an honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations. In the minds of anti-Revisionists, the term savors of malice, vindictiveness, and an unholy desire to smear the saviors of mankind. Actually, Revisionism means nothing more or less than the effort to correct the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude...

  By the mid-1990s the term “Holocaust denier” had become part of the popular consciousness and vocabulary. Likely catapulted into media newspeak by Deborah Lipstadt’s publication of Denying the Holocaust in 1993, the new term supplanted the earlier term “Holocaust revisionist.”..Revisionists may be ahead on forensic research but the public will likely never know this as our detractors have won the day in the battle for public relations...
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...The rabbi seized the opportunity handed to him by the settlers' main media outlet for publishing one of the most racist articles ever published in Hebrew. Luckily for him, many of the idioms used lose much of their original strength when translated into English; yet, the material is clear. “The main problem is operational; how do we stop the infiltrators’ flow, and get rid of those who are already here?” The rabbi asks this question almost at the beginning of his piece and then he adds: “We treat the issue of African infiltrators as a first rate national danger. This danger dwarves—almost zeroes—the personal and human dimensions of the problem.”..
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...Emad Salem, the Egyptian-born FBI informant who was complicit in the first World Trade Center bombing, found himself in a similar situation when he was instructed to infiltrate the bombers' circle, but his pleas directed to his handlers at the FBI to allow him to substitute a harmless substance for the explosive material in the bomb were ignored. He taped the conversation to prove it..
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  Jihan Hifaz: Supreme Court disbands Parliament and brings back emergency powers; Real News crew temporarily detained...

  A well regarded and qualified author of the prime German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported (in German) how the recent massacre in Houla, Syria, was perpetrated by Sunni rebel forces. I translated the piece to English. There was some push back against the piece and an anonymous rebuttal from Houla activists. In a new piece (in German) the reporter, Rainer Hermann, extends on the first one and explains why his reporting is correct and why other reporting was terribly wrong...
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  Israel is apparently laying the groundwork for a possible military attack on Syria by alleging that Damascus could be using chemical weapons against the Syrian people. Tel Aviv has recently expressed concern about what it calls the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Israel says the weapons could fall into the wrong hands and that they may even be used by Syria to carry out an attack against Israeli forces. The pretext is being used to justify a possible military assault on Syria even if it means triggering a broader conflict across the region...

  A number of warships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet are prepared to go to Syria, the Russian General Staff told Itar-Tass on Friday. “The Mediterranean Sea is a zone of the Black Sea Fleet responsibility. Hence, warships may go there in the case it is necessary to protect the Russian logistics base in Tartous, Syria,” it said. “Several warships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, including large landing ships with marines aboard, are fully prepared to go on the voyage,” he said...
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  Officials with the US Department of Defense have confirmed that the Pentagon has finalized procedures that outline how American forces could soon combat the government of war-torn Syria and officially involve itself in that state’s bloody uprising. After months of rumors suggesting that the US has unofficially made efforts to weaponize rebel forces fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, officials with the Defense Department tell CNN that the Pentagon has finished drafting blueprints that lay-out just how the US military could aid in ousting the leader with America’s own troops...

  A terrifying letter, signed by nearly half the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, pushing Obama toward war with Iran - and let's see who is telling us about it...
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..After Japan lay in ruins, not only from the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also from the massive carpet bombing of Tokyo and several other urban centers, Einstein went public with his fears and anxieties. In famous passages that have been subject to various translations and paraphrasing Einstein observed, “Our world is faced with a crisis that has never before been envisaged in its whole existence… The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.”..
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..Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 - were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland.. the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could...
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  The "Awakening" is taking a turn, very different to the excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary "cultural revolution" - a re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is emptying out those early high expectations, and which makes a mockery of the West's continuing characterization of it as somehow a project of reform and democracy...
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  At one point in my youth it became clear that the U.S. was a violent force in the world, probably as I watched the Vietnam war news on the local TV news. Later, it also became clear that its whole history is one of violence, at home and abroad. More recently I had naively hoped that as the U.S. Empire goes through its death throes, that it would quit the world peacefully. The latter thought was more a suspension of belief of my knowledge that I knew violence was the U.S. way of life, than I feared what the end of empire might bring...
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  On Thursday, June 14, 2012, Egypt’s highest court dissolved Parliament and martial law was reimposed by the country’s military rulers. On June 16-17 will take place the second round in Egypt’s first free presidential polls. The two events are closely related, being an attempt of the military to manipulate the judicial system in order to reinstate the deposed Mubarak regime with a different head...
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  In a letter written by Germar Rudolf from his prison cell he explained why he became a holocaust Revisionist and why he was prepared to pay such a terrible price. Perhaps surprisingly, Rudolf, a chemist, was never much interested in World War II or the holocaust. What interested him were the whys and wherefores of propaganda lies. To him holocaust propaganda is not a mere historical issue but rather also an ideological issue. Rudolf has an abiding interest in understanding how and why wars get to be, the intrigues, schemes, lies and propaganda used by all sides to justify it, and how in some cases, this propaganda is afterward maintained by the victorious side...
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Scott Horton Interviews Grant F. Smith | Antiwar Radio

  Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, discusses his article “US Charity Secretly Funds Israeli Nukes;” how the Weizmann Institute, posing as a non-profit charity, conducts espionage and fundraising for Israel’s nuclear weapons program; why the US government continues pretending that Israel’s nukes don’t exist; the IRS’s tentative ruling on tax-deductible donations to the Weizmann Institute; how the Justice Department’s secretive “shutdown” orders on productive FBI investigations violates US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; and why the mainstream media won’t touch this stuff with a ten foot pole...

