Nov 30, 2013 Israel And The Slow Death of Gaza, by Mohamed Khodr | Sabbah Report ...Only Jews regardless of the international crimes they commit are the planet’s “Sole Untouchables”; above all divine and human laws. They are not the Chosen People and never have been but today they are the Chosen Criminals who have the wealth and power to manipulate the entire world forcing it to only revolve around their feigned fears, emotions, sensitivities, and demands for war against a nation or people of their choosing. They are not the “victims”; the true victim is all of Humanity... A Saudi-Israeli Defeat on Iran Deal, by Robert Parry | Consortium News ...Saudi Arabia and Israel will not abandon their efforts to torpedo a fuller agreement – and one can expect more sabotage by members of Congress, elements of the Western news media, and countries, such as France (a disgruntled p-5-plus-1 member), angling for lucrative business deals with Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, this interim arrangement with Iran – on the heels of a negotiated agreement on Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal (which headed off a threatened U.S. military strike last summer) – means that Saudi Arabia and Israel were blocked on two high-profile issues in which they favored a violent solution that would have dragged the U.S. military into another Mideast conflict... Saudi terror hurts British image, by Finian Cunningham | PressTV ...Typically, the British skirt around the issues, but the rest of the world is increasingly realizing that it is the Saudis who are funding and arming mercenary gangs that are slitting the throats of Christians and Muslims in Syria, and carrying out suicide bombings against innocent civilians, from Lebanon to Iraq to Pakistan... Obama surrenders to Bibi & Bachmann, will bomb Iran, by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today President Obama has announced that due to the interminable whining, nagging, and complaining from Israeli PM Netanyahu and US Congress clown Michelle Bachmann, he has decided to go ahead and bomb Iran with them – despite the P5+1 nuclear agreement... The Debacle: The Greatest Danger to Israel is the Stupidity of Its Leaders, by Uri Avnery | CounterPunch ...Israeli politicians, like most of their colleagues elsewhere, are not well versed in world history. They are party hacks who spend their lives in political intrigues. If they had studied history, they would not have built for themselves the trap into which they have now fallen... [Stupidity is often indistinguishable from insanity, as in the creation of the State of Israel in the first place] Escalation as Sunnis Join Shia in Repudiation: Salafist Crimes Against Islam in Syria, by Franklin Lamb | CounterPunch Reports from across Syria, and increasing coming in from many areas.. lay bare massive crimes being perpetrated against the Syrian people in the name of Islam from areas under Salafist control. A recent German domestic intelligence service annual report described Salafism as the fastest growing Islamic movement in Syria.. it is evident that mainstream Salafism, with its emphasis on adherence to the Korans principles and standards for correct behavior towards humanity, is being deeply subverted in the Syrian Arab Republic by forces organized from outside this country... On the «bombshell» dropped by China on 20 November 2013, by Valentin Katasonov | Strategic Culture Foundation Since 21 November, an article by well-known financial analyst and blogger Michael Snyder under the headline «China announces that it is going to stop stockpiling US dollars» has spread through the media like wildfire... [When it finally happens, the Empire’s nakedness (i.e., moral and financial bankruptcy) will be plain for all to see, and there will indeed by a New World Order.] Israeli Media 30-Year ‘Reign of Error’ Predicting Iranian Nuke | Tikun Olam Israel (and western ) media have a long history of predicting an impending Iranian nuke. That history goes back at least to 1984 if not before. Thanks to Israeli blogger and reporter for Calcalist, Omer Kabir, we have this history (Hebrew) in headlines and screenshots from Israel’s media. Scott Peterson performed the same research to prepare [his] timeline of world media predictions. Prof. Muhammad Sahimi published his own report on this subject.. Nima Shirazi also prepared his own... Ticking Bombs: New Attempts to Silence Cafe Palestine Freiburg, by Gabi Weber | The OtherSite Over the last three years Cafe Palestine Freiburg has been harassed by both major and minor institutions in the City of Freiburg. We took the mayor and also the University of Freiburg, influenced by Holocaust scholar Dr. Schwendemann, to court and won both cases and we also easily survived Henryk M. Broder (infamous German Hasbara-Islamophobe), German Israeli Society and Antideutsche’s attempts to destroy the Cafe’s reputation. But apparently, Zionists and supporters of Israel, still determined to stop us, are now reverting to terror... [This may seem like an insignificant story, but’s it’s in Germany, a country until now completely in thrall to tribal Jewish diktats and the Holycause extortion racket.] Geopolitical shifts, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance We are in the middle of major, some say tectonic, changes. We see realignments going left and right that will change the geopolitical reality in Western Asia (the Euro term is “Middle East”) and even beyond... Boycott activists beat Israel lobby in French high court, by Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada Palestine solidarity activists in France are celebrating a victory in the country’s highest criminal appeals court this week, affirming the earlier acquittal of an activist in a case stemming from protests calling for the boycott of Israeli goods.b The ruling strikes a severe blow to efforts – supported by the government – to use legal repression to outlaw boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns in France... Palestinians set animal traps to protect lands from settler raids | Maan News Palestinians seeking to protect themselves and their properties from Israeli settler attacks have begun using animal traps, sources say. In response to recurring raids by local Israeli settlers targeting Palestinian homes and agricultural areas, farmers in villages around Nablus have began to use an old method to protect their fields... [Any settlers captured by this means should be sold to the Salafis, who would probably eat them - a win/win all around.] What is Normalization? by Nassar Ibrahim | Alternative Information Center ...Beginning with the Camp David agreements, an emerging culture of defeat fostered actual political defeat in a self-fulfilling prophecy. This course was driven by a process that subordinated Arab and Palestinian political frameworks to Israel’s will - characterised by a series of concessions that concerned the very core of Arab and Palestinian national rights. These concessions lead to a crisis that ultimately damaged the legitimacy of leading Arab and Palestinian forces... The Alpha Diaries | YouTube An unprecedented, groundbreaking and voyeuristic look into military reserve life in Israel, this film was shot over a 5 year period in director and reserve soldier Yaniv Berman's life. A soldier in the Israeli army reserves, Alpha Company, Berman had unparalleled access and filmed the soldiers as they went about their military service day and night. Crossing over to the Palestinian border the camera captured remarkably every movement of the soldiers from the frenetic night-time house arrests to the quiet moments of self reflection and despair... Chanukah Message from Jewish Voice for Peace | YouTube Easy to understand, historically accurate mini- primer about why Israelis and Palestinians are fighting, why the US-backed peace process has been an impediment to peace, and what you can do to make a difference. This conflict is essentially about land and human rights, not religion and culture. Endorsed by Palestinian, Israeli and American scholars and peace activists... [Although the name is an oxymoron, these folks at least have good intentions.] Druzes Detained in Dimona while Israel Attacks UNRWA | Roi Tov Two apparently unrelated headlines coincided in time but not in space. Both were published on November 28, 2013, one in New York and the other in Tel Aviv. Their timely coherence created an unintended resonance. Each one explained from a different angle why Israel is not only unviable but also quite unacceptable despite their sources being Israel-friendly. Looking at the fine details, one can also identify the trademark blueprint of Western violence... So Iran is Britain’s enemy, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis Cameron’s pledge to his Jewish friends: “An enemy of Israel is an enemy of mine. A threat to Israel is a threat to us all.” Whenever a Western leader expresses adoration and undying support for the Zionist state the Jewish Chronicle (JC) can be relied on to make the most of it. This week it reports on UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Chanucah/Hanukkah reception in Downing Street when he lit a menorah (that elegant nine-branch candlestick) with the chief rabbi... Gaza in Extremis The latest punishment of Gaza may seem like another familiar plot to humiliate the strip to the satisfaction of Israel, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, and the military-controlled Egyptian government. But something far more sinister is brewing. This time, the collective punishment of Gaza arrives in the form of raw sewage that is flooding many neighborhoods across the impoverished and energy-chocked region of 360 km2 (139 sq mi) and 1.8 million inhabitants. Even before the latest crisis resulting from a severe shortage of electricity and diesel fuel that is usually smuggled through Egypt, Gaza was rendered gradually uninhabitable... There are many things to fear in Gaza: Attacks from Israel’s Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter jets, the coastal enclave’s growing isolation, the regular blackouts from power shortages, increasingly polluted drinking water and rivers of sewage flooding the streets.. Drones are increasingly being used for surveillance and extra-judicial execution in parts of the Middle East, especially by the US, but in nowhere more than Gaza has the drone become a permanent fixture of life. More than 1.7 million Palestinians, confined by Israel to a small territory in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are subject to near continual surveillance and intermittent death raining down from the sky... ...This sadistic economic strangulation of 1.6 million people is not just cruel, it’s illegal. A UN panel in September 2011 found that Israel’s blockade subjected Gazans to collective punishment in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.” As one UN special rapporteur explained, about one third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 percent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israeli military measures, while at least two-thirds of Gazan households lack reliable access to food as a result of the blockade... Concealment and Truth in Palestine and Beyond | Gilad Atzmon The following is the text of a talk I gave at the Seek, Speak and Spread Truth Conference in London last Saturday, 23 November, 2013... [A slightly more comprehensive and structured presentation of his views than in his short articles. Well worth reading.] Plunging Deeper Into a Militaristic-Plutocratic Abyss: America and the Other, by Rev. William E. Alberts | CounterPunch America went to bed one night believing it was a peace-loving democracy, and woke up the next morning imbued with militarism and waging war on the world. Citizens had covered themselves with the belief in freedom and slumbered, only to also awaken in a growing police state—designed not only to protect them from the world’s Other, but to protect those in power from them... On Israel’s Collective Amnesia: ‘Could We Kill an Arab?’ by Belen Fernandez | Palestine Chronicle ...Israeli mythmaking and the attendant forced disappearance of history is the subject of a new documentary by Israeli video journalist and former West Bank settler Lia Tarachansky, titled On the Side of the Road. Set to premiere at the first International Film Festival on Nakba and Return in Tel Aviv-Jaffa on November 28, the movie explores Israel’s “biggest taboo” – the events of 1948 – through the stories “of those who fought to erase Palestine and created an Israeli landscape of denial”.. Israel’s threat to us all becomes obvious, by Jim W. Dean | Veterans Today ...this time the Zionist lobby lead with their A-team, the senior senators who have long worked hand in glove with Israeli intelligence operatives to perpetrate a long running psychological operation on the American people. This is a treasonous act but they unfortunately have immunity for it. The Israelis, especially Netanyahu, have been running the ‘Iran is about to have the bomb’ scam for twenty years. In the early years they were wrong, the middle years wrong, and in what I call the current ‘red line’ years even more so... Zionism’s Last Card and Hope For Palestine | Alan Hart Following the interim agreement with Iran the next six months will tell us whether or not the American-led Zionist lobby and Zionism itself has played its last card and lost. If it does lose President Obama will be free to use the leverage he has to try to cause Israel to be serious about peace on terms almost all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept (and which would not pose any threat to the wellbeing and security of those Jews now living in Palestine that became Israel and who wanted to stay). The stakes could not be higher... [Israel is far and away the most dangerous terrorist organization on the planet] Jewish Power Over Academia, Politics, and Free Speech, by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today ...Ideology also does not have to be supported by facts or evidence. Daniel J. Flynn argues in Intellectual Morons that ideology invariably blinds a person even in the face of evidence. As he puts it, “When Ideology is your guide, you’re bound to get lost. Ideology deludes, inspires dishonesty, and breeds fanaticism. Facts, experience, and logic are much better at leading you to truth..” The only antidote to ideology is truth, backed up by evidence, logical consistency, rational conclusions, deductive arguments, and adherence to reality. Ideologues do not always like the truth... Be Thankful for the People Struggling to Limit NSA Spying, by Robert Scheer | Truthdig On Monday the Supreme Court, ruling on an emergency petition, declined to do the right thing and hear a case challenging the massive government surveillance of Americans, revealed by the leaks from Edward Snowden. For the time being, the court acceded to the Obama administration’s argument that it has the legal right to continue its unprecedented bulk collection of American phone records without any restraint. That throws the ball back to Congress, where a historic battle, crossing party lines, is already underway... After Iran deal, the next step is to end the Middle East proxy war in Syria, by Jeremy Shapiro and Samuel Charap | The Guardian ...The conflict in Syria is no longer a domestic struggle. It has become a regional proxy war, principally between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but with important roles played by Qatar, Turkey and Iraq. These external actors are fanning the flames of conflict and actively dissuading their Syrian allies from committing to Geneva II. The record on resolving such wars is clear. Until the external actors reach some sort of accommodation, they will continue to fund and arm their proxies and the war will continue indefinitely... Outgunned: How America’s military spending stacks up | The Economist ...The Empire vastly outspends the rest of the world not only in armaments, but on “Security” and the incarceration of the highest percentage of its own population as well. Not to mention the trillion dollars or so that the US has given to Israel over the last 60 years. Is it any surprise, then, that there’s precious little left over for the country’s infrastructure or meeting the needs of a majority of the population [Ed.]... US diplomatic iceberg spotted near China, by the Saker | Asia Times Online Do you remember president Bill Clinton ordered two US aircraft carrier battle groups into the Strait of Taiwan in 1996 to "send a message" to China? Well, it appears that Barack Obama, the lame-duck, spineless multi-humiliated and multi-defeated president of the US of A, just had a surge of testosterone and decided to provoke China yet again by mocking its decision to extend its air defense zone over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.. One really ought to know absolutely nothing about Asia to believe that you can impose a major loss of face on a superpower like China and not have to pay dearly for it... Iran deal: Death blow to fraudsters, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today Despite the phone calls and bags of cash moving around Washington and New York, bribes for politicians and media alike, the nuclear deal with Iran is insanely popular, not just with the American people but the press as well. Netanyahu is not just shocked, he is bordering on emotional collapse. Of course, none of this is tied to Israeli security... Testimony by Dr. Ilan Pappe on Genocide in Palestine by Israel | Global Research TV ...The testimony of Dr. Pappe was an interesting and revealing account of the Israeli leadership strategy to rid the Palestinians from their homeland since the 1940s. He testified that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in accordance with Plan Dalet drawn up in 1947 by Israel's leaders... Netanyahu against the whole world, by Michel Warschawski | Alternative Information Center Western governments are fed up with the Israeli angry reactions to the agreement between them and the Iranian government. “It is done, and there is no way back”: this is the message they are conveying to the Israeli government, adding that the best for Israel would have been to participate in the international efforts for a final agreement on the nuclear capacities of Iran. According to Haaretz, Benjamin Netanyahu tried for thirty minutes to convince Barack Obama that he has been fooled by the Iranians... Ayatollah Khamenei | Facebook All governments are responsible for Palestine; either Muslims or non-Muslims. Any governments claiming to support humanity are responsible for Palestine. . [Self-evident to those not blinded by the all too pervasive tribal Jewish mindfuck] Israeli Intelligence-Tabloid opens in New York | Roi Tov We live in strangely odd times, when new creatures attack us on a daily basis. After running one year as a beta-stage, Vocativ went live on October 2013. There is no other way of defining it than as an Intelligence-Tabloid. It is run from New York by Israelis who served in Unit-8200, the IDF largest intelligence unit, which specializes in SIGINT... Nov 28, 2013 Israel Has No Right to Exist, by Yukon Jack | Veterans Today Israel is doomed, the state has no right to exist and it’s identity politics are all based on false assumption, hyperbole, a false history of persecution. Israel floats on a sea of lies, once exposed it will sink into oblivion and be remembered as an aberration of evil, a death machine that the world tolerated for too long damning humanity to a miserable future of a nuclear contaminated earth, the Fukushima radioactive volcano a gift of extinction by the chosen ones. Israel is a gift of hell unto the world... [Strong words, Jack, but who can refute them?] The Origins of Palestine | YouTube A World Declaration of Liberation from Criminal Israel | YouTube Israel Charged with War Crimes and Genocide | Sabbah Report The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal reconvened on 20 November 2013 to hear two charges against Amos Yaron (first Defendant) and the State of Israel (second Defendant). The first Defendant was charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, whilst the second Defendant was charged with the crime of genocide and war crimes.. “The perpetrators had committed acts against the Palestinians, with intent to kill, cause serious bodily or mental harms and deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinians as a whole or in part.”.. Read more... JFK: Jim Garrison, The Warren Report and the end of the “magic bullet” absurdity, by Jim Fetzer | Veterans Today The crux of The Warren Commission Report (1964) is the claim that the same bullet that hit JFK in the back also hit Gov. John Connally, which the report itself downplays the “magic bullet” theory as “not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission”. That is complete rubbish, however, since if the same bullet did not both exit JFK’s throat and enter John Connally’s back, then those wounds have to be accounted for on the basis of separate shots and separate shooters, which implies a conspiracy to kill JFK... Masters of Deception: Zionism, 9/11 and the War on Terror Hoax, by Zander C. Fuerza | Les Visible The official explanation of the Bush administration, which was fully endorsed by the mass media, that nineteen Arabs with box-cutters directed by a bearded guy in a cave in Afghanistan miraculously made all of this carnage happen, despite a multi-billion dollar U.S. military, security and defense system standing in their way, is an outrageous, ridiculous, and preposterous contention—an insult to our intelligence. The official story of 9/11 is believed by fewer and fewer people every year. Polls are beginning to show that there are many more people who are skeptical of the U.S. government’s story than those who blindly accept it... Gilad Atzmon: World tired of Israel war policy on Iran | PressTV Political activist Gilad Atzmon says there is a growing international fatigue of Israel’s war-mongering policy and its effort to discredit a nuclear deal with Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he plans to send his national security advisor to the United States to discuss the interim deal with Iran on its nuclear program. “Netanyahu and his cabinet are not yet used to the idea that there is a growing international fatigue of Israeli and Jewish lobby belligerence and war mongering,”.. “We don’t want to fight anymore Jewish wars… we are not going to bomb Iran for you”.. Undermining Geneva Already, by Stephen Lendman | MCW News ...Washington doesn't negotiate in good faith. Promises made are broken. Dozens of treaties and agreements were systematically violated. Trustworthiness isn't in America's vocabulary. It never was. It's not now. Obama broke every major promise made. Throughout his tenure, he's pursued regime change in Iran. Believing he altered policy requires a giant leap of faith... Pope calls for sweeping church reforms | Al Jazeera Pope Francis has issued the mission statement for his papacy, outlining how the Catholic Church and the papacy itself must be reformed to create a more merciful church that is more engaged in helping the needy.. Pope Francis pulled together the priorities he has laid out in months of speeches and interviews. He explained his most controversial remarks criticising the church's “obsession'' with transmitting a disjointed set of moral doctrines, saying that in the church's “hierarchy of truths,'' mercy is paramount, proportion is necessary, and that what counts is inviting the faithful in... [The Pope’s attempt to transform the Roman Catholic Church into a truly Christian institution is laudable and heroic, but most likely quixotic - entrenched interests in the Vatican establishment and elsewhere will probably fatally undermine his efforts. Nevertheless, I wish him luck.] Iran's President Hassan Rouhani in music video | YouTube To Defect or to Integrate? The USA vs Edward Snowden, by Vladislav Krasnov | Veterans Today ...As a former Soviet defector and the author of Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List, I wanted my native Russia, as well as my adoptive country, to prosper in liberty and peace. It is therefore both ironic and unfortunate that after the collapse of the USSR, the USA yielded to hubris of triumphalism and set itself on a course similar to that of the USSR and contrary to the precepts of US Constitution. Snowden is not a Solzhenitsyn. But he is a man of conscience. His concern for the spiritual and political health of his country drove him to do what he did. No wonder many Americans admire him as a hero... Sponsor a mini-Ark now | Gaza's Ark On November 30th, hundreds of Palestinian children will be reaching out to the world from the confines of the ever-tightening Israeli blockade of Gaza... Only rich Americans ‘deserve to live,’ by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today “This country is an island of frightened starving poor who are totally and absolutely oppressed by police and the frightened starving poor used to be the uneducated,” he added. But now “the starving poor in the United States are people with college education and families whose factories have moves away, who lost their homes.” “The starving poor in the United States is about 60 percent of the United States now,” he noted, saying “police keep them away” from the rich... Event honoring Edward Said prompts Zionist smear campaign against San Francisco State students, by Nora Barrows-Friedman | The Electronic Intifada An anti-Palestinian group is mounting an attack against students at San Francisco State University. Following an on-campus event honoring a mural of the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, the group asserted that an artistic stencil glorified “the murder of Jews.” The university’s president, at the urging of pro-Israel advocates, has joined the condemnation of the students... [I graduated from SFSC in 1968. People had gumption then – we might even have lynched the effing president for cowardice in the face of the enemy and complicity in crimes against humanity. Seriously, you have to fight them. Doing battle against the forces of injustice and evil never goes out of style. They will fold like a house of cards if confronted with the implacable will of the people. And now IS the time.] If sanctions work against Iran, why not Israel? Will Agent Hague now rattle his sabre at Tel Aviv? by Stuart Littlewood | Intifada Palestine ...The Zionist regime is reckoned to have up to 400 nuclear warheads at its disposal. It is the only state in the region that is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran is). It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. As regards biological and chemical weapons, Israel has not signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. So Hague is kicking the wrong ass. He needs to propel the toe of his boot into the US-subsidized derrière of the Zionist entity. That’s where his “unprecedented” sanctions are need... Nov 27, 2013 On Palestine: In Search of Pax-Americana, by Anwar Kazaure | Veterans Today Palestine is an open wound in the heart of the Muslim world. Events in this tiny patch of land has for decades determined the fate of the relationship between the West (read: America) and the 1.7 billion Muslims spread across the globe. The history of this conflict is filled with a long list of injustices and double-standards, of Cold War realpolitik and bloody massacres; a deadly cycle of revenge, endless retaliations and a huge catalog of human crimes, a metaphor for all the hateful things that man is capable of inflicting on his own kind... Syria’s Christians Flee Kidnappings, Rape, Executions, by Jamie Dettmer | Daily Beast Traumatized by what they have endured inside Syria and fearful for their future, Christians fleeing the 32-month-long civil war say the persecution of Christians is worsening in rebel-held territories in the country’s north—and that the kidnapping, rape and executions of Christians aren’t just being carried out by jihadist groups, but also by other Sunni Muslim rebels, including those affiliated with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA).. Palestine pre-1948, before Zionism/Israel | The Ugly Truth Some images of what the Eastern European Jewish terrorists destroyed – all but the determination of an innocent and courageous people to endure... Rite of return to a Palestinian home, by George E. Bisharat | IMEU Next Monday, the 58th anniversary of the Palestinian "Nakba" (Catastrophe), when one people gained a homeland and another lost theirs, I will be thinking of a home in Jerusalem. It was the residence occupied by Golda Meir - author of the famous quip that "the Palestinian people did not exist" - when she was Israel's foreign minister. It was also the family home built in 1926 by my grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, "Papa" to all of us... Iran: It's Not about Nuclear Weapons, by Sheldon Richman | MCW News ..In return for agreeing to stop doing what it had no intention of doing, Iran will get the slightest relief from the economic sanctions that inflict so much suffering on the people. There’s another irony. The reactionaries on all sides – including in the U.S. Congress – oppose rapprochement between Iran and the United States for some of the same reasons. Look at the leading opponents of the agreement: Israel and Saudi Arabia. They are among the U.S. government’s closest allies in the Middle East. For overlapping reasons, both would hate to see the 34-year-old cold war between the United States and Iran come to an end... The New Deal Between the P5+1 and Iran | Arms Control Law ..This has long been what Iranian nuclear negotiators have wanted – a negotiating framework with the West that includes an agreed understanding that once the negotiated commitments have all been satisfactorily fulfilled, all sanctions on Iran (both multilateral and unilateral) will be lifted; Iran’s noncompliance case with the IAEA will be closed; and Iran will be able to retain its indigenous full front-end nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment. This agreement provides for exactly such a commonly agreed vision of an end state. Because of this, Iran was willing to make the significant concessions that it did... U.S. Officials Hint at Reservations on Final Iran Nuclear Deal, by Gareth Porter | CounterPunch The “first step” agreement between Iran and the United States that was sealed in Geneva over the weekend is supposed to lead to the negotiation of a “comprehensive settlement” of the nuclear issue over the next six months, though the latter has gotten little attention. But within hours of the agreement, there are already indications from senior U.S. officials that the Barack Obama administration is not fully committed to the conclusion of a final pact, under which economic sanctions would be completely lifted... [Uh-oh. But should we be surprised?] He saw it first... | Paul Eisen I recently came across a translation of Mein Kampf that I'd never seen before. Previously I'd tried to read the book (in my view, anyone who hopes to be informed should read it with an open mind) but always, I'd given up after one or two chapters. But this is different. I'm now well into it and quite engrossed... Read more... Netanyahu’s peace gesture is meant to extract concessions, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth ...More than 35 years later, Mr Netanyahu and his cohorts are not in the least interested in Mr Abbas’s terms for an end to the conflict, even in the midst of the current nine-month peace talks. They want him to come only if he is ready to concede terms of surrender – recognising as a Jewish state whatever enlarged borders Israel demands... Broken From Within: Haredim Cheer Iran Deal | Roi Tov ...The latest hit on Netanyahu came from within, from the foundations of his house. In the Parliament, the Knesset, an ultra-Orthodox leader cheered the agreement with Iran explaining that it was the logical result of Israel's anti-Semitism. Please don't laugh and dismiss the issue, this time the nail hit not only Netanyahu's frozen heart, but also Zionism's core. In Geneva, Israel was broken... Stop Prawer Plan: Call to action on November 30th | Oximity On 24th of June, the Israeli Knesset approved the Prawer-Begin plan, which if implemented will result in the destruction of more than 35 unrecognized villages in Al-Naqab and the forced expulsion and confinement of more than 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins. The Prawer plan is the largest Israeli land-grab since 1948. It epitomizes the nature of Israel’s policy; Israeli-Jewish demographic expansion and Palestinian-Arab demographic containment... Jesse Ventura: Two evils in US politics mean no choice at all | RT/YouTube A man of many titles, Jesse Ventura is a politician, actor, author, US navy veteran and a former professional wrestler. He does not associate himself with either side of the political establishment. Jesse Ventura won the seat of 38th Governor of Minnesota as an independent candidate. He believes the same luck may push him to the top of American politics - to become president of the United States... [Why not? Sure beats the hell of more of the same] Iran nuclear deal foils Israel financial scam, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today ..“Key financial markets dependent on manipulating the threat of global war will no longer be able to ‘print money’ based on vilifying Iran,” Gordon Duff wrote in a column for Press TV on Tuesday. He said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has been working with gangsters” in the United States while threatening an attack on Iran “in order to push up prices for key commodities, oil and others, and make billions based on assuming market positions with total foreknowledge.”.. The Secret Mission of William J. Burns, by James M. Wall | Wallwritings ...Currently serving as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Burns has just completed a far more significant secret mission. He has led ”a secret U.S. back channel to Iran going back to before the June election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani”.. Burns is a U.S. diplomat who has distressed Benjamin Netanyahu by working, initially in secret, to hammer out an agreement that is designed to relieve the suffering of the Iranian people, and curb the further spread of nuclear weapons... Thanksgiving Anxieties, Political and Personal, by Robert Jensen | Truthout ..my rejection of Thanksgiving is more intellectual than emotional, a political decision to reject that distortion of history. Whatever the actual details of the 1621 celebration involving Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians.. Thanksgiving is one way the dominant culture minimizes or denies the larger historical context of Europeans’ genocidal campaign against indigenous people to acquire the land base of the United States. Without that genocide, there is no United States. For the victors’ descendants to take a day off to give thanks without acknowledging that seems, well, just a bit sociopathic... 10 Reasons Why 9/11 Report Is Fiction, by Sherwood Ross | MCW News Key points in the government's version of 9/11 events do not stand up to scientific scrutiny, according to McKnight Professor Emeritus, Dr. Jim Fetzer, a distinguished philosopher of science, who has more than 20 books on scientific reasoning, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.. Writing in a new book titled, "The Dynamic Duo", about the events of September 11, 2001, and to me, Fetzer offered multiple reasons as to why The 9/11 Report should be viewed as fantasy:.. Commentary Magazine attacks me for “Did Israel kill JFK?” article, by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today ..Squealing like a proverbial stuck pig, Commentary writer Michael Rubin calls my article “noxious hate” but makes no effort to dispute its central contention: that Michael Collins Piper’s book Final Judgment makes a strong case that Israel was a key player in the JFK assassination. If Rubin wants to be taken seriously, he should direct his readers to a convincing refutation of Piper’s thesis. Unfortunately for Rubin and the Zionist entity he serves, no such refutation exists... Nov 26, 2013 The Deal (2) The 34-year Wall of Mistrust between the US and Iran started tumbling down on Sunday at 3 am local time in Geneva. Or has it? It is, after all, only a mutually acknowledged "first step" - a deal to start negotiating a real deal. And the terms, for Iran, are harsh... ...Everything about the Israeli response to the agreement implies a threat of some kind. Says Bibi: "Israel is not bound by this agreement. As prime minister of Israel, I would like to make it clear: Israel will not allow Iran to develop a military nuclear capability." Echoed by his crazy extremist Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman – "All the options are on the table!" – the Israeli Prime Minister is clearly threatening to attack Iran. Too bad we can’t count on President Obama to take Zbigniew Brzezinski’s advice and shoot down the Israeli planes as they wing their way through Iraqi airspace toward Tehran... World countries have hailed the recent agreement between Iran and six major world powers over Tehran’s civilian nuclear program.. A New World Order of another kind might be in progress, if it does not suffer a crib death of some sort. Regional countries are now weighing in on support for the initial Iran agreement and future progress. They are Pakistan, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and surprise, surprise...Kuwait. But here is the biggey...Saudi Arabia:.. More than ever, Israel is isolated from world opinion and the squishy entity known as “the international community.” The Israeli government keeps condemning the Iran nuclear deal, by any rational standard a positive step away from the threat of catastrophic war. In the short run, the belligerent responses from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bound to play badly in most of the U.S. media. But Netanyahu and the forces he represents have only begun to fight. They want war on Iran, and they are determined to exercise their political muscle that has long extended through most of the Washington establishment. ...Former Israeli Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said it was a promising first step, mocking the Netanyahu government by adding that Israel acted like “Iran had gotten permission to build a bomb.” Yadlin also dismissed predictions of the deal collapsing, saying Iran “didn’t sign onto this in order to breach it,” and that it would likely stand at least until the end of the six month interim period. No one liked the deal so much as Israeli investors, however, as the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange was up on hopes that despite official comments, the deal really did mean the prospect of a major war between Israel and Iran is quite a bit less likely... If there’s one group of stooges that would never forsake or disobey Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, it’s the government of Canada’s Stephen Harper. While US President Barack Obama plucked up the courage to stand up to Israel and its lobby among the traitors in Congress, and even well-established Israel flag wavers such as British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned Israel not to derail the Western powers’ nuclear deal with Iran, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird insisted that Ottawa would keep its “tough” sanctions “in full force” because “Iran has not earned the right to have the benefit of the doubt”.. [Canada no longer merits the benefit of the doubt - Canadian Kool-Aid is nowCertified Kosher] Identifying the real hypocrisy: The False Analogy of Syria and Palestine, by Jonathan Cook | CounterPunch As with many of those who express a view in the continuing debate about the wisdom of launching yet another “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, I have found myself under attack from those calling for more war. The charge against me and many like me is one of hypocrisy. So where are my double standards? I have consistently objected to all western efforts to interfere militarily in the Middle East over the past decade. I have argued that all states in the Middle East, including Syria, are seen by western governments simply as chess pieces in a great game called the Battle for Oil... Israeli obliteration of Palestinian Olive trees, by Elias Akleh | MCW News Extreme hatred of everything non-Jewish seems to be ingrained in the blood of Zionist Israeli Jews. This hatred is expressed by their warmongering politicians, their terrorist army, their fundamentalist rabbis, and their extremist civilians starting from their children up to their elderly of both sexes. They spew out this hatred against everything Palestinian; people, homes, and fields. In the last few years they have developed what could be called a yearly terrorist harvest ritual where they target Palestinian harvest products particularly the olive trees... Israel to build 829 new Jewish squatter homes on stolen Palestinian land | Redress Information & Analysis In yet another act of bad faith, Israel has given the go-ahead for the construction of 829 new Jewish squatter homes in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli pressure group Peace Now reported today.. Two weeks ago Israel announced its largest ever plan for Jewish squatter homes, saying some 20,000 would be built in the West Bank. But the Zionist land thieves put the decision on hold following pressure from the United States, falsely implying that they would show good faith in the talks with the Palestinians in return for the Americans stepping back from striking a nuclear deal with Iran... US Blue Flag starts in Israel, is the USA bluffing Iran? | Roi Tov ...Blue Flag is carried out this year in Uvda, a military airport about 80km north of the Red Sea, which provides also services to civilian aircraft.. Around fifty fighters from the USA, Israel, Greece and Italy participate with the IAF Red Squadron playing the Blue Flag enemy. Poland was supposed to participate but cancelled due to budget-related issues. Observers from twenty countries, including Bulgaria and Cyprus will watch while sipping strong Turkish coffee... Unraveling: Perfectly and Thoroughly, by M. I. Bhat | Veterans Today ...Lies, lies and more lies. Day in and day out. From the President to the lowly administration official; from the elected representatives to the corporate moguls; from the army brass and intelligence spooks to the economy czars. Anyone and everyone in any position of authority seems on a Talmudic diet, out to deceive its own people and the world... The American Criminal Elite: An Orgy of Thieves, by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn | CounterPunch ...Given a green light in the late 1970s by the deregulatory binge urged by corporate-funded think tanks and launched legislatively by Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, by the 1990s, America’s corporate leadership had evolved a simple strategy for criminal self-enrichment... [Flashback from 2000, but not much has changed] Read more...Israel-Palestine: Enough Negotiations Already! by Adil E. Shamoo | MCW News ...The status quo is unsustainable, and when the United States is no longer a superpower, Israel’s impunity will be much less assured. As Ian Lustick stated recently in the New York Times, “many Israelis see the demise of the country as not just possible, but probable. The State of Israel has been established, not its permanence.” Lustick reminded the Israelis that the “Soviet, Pahlavi Iranian, apartheid South African, Baathist Iraqi, and Yugoslavian states unraveled,” and so too could Israel collapse under the weight of its own injustices... Ukraine's "civilizational choice" - a Pyrrhic victory for Russia? | The Vineyard of the Saker ...In Russia the Presidential regime defeated the oligarchs, in the Ukraine the oligarchs defeated the Presidential regime. In fact, the Ukrainian oligarchs are very similar to their Russian counterparts of the Yeltsin era. The tragedy of the Ukraine is that there has been no "Ukrainian Putin" and what could have happened in Russia without Putin did actually take place in the Ukraine. To say that the Ukrainian political elites are corrupt would be an understatement. The reality is much worse... Nov 25, 2013 The Deal In the wake of the historic P5+1 deal recognizing Iran’s right to enrich uranium, Netanyahu is howling that it was a “historic mistake” – and threatening that Israel will not be bound by the agreement. The whole world, except for Netanyahu and his assets in the US Congress, is cheering for peace. How will Netanyahu try to sabotage the deal and get his long-desired war with Iran? Here is Netanyahu’s list of his top ten ways to sabotage peace... A peaceful agreement has been reached between the P5+1 nations and Iran. As expected, the bomb-dropping idea peddlers are crying like babies:.. ...The deal is limited to six month and chances are that no permanent deal will follow. We will likely be back to the usual animosities and renewed calls for war some six month from now. There are many who do not want a more permanent deal and they will do their best to prevent one. When, in six month, the U.S. will stop adhering to the agreement Iran will be blamed for breaking it... [A reasonable prognostication] ...Some of the extreme stands that are coming out, which oppose any deal, are creating concern in Israel. A lot of people have been criticizing the Prime Minister. What Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be asking for is not a negotiated deal, but in fact an Iranian surrender where they are pressured into simply giving up. That's not a negotiation, that's a surrender. And if you do squeeze somebody so hard, and they surrender, such an agreement isn't going to last. Both sides have to believe that they've got something out of the negotiated deal... ...The image above shows the main page of Haaretz, the most serious Hebrew newspaper and considered being The Voice of the Shin Beth secret police. The main headline reads: "The confrontation with the USA is no less dangerous than a bomb." The subtitle reads: "Netanyahu manipulated Israel to a serious isolation.. In the talks about the nuclear deal, the issue is not whether Israel is right but if it is smart to collide with the USA." Blaming Netanyahu for having left Israel with only Saudi Arabia as an ally is hilarious and of unprecedented seriousness for Netanyahu... Haartetz reported last week that “hundreds of Iranians, including university students and members of the country's Jewish community, rallied Tuesday in support of the Islamic Republic's disputed nuclear program on the eve of the resumption of talks with world powers.” Unlike the so-called ‘progressive’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ Jews who, for some reason, occasionally support Zionist interventionist wars, Iranian Jews are actually patriotic and authentic... Today, the USA brokered a peace deal with Iran on the “Nuke” question royally pissing off the Israelis and their AIPAC sponsored assigns in the U.S. Congress. The vitriolic opposition by Israel has its opposition rooted in the old antiquated ideology of Zionism created in a pre-connected world of the 20th century buttressed by the mythical dogmatic fable of the Promised Land in the 5000 year old writings of anonymous story tellers who believed the world ended at the tail of the Nile river! Come on!.. Are we stupid? | Alan Hart The following is the text of the address I made to the Seek, Speak and Spread Truth Conference in London yesterday, 23 November. Its main thrust is about the need for citizens to become politically engaged to make democracy work (before it’s as dead as the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine) in order for our children and grandchildren to have the real prospect of a future worth having... Bill Hicks on the JFK Assassination | YouTube I can only hope the rest of society opens their eyes soon... Spain's government introduces anti-protests laws | Jurist Spain's ruling People's party on Thursday introduced strict new laws against public protests, which would impose fines on activists who take part in unauthorized protests. The legislation also prohibits [Guardian report] publishing images of police, interrupting public events, possessing illegal drugs, vandalizing public property and drinking alcohol in the street... A Holocaust Debate: Mark Weber vs Michael Shermer | YouTube Michael Shermer (recently renowned for his skepticism of virtually anything that does not carry the official storyline, like 911, the Kennedy assassination, etc) is so far outclassed that he embarrasses himself in a debate that he should have stayed home to avoid... Israeli-Ukrainian soldier admits she killed Palestinians on TV | Oximity ..Zakusilo admits killing Palestinians including Palestinian children. She answers the question “did you kill people” with “yes”.. she explains “we had to fire, had to kill, because it was either they [get] us, or we – them.” Host: Did you happen to shoot at children? Elena: “Yes”.. [Just following orders...] The Landfill Harmonic Orchestra | YouTube And the last shall be the first The Decline of the US (and Everyone Else), by James Petras | The People's Voice The world political economy is a mosaic of cross currents: Domestic decay and elite enrichment, new sources for greater profits and deepening political disenchantment, declining living standards for many and extravagant luxury for a few, military losses in some regions with imperial recovery in others. There are claims of a unipolar, a multi-polar and even a non-polar configuration of world power. Where, when, to what extent and under what contingencies do these claims have validity?.. Nov 24, 2013 Iran, 5+1 Reach Nuclear Deal | Global Research ..The deal was announced on Sunday morning after the intense nuclear talks.. The interim deal also allows for Iran to continue its activities in its nuclear sites in the cities of Arak, Fordo, and Natanz. According to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, the agreement also stipulates that no additional sanctions will be imposed on Iran due to its nuclear energy program. Iran will also receive access to USD 4.2 billion in foreign exchange as part of the nuclear deal... Rothschilds’ Bank of America, by Dean Henderson | Veterans Today The NSC was funneling arms to the Nicaraguan contras before Oliver North’s resupply network was operational. US aid to Saudi Arabia was being forwarded to the contras via the Karachi, Pakistan-based Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI). While House of Saud-bound money was being diverted towards the contras, one of BCCI’s biggest initial depositors was the Shah of Iran, whose Swiss BCCI accounts were bulging... Egypt Junta Attacks Turkey | Roi Tov ...The force leading this horror, the USA, is in no better situation, having become a state-police run by 16 large intelligence agencies directing a mighty military machine. It became an assassin-drones state attacking whatever it can, ignoring the principles of the law and human rights. More than two million Americans live in jail, in proportion this is more than any other country nowadays, and probably the worst proportion in human history. Yet, "America is the land of the free, China is a police state" American politicians keeps brainwashing their innocent voters... Syria, Egypt Reveal Erdogan’s Hidden “Neo-Ottoman Agenda,” by Nicola Nasser | Global Research The eruption of the Syrian conflict early in 2011 heralded the demise of Turkey’s officially pronounced strategy of “Zero Problems with Neighbors,” but more importantly, it revealed a “hidden agenda” in Turkish foreign policy under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan... Inside Emergency Damascene Shelters, by Franklin Lamb | Intifada Palestine This brief update is not focused on the ever deteriorating grave conditions of Palestinians and Syrians displaced and often trapped inside dangerous areas of Damascus, where this observer had been visiting some of the 24 former Damascus public schools currently being used as shelters. Rather it seeks to highlight the esprit de corps, solidarity, resistance, and good will among Palestinians here in Damascus who were forced from Yarmouk and other camps and how they are huddled and preparing for a harsh winter which one senses these frigid nights is not far off... Day of Rage against the Prawer Plan, 11/30/13 | Stop the JNF Campaign On this day, there are so many reasons to rage. The celebration of genocide and colonization of Indigenous people in the United States with "Thanksgiving," the tremendous and wasteful consumption of capitalism on "Black Friday," and the threat of the continued removal of the Indigenous people of Palestine with the imminent Prawer Plan. Our rage can immobilize us or cause us to feel powerless. Or it can bring us together to organize towards the world we want to build and against the violence, oppression and exploitation that do so much harm... Nov 23, 2013 Gaza is Dying Under Israel’s Siege: Will Its Children Ever Eat Again, by Mohamed Khodr | Veterans Today ..In a most comprehensive and wide-ranging study of Gaza a U.N. Report entitled “Gaza: A Livable Place?” issued on August 27, 2012 sounds the emergency alarm bells that without immediate international action Gaza will be “Unlivable” in 2020 and will lose its only aquifer source of water in 2016. “Action needs to be taken now if Gaza is to be a livable place in 2020 and it is already difficult now,”.. [Headline: "Six Million Palestinians in Dire Peril," NYT (That'll be the day) Actually, the number is much greater than that.] White House: Israel’s Stance on Iran Would Lead to War | Antiwar The White House has issued another statement criticizing Israel’s stance on diplomacy with Iran, insisting their “all-or-nothing” proposal, demanding Iran unilaterally give up the sum total of its civilian nuclear program and not accepting anything less, was a recipe for war... GOP senator unloads in private call | Salon ...“It’s the reason why I ran for the Senate, [it] is all wrapped up in this battle. I am totally dedicated to the survival of the state of Israel in the 21st century,” said Kirk, whose office framed the call as an update on Iran’s nuclear program and Kirk’s efforts to pass additional sanctions.”.. [In a saner country he would be clapped in irons for treason] The Mystery of Mark Kirk’s Motivations, by Jim Lobe | LobeLog ...Yet another — and by no means inconsistent — explanation may lie in the tangible rewards he has received for his steadfast support for Israel, at least insofar as campaign finance is concerned. If you look at the Center for Responsive Politic’ “opensecrets” website on the biggest recipients of campaign cash from pro-Israel public actions committees == most of them closely associated with AIPAC in one way or another.. you’ll find that Kirk has been a major — perhaps the biggest — beneficiary of their largesse... [As they say, follow the money] American Sanctions against Iran: A Two-Edged Sword, by Valentin Katasanov | Strategic Culture Foundation ...Washington's sanctions are a two-edged sword. They negatively affect both the object of the sanctions (the country against which they are imposed) and the country imposing them - the United States. The effect for the object of the sanctions is quicker and more visible; for the country imposing the sanctions it is less obvious, but extremely dangerous and damaging. What is this negative effect?.. Our neighbors are our priority, by Mohamad Javad Zarif | Asharq Al-Awsat In the past few weeks, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the P5+1 have endeavored to make use of the unique window of opportunity provided by the Iranian presidential election this past summer to resolve the nuclear issue, which has unnecessarily cast a shadow of insecurity and crisis over the region. While most in the international community welcomed this positive development, some of our friends in our immediate neighborhood have expressed concerns that this opening may be pursued at their expense... Bin Laden's Obituary Notice | Paul Craig Roberts A Funeral Notice for Osama bin Laden was published on December 26, 2001, in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ward. An English translation is provided below.. Also below are is a CNN interview with its medical correspondent who examines the last non-faked video of bin Laden and concludes that bin Laden is seriously ill. There is also below a 2002 report that Israeli intelligence has concluded that bin Laden is dead... Khamenei slams Israel, ‘arrogance’ ahead of negotiations, by Arash Karami | Iran Pulse ..Using harsher language than usual, Ayatollah Khamenei also dismissed Israeli claims about Iran being a threat to the world. “Is the Islamic system after a war with others?” asked Khamenei. “Sometimes this is heard from the enemies of Iran, such as from the sinister mouth of the unclean rabid dog of the region in the Zionist regime,” he said, in a reference to Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... [“the unclean rabid dog “ – good description of the Jewish State] Stephen Fry: The language in Nazi Germany | YouTube That is precisely how the Israelis typically refer to the Palestinians, etc. “The Palestinians are) beasts walking on two legs.” ~ Menachem Begin (Former PM of Israel); “A non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.. The entire creation [of non-Jews] exists only for the sake of the Jews:” ~ Rebbi Mendel Schneerson, the Chabad-Lubavitcher “Messiah” [ibid].. Battle of the Titans: Iran and Chomsky vs. Walt/Mearsheimer Debate, by Uri Avnery | Palestine Chronicle This is not merely a fight between Israel and the US. Nor is it only a fight between the White House and Congress. It is also a battle between intellectual titans. On the one side there are the two renowned professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. On the other, the towering international intellectual Noam Chomsky. It’s all about whether the dog wags the tail or the tail wags the dog... The daylight between Israel and the West | Redress Information & Analysis ..Succumbing to the Israeli prime minister’s blackmail, Fabius took the unusual step of using the French-Inter radio to criticize the very draft agreement he helped negotiate. Mind you, this comes from a leader of the same Socialist party that introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East in the mid-1950s, sending French engineers to build Israel’s first nuclear reactor. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion claimed then the project was a colossal pumping station to desalinate seawater. Israel is run by amoral political leaders who will do and say anything to get what they want... [What they want is eternal life for the Golem (aka the State of Israel). They have become the servants of the Golem, their paranoid creation.] JFK anniversary should be commemorated as "National Ignorance Day,"by Grant F. Smith | IRmep The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is largely being trivialized in elite U.S. corporate media. Regardless of what one thinks of JFK's legacy, one significant outcome to his killing should be better understood. Sixty-one percent of Americans do not believe the official government line that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman... AIPAC no match for the 'sleeping giant' by Pam Bailey | Al Jazeera The absolute power of the "pro-Israel" lobby, as manifested most prominently by the US-based organisation known as AIPAC, is often cited as a truism of Western foreign policy. However, the recent defeat of the Israel-supported push to go to war in Syria, and the US administration's continued backing of a deal with Iran on its nuclear capabilities (which Israel opposes), suggests that the pro-Israel lobby isn't as Goliath-like as perceived.. When the public finally wakes up and mobilises, the lobby's vaunted power dissipates. And the pro-Israel lobby is slowly losing the battle for public legitimacy... No sanctions on Israel was the real ‘Historic Mistake,' by Jim W. Dean | Veterans Today Netanyahu and his Congressional puppets are correct that the world is facing a historic mistake. They just have it upside down. We would never be where we are now if the world had imposed sanctions on Israel for its long-running and huge weapons of mass destruction programs. The West thus ended up being a major proliferator itself in spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary... [Correction: Allowing Israel to exist in the first place was the 'real Historic Mistake,' and it needs to be rectified.] Russia and Middle East Policy: Story of Success and Growing Clout, by Andrei Akulov | Strategic Culture Foundation Resurgent Russia is asserting itself in the Middle East as a big an important international player. The recent diplomacy that averted a U.S. strike on Syria underscored the extent to which Moscow’s steadfast support for its last remaining Arab ally has helped to solidify its role. Russian President Vladimir Putin has emerged as the world leader with the single biggest influence over the outcome of a raging war that is threatening the stability of the broader region... Ambassador Chas W. Freeman: Coping with Kaleidoscopic Change in the Middle East | Intifada Palestine ...the Arab uprisings, revolutions, and coups of the past two-and-a-half years have repeatedly demonstrated that, for all our unmatched military power, Americans no longer command the ability to shape trends in the Middle East. Almost no one now expects us to do so. Delusions of imperial omnipotence die hard, but the question of the day is no longer how we or other outside powers will act to affect the Arab future. Both colonialism and neocolonialism are no more. For better or ill, the states of the region have seized control of their own destiny. ما شاء الله (masha’Allah) — and good luck to them!.. Israel called shots from Grassy Knoll? by Kevin Barrett | PressTV ...The tiny Zionist entity of eight million people, together with its millions of fanatical loyalists all over the world, clearly dominates US foreign policy, and has done so since the murder of JFK. It seems that the JFK coup d'état was a turning point: The Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies ran independent foreign policies focused on US interests not Israeli interests. But since the slaughter of the Kennedys, the US has been an abject slave of Israel. How could the Israelis have engineered a coup d’état in America?.. The Mistake the Killers of J.F.K. Made, by Bob Johnson | Veterans Today ..Israel had a lot to gain by killing, or helping to kill, President Kennedy. President John F. Kennedy was the last president to stand up to the Jewish state of Israel regarding their nuclear weapons. This speaks volumes. It seems politicians got the message loud and clear after President Kennedy was assassinated. Not only did presidents after President Kennedy not try to stop the Jewish state of Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons or attempt to control Israel’s growing nuclear stockpile, they actually committed treason against the US and the US military... [Nowadays, treason is virtually a requirement for high office in the US – Welcome to Wonderland] Nov 22, 2013 Anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination I was about eleven when I saw "PT 49" at the local cinema. It was about the wartime exploits of the then young John Kennedy. In the film, the future President was just like I knew he would be - fabulously handsome and heroic and kind of good... The true story of JFK’s murder has never been officially admitted, although the conclusion that JFK was murdered by a plot involving the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been well established by years of research... This photo sums up a nation’s shock, dismay and disbelief when we all learned of the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963. But there were many others who were not shocked but relieved, if not happy, when JFK was gunned down ~ and the obvious questions still remain unanswered:... The corporate media is still pushing the myth that JFK was killed by a communist lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald. But most of the American people are not buying it. Since the early 1990s, a strong majority of Americans has believed that JFK was killed by a conspiracy, and that the CIA had a hand in it. The American people are right... Iran: Latest Update This could be the moment when the intransigent few destroyed hope for bringing Iran, the world’s most significant, scapegoated pariah nation, back into what passes for the international community, preferring to indulge their lust for war in all its unpredictable uselessness. Or, more hopefully, this moment is only a pause, a slowing of the mutually desired normalization of Iran’s presence in a world that already accepts states with much worse and more dangerous patterns of behavior. One thinks first of the United States... It is hard to believe that even though 64% of the American public favors a negotiated settlement with Iran over its nuclear program fully 37% of those polled also believe that the United States actually needs Israel’s permission before coming to any kind of agreement.. One has to suspect that the percentage consists mostly of the Christian-Zionists... Claims from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran has enough low enriched uranium to make up to five nuclear weapons in a matter of weeks are not plausible, according to experts.. Netanyahu’s estimate is a “chalkboard equation that does not match up with the realities of what it would actually take for Iran to breakout”.. As talks on Iran's nuclear program resume today, hopes for a deal are high. Regular paying guests at the Hotel Intercontinental, where some meetings are being held, have been told to vacate their rooms on Friday, apparently just in case ministerial delegations fly in for a signing ceremony... One remarkable aspect of the Iran debate now taking place in Washington is its lack of balance. From Israel and the various Iran hawks, no argument, no matter how over the top, can be in bad taste... Without taking Iranian leaders who stand on their country's middle ground seriously, the West is doomed to stalemate on nuclear talks.. Among Americans who really count, the notion of bombing having a salubrious effect on Iranian human rights is shared by the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Provided, of course, that the 'real humanitarians' do it... The subject of the right to peaceful nuclear energy, recognized in Article IV(1) of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), has been of current interest in the context of Iran’s negotiations with the P5+1 regarding its nuclear program. One of the core concessions Iran is reportedly seeking from Western powers is a recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium, as a part of its indigenous fuel cycle... On June 6, 2013, USA Secretary of State John Kerry spoke with American Jewish Committee leaders in Washington. "Peace is possible, but we must hurry up," was his message. Israel didn't like it. It was nicknamed "Kerry's Whale Speech.".. Israel-Gulf-Saudi Arabia can unite in an ad hoc alliance designed to impose their red-lines on the Geneva talks between Iran and the P5+1 countries.