...we don’t accept this kind of mythology that the insurgents are pro-reform people. Because we know very well that they have been financed and armed by monarchies of the Persian Gulf. They don’t even hide this fact and I hardly see a situation where democracy in Syria will be established with the help of Saudi Arabia and Qatar...
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...At the risk of upsetting Žižek's fanatical global following, I would say that a lot of his work is impenetrable. But he writes with exhilarating ambition and his central thesis offers a perspective even his critics would have to concede is thought-provoking. In essence, he argues that nothing is ever what it appears, and contradiction is encoded in almost everything. Most of what we think of as radical or subversive – or even simply ethical – doesn't actually change anything...
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  “We shall not be a normal people, until we have Jewish whores and Jewish thieves in the Land of Israel,” our national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, said some 80 years ago. This dream has come true. We have Jewish murderers, Jewish robbers and Jewish whores (though most prostitutes in Israel are imported by international slave traders from Eastern Europe through the Sinai border). But Bialik was too unambitious. He should have added: We shall not become a normal people until we have Jewish Neo-Nazis and Jewish concentration camps...
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...That same day Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued what amounted to an ultimatum to two top Japanese diplomats, ambassador to the U.S. Kichisaburo Nomura and special envoy Saburo Kurusu. "Nomuru," writes John Toland in his book Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, "was too stunned to talk," while Kurusu instantly saw that this would be regarded in Tokyo as "an insult." Having placed Japan under strain of severe economic sanctions, the United States now was showing no willingness to negotiate a way out of the impasse short of a Japanese humiliation. This was the day Roosevelt both ensured war with Japan and began preparing for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans when the war came...
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  Below is another extraordinary speech given by Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, daughter of a general in the Israeli army and a granddaughter of a signer on the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Nurit lost her daughter in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, but even in the face of such a personal tragedy, she has never hesitated to speak out passionately about the terrible injustices suffered by the Palestinian people at the hands of her government and its leaders. Like her charismatic brother Miko Peled who came to speak in Australia last year, Nurit speaks from firsthand experience of Israel’s true intentions to take all of the land and gradually expel the Palestinians from their homeland...
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  In a few days, perhaps as early as Friday, June 15, at noon, the Syrians wanting to watch their national TV stations will see them replaced on their screens by TV programs created by the CIA. Studio-shot images will show massacres that are blamed on the Syrian Government, people demonstrating, ministers and generals resigning from their posts, President Al-Assad fleeing, the rebels gathering in the big city centers, and a new government installing itself in the presidential palace...
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  The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage [April 2001] with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs. "It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover...

  A new Egypt demands a new constitution and president. Many pressing questions also need to be addressed, including the religious-secular divide, the value of Sharia in the making of law, citizenship, minority rights, the rule of civil society, foreign policy, and much more. One issue that requires urgent attention in the current discussion is that of Egypt's shattered economy...
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  South Africa's recent demand that products originating in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights remove the label "Made in Israel" is extremely significant - much more so than the European Union's decision to deny these products preferential status and subject them to customs duty...
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  For three decades, Norman Finkelstein has been the American Jewish community’s problem-child—denounced as a hysteric, a marginal ideologue, and a self-hating Jew. Selfless and vain, highly emotional—sometimes hysterical—in tone yet relentlessly logical in his arguments, he is now an academic with a doctorate from Princeton whose attacks on “the Holocaust Industry” and public cheerleading for Hezbollah have rendered him so toxic that he can’t obtain even the lowliest adjunct teaching position at any community college in America...
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  As European soccer stars compete in the European Championship, the eyes of the world must turn to a soccer star at urgent risk of death: Palestinian national team member Mahmoud Sarsak, 25, has been imprisoned under Israel’s “Unlawful Combatants Law” – the only prisoner so held – without charge or trial – for three years. Sarsak, from Gaza, traveled to the West Bank to join the Palestinian national soccer team for training. Upon his arrival he was abducted by the Israeli occupation military and since that time has been held in Israeli jails, subject to this special version of administrative detention designed especially for Palestinian prisoners from the Gaza Strip...
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http://samidoun.ca/2012/06/urgent-act-now-for-mahmoud-sarsak-on-84th-day-of-hunger-strike-palestinian-soccer-star-at-risk-of-death/

  Several years ago, the Internet was introduced into the more rural parts of southeast Nigeria. As it has done for so many people around the world, it opened the eyes of a few young Igbo people and began answering some difficult questions of identity. For Shmuel (who was then called Sam), the nagging question he wanted answered was whether there was any truth to the long-told lore that the Igbo people were once Jews...

...Israel opens its arms to Russians and East Europeans Goyim who are happy enough to live in the ‘Jews Only State’ and even pretend to be Zionist Jews and hate Arabs accordingly. But Israel is also ‘the only democracy in Middle east’- it is open, liberal and tolerant. Tel Aviv is famous for being ‘The World’s Gay Capital’. If Russian gays are unhappy with their meshigine Goyim homophobic leaders, they should simply make Aliya and join more than one million of their expatriates who already live happily in Israel...

  At 8:30 am, an Israeli naval warship attacked the international observers and Palestinian captain of the Civil Peace Service Gaza (CPSGAZA) boat "OLIVA", in an apparent attempt to harm and arrest the crew members...