$ The strange and unholy alliance is a formidable force, controlling vast mineral resources, financial power, and international media. They may define the outcome of this new version of the Great Game. Will the American whale find out that it is just a meagre anchovy in a Middle Eastern Spicy Pizza?.. Israel has gotten so used to the United States being totally subservient to it that it seems incapable of tolerating the slightest deviation from its diktats by Washington. For a country that swallows up some eight million dollars a day of American taxpayers’ money, one might expect some self-restraint, at least in symbolic gratitude for the largesse it receives from its increasingly economically desperate benefactors. But no... ..Israel and Saudi Arabia are the two most active terrorist organizations in the Middle East. They have tremendous experience on the Israeli side and they have unlimited funding on Saudi Arabia’s side. So, for this to happen on the eve of the talks, they were just sending a message that if we are unhappy we can do lots and lots of bombings and it is basically a challenge to them; you cannot stop us unless you give us what we want... ♫ An Angel Song for Peace and an End to Violence | YouTube ANGEL, by Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, political analyst, singer-songwriter and guitarist... US Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere, by Colum Lynch | Cryptome The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy.. The diplomatic battle is playing out in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is considering a proposal by Brazil and Germany to place constraints on unchecked internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services... Israel and its apologists can no longer defend the country on its merits, instead they must try to suppress debate, by Josh Ruebner | Mondoweiss In yesterday’s New York Daily News, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin scurrilously attacks Brooklyn College President Karen Gould and the university’s Political Science Department for encouraging an open debate on campus about Israel’s apartheid policies toward Palestinians. She baselessly charges that I, having spoken yesterday on campus, support “anti-Semitic” policies, “condone terrorism,” and “advocate the elimination of the Jewish state” in my effort to change U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians to support human rights, international law and equality... The Money Changers Serenade: A New Bankers’ Plot to Steal Your Deposits, by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts | Global Research Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a protege of Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers, has received his reward for continuing the Rubin-Summers-Paulson policy of supporting the “banks too big to fail” at the expense of the economy and American people. For his service to the handful of gigantic banks, whose existence attests to the fact that the Anti-Trust Act is a dead-letter law, Geithner has been appointed president and managing director of the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus, and is on his way to his fortune... Kyrgyzstan sends US a memorandum to leave Manas air base by 2014 | The Voice of Russia The Defense Minister of Kyrgyzstan Taalaybek Omuraliev has informed his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu about delivering a memorandum to the United States of America requesting them to leave the Manas air base by 2014... [We can hope it’s the beginning of a trend] Tom Friedman On AIPAC & Mark Kirk Calls Himself A Whore | MJ Rosenberg It’s been clear to me for about ten years that the primary problem the United States faces in crafting Middle East policy is not so much the Arabs or the Israelis. It is the Israel lobby.. Writing about the lobby’s influence (from the perspective of someone who had spent 20 years dealing with AIPAC as an aide to a senator and several House members), I initially felt like a voice in the wilderness... Quotidian Signs of Structural-Political Decline: Empire Deconstructed, by Norman Pollack | CounterPunch Every day brings evidence.. of America’s downward projection into a class-state of concentrated wealth and power buttressed by a military establishment and accompanying weakening of constitutional rights, all with the result that global hegemony—the sun never sets on an American military installation—is seen as the means of staving off systemic failures in a market-fundamentalism, bred-in-the-bones, US capitalism... Nov 21, 2013 Israel's policy of erasure, by Saree Makdisi | LA Times ...Settlement expansion, we are constantly told, is the stumbling block to the fragile negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. The settlements are eating up the territory that is supposed to provide the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. If only there were a settlement freeze, some say, one last chance for peace might be salvaged. All of that may be true enough as far as it goes. But in fact, Israeli settlement expansion is meaningless when it's considered in isolation. And that is how it is usually considered, given how much media attention the word "settlement" garners every time it comes up... Qatar World Cup: The ‘ugly game,’ by Finan Cunningham | Intifada Palestine It is proudly known to millions of fans worldwide as the “beautiful game.” But in Qatar’s case, it is coming to be seen as the “ugly game” – owing to the appalling poverty and human suffering that underlies that country’s hosting of the Football World Cup in 2022. What is supposed to be a resplendent spectacle of sporting skill and jubilation is rapidly turning into a sickening charnel house of human exploitation and degradation. Some estimates reckon that up to 4,000 migrant workers will die from accidents, suicides and ill health incurred over the next decade while laboring as “modern slaves” on construction sites to host the finals in Qatar... The NSA’s Global Threat to Free Speech, by Kenneth Roth | The New York Review of Books Following months of Snowden disclosures, the extent to which the National Security Agency’s extraordinary surveillance infringes on the privacy of our communications and other vast areas of our lives has become widely apparent. Far less appreciated, however, is the global threat that the NSA’s spying poses to freedom of expression over the Internet... Closing Gitmo Isn’t Nearly Enough, by Anthony Gregory | The Beacon ...Anyone who is an actual terror suspect—there are only a handful—should, at the very most, go through a civil trial, with all the bells and whistles, the normal standard of evidence, and rights to confront their accusers and call witnesses and all the rest. If you believe in the system of government justice, this is what you should favor—due process and civil prosecution. In a fairer world, the same could be afforded to those in the Bush and Obama administrations who have actively deprived so many people of their basic rights... Chanukah Message from Jewish Voice for Peace | YouTube At Jewish Voice for Peace, this Chanukah we re-dedicate ourselves to creating a world where all people can know peace, justice and equality... Jury Rights Billboard Campaign Infuriates Prosecutors | YouTube A new billboard in Washington, DC is causing controversy with its call to jurors, informing them of their right to jury nullification. The illuminated advertisement appears at the Judiciary Square Metro Station in the nation's capitol... [It’s about time to decriminalize victimless crimes - maybe this is how we’ll get there. The spineless, opportunistic pols won't do it. It should cut the prison population at least in half.] Iran Has a Right to Enrich—And America Already Recognized It, by Muhammad Sahimi | The National Interest ...Historically, the United States recognized an Iranian right to enrich in the 1970s, although the U.S. has no authority to interpret the NPT in an arbitrary manner that suits its interests. Many legal scholars disagree with the U.S. position. Ironically, in the 1970s, the U.S. offered Iran both uranium enrichment and spent-fuel technologies... The Riddle of “Inalienable Right” in Article IV of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons: Intentional Ambiguity | Oxford University Press ...In contrast to what has been recognized as the US view that the NPT commitment not to “manufacture” nuclear weapons includes a prohibition on all related development, component fabrication and testing, the European view prevailing in the 1980s insisted that the “inalienable right” was subject to no restrictions except the explicit ban on nuclear explosion in the Treaty... Lieberman: "Israel Needs New Ally" (Not USA) | Roi Tov Shortly after returning to his cherished chair as Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman said "The relations with the USA is the angular stone, without it we won't be able to manipulate[!] the current world." This is a bit brutish, but expected. Soon he learned that things had changed since the last time he sat in his favorite chair. On November 20, 2013, he dropped his first political bomb of the season... [I suggest the Russian (Jewish) mafia – it’s a perfect fit. I wouldn't be surprised if the Moldavian bouncer is already discussing terms with his buddies.] School of Assassins Faces Protest & Congressional De-Funding: Teaching Torture the World Over, by John LaForge | CounterPunch The US Army School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia is a notorious training operation for Latin American officers and soldiers. It’s associated with some of the worst dictatorships and human rights violators in the hemisphere. For over 20 years, the grassroots School of Americas Watch (SOA Watch) has grown into one of the most dynamic, multi-generational, cross-continental movements against militarism in the Americas... ♫ Someday (Song for Palestine) | YouTube SOMEDAY by Finian Cunningham, political analyst, singer-songwriter, originally from Belfast Ireland, featuring Tubby Corrway on lead guitar and Colin Merrill on drums... “Was 9/11 an Inside Job, or a Mossad Job?” by Laurent Guyénot | My Catbird Seat ...Francesco Cossiga, President of Italy between 1985 and 1992, said in 2007 to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, that it was well known in informed circles in America and Europe that the September 11th attack “was planned and executed by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world in order to blame the Arab countries, and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in both Iraq and Afghanistan”.. The Likudnik/House of Saud Axis of Terror, by Pepe Escobar | CounterPunch ...Whether carried out by a hazy al-Qaeda-linked brigade or by Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan’s (aka Bandar Bush’s) goons, the Beirut terror attack is essentially configured as a major, Saudi-enabled provocation. The larger Saudi agenda in Syria implies getting both Hezbollah and Iran to be pinned down inside Lebanon as well. If that happens, Israel also wins. Once again, here’s another graphic illustration of the Likudnik House of Saud in action... The War on Syria and Britain’s “Left Wing Progressives” by William Bowles | Global Research ...What these sniveling ‘lefties’ want is everybody, everywhere toeing the Western lefty line. It’s all or nothing apparently. Essentially the Western left is saying, ‘What we need is a real revolutionary running Syria not Assad the phony anti-imperialist and until he comes along, we support bombing you into democracy’. Now Assad’s credentials may or may not be up to the mark, this is not the point. It’s the idea that we, that is the miniscule Western left decides on the fates of others. It’s outrageous!.. The U.S. Isn’t Leaving Afghanistan, by Sheldon Richman | The Future of Freedom Foundation If a draft agreement between the Obama administration and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is finalized, U.S. troops will remain in that country indefinitely — instead of being withdrawn at the end of 2014, as the administration has said. This is a confession of failure. America’s longest war is nowhere near its end... Iran minister optimistic over nuclear deal | Al Jazeera ...Iran has voiced optimism regarding a nuclear deal ahead of talks in Geneva, but accused Israel of trying to sabotage them and of stoking Middle East tensions, following bomb attacks on its embassy in Beirut.. "We have reason to be suspicious of every move they make." Referring to the nuclear negotiations, he added: "They have been trying so hard to torpedo the process.".. [Cross your fingers and hope not to die - the ZioNazis are in a frenzy and they want blood] Ann Jones, War Wounds | TomDispatch ...“I’ve been in the Army twenty-six years,” he says, “and I can tell you it’s a con.” He has been an adviser to the chief counterterrorism officer in Iraq. It’s hard even to imagine what’s involved in work like that, but his version of his job description evidently failed to match the official checklist of his boss. He doesn’t think much of military bosses or politicians or Americans in general who send the lowliest 1% to fight wars that make the other 1%, on the high end, “monu-fuckin'-mentally rich.”.. “War is absurd,” he says. “Boys don’t know any better. But for a grown man to be trapped in stupid wars - it’s embarrassing, it’s humiliating, it’s absurd.”.. Nov 20, 2013 Israel forces Gaza Children to Wade through Sewage as Creepy, Evil Blockade Continues, by Juan Cole | Informed Comment The health minister in the Gaza Strip has warned that the territory is on the verge of a major health catastrophe. Children are risking cholera and worse because they have to walk through raw sewage to get to school. The sewage has flooded the streets in Gaza City because the sewage treatment plant has no electricity. It has no electricity because the Israelis are blockading the strip, including its children (50% of the population). The Israelis are not letting cheap fuel in. Some inexpensive fuel used to come in from Egypt, but the military there has blocked smuggling tunnels leading into the strip from the Sinai Peninsula... [That America is supporting Israel no matter what they do is not only indicative of the stranglehold that country has over the US, but of a complete collapse of moral, ethical and spiritual values.] Whose Foreign Policy? by James A Russell | LobeLog Whether we Americans like it or not, there is a profound struggle for control over our nation’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Push has finally come to shove, with the unseemly sight of Israeli government officials and AIPAC lobbyists fanning out on Capitol Hill to actively discredit the Obama’s administration’s attempt to craft a deal with Iran to bring the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program back under comprehensive international safeguards. After being supported for decades by tens of billions in American taxpayer dollars, free defense equipment, and unquestioning and limitless political support on countless occasions, Israel has shown its gratitude by biting the hand of its principal benefactor... American-Israeli Obstructionism, by Norman Pollack | CounterPunch ..America thrives on war, the preparation for war, the militarization of the national consciousness.. as though intuitively recognizing that in no other way can the US maintain its position of global leadership in an increasingly multipolar world-power system. Leadership here refers to, not the paragon of moral virtue, beacon to the world championing human rights, but quite the opposite, unilateralism, vehicle for the expansion and security of a capitalistic system which has seen better days and is now witnessing the atrophy of manufacturing, the utter scurrilousness of market behavior, the growing disparities in wealth, income, power, reflected in bubbles, unemployment, foreclosures, hardship... ‘Don’t attack Iran!’ Anti-war protests hit UK and Israel | RT News UK activists from the ‘Stop the War Coalition’ have held a day of action to speak out against war with Iran. Protesters took to the streets of 15 major British cities. In Israel, hundreds marched in Tel Aviv protesting the war. The coalition’s unit in Nottingham declares on its website, that the United States has always been “tempted to use its overwhelming military strength” to try to make up for its relative economic decline, exacerbated by the current crisis... Five lessons from the Iranian foreign minister’s video asking for peace, by Max Fisher | Washington Post Whether you think that Iran's outreach for a nuclear deal with the West is a good-faith effort to end the years-long standoff or a cynical ploy to weaken Western sanctions, there's no question that Tehran is pushing hard. The latest gesture comes from Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, whose office has just released this English-language video explaining his country's position... Sham philosopher and the destruction of Libya, by Ramzy Baroud | Arab News ...To claim that at best Levy is an intellectual fraud is to miss a clear logic that seems to unite much of the man’s activities, work and writings. He seems to be obsessed with “liberating” Muslims from Bosnia to Pakistan, to Libya and elsewhere. However, it is not the kind that one could qualify as a healthy obsession, stemming from for instance, overt love and fascination with their religion, culture and myriad ways of life. It is an unhealthy obsession... Ramzy Baroud: the reality of war in the Middle East | YouTube Journalist Ramzy Baroud is speaking about conflicts in the Middle East and the real reasons for it... Scowcroft, Brzezinski Urge Iran Accord, by Jim Lobe | LobeLog Two pillars of the U.S. foreign policy establishment urged Congress Monday to forgo any new sanctions legislation directed against Iran, warning that it will risk “undermining or even shutting down” ongoing negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme... Turn the Gaza Lights On, by Sarah Salibi | The OtherSite Imagine that you have to spend your night in utter darkness, to arrange your plan for each day according to a power-cut plan, or to force yourself into bed as there is nothing you can do other than to sit in the dark. Picture yourself studying for your exams using a candle, or spending all day long waiting for the electricity to come back, or walking in streets at night that are only lit by cars' headlights. If you find it hard to imagine all of these things combined, just seek the help of a Palestinian from Gaza. No one could explain it better... Jewish Light Bulb Jokes | Gilad Atzmon In the light of the darkness in Gaza, here is a collection of Jewish Light Bulb Jokes... ♫ Пелагея: Снежочки | YouTube Pelagea: Chezhochki - Russian folk-rock... Declassified: Golda Meir on Kennedy’s Assassination | Roi Tov ...What Golda clearly said to her Hebrew speaking audience was "Ruby is alive, Oy vaaboy if we get caught!".. The Fight for a “Right”: How an Iran Deal Might Hinge on One Simple Word, by Michael Crowley | TIME Talk of war is in the air as envoys from Iran and six major powers head into a new round of talks over Tehran’s nuclear program in Geneva later this week. The goal will be to craft an interim agreement that can buy time and trust for a grander bargain sometime next year. The two sides will haggle over several technical issues, like how much uranium Iran is allowed to retain and how may centrifuges it can operate. But one of the hardest questions is an abstract one: does Iran have a “right” to enrich uranium? The United States says definitely not. Iran says absolutely yes... [Iran’s right to enrich uranium is simple and obvious. What the US is insisting on is its “right” as the world’s hegemon to dictate what other countries can or cannot do. That time is drawing to an end, which is what comes from keeping bad company.] Kerry and Lavrov Close Ranks Against Israel | Veterans Today What you will read below folks is what used to be referred to as the 'one - two punch', or a 'tag team' move. Kerry and Lavrov laid it right out that Israel will not be a deal wrecker with its silly zero nuclear activity demand for Iran, something they knew that Iran would never accept... Russia and Egypt: Back to the Future, by Vladimir Belyakov | Veterans Today The real test of whether the Cold War will really ever be over is when we see all countries 'allowed' to have good relations with the East and the West. This means that business will be conducted in the normal way without the assistance of gunboats, missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Only then will our military be refocused on defending us from military assaults instead of it bullying role it so often finds itself playing... Son of Israel, Caught in the Middle: Ari Shavit’s ‘My Promised Land’ by Dwight Garner | NYT ...“My Promised Land” combines road trips, interviews, memoir and straightforward history to relate Israel’s story. The book taps his existential fear for his country, and his moral outrage about its occupation policy. He dilates especially on Israel’s essential, combustible duality... [Sounds like a Rube Goldberg cartoon in words - an apt description of the Jewish State.] Iran and the Axis of Anxiety, by Peter Lee | CounterPunch ...Chief among the usual suspects is, of course, Israel under PM Netanyahu. If the Israeli government is able to spin Iran as a nuclear (almost) capable existential threat to Israel, then Israel can make an absolute claim on US sympathy, support, and protection. If Iran returns to good relations with the United States, the US will arguably become less willing to bear the sizable political, diplomatic, and economic cost of deferring to Israel’s priorities—on the Palestinian question, on regional security, and its obstinate refusal to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal and integrate it into the international arms control regime... “If You Liked Iraq, You’ll Love Iran” by Murray Polner | NYTimes eXaminer ...Say what you will about the Times’ star Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman but for now at least “Let Us Praise” him. Having reported from Beirut and Jerusalem from 1979 to the eighties, he’s at it again, posing a fundamental question about Israel’s campaign to destroy Obama’s plan to ward off congressional sanctions against Iran and be allowed to work out a deal restricting Iran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb. More and more sanctions, actively promoted by Israel and its Lobby in and out of the Congress, as a subsequent Times editorial argued “could cause negotiations between the two sides to collapse and, worse, become a pathway to war.”.. What did a Guantanamo inmate learn about Americans during Halloween?: The two faces of America, by Shaker Aamer | Al Jazeera ...Elected American officials labeled me and the other prisoners here as "the worst of the worst". They called us "terrorists". Yet, despite these claims, I have not been charged with a single crime nor has any evidence been presented to support my imprisonment these long years. In fact, I have been cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations... John Hagee’s Bloody Moons, by Yukon Jack | Veterans Today ...John Hagee, like that other evangelist sage, Hal Lindsey, is a fail. Both are famous for their failed eschatological predictions. They both have predicted a second coming and rapture. They can’t seem to figure that predictions based on myth will fail every time. These modern carpetbaggers have come up with clever end timelines, weaving random Bible verses into a net to catch more gullible Christian sheep a needin’ a good shearing and separating them from the contents of their wallets... [Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Four Square Gospel Church, who famously declared "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" is constantly resurrected - it's a great American tradition, although it dates back to biblical times, maybe earlier - I'd bet there was a religious scam artist at the very first campfire, telling scary stories and offering magical means to fend off the evil lurking in the dark - for a price.] Nov 19, 2013 Anti-Iranian Israeli-Saudi Alliance | Stephen Lendman ..According to the Sunday Times, Saudi Arabia and Israel are preparing contingency plans to attack Iran. A diplomatic source was quoted saying: "Once the Geneva agreement is signed, the military option will be back on the table. The Saudis are furious and are willing to give Israel all the help it needs." Riyadh allegedly offered Israel tactical support.. Mossad and Saudi officials are reportedly cooperating... Rep. Rogers: Crazed al-Qaeda Terrorists Coming to America, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars Rep. Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who heads up the House Intelligence Committee, is worried about al-Qaeda finding its way into America... [The thing to do, Rep Rep Rogers, is for all Congress critters who are dumb as rocks or certifiably insane to quietly tiptoe out of the country. Granted, the remaining critters wouldn’t be able to muster enough members for a quorum, but is that really a problem?] “Nuclear Diplomacy”: Brazil and Iran. Our Motives and the Bullying Trio, by Tomás Rosa Bueno | Global Research Despite what the experts of barefoot diplomacy never stop repeating, there is nothing even remotely anti-American in the Brazilian position on Iran: our motives, unlike those of the bullying trio (USA, France, United Kingdom), are clear, transparent and openly stated several times. We support the peaceful development of nuclear energy. We do not believe there is any evidence that Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program. Defending Iran, we are defending our own right to master the full nuclear-fuel cycle, we are defending our right to develop our own enrichment technology, we are defending our right to build our own reactors.. We want for Iran just what we want for ourselves... Stay the Dogs of War on Iran, by Leslie H. Gelb | Daily Beast No honest person can know whether the nuclear negotiations with Iran will produce a sound agreement, least of all the know-it-alls who are fighting to prevent it. Maybe, the West will have to further strengthen economic sanctions. Perhaps, Iran will make threatening moves that justify a Western military strike. But the arguments against a full and serious drive to try staying the dogs of war are sheer, dangerous nonsense... No Surprise That No One Wants Syria's Chemical Weapon Stuff | Moon of Alabama The U.S. is trying to find some country, any other than itself, to take and destroy the precursor materials from Syria's chemical weapon program. It first asked, for mysterious reasons, Norway. There was nothing that would qualify Norway. It never had chemical weapons and has no capacity to handle and destroy the materials in question. It also has no storage facility for the hazardous material that would result from the precursor destruction. Norway rejected the U.S. request. The next country the U.S. asked was Albania... [How about the District of Columbia? It's outside the country. Just park it along the Anacostia River – no one would notice.] Israel’s ‘exceptionalism’ and the UN, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth Israel is again at the centre of moves to challenge key agencies at the United Nations, as it lobbies to prevent the Palestinian leadership from gaining more of a foothold in global forums... ♫ Eivør Pálsdóttir: Do Not Weep | YouTube Answers on a postcard please | Paul Eisen These clips aren't new but they raise some interesting questions:.. [Translation: without institutionalized multiculturalism and mass immigration tribal Jewry might lose its grip on power and face the possibility of yet more time-honored expulsions.] Ernst Zundel Warns The Jews About Doing To America What They Did To Germany | YouTube Microbiologist Defined Al-Qaeda is Detained in Armageddon | Roi Tov ...Western countries like to claim they are free and democratic. They even teach about the need to refuse to obey illegitimate laws. Yet, what they teach at school stays at school. Systemic violence and breach of their own legal principles is the trademark of the West. On November 18, 2013, Israel provided a superb example of that when the illegitimate and secret arrest for over three years of a man that committed no crime became public due to a glitch in the system... The Coronation of Janet Yellin, by Mike Whitney | CounterPunch ...Yellen is as slippery as they come. She skillfully dodges tough questions by poring over arcane economic theory that sounds like an answer, but really doesn’t reveal anything about how she plans to lead. She also has a good sense of how her diminutive appearance works in her favor making it impossible for male senators to be too tough on her without being seen as “sexist” or “bullies”. Also, she’s already mastered the opaque language of the Fed, that is, she knows how to use circuitous, jargon-laden koans and pompous-sounding gibberish to conceal the Central Bank’s real agenda which is to shift more wealth to its constituents on Wall Street... [In case you hadn’t noticed, Yellin is the third Jewish Head of the Fed in a row] America’s Chemical Weapons: Hypocrisy, Conspiracy and a Forgotten History, by Felicity Arbuthnot | Global Research Since the fairy tale about weapons of mass destruction that can be launched against Western targets “within forty five minutes” is well past it’s sell by date, the trans-Atlantic hasbara industry has dreamed up a new Grim Reaper for Syria, their latest quarry: chemical weapons... Canada: Challenging Stephen Harper’s Imperialist Agenda, by Prof. Greg Albo | Global Research ...It has become commonplace to observe that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has been re-making the symbols and practices of the Canadian state. Canada, in this view, was once the social democratic heartland of North America. But under Harper, Canada has been transformed into a hyper-regime of neoliberal market fundamentalism.. Canada was once the pre-eminent middle-power, peace-keeping nation. But now Canada operates like a renegade state: abandoning peace-keeping; deploying troops in combat missions across several continents to discipline wayward states; attacking the United Nations; money-wrenching climate change negotiations; and on it goes... Israeli Ex-Chief Rabbi Arrested For White Collar Crimes | Gilad Atzmon Rabbi Yona Metzger, former chief rabbi of Israel, was arrested on Monday morning on the suspicion of bribery, fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. Metzger was also arrested five months ago. Israel Police said it suspects that the scope of the funds connected with the alleged crimes has reached the millions of shekels... [It stands to reason that the elites of a criminal state are likely to be criminals] X Y Z vs Gaza | YouTube I do not know where this was produced but it needs to be spread far more than it has thus far. Absolutely brilliant. ~ Ken O’Keefe Veterans Day and Foreign Interventionism, by Jacob G. Hornberger | The Future of Freedom Foundation Commemorating Veterans Day, people honored Americans who have served in the U.S. military, especially those who have fought and died in America’s foreign wars. In doing so, however, it’s easy to forget the fact that what the soldiers fought for and died for in those foreign wars wasn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.. American soldiers in World I fought and died for nothing.. World War II also gave rise to America’s enormous totalitarian apparatus known as the national-security state... Uri Avnery: Lifetime Achievement Prize | Veterans Today ...In the political arena, we completely rejected the regime David Ben-Gurion had set up in our new state. Not in one field, but in all fields. We rejected his entire model. We had another model in mind. We rejected his definition of Israel as a “Jewish state”. We wanted an Israeli state. A state rooted in the country. A state that belongs to its citizens. We rejected Ben-Gurion’s attitude towards the Arab world... Nov 18, 2013 Zionism: The Greatest Criminal Ruse of All Time, by Yukon Jack | Veterans Today The launching of Israel at the end of history, a state based on archaic Bible myths, is proving to be mankind’s greatest folly. The Old Testament is now married to high tech weapons. The human species is threatened with extinction because now the Jews have a state to carry out out their lunatic agenda of world domination. Jewish supremacists have prepared a final option to their madness, when the world finally comes to its senses and rejects the racist warmongering bloody state of Israel they will launch their nuclear option on their western hosts... [The reader might consider this piece to be overwrought and excessively hyperbolic, but I'm not so sure - I think he basically gets it right. And to my fellow secular Jews who protest that they are unaffected by those ancient, atavistic memes I would say - look deeper within.] The Logic behind Mass Spying: Empire and Cyber Imperialism | James Petras ..One of the essential components of a police state is an all-pervasive spy apparatus operating independently of any legal or constitutional constraints. Spy operations include: 1) massive surveillance over text, video and audio communications and 2) the capacity to secretly record, store and use information secretly collected. This information strengthens political and economic leaders who, in turn, appoint and direct the spy chiefs. The political and economic rulers control the spy-lords by setting the goals, means and targets of the surveillance state... Who killed Kennedy: CIA, LBJ, or the Truly “Unspeakable”? by Laurent Guyénot | My Catbird Seat Anybody following closely the recent developments in JFK research cannot fail to notice that there are basically two kinds of books on Kennedy’s assassination. (I am only talking of books seriously engaged in the pursuit of truth, not those defending the Warren Commission cover-up, such as Vincent Bugliosi’s pitiful Reclaiming History... [Extensive analysis by one of the sharpest observers out there] Finian Cunningham: Leader’s Fatwa Against Nuclear Weapons Highly Significant | Fars News ...Cunningham believes that the dominant Israeli lobby in the United States is pushing the administration and the Congress to ramp up the sanctions and abandon diplomacy, but the onus is on the wise US politicians and lawmakers to resist the influential Israeli lobby and take up a realistic, conciliatory and constructive approach toward Iran. He also says that the fatwa (religious decree) issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei can serve as a robust basis for the negotiations between Iran and the six world powers and should be considered an important confidence-building measure adopted by Iran... Israel's other silent war, by Belen Fernandez | Al Jazeera ...Sheen marked the one-year anniversary of the "anti-African pogrom" in Tel Aviv, when "a thousand Jewish Israelis ran rampant through the streets… smashing and looting African-operated businesses and physically assaulting any dark-skinned person they came across." The rioters were encouraged by the likes of lawmaker Miri Regev, who announced that African migrants are "a cancer in the body" of the nation - terminology generally reserved for Palestinians... The Two Snowdens, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar ...Many readers of antiwar probably believe it would be best to dismantle both the CIA and NSA for the very reason that largely unaccountable organizations answering only to the chief executive should not wield such power in a democracy lest the democracy itself be subverted. The point is well taken and finds strong support in recent developments, but I would argue that both organizations should instead be made much smaller, have less operational autonomy and more independent oversight, and be placed under adult supervision with professional managers who are not beholden to the president for their status... Israel, Saudi Arabia Threaten War as West Prepares for Iran Nuclear Deal | Tikun Olam Not so subtle leaks have emanated from Israel and Saudi Arabia about their immense displeasure with the nuclear deal the P5+1 nations are preparing to finalize with Iran. Those leaks have gone far beyond mere expressions of alarm. In fact, they include not so subtle “secret” meetings between their intelligence chiefs, and stories from cozy journalists who warn that both countries are contemplating an attack on Iran if the nuclear deal is as favorable to Iran as they fear it will be: “Once the Geneva agreement is signed, the military option will be back on the table. The Saudis are furious and are willing to give Israel all the help it needs,”.. A Salute to Eric Hoffer and Gordon Duff: On Original Ideas, by Jim W. Dean | Veterans Today ...Eric Hoffer was the self educated longshoreman philosopher who came to fame with his first published book in 1951, The True Believer on the psychology of mass movements.. Enjoy these three clips while we still have them. You will see some of our own Gordon Duff in this Hoffer interview, the iconoclast, the defender of the common man from elite snobs... More interesting reading about the Iran nuclear negotiations | Iran Affairs ..I am not holding my breath waiting for any sort of actual deal to happen with regard to these nuclear negotiations, as you know. But I do think it is interesting how the coverage has led to the scales falling off people's eyes about who is pulling who's strings in dealing with Iran. Suddenly we're seeing articles (albeit in UK's Guardian) raising the question of whether Israeli interests correspond to US interests or not, and people are wondering why the US has to be on the side of the likes of the Saudis in this affair, and we're also seeing mainstream reporting on how US senators are falling over themselves to appease Israeli lobbyists... Israel to return Palestinian body parts | Jonathan Cook Remember back to 2009, when there was a huge row over allegations in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israel had been secretly harvesting body parts from Palestinians in the occupied territories. There were problems with this story, which suggested that Israel had a shoot-to-kill policy so that it could get organs from those it killed.. Israel effectively shut down all debate about the story and the validity of any of its allegations by accusing anyone who mentioned organ harvesting in Israel of committing a “blood libel” against Israel / Jews... French-Israeli Attack on Iran? | Roi Tov ..."I will always remain a friend of Israel.. France will not give way on nuclear proliferation, so long as we are not certain that Iran has renounced nuclear arms, we will keep in place all our demands and sanctions," he said afterwards. He didn't explain why France and Israel have the right to threaten humanity with nuclear weapons and others do not have the right of self-defense. This wasn't just diplomatic chit-chat, Israel and France are getting as close as they haven't been since the 1950s. Hollande had arrived with seven of his government ministers, tens of French businessmen and many journalists. They came to sign many deals publicly and a few secretly... How the Sunni-Shia schism is dividing the world, by Robert Fisk | The Independent The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations... Secret TPP treaty IP Chapter: Advanced text with negotiation positions for all 12 nations | Wikileaks ...The TPP negotiations are currently at a critical stage. The Obama administration is preparing to fast-track the TPP treaty in a manner that will prevent the US Congress from discussing or amending any parts of the treaty. Numerous TPP heads of state and senior government figures, including President Obama, have declared their intention to sign and ratify the TPP before the end of 2013.. Assange stated: “The US administration is aggressively pushing the TPP through the US legislative process on the sly.”.. Round-Up #29 | The New Great Game After Ilham Aliyev won the heavily rigged presidential election in Azerbaijan and consolidated his power, the Azerbaijani leader decided to visit close ally Turkey on his first trip abroad. Baku and Ankara maintain very good relations and plan to increase cooperation in various areas. With the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railway near completion, the Azerbaijani and Turkish governments are focusing on the next major project, the construction of the Trans-Anatolian gas pipeline (TANAP), which is set to begin in early 2014:.. Top Israel Lobby Senator Proposes Permanent US Air Bases For Afghanistan | Aletho News Finally, light is being shed on the purpose of the massive new airbase in western Afghanistan distant from the Pashtun areas of major insurgency but within easy striking distance of Iran. It appears that there is more to the occupation of Afghanistan than merely ‘fighting the terrorists over there so that we don’t have to fight them here’ or other such inane catch phrases... Zionist, Arab despots ‘strategic partners,’ by Finian Cunningham | Intifada Palestine The violation of children’s rights by the Israeli and Bahraini regimes is more than mere coincidence. It is indicative of a much broader strategic alignment that has emerged between the Zionist regime and the Persian Gulf Arab monarchies. The use of state terrorism against children by Israeli military and Bahrain regime forces is not some random, isolated aberration. The scale and systematic pattern of the violations strongly suggests that the regimes are collaborating closely in methods of counter-insurgency. In recent months, hundreds of children, under the age of 18 and some as young as five years-old, have been arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial... Nov 17, 2013 American Intifada: Shaking Off Six Decades of Deceit, by Jeff Gates | Palestine Chronicle During the 1960 Christmas season, Americans flocked to the theaters to see Exodus, a 3-1/2 hour epic featuring romance, handsome freedom fighters and the triumph of Jewish destiny over Arab evil—all set against a Yuletide backdrop of Biblical prophecy as heroic Jews returned to their promised land.. Then as now, Americans are easily swayed by sympathetic portrayals of an extremist enclave granted nation-state recognition by Harry Truman. A Christian-Zionist who had famously read the Bible cover-to-cover five times by age 15, Truman was a True Believer in the prophecy that the Messiah could not return until the Israelites returned to their ancestral home... Cut Zionist genocide, feed Americans instead, by Finian Cunningham | PressTV Some 47 million poor Americans - one in four children - see their already meager federal food allowances slashed this week. The cuts amount to $4 billion a year over the next decade. That $4 billion figure should ring a bell. It is equivalent to the official annual subvention that the US government sends to Israel - courtesy of the American taxpayer... The Extraordinary Pierre Omidyar, by Mark Ames, and Yasha Levine | NSFW The world knows very little about the political motivations of Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire who is founding (and funding) a quarter-billion-dollar journalism venture with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. What we do know is this: Pierre Omidyar is a very special kind of technology billionaire. We know this because America’s sharpest journalism critics have told us... [Everybody get down! Incoming!] Welcome to Zionist History…Now Bend Over (Part II), by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today ...Less than three days ago, USA Today reported, “Official: Al-Qaeda in Iraq Strongest since 2006.” In other words, America spent billions of dollars in Iraq and what does the average American get in return after more than ten years? Al-Qaeda is stronger! We are left with two competing explanations: either Al-Qaeda is extremely smarter than the neo-Bolsheviks and the entire Zionist kingdom, including the NSA and the Israeli regime, or terrorism is largely a Zionist invention.. Israel Gets Pink | Roi Tov On November 13, 2013, Sotheby's Jewellery Division in Europe and the Middle East auctioned the Pink Star Diamond in an event named the Magnificent Jewels Auction in Geneva. Isaac Wolf, a Hasidic Jew, bought it for $83.2 million transforming it into the most expensive gem sold until then. He re-baptized it the "Pink Dream," even in Hebrew it sounds obscene... If I Were A Rothschild And The Yearning For Mammon | Gilad Atzmon ...The most memorable tune from this Jewish American musical was ‘If I Were a Rich Man’. I guess that not many would know that the musical was also translated into Hebrew and Yiddish. However, the translator of the Hebrew and Yiddish shows took some liberties in their adaptation; they decided to appeal to the Jewish imagination, by means of concretisation . ‘If I Were A Rich Man’ became, ‘If I Were A Rothschild.’.. Israeli troops attack children with stun grenades then handcuff them | Redress Information & Analysis While Israel and the Palestinian Authority are locked in the futile sideshow euphemistically known as the “peace process”, in the real world of the occupation it’s business as usual. On 15 November Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank village of Kfar Qaddum detained and handcuffed four Palestinian children aged five to nine years, the French news agency AFP reported, citing Palestinian witnesses... The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, by Hooman Majd: Review by Azadeh Moaveni | Financial Times One boozy evening during the year that Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd spent living in Iran, an artist friend unburdened himself over successive drinks. The friend had spent weeks in prison in the aftermath of the country’s 2009 uprising, stuck first in solitary confinement and then in a cell with errant Revolutionary Guardsmen, and was eventually put on trial for sedition. He was not a political organiser, just an ordinary man who was out watching the mayhem on his street, but the Revolutionary Guards were envious of the Intelligence Ministry’s high-profile prisoners so they decided to manufacture some of their own... Lavrov Reveals Amended Draft Circulated at ‘Last Moment,’ by Gareth Porter | Antiwar Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed a crucial detail Thursday about last week’s nuclear talks with Iran in Geneva that explains much more clearly than previous reports why the meeting broke up without agreement. Lavrov said the United States circulated a draft that had been amended in response to French demands to other members of the six-power P5+1 for approval “literally at the last moment, when we were about to leave Geneva.”.. Lavrov provided the first real details about the circumstances under which Iran left Geneva without agreeing to the draft presented by the P5+1... Israel and White House Locked in an Info War Over Iran, by John Hudson | Foreign Policy The White House and Israel are locked in an information war on Capitol Hill, and right now, Israel may be winning. All week, the Obama administration has provided facts and figures to lawmakers on its sanctions relief proposal to build support for a deal on Iran's nuclear program. But some members in Congress don't trust the data U.S. officials are providing -- they trust conflicting data provided privately by senior Israeli officials. According to multiple Congressional aides, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee are storming Capitol Hill in an effort to discredit the Obama administration's interim nuclear deal with Iran... Libya almost Imploding, Status Quo Unsustainable, by Nicola Nasser | Palestine Chronicle More than two years on since the “revolution” of Feb. 2011, the security crisis is exacerbating by the day threatening Libya with an implosion charged with potential realistic risks to the geopolitical unity of the Arab north African country, turning this crisis into a national existential one. Obviously the status quo is unsustainable. “Libya is imploding two years after the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi” was captured and killed on October 20,” Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Independent on last Oct. 10... Be careful what you ask for! by Ed Mattson | Veterans Today In 2008, with the economy unraveling due to the policies of our elected politicians who wanted to guarantee every American a home regardless of his/her ability to pay for it, the country went to the ballot box and elected a candidate who had not a single shred of experience in either business or governing; a man who was elected as an apology to Black America for the years of slavery which officially ended on December 6th, 1865, with the Thirteenth Amendment; and with the naiveté of a high school freshman. America elected the smoothest talking snake-oil salesmen to ever grace the cover of Time magazine... Translating The Palestinian Declaration Of Independence, by Professor Francis A. Boyle | CounterCurrents ...the governments of Israel and the United States were never seriously interested in obtaining a comprehensive and just Middle East peace settlement in the first place, going all the way back to the preparatory work for the Middle East Peace Negotiations by the Bush Sr. administration in the aftermath of its genocidal war against Iraq. Rather, Israel’s perpetration and prolongation of its "low intensity" conflict against Palestine and the Palestinians as well as against Lebanon, the Lebanese, and Palestinian refugees living involuntarily in Lebanon, suit the economic and political interests of the interpenetrated security-military-industrial-complexes that really control the governments of the US and Israel... Syria Update: Assad and His Government are Winning | Going to Tehran We are pleased to feature an exceptionally insightful update on the Syrian conflict, prepared last month by our colleagues Aisling Byrne and Alastair Crooke at the Conflicts Forum. As Syrian oppositionists, backed by the United States, continue to insist that President Bashar al-Assad must leave office before any political solution to the conflict can unfold, this report highlights the Assad government’s increasingly strong position, vis-à-vis opposition elements and regionally... Fixing Intel Around the Syria Policy, by Robert Parry | Consortium News After the Aug. 21 chemical weapons incident in Syria, a number of senior U.S. intelligence analysts disagreed with the Obama administration’s rush to judgment blaming the Syrian government, but their dissent on this question of war or peace was concealed from the American people. The administration kept the dissent secret by circumventing the normal intelligence process and issuing on Aug. 30 something called a “Government Assessment,” posted at the White House press office’s Web site and fingering the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad as the guilty party... As Gaza Drowns in Sewage, UN Rapporteur Announces First UN World Toilet Day, by Julie Webb-Pullman | Palestine Chronicle As streets in Gaza flow with excrement, as families stay awake until 2am to take advantage of the two hours that water will flow through the taps – if they are lucky – the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, celebrated the UN General Assembly’s decision declaring 19th of November as UN World Toilet Day with a Press Release on November 15. The irony will not escape Palestinians in Gaza – they must be asking themselves “Is she for real?.. In photos: Gaza Strip plunged into darkness as fuel runs out | Maan News Agency Fuel shortages have caused daily life in the Gaza Strip to grind slowly to a halt, as power plants and water pumps are forced to shut down, cutting off access to basic necessities for 1.7 million residents. The lack of diesel fuel is a result of the tightening of a 7-year-long blockade imposed on the territory by Israel with Egyptian support. Until July of this year, tunnels connecting Gaza to Egypt provided a vital lifeline for the territory amidst the otherwise crippling Israeli blockade.. Israeli Hawks Resisting Deal, by Paul Balles | Intifada Palestine ...The American public needs to awaken to the continuous propaganda designed to lead the world into a full-scale war. Israel, the only country in the Middle East with 200-300 nuclear bombs, complains about their need for security. James Petras has pointed out that “we have the situation in the US today where the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu dictates the ‘negotiating terms’ to the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations... Nov 16, 2013 Israel, Iran and the Bomb, by Andrew Levine | CounterPunch What accounts for the U.S.-Israel “special relationship”? This question is seldom addressed outside dissident circles; the foreign policy establishment simply takes it for granted, much as they used to take it for granted that the Cold War needed to be fought. From the Israeli side, there is no mystery. The association with the United States is an economic, military and diplomatic necessity. Keeping it going is therefore Israel’s top priority; taking advantage of it whenever they can is a close second... Occupy the Dharma: How Contemplative Practice Will Save the World, by Jay Michaelson | Tikkun Daily We hear it all the time. Meditation is narcissistic. It’s self-centered; you’re staring at your navel instead of out there fighting injustice. And God forbid it actually works, in which case you’re too happy. Dropping out, calming the mind – this only mutes our righteous political indignation. Because angry activists are effective activists. Not only is this offensive and inaccurate, it’s not even new... [The purpose of the Hinayana (now encompassed within the Theravadin/Insight/Vipassana tradition) is to achieve personal enlightenment/liberation. The Mahayana and its tantric sibling, the Vajrayana, are about saving all sentient beings. This implies the establishment of a sane society and is inherently political. All genuine spirituality leads in this direction. This website strives to help realize that vision.] Iran to ban morality police from targeting women, by Ahmed Vahdat | The Telegraph Iran's notorious morality police have been barred from arresting women deemed to be immodestly dressed, as President Hassan Rouhani moved to fulfil an election promise to ease up on the country's strict Islamic dress code... The greatest story never told | Paul Eisen There's over six hours of film here in twenty-four installments (give it a few seconds to load). By any measure, in both its conception and execution, this is a fantastic piece of work. I'd watch it now - the way things are going, it may not be here much longer... Too many cooks in the Iran nuclear kitchen, by Yousaf Butt | The Great Debate/Reuters ...France’s torpedoing of the agreement appears less related to genuine nuclear proliferation concerns than with trying to curry favor with anti-Iranian countries — like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – who commission and buy expensive French military, satellite and nuclear hardware. The lesson in this latest failure is there ought to be a single point of contact with Iran endowed with executive authority over resolving the nuclear issue... EU to re-impose Iran sanctions quashed by court | Reuters The European Union will re-impose asset freezes on several Iranian companies, annulled this year by court order, even as world powers appear close to a breakthrough deal with Tehran over its contested nuclear program. EU diplomats said the move was to re-establish sanctions already imposed, rather than increasing pressure on Iran. Any new sanctions could risk scuppering a deal that global powers hope to reach with Iran at talks that start next Wednesday... The Israel Lobby Is Killing Iran Negotiations In Favor Of War, by MJ Rosenberg | Tikkun Daily The Israel Lobby has truly gotten out of control.. the French have provided the delay the lobby needed. And it has gone to work. Here is the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman saying that Kerry’s Iran opening is “chutzpah” that he hopes “will unite American Jews” in opposition. Here is Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer and pro-Israel spokesman, likening Kerry to Neville Chamberlain and, like Foxman, saying that the “entire pro-Israel community must unite” against the Iran deal. Far more significant than either is the memo that the official lobby, AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) sent to Congress:.. Sick and twisted? | Paul Eisen This is an example of a phenomenon that I think is far from unusual. In fact, I think that an awful lot of the Holocaust nonsense that surrounds us is based on it. The Daily Mail writer describes it as 'twisted'. Well, I'm not so sure. An awful lot of these people are just old and not-so-old folk who just get a bit carried away...and when they see the attention it brings them...well, they just get a bit more carried away... Sheftel: "US Secretary of State is the enemy of the Jews" | Roi Tov ...According to the Book of Esther, Haman, royal vizier to King Ahasuerus, planned to kill the Jews. Following an intricate string of events, his plans were thwarted by Mordecai and Queen Esther. Afterwards, the Jews killed not only their would-be executioners, but also their wives, children and relatives. Altogether, 800 were killed in Susa—the capital city—alone, and 75,000 in the rest of the empire. The following day was declared feast, the genocidal Purim we still can see being celebrated today... Senate Republicans go Rogue with the Zios | Veterans Today ...As Obama has not bent over enough for the Zios and their Lobby friends the shift is now to Congress where their Republican sock puppets are not only lined up but humiliate our country by reading their Israeli prepared talking point scripts without changes. The Israelis are in a panic to torpedo the Iran talks because if the myth of their nuclear weapons program goes up in smoke then Israel knows it will be in the cross hairs for funding cuts to it own WMD programs... The Assassination of Arafat, by Uri Avnery | CounterPunch From the first moment, I did not have the slightest doubt that Yasser Arafat was assassinated. It was a matter of simple logic. On the way back from the funeral, I happened upon Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset for the nationalist Arab Balad party, who is a highly qualified doctoral pharmacist. We exchanged views and came to the same conclusion. The findings of the Swiss experts last week only confirmed my conviction... Good news! Veolia is out! | We Divest We are delighted to share the news with you that TIAA-CREF has dropped Veolia from its social choice fund. This is the second company targeted by the We Divest campaign for divestment that TIAA-CREF has removed from their socially responsible portfolios - Caterpillar was the first in 2012... Everything But Real News | Gilad Atzmon In this video I expose the obvious contradictions intrinsic to Jewish progressive thoughts as explored by Paul Jay and Max Blumenthal. We are dealing here with nothing short of controlled opposition. This is my first attempt to produce such a video.. I am obviously technically limited on that front. But I promise to improve quickly.. So Have Peace Talks Collapsed? by Stuart Littlewood | Veterans Today In an earlier article I said that if the Palestinian Authority suddenly beamed information at me I’d view it with grave suspicion. So what was I supposed to make of the press release below, received yesterday evening and purporting to be from the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department and relayed by the embassy in London?.. False flags & gov’t lies: What REALLY happened this week | Veterans Today Word on the cyber-street has it that this is the best-yet edition... Nov 15, 2013 Iranicide
Why Iran Nuclear Talks Failed and Why They Will Get Tougher, by Gareth Porter | Truthout The chance for a first preliminary agreement between Iran and the six powers (US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China) to resolve the decade-long conflict over Iran's nuclear program was lost during the weekend because of a deliberate French policy of preventing agreement at the behest of Israel and the Obama administration's lack of commitment to reaching a comprehensive settlement of the issue...