  Andre Pshenichnikov, an Israeli who immigrated from the former Soviet Union, was arrested by the IDF after living for two months in the Dheishe Refugee Camp near Bethlehem and kept in detention for eight days at the police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. He told his police interrogators that he wants to break all ties with Israel, to give up his Israeli citizenship and obtain a Palestinian citizenship instead...
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  On Friday, 25th May, six female Palestinian students from the al-Tur School for Girls were injured when a group of Jewish Israelis attacked them in Yarkon in Tel Aviv. The attack occurred while the students were on a field trip in Menachem Begin Park. Two Jewish men and two Jewish women threw stones at the girls and beat them with sticks, while they were playing in paddleboats. The girls suffered bruises and six students were transferred to the hospital in Tel Aviv...

  Jamal Kanj views the sad choice facing Egyptians in the second round of the country’s first-ever democratic presidential election: Ahmad Shafik, a Mubarak-era establishment figure representing the military’s privileged status, and Muhammad Morsi of the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood...

  The Peace Cycle is a unique bike ride and an exceptional opportunity to see the sights, learn the history, meet the people... and discover the truth about Palestine. The Peace Cycle 2012 will take place between 7th and 19th November and will visit Nazareth, Jenin, Al-Fara, Nablus, Qalqilya, Bil'in, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and Jerusalem...
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  Israel stripped more than 100,000 residents of Gaza and some 140,000 residents of the West Bank of their residency rights during the 27 years between its conquest of the territories in 1967 and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994...

My Beloved has Many Faces | Uprooted Palestinian
        ..Seven sisters, three brothers, a mum and a dad and an orange farm Read more...

  Ben Doherty published an illuminating report at Electronic Intifada about a new initiative by the American Jewish pro-Israel lobby to smear Iran. There are so many that it wouldn’t be newsworthy but for the fact that this new group, Iran180, created under the auspices of the New York Jewish Community Relations Council, is using sexual humiliation and abuse as a political tool smearing Iran’s president...
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  Jamie Rubin, a one-time foreign policy spokesperson in Bill Clinton’s administration has put forward a truly diabolical argument in Foreign Policy Magazine on behalf of Syrian regime change as a way of defanging the Iranian mullahs. The odd thing about Rubin’s essay is that while he’s offering nostrums on behalf of U.S. foreign policy objectives, he makes no bones that the reason we should do these things is not so much for ourselves, but on behalf of Israel. Once again showing that for pro-Israel mandarins like Rubin and Dennis Ross there is no difference between Israel’s interests and our own. Personally, I think this is one of the most pernicious notions affecting U.S. Mideast policy...
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  After its initial discovery in 2010 by a little-known antivirus vendor from Belarus, the culprit behind the Stuxnet computer worm has been revealed. Last week, based on information leaked by inside sources, an article in the New York Times reported that the United States and Israel had secretly embarked on a joint project (code-named Olympic Games) which developed the malware we know as Stuxnet. Despite the ruckus that members of the establishment make in public about foreign hackers (e.g. warning that China is a “threat to world order”, the U.S. is admittedly one of the most active players in this field...
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  When Charles Ferguson accepted the Academy Award in 2010 for his documentary film Inside Job, he told 30 million people viewing the award ceremony that “three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single senior financial executive has been prosecuted and that’s wrong.” Two years later, still no prosecution...
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  One might be tempted to regard Russian premier V. Putin's paper “A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making”, which saw the light of day in Izvestia on October 3, 2011, as the presidential front-runner's sketchily laid out program, but upon scrutiny that appears to be only one part of a wider picture. The opinion piece momentarily ignited wide-scale controversy in and outside of Russia and highlighted the ongoing clash of positions on global development...
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...Another infamous case of trading on religious rights and rites is the selling of indulgences by the Catholic Church; this led to the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther in 1517. Yet, modern rabbis have improved on these; taking the selling of charms, blessings and prayers to new levels of glory. They created a money machine almost unmatched in size in the Israeli market, with a formal annual turnover of over NIS 1 billion, and unknown black market revenues...
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  In the second of our exclusive extracts from "The Case For Sanctions Against Israel," Ilan Pappé, celebrated Israeli Historian and author, argues that the BDS movement is the best means to end Israel's oppressive occupation and prevent another Nakba...
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  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is calling for an R2P humanitarian military intervention in Syria to curb the atrocities allegedly ordered by the government of president Bashar Al Assad. In a twisted logic, Clinton recognizes that while "opposition forces" are integrated by Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists, the government rather than the terrorists is held responsible, without a shred of evidence, for the ongoing massacre of civilians. Amply documented, these sectarian killings and atrocities are being committed by foreign mercenaries and militia which are armed and supported by the Western military alliance...
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  As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling the drone as a wonder weapon despite all the evidence to the contrary...
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...For some in Israel, built by immigrants and refugees, internment and deportation are bad solutions that may damage the international image of the country needlessly. They say rounding up members of a different racial group and holding them in camps for deportation may invite allusions to the Nazi Holocaust, however unfair such comparisons may be, and betrays Jewish values...

  Some ask why the Palestinians seem to have been left behind in the so-called Arab Spring. In fact, they have not. Palestinians in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and throughout the Middle East region have been engaging in nonviolent resistance over the past year. But the Western media have been largely silent in their coverage of this remarkable movement, which is unifying groups as disparate as Fatah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine...
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  Munib Masri, a former Arafat confidant, says the two-state solution might be dead in six months. After that, Israel will be ‘begging for a Palestinian Mandela’..

  Princeton University Prof. Emeritus Richard Falk speech, "The Economic, Legal and Moral Cost of War: A Forum on Israel, Palestine and the United States."..

  France and Germany were prepared in spring 2005 to negotiate on an Iranian proposal to convert all of its enriched uranium to fuel rods, making it impossible to use it for nuclear weapons, but Britain vetoed the deal at the insistence of the United States [just following orders from Tel Aviv], according to a new account by a former top Iranian nuclear negotiator...
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...there are major problems with cyber warfare as a tool of national policy. First, if the US really does want to reduce Iran's perceived nuclear threat through negotiations, covert acts of sabotage only hinder such diplomatic efforts. The fiercely nationalist Iranians will not take kindly to such acts, particularly in light of cyber warfare being part of a broader and sometimes lethal campaign widely attributed to the Mossad of Israel and Iranian dissident forces, which has also included the assassination of key Iranian nuclear scientists...
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...the reason for the President’s hostility toward Iran has nothing to do with American security. Rather, Obama’s aggressiveness—which carries with it a willingness to put significant long-term American interests at risk—is motivated by a perceived imperative to prevent the Israelis from doing something that they cannot credibly do in the first place: namely, strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear program...
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...The weapons’ systems being purchased by Israel and Pakistan are formidable and apparently unmatched in their technical capabilities. The new German submarines feature an air-independent propulsion system which uses hydrogen fuel cells; this is safer than previous closed-cycle diesel engines and steam turbines, cheaper than a nuclear reactor, and quieter than both. The boats leave an undetectable exhaust of water in the sea, leaving no fuel traces during use, storage or refueling. This improved propulsion system is of undisclosed performance, but according to sources in the Israeli Ministry of Defense, it gives the boats capabilities similar to those of nuclear submarines in their range.. almost every point on the planet is accessible to a nuclear attack from such a submarine...
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...In Germany, the government's military assistance for Israel's submarine program has been controversial for about 25 years, a topic of discussion for the media and the parliament. Chancellor Angela Merkel fears the kind of public debate that German Nobel literature laureate Günter Grass recently reignited with a poem critical of Israel. Merkel insists on secrecy and doesn't want the details of the deal to be made public. To this day, the German government is sticking to its position that it does not know anything about an Israeli nuclear weapons program...
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  Lawrence Davidson argues that the US National Defence Authorization Act will not only curtail civil liberties by allowing the military to indefinitely detain, without charge or trial, citizens and non-citizens alike, but will also allow the government to direct the same kind of massive propaganda campaigns domestically that are presently waged as part of American war efforts overseas...
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..A new report in one of Germany’s leading newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and most of the victims killed were members of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad. The reports cites anonymous opponents of Assad who admitted their involvement in the massacre...
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  I have no animosity towards people who supported and voted for President Obama. Well maybe a little, but only because I know your energy could have been put to better use. But if you vote, then given the options available, which is insanity or maybe slightly less insanity, then you could argue that it was perfectly reasonable for you to vote for what you perceived to be slightly less insanity. Maybe there was a time when there was some truth to this logic, and many would argue that there still is. This prevailing logic of supporting the lesser-than-two-evils, fitting for an era of diminished expectations, is the most important political resource of the Democratic Party and the typical cop-out for its “progressive” supporters...
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  The US Department of Justice has released new files about convicted spy Jonathan Pollard’s bid for presidential clemency.. While the contents have been withheld, their existence signals that the Pollard commutation request may be nearing a conclusion within the Obama administration. June 18 could mark the culmination of a massive lobbying campaign for release. Obama’s dismal record on Israeli accountability suggests Pollard will soon walk free...
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...Abu Yahya al-Libi was also held in Bagram from 2002, until his dramatic escape in 2005. I was there in 2002, but I did not see him or any of the other three who escaped with him. However, after my release, I did see an interview on the al-Arabiyya news channel, in which Aby Yahya not only described the escape in detail, but also the conditions in Bagram and his experience as a captive of the US...
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...it’s simply indisputable that drones (for obvious and completely understandable reasons) are a leading cause of rising anti-American hatred among would-be Terrorists and their enablers. His touching little story about how CIA drone operators waited for one of their targets to finish playing with his small child before blowing the father to bits is just too propagandistic for words (aren’t our leaders so deeply humanitarian?)...
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...the American empire has been exceptionally irresponsible because of its lack of self-awareness and the absence of conservative restraint. Because Americans prefer not to embrace Old World conservatism and have habitually denied the imperial character of our foreign policy since the 1890s, ours has been an exclusively liberal, commercial, and ideological empire. While we pretend to confront one great question that haunted Europe in the 19th century—empire or nation?—we refuse to consider the other—what kind of empire?..
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  They did it again. This time it is Spain - or rather, Spanish banks - which are getting a 100 billion Euros bailout in exchange for a wide and comphensive program of austerity measures by, no, not the Spanish banks, but the Spanish people. You got to admire the brazen arrogance of this system. First, the banks screw the people, then the international plutocracy makes it a condition to further screw the people before bailing out the banks (and not the screwed people, of course!)..
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  The Israeli colonization of Palestine continues unabated, and the political show that protects and enables it has become a boring and repetitive charade. At the same time, it serves to feed the agendas, wallets and speeches of politicians and others who like to pretend that they believe in a 'negotiated solution'. It doesn't take a genius to see how this deceptive game works, but it may be helpful to those whose eyes are filled with the sand that routinely gets sprinkled into them by Zionist spin doctors and their supporters around the world, to have the scenario spelled out in a clear and unambiguous way...
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  Graham Peebles highlights the green shoots of a culture of sharing around the world and argues that, through sharing, justice and the dissipating of tensions between wealthy countries and the developing nations may eventually be realized...
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  The lesson of the cold-blooded attack on the USS Liberty was that there is nothing the Zionist state might not do, to its friends as well as its enemies, in order to get its own way...
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  Forty five years ago on June 8th, 1967, the USS LIBERTY was deliberately attacked by Israel and two thirds of those on board the LIBERTY were either killed or wounded. The cover up began that very day and continues now all these years later. Today’s post commemorates that solemn event...
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  This report of war crimes committed against U.S. military personnel is submitted to the Honorable Secretary of the Army in his capacity as Executive Agent for the Secretary of Defense, pursuant to Department of Defense Directive Number 5810.01B (29 March 2004). This Report is filed by the USS Liberty Veterans Association...