Robert Kelley Pretty Much Explains it All | Arms Control Law Friend of ACL Bob Kelley, who is one of the most qualified people on the planet to discuss the technical aspects of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons programs, has given a couple of interviews to The Real News about the recent joint statement between Iran and the IAEA, the P5+1 talks, and a number of the most important issues and questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. The result is just a tremendous amount of clarity and information on these questions...
Lobby War On Iran Deal Proves Validity Of Israel First Thesis | MJ Rosenberg I am proud to have coined the “Israel Firster” meme. And I caught hell for it, not that it slowed me down any. Nor did it reduce the truth of my thesis which is that the Israel lobby and the politicians it owns put the interests of Israel (or, at least, their perception of those interests) over the interests of the country they live in...
The Iran Question: What Next? by M. K. Bhadrakumar | Strategic Culture Foundation ...an impression has also gained ground that France was actually bidding to please Saudi Arabia and the other petrodollar-rich Gulf Arab regimes while ingratiating itself with Israel. The latter interpretation cannot be easily brushed aside because France does have huge commercial interests in the Persian Gulf region be it in the field of energy, water desalination and electrical infrastructure, construction or weapon sales – and France is locked in fierce competition with the US and Britain in the Gulf Arab market for trade and investment...
Israel Lobbies Senators to Oppose U.S. Policy on Iran | Tikun Olam Man, if this doesn’t take the cake! Buzzfeed reports that GOP senators publicly avowed that Israeli diplomats had lobbied them to oppose U.S. policy toward Iran. While I don’t want to make the case that lobbies or lobbyists are evil incarnate since they seem to be as American as Wall Street (or apple pie); this strikes me as, if not a reasonable facsimile of treason, then at least a foreign government intruding on U.S. sovereignty...
France, Iran and the Lubricated Geneva Talks, by Ali Reza Eshraghi | LobeLog Negotiation, as the French writer Marquis de Sade once said, “like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.” In the most recent session with Iran in Geneva, the lubricant was strikingly effective. The jovialness and the diplomatic experience of Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry showed the extent it could help pave the road to agreement. But it seems that de Sade’s home country, France, preferred a tough negotiation with no lubricant... Do Zionists/Israel Control the U.S. Government? | YouTube Kay Griggs explains how she went into the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. to see why there was no peace in the Middle East. She tells how the area in charge of overseeing peace between Muslims and Jews / Palestine and Israel is ... totally Zionists Jewish Owned... no Americans, No Muslims, No Arabs .... that's about as fair as if a Jew got arrested for Murder and we placed nothing but Nazis on the Jury Panel... [Is anyone reading this surprised? If so, hopefully you're beginning to get the picture.]
When Falsehoods Triumph: Why A Winning Palestinian Narrative is Hard to Find, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle ...Hamas’ world is fixated on their hate of Fatah and other factional personal business. Fatah TV is stuck between several worlds of archaic language of phony revolutions, factional rivalry and unmatched self-adoration. The two narratives are growingly alien and will unlikely ever move beyond their immediate sense of self-gratification and utter absurdity. It is no wonder why Palestinians are still struggling to tell the world such a simple, straightforward and truthful story... [“The universe is made of stories, not atoms” ~ Muriel Rukeyser]
Just how real is Hamas's transformation? by Stuart Littlewood | Intifada Palestine ...Hamas and Fatah have never given a toss for the toils of the alternative media on their behalf. We expect ignorance from the quislings but not from genuine patriots. Hamas is obstinately insular, obstructive and unapproachable, so writers like me are frankly fed up with them...
Settlers Avenge Killed Soldier | Roi Tov In the night between November 13 and 14, 2013, settlers attacked a Palestinian home in Sinjil while the family was in. It was a revenge to the killing of Private Attias a few hours before in Afula. Yesterday's event was bad. In an area devastated by millennia of violence, the killing was neither rare nor exceptional. Yet, it disclosed the human weakness of the Israeli society and the IDF...
A Culture of Walls, by Lawrence Davidson | Intifada Palestine ...The original Zionist rationale for the state of Israel was that it would serve as a place of safety for the world’s Jews as anti-Semitism played out its allegedly inevitable horrid destiny. Well, the problem today is that the policies of Israel are the major motivators of worldwide anti-Semitism, and because of these same policies, there is no place in the world more potentially dangerous for Jews than Israel. Thus the Israeli fondness for walls. It may very well be that when all of this wall construction is finished, Israel will look like the world’s largest ghetto... [As I never tire of pointing out, that’s precisely what it is, with the IDF guarding the Palestinian ghettos inside of it. It’s like a sea creature that builds a shell around itself wherever it goes (both physical and psychological).]
The Charlatanism of Palestine-Denial, by Vacy Vlazna | Palestine Chronicle Here we go again. On Israel and the US losing their UNESCO voting rights, ‘Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, ‘said in an interview that his country supports the U.S. decision [to suspend contributions], “objecting to the politicization of UNESCO, or any international organization, with the accession of a non-existing country like Palestine.” Palestine-denial, next to straight out violent ethnic-cleansing, is Israel’s sinister stratagem to wipe Palestinians off the face of their own ancestral land in order to lay a fictitious claim to the whole of historic Palestine.
Quitting Over Syria, by Philip Giraldi | The American Conservative The release of the White House “Government Assessment” on August 30, providing the purported evidence to support a bombing attack on Syria, defused a conflict with the intelligence community that had threatened to become public through the mass resignation of a significant number of analysts.. A number of analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down...
We Are Not the Enemy | Jordan Elgrably Today most Jews of Arab/Muslim lands live outside the region, or in Israel where we have experienced a history of discrimination from European-origin Jews who believe that their cultures are superior to ours. I would tell the people of the Middle East that not all Jews support the occupation policies of Israel’s military and government; and I would insist that the historic expulsions of Palestinians from their homes, businesses and properties in 1948 and 1967 were illegal, inhumane and did not occur with our knowledge or blessing... [If the Mizrahim and Sephardim made common cause with the Palestinians, it would be all over for the Ashkenazi colonists .]
This is probably the best 9/11 deconstruction | Gilad Atzmon It engages with the topic scientifically and technologically. It is also very well made...
Think Algeria | Poetry for Palestine Our problem is that most people who are learning about the Palestinian cause and are willing to help and support, are generally very principled and compassionate people.. They project their own feelings and understanding of the world, and innocently assume that “equal rights for all” under “one state” is actually the best solution. That my friends would work in NORMAL circumstances, when we deal with people of similar mentality, i.e humanists and who believe in inconclusiveness, multiculturalism and equality of mankind. This is not the case in Palestine... [You go, girl! One Democratic State doesn’t necessarily mean that the ZioNazis get to stay. I am fully in favor of the Algerian Solution.]
Henry Kamens: US and EU backed Caucasus-Balkans Mafia in Georgia | Veterans Today Governments routinely deal with low lifes as that is who often ends up running countries, and always has. We usually have three choices, authoritarian hoods, the democratic elected kind, and then the traditional professional hoodlums who get into politics because there is either so much more to steal (the Bush family), or because it is the only place to really steal anything. The Caucasus-Balkans region provides a rich mix of all three, but the West thought that with the so-called Columbia-Georgetown 'attendee' Mikheil Saakashvili as president they could, to borrow a phrase...put lipstick on a pig and make it fly...
Anonymous calls for Israeli boycott with massive Twitter protest | BDS On Saturday, hacktivist collective hosted its most successful tweetstorm to date, #OpBOYCOTTIsrael, in which it provided “70 tweets with images and articles that promote boycott and divestment, expose Israeli war crimes and crimes against Palestinian children, and call out companies who profit off Israeli apartheid.” By flooding a given Twitter hashtag, Anonymous makes its point of focus trend globally, helping raise awareness through sheer ubiquity and curiosity. This particular tweetstorm was nearly a week in the making. A Pastebin document detailing the objective was released Nov. 4...
Old-Fashioned Political Activism Doesn't Work, by John Spritzler | New Democracy World ...People already know that we live in a dictatorship of the rich that prevents the world from being the way it ought to be. What they don't know is that they are part of a majority, not a small minority, in having revolutionary aspirations. They know revolution is necessary to make the world right; what they don't know is that revolution is not only necessary but possible... Nov 14, 2013 Iran Still Under Threat from the Axis of Evil (and Stupidity) We are living in dangerous times – and this moment, when the Geneva talks with Iran over their nuclear program have reached the tipping point, is potentially a decisive turn for the worst. Two factors are simultaneously moving us toward a general cataclysm, and both have to do with the state of Israel:.. Since the formation of Israel and even before that, Tel Aviv has always resorted to lobbying to pursue its illegitimate objectives, including efforts to earn recognition for its so-called government. Israel’s most active lobby is in the US, but it is also highly active in European countries such as Britain, Germany, France and even Italy and Spain. The present article seeks to discuss the influence of the Zionist lobby and France-Israel ties... Notwithstanding France’s simultaneously arrogant and craven grandstanding over Iran’s Arak heavy water reactor, the main reason for the failure of last week’s nuclear talks between the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 was the Obama administration’s imperious refusal to acknowledge Tehran’s right to enrich uranium under international safeguards... Signs of rapprochement between Tehran and Washington are growing. A new era seems about to begin. It is now possible to imagine a political solution that would put an end to the 33-year confrontation between Iran and the United States... ...A former Israeli official has admitted that a possible nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States would be disappointing for Israel as Tel Aviv’s plans for unilateral strike against Iran would be diminished. “Practically speaking, [a deal] shuts the [Israeli military] option down,” former National Security Advisor Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland told Israeli media... The best way to keep Iran from building a nuclear bomb is for the Obama administration and its nuclear client Israel to stop threatening the Islamic Republic., Lesson for foreign leaders who are in the doghouse with the U.S. government: Get a nuke. Therefore it follows that not threatening a foreign regime is a good way to keep it from following the yellowcake road. And it sure beats threatening war, which all too easily can become actual war... [Far too reasonable to be taken seriously by the Zionist dominated US administration.] Iranian soprano – wonderful... ..Negotiations to resolve the nuclear deadlock and lift economic sanctions on Iran appeared to be near a breakthrough agreement after three days of talks in the Swiss capital, Geneva, over the weekend. The hasty arrival of US Secretary of State John Kerry as well as the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany raised expectations that a potential deal was in the offing. But it was the French diplomat, Laurent Fabius, who threw a spanner in the works at the last-minute. Fabius invoked “security concerns of Israel” and announced that his country was not going to sign a draft agreement... A Vast Wasteland of Effort Spent: America’s Rampage Through the Middle East, by John Chuckman | Intifada Palestine I read that six thousand people have been killed by sectarian violence so far this year in Iraq, surely a good rough measure of what America’s invasion achieved there. In Afghanistan, America’s chosen man publically disagrees with America’s ideas of what withdrawal means, how many occupying American forces should remain, and the role the Taleban should play. Killing remains a daily occurrence, including regular instances of American special forces murdering civilians, drugs flow freely through the country and out to the world, and most women still wear the burka. Libya is reduced to rag tag bands engaged in fighting like rival gangs of bandits... 10 Explosive U.S. Government Secrets About Israel | IRMEP ...Former government insiders who know firsthand about explosive secrets often seek their public release to alert others using the Mandatory Declassification Review, even requesting documents by name, subject, location, author and date. After such "unknown knowns" (like the LBJ memos) are unsuccessfully sought for decades by multiple researchers, well-warranted suspicions arise about the reasons behind the impermeable government wall of refusal. The following ten US-Israel policy "unknown knowns" suggest the Israel lobby's ongoing corrupt power is the only possible explanation for why they are still secret... Private Pays Price of Jewish Racism | Roi Tov ...The killed soldier was from Nazareth Illit.. In the October municipal elections, Shimon Gafsou was reelected as mayor.In 2010, Gafsou ordered the municipality to confiscate Christmas trees from Christian houses. In January 2013, after publishing a racist bombshell.. I thought that Mr. Gafsou was like a rotten leaf floating atop a stream of sewage. Moving downwards into the deep waters of eternal oblivion, he was unlikely to be heard again. I was wrong. He returned with one of the most awesome racist texts ever published. In mid-April, Nazareth-Illit Mayor Shimon Gafsou published a pamphlet entitled "Report to the Citizen. What we have done. Nazareth Illit Jewish Forever!".. America Vanquished: America under Jewish Rule | Dr Lasha Darkmoon ..Slowly and imperceptibly, duped by lies and lulled into complacency, Americans have let their country slip into the hands of a fifth column: of a hostile ethnic elite whose primary allegiance is to Israel, a country built on stolen land and engaged in systematic genocide... ♫ Someday (Song for Palestine) by Finian Cunningham | My Catbird Seat ..political analyst, singer-songwriter, originally from Belfast Ireland, featuring Tubby Corrway on lead guitar and Colin Merrill on drums. This video and song pays tribute to the incredible resilience and steadfastness of the Palestinians in their struggle for justice and end to apartheid and occupation of their homeland... Media package conspiracy theories as news | Jonathan Cook ...the western media peddle outrageously unsubstantiated stories that reflect badly on official enemies as serious “news”. In short, the role of the “free press” is chiefly propaganda – and they all do it to a greater or lesser extent, whether it’s the yellow press of Rupert Murdoch or respectable liberal media such as the BBC and the Guardian... The Security Council as a Legal Hegemon, by Daniel Joyner | SSRN This article will examine the United Nations Security Council’s efforts to implement, preserve, and universalize the obligations of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. This discussion will lead to questions regarding the Security Council’s role and authority in the international legal system, and ultimately to a consideration of how the international legal system can better guarantee that the Security Council does not exercise an unwarranted degree of legal power at the expense of the member states of the United Nations... Sex Slavery In Israel | YouTube ♫ Gwerz Kiev | Daily Motion A Breton in Kazakhstan: Denez Prigent - Breton / Karen Matheson - Scottish Gaelic. Gwerz Kiev relates the Holodomor, the famine that struck Kiev in the 1930s, with an estimated four million casualties ... [Unlike the mostly paranoid, self-obsessed fantasy known as the "Holocaust," this was a deliberate act of mass murder] David Irving: Revelations from Goebbels' Diary | Paul Eisen This very credible piece from the IHR not only told me a lot about Goebbels, it also helped me to better understand the Holocaust narrative and it's subtle blend of fact and fiction... Netanyahu’s latest deception, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis His own explanation was that he wants to avoid or minimize the prospects for an “unnecessary confrontation” with the international community, for which read President Barack Obama and the European leaders who would follow his lead (with the arguable exception of the French whore). I think it’s more than reasonable to believe that Netanyahu was concerned, possibly even alarmed, by the explicit nature of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s condemnation on 6 November of Israel’s on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank... Israelimandering of Palestine, by Ben Tanosborn | MCW News The coinage of the term gerrymandering came to be as a fusion of the last name of a then Massachusetts governor, Elbridge Gerry, and salamander, an amphibian whose contour appeared similar to that of a created voting district. The word stuck in future roguish redistricting use regardless of geographical contour.] Now it’s Israel’s turn to engage in these dirty tricks... [In the US, the strategy was to create “autonomous,” impoverished reservations. In South Africa they were called bantustans] Nov 13, 2013 Empire Under Obama: Counterinsurgency, Death Squads, and the Population as the Target, by Andrew Gavin Marshall | Truthout While the American Empire - and much of the policies being pursued - did not begin under President Obama, the focus of "Empire Under Obama" is to bring awareness about the nature of empire to those who may have - or continue - to support Barack Obama and who may believe in the empty promises of "hope" and "change." Empire is institutional, not individual. My focus on the imperial structure during the Obama administration is not to suggest that it does not predate Obama, but rather, that Obama represents 'continuity' in imperialism, not "change.".. Committees of Correspondence, by William John Cox | MCW News Two hundred and fifty years ago the people of America were subject to an unrepresentative government controlled by powerful commercial interests. They rebelled and formed their own government, which has now come to be controlled by powerful commercial interests. Once again, "these are the times that try men's souls." What lessons can we learn from history to help us through this crisis?.. [Quite so, but who is going to be the Samuel Adams of our day?] “I have a Dream…” | Poetry for Palestine ...It is unrealistic to fight against a tyrannical occupation force with deference and only meek means of persuasion and appeasement, because it never stops the crimes, never pushes back the tyrant. Instead, it confirms the tyrant’s authority, which in return will trigger him to pursue unchanged his ruthless methods of conquest and enslavement. It is realistic and can not be ignored that only creative and surprising means of pushing out occupying tyrants, be it radical, will defeat a tyrant equipped with overwhelming military powers and determined to annihilate the conquered... Read more... Israel’s gains from the death of Arafat cannot be ignored, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth ...It is time to state the obvious: Arafat was killed. And suspicion falls squarely on Israel. Israel alone had the means, track record, stated intention and motive. Without Israel’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, it may be impossible to secure a conviction in a court of law, but there should be evidence enough to convict Israel in the court of world opinion... Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb à la Librairie Résistances | YouTube She speaks in English... Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel: A Book Review | Gilad Atzmon ...Blumenthal’s book is a powerful expose of Israeli exceptionalism, deep and sinister Goy hatred, Judeo-centric bigotry, supremacy and a vast collective lack of ethical awareness. But Blumenthal fails to ask the most important question: why is the Jewish State so bad?.. [Let’s not mince words; the Jewish State is evil incarnate. The words may sound bombastically religious and moralistic, but the reality they express is undeniable.] UK Zionists scramble to defend Israel, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis Of course, it wasn’t going to be long before the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) stuck their oar into the Methodists’ big debate on BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel, which included a public consultation questionnaire. The BoD has now pubished their 33-page “Response to the Methodist Church in Britain’s Inquiry into the Tactic of BDS”. Vice-President Jonathan Arkush complains that “BDS has the unacceptable aim of delegitimizing Israel, encourages the rejectionists of peace, hurts moderates and sows divisions”, and activists should “invest in peace and reconciliation projects” instead... Welcome to Zionism…Now Bend Over, by Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today ...The marriage between Bolshevism and Zionism is not far-fetched at all. In the summer of 2011, Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who was a former Communist during World War II and former lecturer at Tel Aviv University, made this statement: “Israeli politicians are terrified of peace. They tremble with fear from the possibility of peace, because without war and without general mobilization they don’t know how to live.”.. Another Word for “Holocaust” by Jim Goad | Taki's Magazine ...Estimates for the death tolls of the Holocaust and Holodomor range all over the place—usually correlated (surprise!) with how much ethnic and political sympathy the estimator has for the deceased—but a rough consensus is that the number of victims was roughly the same. Yet one would have to be smoking banana peels dipped in formaldehyde and sprinkled with PCP to assert that both events receive a similar amount of attention in Western media and academia... Iran's Nuclear Rights vs. the West's "Bombastic Diplomacy" by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America Reports following the end of the most recent round of talks between six world powers and Iran in Geneva early Sunday morning revealed that, while a preliminary deal was close at hand, the failure to produce a workable agreement was due to unnecessary, last minute intransigence by the French delegation, led by Laurent Fabius, France's foreign minister... France wrecks P5+1 deal for Arab money, by Finian Cunningham | Intifada Palestine ..Negotiations to resolve the nuclear deadlock and lift economic sanctions on Iran appeared to be near a breakthrough agreement after three days of talks in the Swiss capital, Geneva, over the weekend. The hasty arrival of US Secretary of State John Kerry as well as the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany raised expectations that a potential deal was in the offing. But it was the French diplomat, Laurent Fabius, who threw a spanner in the works at the last-minute. Fabius invoked “security concerns of Israel” and announced that his country was not going to sign a draft agreement... After Betraying USA and Pollard, is China Israel's Next Victim? | Roi Tov On November 12, 2013, while a senior Israeli delegation met senior Chinese officials in what was shamelessly called a private visit, a former Israeli spy disclosed that Israel made a deal with the USA abandoning Jonathan Pollard, an American-Jewish agent of Israel. The Israeli delegation leader, Dore Gold, was instrumental in the past in one of PM Netanyahu most shameful political moments, when he worked against the Israeli Government. The converging news reminded that Israel is Betrayal Ltd., a minor subsidiary of the Western Colonizing Corporation... IAEA and Iran Make Breakthrough, by Jim W. Dean | Veterans Today Major progress has been made in the IAEA talks with Iran, notwithstanding the French induced delays in the P5+1 group this past weekend. You will see this not being covered very much in the non Jewish controlled Western media as it clearly shows Iran making concessions that it has no treaty obligation to do. You can contrast that to Gordon Duff's barn burner report in Press TV today, about France having violated the NPT by supplying the Saudis, with the Israelis lurking in the background, who the French began helping build their nuclear program before the bodies of the 1948 war were barely cold... What an Al-Monitor Analyst Gets Wrong about Arak, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America In a new piece over at Al-Monitor, Iranian-born Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar commends the blocking of a preliminary nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius over the issue of Iran's continuing construction of the Qatran Complex, a heavy water facility near Arak, a city southwest of Tehran. But it is riddled with the factual errors and decontextualized conjecture that have long been a hallmark of Mr. Javedanfar's analysis. This time around, it appears Mr. Javedanfar is a bit confused as to the difference between Iran's two facilities at Arak... Boston Marathon Bombing Obvious False Flag, by Mike Palecek | MCW News The Boston Marathon bombing of April 15th is "the most obvious 'false flag' attack in U.S. history," Dr. Jim Fetzer, a distinguished university professor and author of 20 books on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, says. The attacks, near the finish line of the annual event, killed three spectators and injured 264 more, forcing a halt to the race. "The Boston bombing was an obvious staged event…where the perps were not those two (Tsarnaev) brothers but members of the paramilitary company Craft International," of Dallas, Tex... Voice of Palestine (November 11th, 2013) | YouTube ...This week Voice of Palestine interviews Alan Hart, British author and journalist. Alan talks with us about the 9th anniversary of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the new evidence pointing to his murder, as well as the dysfunctional state of the Palestinian Authority and challenges facing the Palestinian diaspora... Nov 12, 2013 The U.S. Secret State and the Internet: “Dirty Secrets” and “Crypto Wars” from “Clipper Chip” and ECHELON to PRISM, by Tom Burghardt | Global Research ...Time and again, beginning in the 1970s with the publication of perhaps the earliest NSA exposé by Ramparts Magazine, we learned that when agency schemes came to light, if they couldn’t convince they resorted to threats, bribery or the outright subversion of the standard setting process itself, which destroyed trust and rendered all our electronic interactions far less safe. Tunneling underground, NSA, telcos and corporate tech giants worked hand-in-glove to sabotage what could have been a free and open system of global communications, creating instead the Frankenstein monster which AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein denounced as a “Big Brother machine.”