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..The coalition brings three comrades from the "counter-terrorist" Sayeret Matkal into the three highest political positions in the state of Israel. This is really a grand coalition of three senior terrorists who masterminded and carried out the attacks of 9-11: Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Shaul Mofaz. The Sayeret Matkal coalition was only possible after Mofaz took over the reins of the Kadima party in March 2012 from Tzipi Livni...
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  The "Global War on Terror", more appropriately named the Jewish Global War of Terror, is one big Jewish racket serving international Jewry's global agenda of world domination. This supremacist agenda seeks to subjugate the entire world, politically, economically, culturally, and psychologically, relying primarily on societal acceptance of the two greatest hoaxes of the 20th and 21st centuries respectively: the alleged "Holocaust" of European Jews during WWII and the alleged al-Qaeda terrorist attack on 9/11...
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  Uri Avnery considers the deceit, deception, falsehoods and fabrications that underpinned Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon 30 years ago this week – Lebanon War I. He argues that the failure to learn lessons from what was in fact a political and military disaster not only led to another disaster – Lebanon War II in 2006 – but could still lead to yet more bloody adventures...
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  Discussing the nature of the US Empire and how it got to where it is today with most US residents is always a challenge. Recommending books explaining it is equally so. This is especially true when one considers that most people who live in the United States have little or no concept of what an empire is and, when explained to them, are reluctant to believe that their nation is such a thing. I have often thought that someone should make a film that might accomplish this educational goal...
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  The affair known in Israel as “Bibi-Tours” is nearing its end. Netanyahu was formally interrogated in March; this was the final stage of the formal investigation. Now everything is ready for issuing a decision. Israel State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss is expected to retire before October 2012, the date being subject to the nomination of his successor by the Knesset. Before retiring, he must issue a final report on the most important probe of his career. If he concludes that Netanyahu committed criminal offenses, he will pass his findings on to the Attorney General and Netanyahu may find himself facing criminal charges...
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  Stuart Littlewood contrasts the values which the British Queen is seen to represent with the shameless pimping and stooging by UK ministers on behalf of Israel, a racist rogue state that is in breach of numerous international conventions, the UN Charter and countless UN Security Council resolutions...
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  Near the Dulles International Airport west of Washington last weekend, I found myself a couple of dozen meters away from a formidable gathering of 150 powerbrokers – the Bilderberg Group – whose capacity to move money and influence events rivals even the upcoming G20 meeting in Mexico, last month’s G8 summit in Camp David and NATO military meeting in Chicago, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meeting in April, or the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January...
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..All wars waged at the behest of American Jewry on Israel’s behalf are wars of disaster that can in no way be regarded as beneficial to America. The shameful fiasco in Iraq and the spectacular defeat of America in Afghanistan (its new Vietnam) are obvious examples. American Jewry is one hundred percent to blame for these disasters. Pay no attention to the ad hominem slur that this self-evident truth is an “anti-Semitic canard.” That won’t wash any longer...
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...Palestinians remain the largest refugee population on earth. We are experiencing the longest remaining occupation - the suffering has endured for 63 years. We have a history of 130 years of colonization and a far longer history of conflicts, wars, and occupations going back over 4,000 years. It is thus not surprising that we have plenty of history to relate to in our memory, much of it is unfortunately sad. But we also have the most amazing story of survival and persistence (sumud)...
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  Israel keeps arresting my little brothers and sisters. I kid you not, the youngest child summoned to a court was 40 days old. (yes you read right) and last week they attempted to arrest a 2 year old little brother. Currently 206 of my brothers and sisters are illegally detained in Israeli jails so we need your help!..

  Sandra Tamari is a Palestinian-American Quaker who lives outside St. Louis. She is is a member of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee and has worked on divestment, as you can see in the picture above. Last week she was deported from Israel and the American embassy asked if she was Jewish and then said it couldn't help her...

[No surprise if you know who makes the rules]
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..Jews face special risks that require vigilance, though there is no “specific, credible threat” against Jewish targets, Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told the Forward during a visit to the newspaper’s New York offices. In a June 4 meeting with the paper’s editorial staff, Napolitano cited the particular exposure she said Jews face in explanation of a DHS security grant program that mostly benefits Jewish groups.

  I would like to propose publicly here in Gaza, Palestine--where the Intifadah began ten years ago at this time--that the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine and its President institute legal proceedings against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague (the so-called World Court) for violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. I am sure we can all agree that Israel has indeed perpetrated the international crime of genocide against the Palestinian People. The purpose of this lawsuit would be to demonstrate that undeniable fact to the entire world...
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  The genocidal character of the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 is discussed in the pages of the premier genocide journal, Journal of Genocide Research, in its new issue, where I debate the issue with the historian, Omer Bartov: ‘The question of genocide in Palestine, 1948: a debate between Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov’...
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  The Zionist Story, an independent film by Ronen Berelovich, is the story of ethnic cleansing, colonialism and apartheid to produce a demographically Jewish State. Ronen successfully combines archival footage with commentary from himself and others such as Ilan Pappe, Terry Boullata, Alan Hart and Jeff Halper...

  Back in 2009, in Houston Texas, Mimi Adams, a distinguished Palestinian solidarity & human rights activist, gave me a present- a USS Liberty baseball cap. She put it on my head and said, “Gilad, in the next two weeks, make sure you have it on your head everywhere you go in America. You will see what happens.”..

..."I believe that Israel has a powerful strangle hold on the American government. They control...the House and Senate. They have us involved in wars of which we have little or no interest. Our children are coming back in body bags. Our nation is bankrupt over these wars, and if you open your mouth, you get targeted. And if they don't beat you at the polls, they'll put you in prison... It's an objective assessment that no one will have the courage to speak about. They're controlling much of our foreign policy. They're influencing much of our domestic policy...

  Most Israelis observe a conspiracy of silence by which certain subjects widely discussed in the Hebrew press are seldom aired in English-language media. One Israeli who dared to break that code of silence, however, is the late Livia Rokach, daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the government of Moshe Sharett. She translated the diaries and she was eventually found dead in her hotel room in Rome. This document is riveting, a must read...

  As organizations dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights, the Palestinian Council of Human Rights Organizations (PCHRO) and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) are gravely concerned for the lives of three Palestinian prisoners who remain on hunger strike in Israeli prison. Today (Wednesday, 6 June), Mahmoud Sarsak and Akram Rikhawi were visited by PHR-Israel’s independent doctor for the first time since they launched their hunger strikes. Mahmoud Sarsak is currently on his 80th day of hunger strike, resulting in an imminent threat to his life...
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  The more danger, the more honor - this saying could be a trade mark for the straightforward attitude and non-corruptible scholarly work of the US-American political scientist Norman G. Finkelstein. There is no other American Jew in the United States whom the right-wing pro-Israel Zionist lobbies and their cheerleaders’ worldwide love to hate more than Finkelstein...
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  As the destabilization effort against Syria continues, the connections between the terrorist “opposition” forces and Anglo-American, pro-NATO governments are becoming more and more obvious, even as the mainstream media refuses to address the issue in any manner other than direct obfuscation. Thankfully, a sizable portion of the alternative media, along with outspoken Syrians like YouTube blogger Syrian Girl have played a major role in exposing the “rebels” for what they are – foreign terrorists and criminal Syrian elements that are being backed by Anglo-American and pro-NATO governments and intelligence agencies...
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...The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst–Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere. The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogyman- in-the-making–China, the country selected for the role of Washington’s new Cold War enemy...
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...Since at least 2007, the West, particularly the US, along with Israel and Saudi Arabia, have been attempting to build up both the Muslim Brotherhood and smaller, armed extremist groups with direct ties to Al Qaeda, to directly target Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Started under the Bush administration and continuing seamlessly under Obama, in a 2007 New Yorker article titled, "The Redirection" by Seymour Hersh, the Brotherhood was already described as being backed by the US and Israel who were funneling support through the Saudis so as to not compromise the "credibility" of the so-called "Islamic" movement...
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...financial deregulation leading to Wall Street's gambles, the US government's decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset...
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...Total War requires intense and constant psychological warfare to convince public opinion – both at home and abroad – that “our boys” fighting “to spread peace and democracy”, always do the “the right thing” by killing “the right people” who threaten America, Europe, Israel and the rest of the West; in other words, by only killing “militant terrorist combatants”..
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  The anti-Jewish riots, or “pogroms” of late 19th-century Russia represent one of the most decisive periods in modern Jewish, if not world, history. Most obviously, the riots had demographic implications for western countries – around 80% of today’s western Diaspora Jews are descendants of those Jews who left Russia and its environs during the period 1880–1910. But perhaps the most lasting legacy of the period was the enhancement of Jewish “national self-awareness,” and the accelerated development of “modern, international Jewish politics.”..

  In his book "The Jews & Modern Capitalism," (1911) German sociologist Werner Sombart credits Jews for the rise of capitalism as the most dynamic force in the modern world. In the excerpt below, he says Jews built the USA to become the epitome of capitalism: "Americanism is the Jewish spirit distilled."..

...It needs to be noted that "Khazar" is not the self-definition of a people with a self-conscious history, but simply a word signifying "nomads". Naturally, the Jews, thanks to their greater organization, energy, entrepreneurship, artisans' skills and, above all, trade capital, rose quickly, Judaized the local ruling class and became the factual rulers of Khazaria, that is, "Nomadia". Before long, Judaism became the the state religion of the Khazars...
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  This poem is dedicated to all political prisoners past and present all over the world who seek a life of dignity, freedom, safety, human rights and justice. This poem is dedicated to all Palestinians who remained principled and steadfast in our struggle against the State of Israel and all other forms of oppression. But this poem is also dedicated to the pain locked inside my father's eyes and caged inside his body. This poem is my heart song that seeks to make you free. Daddy I see you and I see Palestine. One day, I will build again the home that was stolen from you...

  Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, explains why he believes Israel's "separation barrier" enforces apartheid between Israelis and Palestinians. He compares the Israeli West-Bank barrier to the Berlin Wall...
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  On June 3, 2012, in the Sunday edition of the German Der Spiegel, the Editor in Chief Georg Mascolo wrote that “months-long research proves that the submarines Germany supplies to the Israeli navy make use of equipment capable of carrying nuclear weapons;” the article claims that this was confirmed by German officials. This statement contradicts earlier remarks by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said that the vessels cannot carry nuclear weapons...

...For the last 64 years, Palestinian women, men, elderly, and youth have steadfastly and spiritedly resisted the occupation and the Zionist state. It is a resistance that continues flourishing among Palestinians from all walks of life both inside and outside Palestine, be they farmers, workers, students, poets, or intellectuals...

  Stuart Littlewood looks at the heroic efforts of students in the besieged Gaza Strip to compete in an international event despite the sadistic obstructions of the Israeli regime, international cowardice and sheer bad luck...