.. France Blocks U.S. Pivot To Persia | Moon of Alabama France has been and is a major nuclear proliferator in the Middle East. While it worked and works to enable some countries to build nuclear weapons it wants to deny any and all civil nuclear capabilities to others. The primary reasons are greed and a certain craving for its former grandeur which today is no longer supported by the necessary economic and military means... [As the Empire crumbles, the vassal states will begin to assert their own interests. See also While France Blocked Negotiations Kerry Blames Iran] Iran nuclear talks: Enrichment was the pretext (again) not France | Iran Affairs ...this demand that Iran abandon enrichment is deliberately made in order to prevent any resolution of the nuclear issue, which would deprive them of a pretext for imposing regime change on Iran (the goal all along.) Iran suspended enrichment entirely for more than two years, and has historically repeatedly offered to limit its enrichment capability to a fraction of what it is today, and even then they didn't accept it. The point is to deprive Iran of her rights and subjugate Iran, relegating Iran and subsequently all other developing nations who signed the NPT and are entitled to develop technologically, to a third class status forever reliant on a handful of self-appointed nations... Saudi Arabia and Israel Try To Derail Nuclear Negotiations With Iran by Terrorism, by Muhammad Sahimi | Antiwar Ever since Hassan Rouhani was elected Iran’s President on 14 June 2013 and promised that he will lead a government of "hope and prudence," the United States’ most important allies in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia and Israel – and their lobbies here have been doing their best to prevent any agreement between Iran and the Obama administration regarding Iran’s nuclear program... The Silencing of Dorothy Thompson, by Alternate Focus | Kickstarter ..For three decades, amid the sweeping events of the first half of the twentieth century, no journalist was more controversial, more iconoclastic, or more quoted than Dorothy Thompson. At the pinnacle of her career, Thompson’s syndicated news column, “On the Record”—one of the longest-running columns ever—reached millions of people around the globe.. She spoke out against Hitler. For that, they made her a hero. She spoke up for Palestine. For that, they silenced her... [I remembered Dorothy Thompson only as the prominent journalist who at the end of WWII advocated the sterilization of all German women. I didn't know about her subsequent views - who did?] Bad for America: The Dynastic Hillary Bandwagon, by Ralph Nader | CounterPunch ..Does the future of our country benefit from Hillary, another Clinton, another politician almost indistinguishable from Barack Obama’s militaristic, corporatist policies garnished by big money donors from Wall Street and other plutocratic canyons? There is no doubt the Clintons are syrupy political charmers, beguiling many naïve Democrats who have long been vulnerable to a practiced set of comforting words or phrases camouflaging contrary deeds... [A new twist on the Shakespearean tragedy – Lady Macbeth succeeds her husband] On the Edge of Civil War - Again: The Imperial Roots of Iraq’s Sectarian Violence, by Ashley Smith | CounterPunch As Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington, D.C., for a summit meeting with Barack Obama on November 1, his country teetered on the precipice of a new sectarian civil war. Iraq Body Count reports that an average of 70 bombings and shootings each month have killed more than 7,000 civilians and wounded thousands more in 2013. The wave of violence has forced even more Iraqis to flee their homes, adding to the 4 million displaced during the Sunni-Shia civil war that reached its height between 2006 and 2008... [Uncle Shmuel’s elegant handiwork] Adam Hochschild: The War to Begin All Wars | TomDispatch ...Everyone knows how World War I was advertised. In retrospect, however, it could more accurately be thought of as the war that began all wars. Admittedly, trench warfare seems a thing of the past, last seen in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. But World War I launched the age of mass industrial warfare, with the marriage of science, academia, the corporation, and the military leading to everything from nuclear proliferation to drone warfare. Without it, a military-industrial complex would have been inconceivable... A Million Veterans Injured In Iraq, Afghanistan Wars, by Rebecca Ruiz | Forbes The International Business Times reported Friday that the Department of Veterans Affairs had stopped releasing the number of non-fatal casualties of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, thus concealing what the paper called a “grim milestone” of 1 million injuries... Google Bans Babylon | Roi Tov ...Engineers who had developed applications for 8200, often adapt them to the civilian environment. Over the years, this has created what is known as the Israeli Hi-Tech market described in this article. Often this is done with the blessing and help of their military unit. After all, these applications provide valuable data for those persecuting others. Where a person connects to the web, what he does, with whom he communicates. All provided willingly by the victim of the State... Veterans Day Hypocrisy | Stephen Lendman ...Veterans Day dishonors living and dead veterans. It ignores longstanding US imperial lawlessness. It airbrushes from history decades of what matters most. It includes militarism, raw aggression, permanent wars on humanity, mass killing and destruction, exploiting resources and people, seeking unchallenged global dominance, and creating unspeakable human misery. Depravity defines America’s agenda. War is a national obsession. It’s a longstanding addiction. It’s got nothing to do with national security... Gilad Atzmon: The Palestinian Cause and the Discourse of Solidarity | YouTube Author and saxophonist Gilad Atzmon gave his first U.S. talk on April 13, 2007 at the University of Denver. He spoke about the Palestinian cause and the discourse of solidarity... Slip-sliding away: American Jewish support for Israel | Redress Information & Analysis “A large majority of Israelis, nearly four in five, believes Israel’s future is dependent on the country’s ties to American Jewry, a new poll of Israeli public opinion has found,” reports the Times of Israel. If the poll is accurate, then Israelis are in for a shock. As we reported last month, a recent poll of American Jews by the Pew Research Centre confirms that American Jews are turning away from Israel, with nearly a third (31 per cent) saying they did not feel attached to the Zionist state and another 39 per cent feeling only “somewhat” attached... America makes first payment for love-fest with Israel, by M. I. Bhat | Veterans Today ..The pain of losing lordship over the Organization immediately visited the US administration. The Washington-based US National Commissioner for UNESCO, Phyllis Magrab, was quoted saying, “We won’t be able to have the same clout. In effect, we (now won’t) have a full tool box. We’re missing our hammer.” “Hammer” that the US has been accustomed to use in every other UN organization to have its way... The Birth of a Police State: UK Police to be Granted Sweeping New Powers | Scriptonite Daily The UK Government is about to pass legislation which will make any behaviour perceived to potentially ‘cause nuisance or annoyance’ a criminal offence. The Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill also grants local authorities, police and even private security firms sweeping powers to bar citizens from assembling lawfully in public spaces. The Bill has successfully passed through the House of Commons without issue, and is now in the latter stages of review by the House of Lords, after which it will receive Royal Assent and become Law. Those who refuse orders under the new rules will face arrest, fines and even prison time... Zionist Crimes Against The Jews, by Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine ...Mizrahi and Sephardim Jews of Morocco enjoyed greater equality with Muslims. Many of them gained important positions in the government administration as officials and in courts of law as judges. The Jews had their own quarters in the main cities, where they had their own schools, their own synagogues, and even their own courts and judges. They comprised a large section of the middle class, who played large roles in the economy, trade, industry and educational system of the kingdom. All this was changed with the invention of the Israeli state, especially after Zionist leaders had sent their agents to encourage and to bribe Moroccan Jews, among many other Arab Jews, to emigrate to occupied Palestine... Nov 11, 2013 World Jewry Pushing World Towards War Against Iran, by Bob Johnson | Veterans Today ...When Israel and world Jewry was pushing for a war to eliminate their enemy Iraq, they employed the same tactics as they did to get the war against Germany started. For example, they called anyone who wanted peace an “appeaser.” They filled the Jewish dominated news and media with stories which would promote their war agenda whether they were true or not. Tactics like these put such pressure on people they too often become afraid to stand up for peace and progress... Police Terror and the Israeli Kristallnacht | Roi Tov ...Israel outshone the Nazi Regime it so likes to attack. The Nazi Kristallnacht suddenly looks like a kindergarten picnic while reading the report about the Palestinian Kristallnacht inflicted by the State of Israel. It is important to understand that Israel doesn't deny the facts; on the contrary, in the Hebrew media —especially the Beit Oranim Transcript—soldiers and officers of the IDF brag off on their orders to inflict terror and damage on the civilian population. They proudly describe how grannies, mothers and children were assassinated by coward IDF snipers from the distance... Israeli Intelligence Sources Contradict Bibi, Congress on Iran, by Marsha Cohen | LobeLog ...The position paper by Israel’s top military assessor stated that the process of change sparked by Rouhani’s victory s “cannot be ignored,” according to Ravid. Netanyahu ignored it. Although Netanyahu received Kochavi’s assessment a few days before he left for the U.S. in late September, the Israeli Prime Minister disregarded it entirely in his speech to the UN on Sept. 30, in which he vilified Rouhani as nothing more than a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” who was no different than his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad... The New York Times continues to exemplify everything that's wrong about Iran news coverage | Iran Affairs ...The entire newspaper staff there has blood on their hands, as far as I'm concerned, and in an ideal world they should be on trial for deliberately promoting the nonsense that led to the Iraq invasion, nevermind the terrible "journalists" like Michael Gordon, the human dictaphone, who work there. But just to point out that nothing has changed, I refer you to the latest example of crap posing as news by, who else, then Michael Gordon (and Mark Lander.) I could poke holes in this story all day but the best bit is about the Arak heavy water reactor... [So what else is new? The JYT, after all, is the flagship Zionist rag. It carefully maintains the appearance of being "liberal," thoughtful and balanced, but it's easy enough to see through.] Pro-Israel groups keen to revive discredited anti-Semitism definition, by Ben White | The Electronic Intifada ...The working definition is popular with pro-Israel groups because it defines certain kinds of criticism of Israel, including criticism of its self-definition as a “Jewish state,” as forms of anti-Semitism. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the groups that has used it most crudely, such as in 2012 when it asked the French government to cancel a conference on Israeli apartheid... Israel to Lobby US Congress to Prevent Iran Deal | Israel National News ..."Before the talks resume, we will lobby dozens of members of the US Congress to whom I will personally explain.. that Israel's security is in jeopardy," Bennet said. The statements follow a letter Bennett drafted to members of Jewish organizations in the US and abroad which urged them to help pressure international leaders to stop continuing to entertain a diplomatic agreement with the nuclear threat... [And don’t forget to brush your teeth] After Reportedly Being Offered Saudi Weapons Sales, France Tries to Blow Up Iran Deal | Empty Wheel ...It’s fairly clear what’s going on. Saudi Arabia has to forestall an Iran deal, because once that happens the Iran will be in a position to challenge the Saudi position as a swing producer (particularly if you assume Iran and Shia-led Iraq might act in concert). So France will make an effort to thwart any deal. And if talks fail, they’ll get a big chunk of Saudi Arabia’s considerable weapons spending, at a time when the Saudis will probably be even further ramping up their purchases... France’s last-minute hold-out aborts Iran nuclear deal in Geneva | Debka File ...Fabius amazed his American and European colleagues and Iran when he stuck to its guns to the last, insisting that Iran’s Arak heavy water plant must not come online and that Tehran dispose of its 20-percent enriched uranium stock. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif refused to accept this. No one believed Fabius would go so far as to scupper the conference... [“DEBKAfile is an Israeli military intelligence website based in Jerusalem.” ~ Wikipedia] What Kind Of Murderer Deliberately Leaves Fingerprints Behind? | Gilad Atzmon ...I gather that the Israelis who took the decision to poison Arafat with radioactive polonium came to the conclusion that the Goyim must be stupid, and they had a good reason to come to such a conclusion.. when it became clear that Arafat’s body was indeed saturated with a radioactive substance, not a single Western leader saw the need to denounce Israel or call for an immediate probe of Israel nuclear industry. As if this is not enough, Israeli spokesmen ridiculed the recent scientific findings, tagging the media reports as a ‘soap opera.’ Clearly, they are convinced that Israel can get away with murder, and they are apparently correct... How God Made the English - A Chosen People? | YouTube ...In this first episode, Professor MacCulloch chronicles the roots of the idea that the English think themselves better than others and duty-bound to play a leading role in world affairs. He argues that the roots of this attitude lie in a tangle of religious motives. He traces its origins to the notion of a 'chosen people' - a Biblical idea which the monk and historian, the Venerable Bede, took lock, stock and barrel from the Jewish scriptures and applied to the early English... [The old, seemingly ineradicable viral meme complex – or is it more like cancer?] An honest Israeli Jew tells the Truth about Israel | YouTube Miko Peled was born in Jersusalem into a famous and influential Israeli Zionist family. His father was a famous General in the Israeli Army, of which Miko also served his time. When Miko's niece was killed by Palestinian suicide bombers, you may have expected the family to put Palestinians at fault, but surprisingly they blamed the state of Israel, and their violent torturing and persecution for driving people to such sadness that they would take their own lives... How to Bomb, Corner, and Bet Your Way to Riches: A Neoliberal Field Guide, by Jason Hirthler | CounterPunch In author and editor Michel Chossudovsky’s excellent book, “The Global Economic Crisis,” he quotes democracy’s bête noire emeritus, Henry Kissinger, who stated in that plain and bloodless manner, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.” This cynical insight could be the mission statement of global corporate power bent on the total control of the world’s food and fossil fuel... Dianne Feinstein's Fake Surveillance Reform Bill, by Michelle Richardson | American Civil Liberties Union Members of Congress have introduced almost 30 separate bills to rein in NSA spying, increase transparency, or rework the secret court process that has sanctioned these programs. Two pieces of legislation, however, have momentum, and they couldn't be more different... Of Love and Resistance: Shafik Kabha, Palestinian Music Icon, 1960-2013, by Louis Brehony | Palestine Chronicle One of Palestine’s most loved singers Shafik Kabha was gunned down on his way home from singing at a wedding in Umm al Fahm, Galilee on 22 October. He was aged 53. Shafik was famous for his staunch support for the Palestinian cause, which he bravely upheld as a ’48 Palestinian, forced to live under the apartheid rule of the Israeli state. His musical approach was diverse, modern and highly skillful. He refused to let obstacles stand in his way and sang anthems for a free Palestine wherever he went... Israel's Lieberman to return to government | Al Jazeera Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign minister, will return to the cabinet, the Israeli prime minister has said. Netanyahu made the announcement on Wednesday shortly after Lieberman was cleared by an Israeli court on charges of fraud and breach of trust. He was unanimously acquitted by a panel of three judges at Jerusalem Magistrates Court in a hearing which lasted just a few minutes, an Israeli radio station said... [The Moldavian bouncer was born to represent the Terrorist State of Israel] Israel says Separation Wall will be border | Al Jazeera Israeli negotiators have told their Palestinian counterparts that the Separation Wall that cuts through the occupied West Bank will serve as the border of a future Palestinian state, local media reports said. Just hours before US Secretary of State John Kerry's arrival for top-level talks on ongoing direct peace negotiations on Tuesday, two press reports said the Israeli team had made the proposal. "Israel's opening position was that the border be the route of the separation barrier [wall], and not the 1967 lines as the Palestinians have demanded,".. [I propose that a wall be built completely around Israel (pre-1967). Only Jews would be allowed to live there, and all Jews in the diaspora would have to either move there or renounce their tribal affiliation. Otherwise, no one would be allowed in – or out. This ghetto would be disarmed and all communication with the outside world would be outlawed. Finally, the Jews would be safe - and so would the rest of us.] Israel attacks America through our own Congress, by Jim W. Dean | Veterans Today This is a sad and embarrassing column to have to write, about Israeli espionage penetration into our highest levels of government, our security forces knowing that it has happened but then can’t, or refuse to do anything about it... Nov 10, 2013 Late Breaking: Talks With Iran Fail to Produce a Nuclear Agreement | NYT Marathon talks between major powers and Iran failed on Sunday to produce a deal to freeze its nuclear program, puncturing days of feverish anticipation and underscoring how hard it will be to forge a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions... [I’m extremely disappointed, although hardly surprised, that my prediction was correct.] It is both risible and insulting of intelligence to read the tone of Western media coverage of the latest Geneva negotiations between Iran and the coterie of powers that self-appoints itself as the “international community.”.. It is Iran that is the peaceful nation, and yet it is the one that is being treated like a criminal pariah... Secretary of State John Kerry is now in Geneva, no doubt invigorated from his diplomatic triumph at the Israel-Palestine "peace" talks (not). He wouldn't be headed there if there wasn't some tangible progress to report (and take some credit for). The reported deal is straightforward: Iran will halt its nuclear program for six months in exchange for the U.S. lifting a few minor sanctions... [It's surprising that the French didn't follow Washington's lead - or was there a wink and a nod?]. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his warmongering compatriots are incensed at the prospect of a deal between Iran and the Western powers that would ease some sanctions on Iran in return for Tehran scaling back its nuclear programme. In fact, it’s fair to say that Netanyahu is turning into a parody of his already ridiculous and nauseating self... ...Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, reveals the actual reason this deal (any deal) with Iran enrages Netanyahu: “I can understand why Netanyahu is so furious. A unilateral military option would have no real chance now. Not because we can’t do it, but because it would be seen as moving against the whole international community. That is something Israel cannot afford.” Any deal with Iran, no matter how lopsided and favorable to the Western powers, would enshrine Iran’s limited enrichment program as legitimate in the eyes of the international community... [Thanks to the French, Uncle Shmuel is happy - for now.] ...For the first time since he managed to restart the talks in July, Kerry dropped his statesman-like public impartiality, and clearly spoke from the heart — and what emerged were a series of accusations that amounted to a forceful slap in the face for Netanyahu. It was a rhetorical onslaught that the prime minister cannot have expected and one he will not quickly forget... ...There is no much use for such a violent word except for a popular phrase "Meharher Milhama" can be translated as "Someone who wrath war." A discourse preaching war at all cost; the overdose of gutturals clarifies the point. Hitler's speeches probably are the best example in this category. One day after a distressed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu threatened to attack Iran after an almost-agreement was achieved in Geneva, Israeli media were filled with such "Meharherei Milhama" discourses preaching war with Iran, which may pay dear for its diplomatic success. "You shall not spoil Zion's Business of War," is the Elders First Commandment... [Watch Iranian video of missiles hitting targets in Israel (it auto-plays when you hit the page). What’s good for the goose...] ...Iranian state TV aired a documentary about Iran’s missile capabilities in confronting external threats and responding to any strikes against its soil. The one hour long documentary includes a video simulation of Iranian respond to an airstrike by Israel against Iran’s nuclear facilities... [A little stick for Israel to balance the carrot offered the West. All the Israelis respect is force or the threat of force.] Wiesenthal Centre hunts for the dodgy definition | Jews sans frontieres The Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC) has just discovered that the bogus definition of antisemitism produced by its kindred spirits at the American Jewish Committee has gone missing from the European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency's website.. Zionists are right to be concerned about the ditching of their misdefinition of antisemitism because it is clearly aimed at insulating the State of Israel from criticism, in particular anti-zionist criticism... [This war of words matters – the tribal Jewish definition is an essential prop in maintaining its fantasy version of reality and a vital weapon in its war on truth. Without the mirage of an endemic antisemitism ready to strike, the glue that holds the Zionist charade together would just dissolve. Tribal Jewish fascism has always needed the bogeyman of antisemitism in order to survive.] Arafat’s Death: There’s really no mystery | Alan Hart For once Israel is telling a part of the truth. It was impossible for any of its own (Israeli-Jewish) agents to get into the rubble of Arafat’s compound to administer the poison that killed him. But they didn’t need direct access. Israel’s role was to provide the radioactive polonium for one of its collaborators in Fatah’s leadership... Israeli Bombers over Syria: Al Qaeda’s Air Force, by James Petras | Global Research The current series of Israeli bombing raids and missile strikes against Syria are designed to strengthen the armed Syrian opposition and Islamist mercenaries seeking to destroy the government in Damascus. Israel intends to sabotage the upcoming round of peace negotiations. The Zionist state does not want a peaceful resolution to the current regional conflict. Its foreign policy depends on perpetual regional wars and political instability. Toward this end, Tel Aviv has the unconditional support of the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization and all other Zionist organizations in the US... Makram Khoury-Machool Tells The Truth about Syria At The House Of Lords | Gilad Atzmon My Lord, Ladies and Gentlemen… Good evening… The Invention of the Jewish People | Veterans Today Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list.. Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.. “The ideal project for solving the century-long conflict…would be the creation of a democratic bi-national state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”.. Why 9-11 Truth Has Won, by Allen Jasson | MWC News The 9-11 Truth Movement has clearly won the fight. The two key facts essential to defeat the official explanation and establish critical need for a new, wider, criminal investigation are the free-fall collapse of three WTC buildings (proving the complete absence of structural resistance) and the presence of thermite in large quantities (as the prime explanation for the absence of structural resistance). These facts have been established irrefutably as a matter of repeatable and verifiable science... Israel Shahak: Open Secrets Revisited, by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News ...Large parts of the U. S. political establishment together with the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) in the USA are still promoting war against Iran. This Muslim country and its leadership have been demonised by some Zionist public interest groups as the embodiment of the ultimate evil. Like in the case of Iraq, the Americans have a distorted picture of reality due to a selective information policy by the FCM. According to an opinion poll conducted by CNN, 71 percent believe that Iran possesses nuclear weapons... Small sparks, by Adam Keller | Crazy Country At the border of Gaza, the Hamas tunnel experts and the IDF’s counter-tunnel specialists are conducting a ceaseless battle of wits, of which only a small portion is seen on the surface. Two weeks ago, the IDF announced with great fanfare the uncovering of a Hamas tunnel dug under the border and reaching a few hundred meters into Israeli territory. A week later, soldiers entered the Strip in order to drill and destroy the tunnel from its Palestinian end. But the Hamas had anticipated this move and booby-trapped the tunnel... Arafat, Balfour and Palestine, by Sami Jamil Jadallah | Veterans Today Balfour gave a “promise” for a Jewish Home Land, a land he had no right to promise, then Arafat legitimized the promise and gave away the land he never had a right to give away. When we remember Balfour, we must remember Arafat and the PLO. Arafat and the PLO turned the Palestinians from proud successful professionals highly educated to a bunch of beggars and thieves... Israel Killed Arafat | Stephen Lendman ..Previous articles discussed his death. It wasn't accidental. It wasn't natural. Credible evidence points to assassination. Israel wanted him eliminated. He became more liability than asset. His former aide, Hani al-Hassan, said he personally witnessed 13 attempts on his life. Arafat said he survived 40 attempts... Israeli Army storms Internet Cafés in Jerusalem. 