...There is ample reason to be skeptical about U.S. government claims amplified in mainstream media reports. How many times recently have lies and exaggerations been used to push for the use of force overseas? It was not long ago that we were told Gadhafi was planning genocide for the people of Libya, and the only way to stop it was a U.S. attack. Those claims turned out to be false, but by then the U.S. and NATO had already bombed Libya, destroying its infrastructure, killing untold numbers of civilians, and leaving a gang of violent thugs in charge...

  On June 4, Palestinian national soccer team member Mahmoud Sarsak completed 81 days of a grueling hunger strike. He had sustained the strike despite the fact that nearly 2,000 Palestinian inmates had called off their own 28-day hunger strike weeks ago. Although the story of Palestinian prisoners in Israel speaks to a common reality of unlawful detentions and widespread mistreatment, Sarsak's fate can also be viewed within its own unique context. The soccer player, who once sought to take the name and flag of his nation to international arenas, was arrested by Israeli soldiers in July 2009 while en route to join the national team in the West Bank...

  Occupiers/colonizers are of course always dependent not just on military might but also on propaganda and psychological manipulation to reach their goals. For example, from the late 19th century, the Zionists successfully infiltrated the minds of their victims with notions like "Arabs" and/vs. "Jews". With this one simple concept, Zionists succeeded in 1) equating a linguistic group with a religion and elevating Jewishness to a supposed national structure ("a people"), 2) removing Arab Jews as a viable group whose allegiance lies naturally with their fellow Arabic speaking people, 3) fostering anti-Jewish feelings (mistakenly called anti-Semitism) to help their cause in conflating Zionism with Judaism...
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  A month ago, I was invited by American Jews for a Just Peace to give a talk in Boston in memory of Hilda Silverman z’l, a friend, congregant and passionate advocate for justice for Palestinians. In honor of Hilda, I wrote a talk that described my journey from liberal Zionist to a belief in a Judaism and Jewish Identity without Zionism...
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  Some of the world's biggest stars – from Madonna to the Red Hot Chili Peppers – are being accused of putting profit before principle in a growing backlash against artists performing in Israel. Campaigners angry at human rights abuses against the Palestinian people – symbolised by Israel's policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinians and allowing Israeli settlers to take over their land – are demanding a boycott of Israeli venues in a campaign that echoes the 1980s protests against South Africa and the infamous venue Sun City...
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...De-Beers, the diamond behemoth, is exploiting the celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in a vulgar and insensitive manner in order to promote their diamonds. The company's decision to display a Forevermark Steinmetz Diamond at the Tower of London ignores the fact that the Steinmetz Diamond Group, through the Steinmetz Foundation, has "adopted" a Unit of the infamous Givati Brigade in the Israel military...
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  So now we have Rambo Obama, a steely warrior who, according to a lengthy leaked insider account in The New York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the good old USA. Including children. Those children are presumed guilty by virtue of proximity, and the Times plays along, not even modifying a targeted terrorist with the word “alleged,” as once had been the paper’s convention...
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  Damascus feels like a city expecting the worst to happen and seeing no way to avoid it. War is spreading across the country and is unlikely to spare the capital. Rebels speak of stepping up attacks in the city and could easily do so in the next few weeks. I spent the last week in Damascus and the atmosphere reminds me of Beirut in 1975 at the start of the 15-year civil war. Again and again in conversations, people realistically laid out for me the nasty things that are all too likely to happen, but few were able to produce plausible ideas on how disaster might be averted...
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...People like McCain and Romney and John Kerry and the other powerful people in Congress calling for more direct intervention in Syria like to present themselves as being genuinely concerned with the suffering of their fellow man. But that is evidently not the case. Syria is strategically located in the Middle East, is geographically a close neighbor of Israel and a close ally of Iran. President Bashar al-Assad is a puppet of the Russians who value their last close ally in the region because it affords them geo-political influence and a chance to defy U.S. imperialism...
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  I urge you all to listen to this amazing, truly visionary, presentation by Eben Moglen, one of the most knowledgeable and savvy defenders of freedom of our times. To be honest, I find his arguments very disturbing, because he brilliantly shows that our society and our technology are truly headed in the wrong way, and because I find it very believe that this can be stopped. But maybe it can? At hte very least, the more people will truly understand his arguments, the longer we can resist. Just like George Orwell showed in his book "1984" how thought is dependent on words, so does Moglen show that modern thought is dependent on media, which itself is dependent on the technology which runs and, really, defines it...

  Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Israel deliberately undermines peace and is single-mindedly pursuing the Palestinians’ socio-political extinction and national erasure, liberal supporters of Israel, who may acknowledge that Zionism’s historical and legal claims to Palestine do not hold up, insist on the “existential threat” rationale—the murderous historical persecution of Jews and its potential recurrence. This to them encapsulates Zionism’s and Israel’s justification. This argument constitutes a variation of what one might call “saving a drowning man” analogy...
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  On June 2, 2012, an Egyptian judge sentenced former President Hosni Mubarak to life in prison after being found guilty of conspiring in the killing of about 850 protesters during the first six days of protests that ended his rule. He was found not guilty of corruption. Together with him was convicted Former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly for the same charges; he got the same punishment. All other persons accused, including his sons Alaa and Gamal, were found not guilty. After the weak verdict, angry protestors filled again Tahrir Square, the heart of the upheaval. Yet, this is an important milestone in the Middle East: a corrupt tyrant is seen by the people behind bars...
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  Alan Hart views the Zionist-manufactured myth that the 1967 war was a defensive war – rather than a war of aggression – launched by Israel because it faced a threat of extermination by its Arab neighbours, and laments the lazy – or Zionist-motivated – journalism which continues to perpetuate this myth in the Western media...
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  A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today. This documentary is about the foreign policy of the United States. It demonstrates the importance of the political economy, the Mafia principle, propaganda, ideology, violence and force. It documents and explains how the policy is based on the interest of major corporations and a tiny elite to increase profits and the United States governments own interests in maintaining and expanding it’s imperialistic influence...

  The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously. The concept of the “Long War” has characterized US military doctrine since the end of World War II. The broader objective of global military dominance in support of an imperial project was first formulated under the Truman administration in the late 1940s at the outset of the Cold War...
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...Caliph Umar Ibn Al-Khattab was known for his simple and modest lifestyle. A famous story tells of him walking beside his camel upon which his servant was sitting on arriving in Jerusalem in order to resolve a long festering dispute between the different Christian sects in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Before he adjudicated the dispute, he cleaned himself up and prayed outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, lest Muslims thought it ought to be a Mosque. He asked the Church Leaders to give the keys of this most important Church to an old Jerusalem family that had converted to Islam. They were to open and close the Church, resolve disputes and lead Religious Processions...
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  A warning to Muslims...

  Not yet signed sealed and delivered: the US Congress declares and codifies its subservience, obedience and allegiance to the Jewish State...
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  Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true. This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing...
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  The death of nearly 100 people — reportedly mostly women and children — over the weekend is a salutary reminder of an eternal truth with which Western leaders seem unfamiliar: PEOPLE GET KILLED IN WARS. In the present Syrian case, both sides in the ongoing Syrian civil war appear to share responsibility for the deaths. And while the trigger pullers on each side bear responsibility, the line of responsibility also leads directly back to Britain’s David Cameron, the UN’s leaders, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Barack Obama, and especially Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice...
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...Considering the provenance of all this concern for their welfare, the newly-liberated people of the Middle East and North Africa would do well to remember the price that was paid for earlier popular “revolutions” in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union...
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  This incisive report by independent Russian journalist Marat Musin dispels the lies and fabrications of the Western media. The report is based on a chronology of events as well as eyewitness accounts. Entire pro-government families in Houla were massacred. The terrorists were not pro-government shabbiha militia as conveyed, in chorus, by the mainstream media, they were in large part mercenaries and professional killers operating under the auspices of the self-proclaimed Free Syrian Army (FSA)...
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  The true reality of the 'Jews only State' . It isn't just the Palestinians. Segregation and ethnic cleansing are at the heart of Israeli and Zionist cultures. If we want to understand it all, we must elaborate on the real meaning of Jewish identity politics.. Watch the Israeli mob celebrating their symptoms...

The Amira Brothers of Ni'lin villege try to get to Madonna's "Peace Concert".The road is long, but they are determined. Through the apartheid wall, to the checkpoint' to the DCO's office, will they make it?..

...Whatever we want will happen. We'll find a way, we'll find an excuse - including lying, using pictures from Iraq for Syria media coverage, mass murdering 30 children by slitting their throats, executing them at close range, and blaming it on the Syrian government, then expelling Syria's diplomats even as the West's contrived narrative crumbles. Truly, with Trish Schuh's Abdel Nour interview, we have just profiled a criminal mind not only psychologically and operationally capable of engineering the Houla Syria massacre, but a mind who possessed the intent and motive to do so...

..Gen. Dempsey told CNN’s “Starting Point” that while he would prefer for the international community to find ways to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to leave power, the use of military force is always on the table. On Friday, 108 people were killed and 300 were injured in a massacre in Syria that sparked international outrage...
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  Modeled on US covert ops in Central America, the Pentagon's "Salvador Option for Iraq" initiated in 2004 was carried out under the helm of the US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte (2004-2005) together with Robert Stephen Ford, who was appointed US Ambassador to Syria in January 2011, less than two months before the beginning of the armed insurgency directed against the government of Bashar Al Assad. "The Salvador Option" is a "terrorist model" of mass killings by US sponsored death squads. It was first applied in El Salvador, in the heyday of resistance against the military dictatorship, resulting in an estimated 75,000 deaths...
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  Britain’s state-run broadcast BBC has been heavily criticized for using a fake photo of Iraqi dead children in order to sell a new NATO-led invasion, this time targeting Syria. On May, 2012, the BBC published a photo showing several rows of dead Iraqi children to illustrate a recent massacre in the Syrian city of Houla...
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  UN admits almost all of the 108 killed in Houla were killed at close range by militants, not Syrian soldiers firing artillery...

  Graham Peebles highlights the injustices and hardships caused to ordinary Ethiopians by their government’s policy of giving away agricultural land to foreign cash-crop investors and land speculators.. ‘It is a colonial phenomenon: appropriate land for the needs of the colonists and to hell with the indigenous people. Might is right, be it military or economic. The power of the dollar rules supreme in a world built upon the acquisition of the material, the perpetuation of desire and the entrapment of the human spirit.’..
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..We seem, truly, to be on the threshold of some major changes—changes which could conceivably result in total or near-total Jewish global domination. A good question to ask ourselves now is what—should these changes in fact come about—will this new world look like? Below are two views...
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...The goal for which we have striven so concertedly for three thousand years is at last within our reach, and because its fulfillment is so apparent, it behooves us to increase our efforts and our caution tenfold. I can safely promise you that before ten years have passed, our race will take its rightful place in the world, with every Jew a king and every Gentile a slave (Applause from the gathering). You remember the success of our propaganda campaign during the 1930's, which aroused anti-American passions in Germany at the same time we were arousing anti-German passions in America, a campaign which culminated in the Second World War...
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