25 Activists Arrested | nsnbc On the evening of Wednesday, 6 November, soldiers of Israel's occupation forces in East Jerusalem stormed several internet cafés. The operation was intended to crack down on Palestinian activists who use social media networks and social media sites to inform the international community about, and to oppose the illegal occupation of Palestine. The crackdown resulted in the arrest of 25 young Palestinians who allegedly were activists, who according to Israeli sources, used social media to incite against the Israeli army... The Stunning Hubris of Syria Hawks, by Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic ...another reason to avoid intervening in Syria is the stunning hubris of the course some hawks are proposing. Take Michael Totten's World Affairs article, "No Exit: Why the U.S. Can't Leave the Middle East." Its author is perfectly aware of U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the unintended consequences of our intervention in Libya, but if he's learned the right lessons from them I can't see how. What he proposes is fighting two consecutive wars in Syria. First, we would ally with the Islamists against the government. Then once the government fell, we would fight the extremist element among the rebels. Only then would our goals be met... As Syria disintegrates, so too does Iraq, by Patrick Cockburn | The Unz Review The civil war in Syria is reigniting the sectarian civil war in Iraq. A vast area of eastern Syrian and western Iraq is turning into a zone of war. Well-armed and well-organised al-Qa’ida-linked movements are launching attacks with suicide bombers from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Tigris River. They may also be over-playing their hand and risk provoking a counter-reaction by all those with a reason to fear al-Qa’ida and its fanatical Sunni fundamentalism... The Collapse of Turkey’s Syria Policy, by Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle Catastrophic for Syria and disastrous for Turkey. So can be summed up the consequences of Turkish intervention in Syria over the past two years. While not admitting that they were wrong, the architects of this policy, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, appear to be backing off, at least to the extent of tightening border security and seeking to repair the damage they have caused to relations with neighboring states... Ann Jones: Silent Soldiers, The Losers From Our Lost Wars | TomDispatch ...Over the years, more and more of America’s kids made that medevac journey back to the States. Costsofwar.com has tallied 106,000 Americans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan or evacuated from those war zones because of accident or disease. Because so many so-called “invisible wounds” are not diagnosed until after soldiers return home, the true number of wounded must be much higher. Witness the fact that, as of June 2012, 247,000 veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq had been diagnosed by the VA with post-traumatic stress disorder, and as of May 31, 2012, more than 745,000 veterans of those wars had filed disability claims with the VA... Saudis Fight a Lost Battle against Change, by Nicola Nasser | Palestine Chronicle The ongoing aggressive Saudi policy for a militarized “regime change” in Syria is more an expression of internal vulnerability, trying hopelessly to avert change outside their borders lest change sweeps inside, than being a positive show of leadership and power, but Syrian developments are proving by the day that the Saudis are fighting a lost battle against change... Damn those pesky revisionists! | Paul Eisen This comes from Bradley Smith's CODOH. If the story of revisionist heroism is ever told.. I suspect Bradley Smith will figure large. It concerns a New York Times article.. by Edward Rothstein. which I posted with some comment in October under the title St Anne of Blah Blah. Rothstein's article is.. not so hot on the detail which is exactly what the letter below picks up on. Oh, damn those pesky revisionists with their obsession with historical truth!.. [Ah, and all those millions of others who were supposedly “gassed”?] US-Iran nuclear negotiations just died | Iran Affairs ...even if the position of the US is that there is no right to enrichment, by explicity stating it so, the US has now made it impossible for any deal to go through. Any sort of compromise now reached and agreed to by Iran under these conditions of non-recognition of Iran's rights under the NPT, would amount to an at least tacit approval and endorsement by Iran of the idea that the US has a veto power over Iran's (and by implication, everyone else's) NPT rights. Any agreement now worked out will always be tainted as Iran's giving up its rights... [Well, maybe it was too good to be true, as I pointed out in one of yesterday’s comments. See also Getting Fordo right http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2013/11/getting-fordo-right.html ] Big Changes In U.S. Middle East Policy? | Moon of Alabama There seems to be big, though forced, moves in U.S. Middle East policy underway. Israel is getting some beating while a temporary deal with Iran is in the making. After trying again and again to get Netanyahoo to accept serious negotiations with the Palestinians U.S. Secretary of State Kerry had finally enough and started to talk tough:.. Why Netanyahu Is So Enraged by a Deal with Iran, by John Glaser | Antiwar ...Israel and hawks in Congress are upset because they believe anything less than total capitulation from Iran, total dismantling of their entire domestic enrichment program, is unacceptable. But Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, reveals the actual reason this deal (any deal) with Iran enrages Netanyahu:.. The Iranian Deal and Netanyahu's Hairdo | Roi Tov How is Netanyahu's haircut related to the deal with Iran? Surprisingly, the two are inseparable. On November 8, 2013, Netanyahu was hurriedly abandoned by US Secretary of State Kerry. While visiting Israel, he was told that a deal with Iran was ready to be signed in Geneva. "Sorry, Bibi," he said and rushed to Switzerland. A bit rude, but nobody expects from an American better manners than from an Israeli, especially one who is proud of his Jewish background... Seek Speak Spread Truth ..Come and be ENLIGHTENED about the hidden truths and agendas of our media, governments and corporations, delivered to you by extraordinary speakers committed to the cause of Truth and Justice – Gilad Atzmon, Ken O’Keefe, Kevin Schot and poetry by Nahida Exiled.. Opening all to the possibility that a mass awakening is already well and truly under way... [Now that would be real Change. What the hell – go for it.] Trading women for profit, by Graham Peebles | Redress Information & Analysis The act of buying and selling sits at the very heart of the global economy, a commercially motivated system [of] “market fundamentalism” in which competition and conservative uniformity are central elements. Creative, independent thinking and originality are anathema to this relentless, homogenous machine, which breeds conformity, crushes individuality and “Borg-like”, assimilates all into “the collective”. The aim of all traders is to buy cheap and sell for the highest price possible; keep costs low, including workers’ wages, and maximize profits for stockholders, directors and senior management... Latin American writers say Israel must abandon “colonial” Zionist ideology | PACBI Israel’s invitation to be “guest of honor” at the Guadalajara International Book Fair later this month has provoked controversy in Mexico. A group of writers and intellectuals have objected to the one-sided inclusion of Israel and demanded recognition for Palestine. Calling Israel a “Jewish fundamentalist state in the garb of a Western democracy,” they are urging festival organizers to create a more pluralistic program... [I wonder whether the invitation was bought or if it was blackmail. Israel gets to see everyone's communications, courtesy of the NSA, paid for by the American taxpayers.] Gorgeous Pictures Of The Holy Land From 120 Years Ago | Business Insider Before the Borg invaded... Is a new revolution quietly brewing in France? | The Vineyard of the Saker ...One could look at France's economic and financial situation (catastrophic) or at the many social problems plaguing an already very frustrated population, but I want to focus on one specific aspect of the current French crisis: the complete alienation of the majority of the people from the ruling elites which I will illustrate by one very telling example: the growing hysteria of the French elites about a brilliant philosopher - Alain Soral - and one stand-up comedian - Dieudonne M'bala M'bala... The Judaization of Israel, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom ...The Founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, now officially designated here as “the Visionary of the State”, envisioned the total disappearance of the Diaspora. In his diary he foresaw that after the founding of the “Jewstate” (wrongly translated as the “Jewish State”), all the Jews who wished to do so would settle in Israel. They (and only they!) would henceforth be called Jews. All the others would finally assimilate in their host nations and cease being Jews. (This part of Herzl’s teachings is completely and deliberately obliterated in Israel. It is neither taught in the schools nor mentioned by politicians.).. [Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men.. Could it have been otherwise? Not really.] National Security Agency: The only part of the government that really listens to what you have to say, by William Blum | Anti-Empire Report ...I have on occasion asked people who reject or rationalize any and all criticism of US foreign policy: “What would the United States have to do in its foreign policy to lose your support? What, for you, would be too much?” I’ve yet to get a suitable answer to that question. I suspect it’s because the person is afraid that whatever they say I’ll point out that the United States has already done it... Nov 8, 2013 Israel and You and Me, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar If the United States fails to take advantage of the opportunity to come to terms with Iran over its nuclear program it will be because of pressure from Israel. If the unthinkable happens and Washington actually attacks Iran, initiating another major war that will have far reaching and possibly disastrous consequences, it will likewise be because of Israel... Kerry on despot tour to reassure, by Finian Cunningham | Intifada Palestine America’s top diplomat John Kerry is not known for honesty. Recall a couple of months ago how Russian President Vladimir Putin labeled Kerry a “blatant liar” when the latter tried to deny the involvement of al-Qaeda in Syria’s charnel house. But the American secretary of state came clean this week – no doubt by accident – when he confirmed to media that recent policy rows between the US and Saudi Arabia’s ruling House of Saud are merely on the basis of “tactical” differences. The fundamental policy goals, that is, the strategy, remain the same, Kerry admitted... The Next Rounds of Nuclear Talks with Iran and Their Strategic Ramifications | Going to Tehran It seems ever clearer that Iran and the P5+1 are headed toward new rounds of nuclear talks this fall. For those thinking through the prospects for these negotiations and their larger strategic ramifications, a couple of recent interviews published in Iran Review provide important input... While Iran and 6 world powers known as the P5+1 are remaining secretive about the details of ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the Nov. 7-8 talks here have kicked off with official statements that some “progress” has already occurred. After describing the negotiations as “extremely complex,” the spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told reporters today that the discussions “are now heading into a serious phase.”.. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi meanwhile told Iranian State TV this afternoon that the P5+1.. has agreed to Iran’s ”proposed negotiation framework” and that discussions about the content can now begin... The United States and five world powers are looking to reach agreement on the first phase of a two-part nuclear deal with Iran, that would halt the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program while negotiations on a comprehensive final deal take place, a senior US official said here Wednesday.. “For the first time, Iran appears to be committed to moving this negotiating process forward quickly,” the official added. “That’s a key shift… For the first time, we do not see them using the negotiating process to buy time.”.. Israel's History of Assassinating Palestinian Leaders | IMEU On November 6, several news outlets reported that the widow of former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat announced that the results of a Swiss investigation into her late husband's death concluded he was poisoned with polonium, a radioactive substance. In November 2012, Arafat's body was exhumed in order for medical examiners to take samples of his remains to test for polonium, part of a murder investigation launched by French authorities at the request of Suha Arafat following the discovery last summer of traces of the highly toxic substance on some of his personal effects... [Not to mention one of their own, who had the gall to seriously consider peace as an option] Ken O'Keefe's Middle East Show | YouTube The Middle East is a focal point of global geopolitics and understanding this region provides great insight into the tyranny of our world. Massive investment in the mainstream media's role to deceive the public regarding the Middle East, with 9/11 being the zenith of this deception, has resulted in continuous crimes against humanity... [You go, Ken. We’re 100% behind you.] Saudi ‘House of Pseud’ Thrives on Deception, by Finian Cunningham | ICH ...since its inception as a state in 1932 at the hands of the British Empire, Saudi Arabia has continually betrayed the Arab people, including its own population, in the service of imperialist interests. The Saudi rulers, from the first so-called King Ibn Saud to the present King Abdullah, have siphoned off the oil riches of the Arabian Peninsula while the ordinary people struggle with unemployment, homelessness and poverty. The lion’s share of wealth of the world’s biggest oil exporter feeds the Saudi elite and their foreign patrons, and what’s more this wealth is used to suppress and oppress... Israel's Culture of Martyrdom, by Baruch Kimmerling | The Nation Nations like to imagine themselves as unique, but one belief they have in common is that it is noble to die in their name. Death and redemption are the themes of almost every form of patriotism. In the case of Israel, however, the connection between nationalism and death is especially visceral. For the Jewish state is a nation that emerged from the ashes of a project of extermination, and that sees itself as the best defense against the renewal of violent persecution. Zionism, the state's ruling ideology, is a triumphal creed shadowed by death... Israel and Exile: a Nation in Need of a Founding Myth, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam lan Ziv’s remarkable film, Exile, a Myth Unearthed is now being screened around the world. You may recall that this was the film the BBC purchased to air and then momentarily abandoned last May. I personally believe doubts were raised by the UK Community Trust hasbara patrol, though they deftly left no fingerprints. After Ziv wrote about the controversy on his blog, the BBC asked him to dramatically pare down the length and he cut almost half of the original... [Self-glorifying tribal mythology, paranoia and deception – both self-deception and conning others – are the foundations of Zionism.] Middle East's Cold War: Pakistani-Saudi Deal | Roi Tov Prisoner's Dilemma is the name of a well-known case in Game Theory in which rational players choose not to cooperate and in fact betray each other against their own interests. The game does not reflect human reality but fits the social one. Humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behavior. In contrast, organizations are biased towards purely-rational behavior and thus fall into the trap... Are the American Jews incubating another Hitler? by M. I. Bhat | Veterans Today ...Sarah Ann Gordon, while confirming Byrant, goes a step further and provides actual data, which are overwhelmingly in favor of Jews vis-à-vis total Jewish population (1.09% of all Germans) in business, commerce, and public and private service, private banking, bank ownership (150 against 11 non-Jewish owned), stock exchange (80%), academics, Law, medicine, theater (50% of the 234 directors), and so forth. No doubt that present-day America has gotten neatly transformed into the post-WWI Germany... Syria the Meat Grinder: An Up Close Look, by Alexander Filonik | Veterans Today ...The scale of the economic warfare is what you would expect to see if the Syrian Army was attacking all of its neighbors in an all out conventional war scenario. But this disaster has been the result purely of a desire for regime change. The scale of the carnage has put the whole European system of morality and justice under the spotlight for being a complete hoax. There are clear elements of Nuremberg precedents for crimes against humanity here, particularly 'waging an offensive war', which this obviously has been... The Psychological and Physical Mutilation of Germany (Part V) | Paul Eisen Initial RAF bombing of military targets was dangerously unsuccessful. Only one out of five bombs reached within five miles of its intended target and nearly half of British bombers were being shot down. Therefore, the British leadership was already coldly studying the idea of terror bombing city centers instead, setting aside morality issues. By early 1942, members of Churchill's Cabinet openly suggested that the strategic bombing of Germany be directed against German working-class houses, leaving factories and military objectives alone... International Forum Regulates Holocaust Denial | The Jewish Press The International Alliance for Holocaust remembrance (IHRA), comprised of 31 member states, the UN and UNESCO have accepted a universal definition of holocaust denial. (Editor: You can see real, live examples of holocaust denial and antisemitism in the comments below).. [My comment on the page, in case it’s taken down: ‘The tribal Jewish elevation of its narrative of "the Holocaust" to the status of a religion - I call it The Holycause" - has not gone unnoticed. It has become the de facto religion of the West. How ironic. And, as your article confirms, there is a very active Holy Inquisition at the center of this religious establishment. The religious term for what the Holycause terms "Holocaust Denial" is 'heresy.' Heresy is the primary sin within dogmatic, supremacist religions - not to mention the commercial arm of this cult - what Norman Finkelstein calls "the Holocaust Industry," an extremely profitable enterprise. ~ Roger Tucker (an American Jew thoroughly disgusted by Jewish tribal fascism') Ireland: Israeli products marked with yellow sticker | Ynet A pro-Israeli activist residing in Dublin, Ireland, was shocked this week when he discovered that a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organization had taped yellow stickers on Israeli products reading "For justice in Palestine, Boycott Israel".. [Erin go brach!] Iran talks: Down to a deal or a war, by Trita Parsi | CNN Talks with Iran over its nuclear program resume Thursday. Make no mistake: The deal the Obama administration is pursuing with Iran over its nuclear program is a good deal. It will leave Iran with neither a nuclear weapon nor an undetectable breakout capability. And by ensuring that the deal also is a win for Iran, Tehran won't have incentives to cheat and violate the agreement. Based on conversations with diplomats on both sides of the table, I believe it is a durable deal that enhances America's security and nonproliferation goals while making Iran much less hostile and U.S. allies in the region much more safe... [Only Israel wants a war – that or the threat of war is their bread and butter. Unfortunately, the Zionist fifth columns in the West run the show, so the likelihood of war is high, even though it’s clear that the current US Administration is against it.] Iranian foreign Minister Javad Zarif discussed this week’s Geneva talks in an interview with France 24, saying there was a lot of distrust on both sides to be overcome, but that the basic framework of a final deal might be reached at the talks... ...Iran’s new negotiating team, led by Zarif — a well-known diplomat with demonstrable knowledge of the US and how to solve political quagmires — has entered negotiations with a serious plan and intent to resolve the nuclear issue once and for all. Of course, Iran and the P5+1 insist on certain bottom lines and it remains to be seen whether the stars will align in Tehran and Washington enough to allow a deal to happen. With that in mind, I spoke by phone with the Iran expert Farideh Farhi, who’s currently in Tehran, to get a sense of where things stand ahead of the next round of talks... ...“If both sides have goodwill, and if the seriousness and political will both sides have shown so far continues, then within three months we can get to the first step,” Aftab reported Araqchi as saying. The prediction suggests a much slower timetable than Iranian officials described six weeks ago... Is Germany poised to break free from US? by Rodney Shakespeare | PressTV ...the Zionists, ignoring other genocides.. and, in particular, denying their own creeping genocide of Palestinians, have played upon feelings of guilt to ensure that Germany is thoroughly blamed for the War and so is amenable to aiding, in practice, the expansion of Israel into the lands of others. This has been done through subtle browbeating and much propaganda in films and television (which industries are largely controlled by Zionist interests).. Germany is waking up to European weakness, to the betrayals of the USA and to the evils of Zionism particularly in its control of the USA. Soon, Germany could be breaking free of Europe, of Zionism and of the USA... [Not bloody likely, as is convincingly explained in this piece by Ludwig Watzal] The Psychological and Physical Mutilation of Germany (Part IV), by Ingrid Zundel | Paul Eisen ...Until recently, nobody understood fully that the terror bombing of German civilians was not a "friendly fire" mistake, or the result of a bomber missing its mark. We bought the fairy tale that schools, churches, cathedrals and castles were hit only when "enemy soldiers were firing from them" or because some small town mayor "refused to surrender". Until the Internet leaked out uncensored, unfiltered information, most of the grim images and graphic accounts of the horror which rained from the skies over Germany were hidden neatly away and free from scrutiny, judgment or condemnation... Hubris Versus Wisdom, by David Krieger | Truthout ...In the Nuclear Age, humankind must not be passive in the face of the threat posed by nuclear weapons. The future of humanity and all life depends upon the outcome of the ongoing struggle between hubris and wisdom. Hubris is an ancient Greek word meaning extreme arrogance. Wisdom is cautionary good sense. Hubris is at the heart of Greek tragedy - the arrogant belief that one's power is unassailable. Wisdom counsels that no human power is impregnable... [Are you listening, Uncle Shmuel?] Afghanistan: U.S. Special Forces Guilty of War Crimes? by Matthieu Aikins | Rolling Stone ...If the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan stalls over negotiations and reverts to the “zero option” as it did in Iraq, the future of the country may well be one of covert warfare under the auspices of the CIA. The status of a regular training mission, as well as international funding, remains uncertain due to the ongoing negotiations over the Bilateral Security Agreement, which the U.S. is adamant should grant legal immunity to American forces. Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Afghanistan to meet with President Karzai and discuss the issue. Karzai refused to be pinned down and has called for a Loya Jirga – a gathering of notables – to discuss the issue this month... Clemency for Torturers, but Not for Edward Snowden, by Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic ...On torture, President Obama laudably decided against restarting what he and Attorney General Eric Holder both declared to be an official program of illegal torture. But the Obama Administration has declined to investigate and prosecute the torturers. Even if the president were within his legal rights to exercise discretion and "look forward," letting torturers go free would be a historic injustice. In fact, Obama's torture policy is itself a violation of U.S. law... Sham Israeli/Palestinian Peace Talks Continue | Stephen Lendman The Palestinians never had a legitimate peace partner. They have none now. Decades of talks went nowhere. Oslo was unconditional surrender. So were Oslo II, Wye River, Camp David, Taba, Bush's Road Map, Annapolis, and other negotiating rounds. Israel demands things its way. So does America. They're all take and no give.. Peace talks are the greatest hoax in modern times. They were stillborn from inception. Palestinians are represented by longtime Israeli collaborators. They're well rewarded for betrayal... The Main Danger to Peace and Liberty, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar ...Hillary is bad on.. everything. From foreign policy to civil liberties to you-name-it, she’s the ultimate Un-libertarian. And I’m not just talking about her formal positions on the issues, although those are horrific enough: it’s her self-righteous mien in taking those positions, her moralistic preening combined with a sensible-shoes "pragmatism" that really does more than merely irk. Indeed, it points to a fanaticism with religious roots which, as Murray Rothbard pointed out in a trenchant essay, energizes Saint Hillary with a theological fire aimed at remaking the world by stamping out "sin.".. The US-Israeli Idea of ‘Peace’ Looks A Lot Like Conquest, by John Glaser | Antiwar ...Later this week, Secretary of State John Kerry is going to Israel to follow up on so-called “peace talks.” “We and the parties remain focused on our goal of achieving a permanent agreement which ends the conflict and all claims, and creates peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” the State Department said last week. Peace eh? Juan Cole provides a round-up of recent Israeli actions to help illustrate how the government of Benjamin Netanyahu understands “peace” with the Palestinians:.. Israel’s Samson Option: the Real Nuclear Threat | Ziowiki ...once Israel acquired nuclear weapons, it became clear that they were not intended solely for adversaries in possible Arab-Israeli war. Israel let it be know that was willing to take down the entire world rather than allow the Zionist dream to come to an end. This is what is known as “the Samson Option,” named after the biblical character who destroyed his enemies by pushing down the columns of a temple, killing himself in the process.. So how did the world reach this insane situation develop? Zionists have inculcated a severe paranoia in Jews in Israel and around the world... [Looks like a promising new anti-Zionist site – the more the better to help counteract ZioNazi propaganda and outsized influence.] Shouting '9/11' in a Crowded Internet, by Micah Zenko | Foreign Policy ...Snowden will likely play an essential role in changing how people think about state surveillance and personal privacy. Tolerating U.S. officials' mischaracterization of the world as one of innumerable terror threats, and then misrepresenting their agencies as responding solely to such inflated threats, is far more damaging than the activities of any one agency, including the NSA. But beyond that, officials are learning the hard way that simply shouting "terrorism" in a crowded policy debate is no longer a convincing call to action.. Pay No Attention to That Imperialist Behind the Curtain, by Robert Scheer | Truthdig What John Kerry did this week in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is nothing short of despicable. He, and the president who appointed him, managed to honor both a vicious military dictatorship and a totalitarian medieval monarchy as examples of progress toward a more democratic Middle East, as if neither stood in contradiction to professed U.S. objectives for the region... 'The real truth about the West Bank' offers rejoinder to Danny Ayalon's hasbara lies | Mondoweiss Lara Sawalha and Dana Dajani set the record straight in Visualizing Palestine‘s new video debunking Danny Ayalon’s lies in Shlomo Blass‘s 2011 hasbara production created for the Israeli Foreign Ministry... Appeasement dooms Palestinians to everlasting misery, by Stuart Littlewood | Intifada Palestine ...Since the beginning of the Oslo process over 20 years ago, the rights of the Palestinian people have been sacrificed on the altar of so-called political progress, the glittering prize being ‘peace and security’. But that was never really on the cards. All we’ve seen is a continuous slide downhill for the Palestinians while the Israelis’ colonisation and expansion programme goes from strength to strength. “In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the expansion of settlements continues relentlessly, while the illegal Annexation Wall creates a situation that is completely at odds with both international law and the stated goals of the peace process,”.. [It’s not exactly appeasement – what the PA has done and is doing is more accurately termed collaboration. It started with Arafat’s ill-starred, and perhaps self-interested, decision to forgo the Right of Return in exchange for a promised Palestinian State. That decision sealed their fate, as the Israelis were being deceptive, as is their nature, and never had the slightest intention of giving the Palestinians a State.] Guilty demeanor: The private 9/11 emails of Noam Chomsky, by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today ...When you show someone a quote proving that he is lying, and that person just gets angrier and angrier as he repeats the lie louder and louder, something is obviously wrong. Something is obviously wrong with Noam Chomsky. Why does he act this way? My best guess: 9/11 was designed and carried out primarily by Zionists. Its primary purpose was to bring the US and the West into a long-term civilizational war against the Islamic world – a war whose major beneficiary is Greater Israel. Chomsky – a Jew who says the best period of his life was spent on a kibbutz – knows this... Top 1% Own 39% Of All Global Wealth: Hoarding Soars As We Hurtle Toward Economic Oblivion | The Economic Collapse According to a study that was just released by Boston Consulting Group, the wealthiest one percent now own 39 percent of all the wealth in the world. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent only own 1 percent of all the wealth in the world combined. The global financial system has been designed to funnel wealth to the very top, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to expand at a frightening pace... Israeli embassy in Washington tweets Islamophobic image, by Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada This morning, the official account of the Israeli embassy in Washington tweeted this astonishingly racist image. It appears designed to tap in to common tropes of Muslims as angry, irrational anti-American mobs. This is precisely the kind of image whose dominance and role in American media Edward Said traced in his classic 1981 book Covering Islam... Nov 6, 2013 BobDreyfuss: American Death Spiral in the MiddleEast | TomDispatch ...Washington’s actual standing in country after country, including its chief allies in the region, has never been weaker. Though President Obama can order raids virtually anywhere using Special Operations forces, and though he can strike willy-nilly in targeted killing actions by calling in the Predator and Reaper drones, he has become the Rodney Dangerfield of the Middle East. Not only does no one there respect the United States, but no one really fears it, either - and increasingly, no one pays it any mind at all... [The defeat of America’s neocon/ZioNazi sponsored project for world hegemony could provide the last opportunity for the US to reclaim its sanity and return to a positive role in history.] Kerry is a true man of his times, by Peter Van Buren | Asia Times Online ...Four decades after his Vietnam experience, he has achieved what will undoubtedly be the highest post of his lifetime: Secretary of State. And he's looked like a bumbler first class. Has he also been - once again - a true man of his time, of a moment in which American foreign policy, as well as its claim to global moral and diplomatic leadership, is in remarkable disarray?.. Read more...The Jewish Paradox arising from TheCurse of Zionism | Alan Hart ...What we are witnessing today is a rising, global tide of anti-Israelism. It is NOT a manifestation of anti-Semitism, meaning that it’s not being driven by prejudice against or loathing and even hatred of Jews just because they are Jews. Anti-Israelism is being provoked by Israel’s arrogance of power, its sickening self-righteousness and its contempt for international law in general and the rights of the Palestinians in particular. The danger for Jews everywhere is that anti-Israelism could be transformed into rampant and rabid anti-Semitism... [Truer words were never said. When will they (we, actually) ever learn?] Read more...Anti Zionist Zionist Dror Feiler OnThe Jewish State And His Right to Return | Gilad Atzmon ..Feiler , because he is a Jew, demands to be allowed into Israel and goes on to contend: "If this is the Jewish State, Jews of different opinions must be let in as well.” By the way, a year ago, the very same Dror Feiler disinvited the adorable Col. Ann Wright from joining his Jews-only boat to Gaza. I guess that time is ripe to expose the horribly flawed, tribal ideology that has settled itself at the very heart of our solidarity movement... [Updated with responses from Feiler and Atzmon. As usual, Atzmon wins hands down.] Read more...Nuclear Negotiations and America’sMoment of Truth About Iran | Going to Tehran America’s Iran policy is at a crossroads. Washington can abandon its counterproductive insistence on Middle Eastern hegemony, negotiate a nuclear deal grounded in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and get serious about working with Tehran to broker a settlement to the Syrian conflict. In the process, the United States would greatly improve its ability to shape important outcomes there. Alternatively, America can continue on its present path, leading ultimately to strategic irrelevance in one of the world’s most vital regions—with negative implications for its standing in Asia as well...Read more... Statewatch "Observatory": In defense of freedom and democracy ..The EU is currently developing anew five year strategy for justice and home affairs and security policy for2009-2014. The proposals set out by the shadowy "Future Group" set upby the Council of the European Union include a range of highly controversialmeasures including new technologies of surveillance, enhanced cooperation withthe United States and harnessing the "digital tsunami". In the wordsof the EU Council presidency: "Every object the individual uses, everytransaction they make and almost everywhere they go will create a detaileddigital record. This will generate a wealth of information.. and create hugeopportunities for more effective and productive public security efforts."..[Orwell lives!] Readmore... Privacy International files OECDcomplaints against telcos for role in UK mass surveillance program | PrivacyInternational Privacy International today has filed formalcomplaints with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD) in the UK against some of the world’s leading telecommunicationcompanies, for providing assistance to British spy agency GCHQ in the massinterception of internet and telephone traffic passing through undersea fibreoptic cables...Read more... AIPAC, AJC won’t suspend Iransanctions lobbying; ADL willing | Jewish Telegraphic Agency AIPAC and the American JewishCommittee refused a White House request to suspend lobbying for new sanctionson Iran. Top National Security Council staffers in an Oct. 29 meeting had askedthe American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the AJC to suspend for 60 dayslobbying for new congressional legislation that would intensify sanctions. Theyalso made the request to the Anti-Defamation League and the Conference ofPresidents of Major American Jewish Organizations...[Vampires aren’t in the habit ofpassing up opportunities to satisfy their thirst.] Read more...America's forked tongue on Iran, byKaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online Against a backdrop oflong-standing animosity and unresolved disputes between Iran and the UnitedStates, the rally in Tehran marking the 34th anniversary of the 1979 takeoverof the US embassy there has taken place at a crucial time for the marathonnuclear negotiations due to resume in Geneva next week. The collectiveexpression of antipathy towards the Western power to some extent mirrors theavalanche of anti-Iran hostilities in the US media, particularly during thepast few weeks...Read more... Russia implores UN to take controlof Libya’s ‘unguarded’ yellowcake uranium | RT News Russia has asked the UNSecurity Council to look into the dangers posed by a badly-guarded stockpile ofyellowcake uranium in the Libyan Desert. Recent reports have said that Al-Qaedais interested in the supply as a potential nuclear weapon component. “I havespoken with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon about the issue, and asked him totake it up with the United Nations mission in Libya,” Russia’s UN envoy, VitalyChurkin, told ITAR-TASS news.. The UN envoy also stressed that Libya remains anissue of “concern” as it acts as a source of proliferation of weapons andmaterials related to the production of weapons of mass destruction throughoutthe region...[Uncle Shmuel always leaves a messbehind for others to clean up.] Read more... A Global Ban on Left-Wing Politics |George Monbiot That’s what the new rulesbeing smuggled into trade agreements are delivering.. Remember that referendumabout whether we should create a single market with the United States? Youknow, the one that asked whether corporations should have the power to strikedown our laws? No, I don’t either...Read more... Hamas appoints first femaleEnglish-language spokesperson | IMRA The Palestinian Hamasmovement has appointed its first female English-language spokesperson, as partof a new strategy to engage with Western media. The new spokesperson, IsraaAl-Mudallal, 23, a writer and a journalist, said: “I will address Western andIsraeli media, and I will work on changing the media discourse and give adifferent picture of Palestine and Gaza.” She added that she recognized thatachieving her goals needed many years of hard work, promising to talk to theworld from a humanitarian angle, not a religious one...[They’re learning, but they have along way to go - they’re up against Leviathan.] Readmore...Mossad Stews Large Operation. Where?| Roi Tov ...on November 4, 2013, the Mossadapproached the Knesset—the Israeli Parliament—asking for a special, one-timebudget. How is this unprecedented event related to a "BenevolentAutumn?" Where is the attack to take place? A sure method of recognizingan unjustifiable war is listening to the aggressor's rhetoric. If he claims tobe searching for ways to "finance the war," then the event is notdefensive in nature and thus it is not legitimate...Readmore... Hagel tells Goldberg: Netanyahuthreats brought Iran to the table, by Ira Glunts | Mondoweiss ...Hagel, after being humiliated inhis Senate confirmation hearings because of previous mild criticism of Israel,assured his Senate adversaries that as Secretary of Defense he would be aspro-Israel as the Israel lobby desires. If Goldberg’s interview is anyindication, Hagel has more than fulfilled that promise...Read more... NYTimes Mentions Israeli Nukes byRobert Parry | Consortium News ...The lack of objectivity inmainstream U.S. reporting about the Middle East – and particularly issues relatingto Israel – has distorted how many Americans understand the issues in thatstrategic region. Pro-Israeli propagandists have been particularly effective inintimidating editors and writers with accusations that they are “anti-Israel”or “anti-Semitic” if they don’t adopt Israel’s preferred narratives ondevelopments in the Middle East...Read more... Iran calls for global nucleardisarmament | Veterans News Total elimination of nukes‘is the only absolute guarantee against their threat or use,’ says IslamicRepublic’s UN envoy...Read more... Nov 5, 2013 Imploding the Myth of Israel, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism... [No one has more cred than Hedges in reporting on the Middle East. I have only one quibble with this otherwise devastatingly accurate piece – Israel was conceived as a fascist project, was born a fascist State, and has become more fascist with each passing year. Zionists, including the majority of Israelis, are rightly referred to as ZioNazis, although I honestly don't think the Germans were quite as bad.] A Manifesto for the Truth, by Edward Snowden | Antiwar In a very short time, the world has learned much about unaccountable secret agencies and about sometimes illegal surveillance programs. Sometimes the agencies even deliberately try to hide their surveillance of high officials or the public. While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders – this is what the currently available documents suggest – we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem in need of global solutions... 42 Years for Snowden Docs Release, Free All Now Out of reported 50,000 pages (or files, not clear which), about 446 500 pages (>1% 1%) have been released over 5 months beginning June 5, 2012. At this rate, 89 100 pages per month, it will take 47 42 years for full release. Snowden will be 77 72 years old, his reporters hoarding secrets all dead... Global Justice in the 21st Century | Richard Falk ...The UN is a geopolitical actor that is behaviorally manipulated by money and hard power on many fundamental issues, including Palestine/Israel; this stark acknowledgement severely restricts the effectiveness of the UN with regard to questions of justice. Fortunately, this is not the whole story. The UN is also a normative actor that articulates the grievances of peoples and governments, influences public discourse with respect to the global policy agenda, and has great and distinctive symbolic leverage in establishing the legitimacy of claims. In other words, the UN can say what is right, without being necessarily able to do what is right... America’s Lead Iran Negotiator Misrepresents U.S. Policy (and International Law) to Congress | Going to Tehran Last month, while testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Wendy Sherman—Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and the senior U.S. representative in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran—said, with reference to Iranians, “We know that deception is part of the DNA.” This statement goes beyond orientalist stereotyping; it is, in the most literal sense, racist. And it evidently was not a mere “slip of the tongue”: a former Obama administration senior official told us that Sherman has used such language before about Iranians... [Yet another traitor (yawn) in our Israel-first government. And, as is the pattern with tribal Jews, her remark about deception is pure projection. See Brother Nathanael Kapner’s rundown of the personnel in Kerry’s State Department (I know - Bro Kapner is a bit bizarre, but he frequently comes up with some good research. Here he enumerates the whole synagogue).] ...Israel has nearly a veto power over any agreement that might ever be reached. Reuters reported on October 12, 2013, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President François Hollande to tell them “sanctions must not be eased.” The same message has been delivered ad nauseam by Netanyahu et al. to President Obama. But that is not all. Israel fortifies its position by pressuring the US Congress, mainly through its numerous lobby groups and its surrogate Senators and Congressmen. The Jewish Daily Forward reported on October 25, 2013, that for “members of Congress, the pressure is to not just maintain, but to increase the current far-reaching economic and trade sanctions against Iran... [What does it tell us that the various power centers in the US (not to mention the other English speaking countries, France et al) - political, financial, the media etc. – are effectively under the control of a foreign power? And when is this fact going to filter through to the public in those countries? And what is likely to happen when it does? Is this why the ZioNazis are so desperate to maintain their grip?] Four U.S. Jewish organizations are said to be giving the Obama administration a 60-day interval to get Iran to comply with western demands before the four groups turn the screws on Congress to tighten sanctions against Iran. Is that really how things work in Washington?.. [How nice of the Sanhedrin to give their boy a little slack. After all, hand-picked by the Chicago Jewish political mafia, he’s their favorite shabbas goy.] ...The fact that the Israel lobby has continued to aggressively push for additional sanctions, and that Congress is just about ready to pull that trigger, might have something to do with Rouhani’s sagging confidence. Republican politicians and right-wing commentators are writing Op-Eds dismissing negotiations as a waste of time and urging the United States to continue with sanctions and even to just cut the bull and bomb Iran. These are not encouraging signals... ...For too long Western thinking on sanctions has been flawed by the fallacy that without the pressure of sanctions, Iran will fail to implement whatever voluntary commitments it may offer and will not comply with its non-proliferation obligations. This fallacy stems from an assumption that Iran has no interest in demonstrating that its nuclear intentions are peaceful and in complying with its treaty obligations. In reality, the opposite is true... Israel and the dangers of ethnic nationalism, by Jonathan Cook | The View from Nazareth ..Zionism was a reaction to the extreme ethnic nationalisms that dominated – and nearly destroyed – Europe last century. It is therefore hardly surprising that it mirrors their faults. In exporting to the Middle East this kind of nationalism, Zionism was always bound to play a negative role in the region... Obama: A Drone Terrorist? by Ludwig Watzal | MCW News The latest killing, of the Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, by a U.S. drone showed again the sovereign contempt displayed by President Obama toward Pakistan’s sovereignty. Five or six people, who joined Mehsud at a mosque, were also killed. The killing came at a time when the negotiations between the Taliban and the Pakistani government were scheduled to start about a peace settlement of this ongoing internal conflict. Pakistan’s interior minister Chaudhry Nisar called the drone attack a “murder of peace”. The Taliban replaced Mehsud with Khan Said and vowed revenge... The CIA "Family Jewels," Then and Now | Secrecy News In 1973, the Director of Central Intelligence ordered CIA officials to prepare a descriptive account of all CIA activities that were “outside the legislative charter of this Agency,” which is to say unauthorized or illegal. The purpose of the exercise was to identify operations that had “flap potential,” meaning that they could embarrass the Agency or embroil it in controversy. The resulting 700-page CIA compendium of unlawful domestic surveillance, wiretapping, mail opening and detention actions became known as “the family jewels.”.. The Gaza Strip is closed and more besieged than ever, by Maria del Mar Fernández | International Solidarity Movement Israel continues to maintain a full, tight closure by land, sea, and air, on the only coastal enclave left to Palestine. This has become even worse since July, as the Egyptian government closes the Rafah crossing on a regular basis and has destroyed many tunnels through which the inhabitants of Gaza could receive food, medicines, fuel and construction materials that Israel bans from entering or allows in insufficient quantities... Police State Britain | Stephen Lendman Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) operates like NSA. They work cooperatively. They're out-of-control rogue agencies. They spy on their own populations. They do it globally. They conduct espionage. They collect enormous amounts of personal information. They do it illegally.. Freedom in Britain sustained another body blow. It's fast disappearing like in America. Both nations are more police states than democracies... Israel pulling NSA strings: James Fetzer | PressTV Press TV has conducted an interview with James Fetzer, Professor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota Duluth (Madison) about the United States government spying on American citizens as well as eavesdropping on several world leaders... White House Expected to Ease Sanctions Targeting Syria, by Franklin Lamb | CounterPunch ...Pressure on Obama from Putin is part of the ‘price tag’ for Russia’s role in bailing out the American president, whose chemical weapons ‘redline’ became something of an albatross. But another reason for the relaxation is that the White House believes it needs to communicate to Damascus that prospects for better relations, and possibly even some cooperation, are not completely dead, despite the 32-month crisis still raging in the Syrian Arab Republic... Who Attacked Ghouta?: The Conclusion | Whoghouta An analysis of all evidence relating to the chemical attack in Ghouta on August 21st 2013 - An online collaborative effort... Richard Falk: Situation in Gaza is almost catastrophic | Palestinian Media Agency An independent United Nations human rights expert on Wednesday held a press conference and warned that developments in the Middle East region, "particularly in Egypt, have made the situation in Gaza one that is a point of near catastrophe." Addressing journalists at UN Headquarters, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Richard Falk noted that because of the situation in Egypt, Palestinians now face increased isolation, lack of access to healthcare and other services, and are facing an uncertain future... Nov 4, 2013 Peace is war: After the Oslo Accords, by Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera ...20 years ago the PLO accepted to fully surrender to Israel and accept its colonisation of Palestine in what came to be known as the Oslo Accords. The abandonment of the anti-colonial struggle would be first formalised with the unofficial dissolution of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, especially the "Liberation" part of its name, and its re-emergence as the Palestinian National Authority (PA), an authority that no longer sought to liberate anything, much less offer any resistance to colonialism. Instead, the PA would offer its services to Israel by collaborating with its forces in suppressing any Palestinian resistance to Jewish colonisation... Descent into Chaos: The United States of Confusion and Disorder, by Franklin “Chuck” Spinney | CounterPunch The US exit strategy from Afghanistan is emerging …. and the picture is not pretty. Nevertheless, it is a revealing microcosm of what now passes for governance in the United States of Confusion and Disorder. Consider please, this analysis.. Murphy explains why “The US war in Afganistan could turn into a pumpkin as soon as the middle of November,” because the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan are now fighting for the favors of Al Qaeda!.. Breaking Bad: America Has Used Walter White Logic Since 9/11, by Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic ...We see ourselves as exceptional. Often times we behave as if the rules that apply to the rest of the world, rules we want constraining them, don't and needn't really apply to us. We're not a regular nation, not like the Chinese or the Brazilians or even the French. Take it from The New York Times, our paper of record. Other nations forcing water into a prisoner's lungs is torture. When we do it? Enhanced interrogation. America doesn't torture. We're the good guys!.. The out-of-control NSA, by Eugene Robinson | The Washington Post Let’s get this straight: The National Security Agency (NSA) snooped on the cellphone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Perhaps for as long as a decade? And President Obama didn’t know a thing about it? Either somebody’s lying or Obama needs to acknowledge that the NSA, in its quest for omniscience beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, is simply out of control... Avigail and Shimon | Paul Eisen Avigail Abarbanel who is desperate "to separate Israel/Zionism from Judaism/Jewishness", says that Shimon Gapso, Mayor of Upper Nazareth is a racist. Well Avigail, who's editor of a Jews-only book, may be right, but Gapso, who 's Mayor of a Jews-only city, at least tells the truth... 5 Broken Cameras star among those shot in Bilin by Israeli forces | Maan News Agency Iyad Burnat, star of the Oscar-nominated film 5 Broken Cameras, was among those shot by Israeli forces during the weekly protest in his village of Bilin on Friday. Israeli forces opened fire on a demonstration against the separation wall four in Bilin on Friday afternoon, injuring four individuals including Iyad Burnat and two other members of his family. Dozens of others suffered from excessive tear gas inhalation... Iraq Today: America's Genocidal Legacy | Stephen Lendman America came to Iraq to stay. Contingents of US forces remain. America's embassy cost over a billion dollars to build. It's the world's largest. It's inside Baghdad's Green Zone. It includes 21 buildings. Extraordinary security measures protect them. They're on 104 acres of land. It's the equivalent of 80 football fields... Syria rejects Kerry's comments on peace talks | Al Jazeera Syria has said comments of US Secretary of State could cause proposed peace talks on the 31-month civil war to fail as John Kerry suggests Washington and its allies shared the goal of a handover of power. The Syrian foreign ministry said in a statement issued on Sunday that remarks by Kerry "are a flagrant violation of Syrian affairs and an aggression against the Syrian people's right to decide their future.".. Barak Obama: hated, despised and humiliated both at home and abroad | The Vineyard of the Saker These are bad times for Barak Obama, and humiliations seems to fall upon him every day. Yesterday it what a double-whammy: first NBC and the WSJ announced that Obama's approval rating were at a historical low and then Forbes announced that Obama's most hated adversary, Vladimir Putin, had displaced him in the Forbes world's most powerful person list and was now the most powerful person on the planet, followed by Obama and right after him Xi Jinping... Poverty in America Is Mainstream, by Mark Rank | NYT Few topics in American society have more myths and stereotypes surrounding them than poverty, misconceptions that distort both our politics and our domestic policy making. They include the notion that poverty affects a relatively small number of Americans, that the poor are impoverished for years at a time, that most of those in poverty live in inner cities, that too much welfare assistance is provided and that poverty is ultimately a result of not working hard enough. Although pervasive, each assumption is flat-out wrong... [At some point it will begin to come clear that Uncle Shmuel is dealings the cards. That will be the beginning of the repetition of an age-old pattern.] Chomksy/Vltchek: “On Western Terrorism,” by Kevin Barrett | Veterans Today ...if Chomsky and the other left gatekeepers had exposed 9/11 early on, it would have been relatively easy to get tens of millions of Americans into the streets demanding Cheney’s head on a platter, a 95% slash in the Pentagon budget, the termination of the CIA, the end of the US empire, and the end of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. No opportunity for a war on Iraq would have even arisen. Millions of lives would have been saved. Chomsky’s ostensible objectives would have been achieved... The Role of the BBC in the Syrian Conflict | YouTube Former heads of state gather in Rome, encourage EU to spy on 'intolerant' citizens | Washington Times A group of former heads of state and government leaders have gathered in Rome, and they have advice for the European Union: Use surveillance units to monitor the “intolerant.” Where Law Stands on the Wall | Sabbah Report In June 2002, the Israeli cabinet approved the construction of a “continuous fence” in the West Bank. In July 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared this barrier illegal, choosing to refer to it as a “wall”. Their decision included three specific reasons for the wall’s illegality:. 9 years on, and despite wide condemnation, little has been done by the international community to hold the Israeli government accountable for its ongoing disregard of international law... Hamas Downs Israeli Drone | Roi Tov On November 3, 2013, both Hamas and the IDF announced that an Israeli Elbit Skylark drone had been downed. The similarities in the reports ended at this point. Hamas claimed it had downed the drone, while the IDF claimed that it sank into the Mediterranean Sea, creating a new version of a submarine-drone... Does the Dollar Have a Future? by Mike Whitney | CounterPunch ...The Fed has distorted prices across the board, which is why the main stock indices are climbing to new highs every day on the back of an economy that has less people in the workforce than it did 10 years ago. What a joke. And people wonder why foreign lenders are getting nervous? What China wants from the United States is simple. They want proof that the US hasn’t lost its mind... [Good luck with that] Nov 3, 2013 Israel Buys the US Congress: Sabotaging the US-Iran Peace Negotiations, by James Petras | Voltaire Net ...Precisely because of the initial favorable response among the participants, the Israeli government escalated its propaganda war against Iran. Its agents in the US Congress, the mass media and in the Executive branch moved to undermine the peace process. What is at stake is Israel’s capacity to wage proxy wars using the US military and its NATO allies against any government challenging Israeli military supremacy in the Middle East, its violent annexation of Palestinian territory and its ability to attack any adversary with impunity... The House of Rothschild, by Dean Henderson | Veterans Today ...Author Frederick Morton estimates that by 1850 the Rothschilds were worth over $10 billion. The old axiom “money begets more money” certainly holds true. Researchers believe that the Rothschild fortune today exceeds $100 trillion.. If we wish we make the world a better place and to usher in a new consciousness; we must study, discuss and expose the source of global warfare, depopulation schemes, poverty and environmental degradation. The head of the serpent is the House of Rothschild... [You can buy a lot of power with $100 trillion, not to mention other things.] Jim Dean: Israel lobby trying to ‘undermine’ Iran nuclear talks | Press TV/Veterans Today In an interview with Press TV on Thursday, Veterans Today columnist Jim Dean said there are some efforts by the Israel lobby in the US for using “military option” against Iran. However, he said, the United States is now focusing on the peace in the Middle East because it is “critical” to Washington’s “economic survival.” The US Senate is ratcheting up pressure on the White House to tighten sanctions against Iran in line with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand for more pressure against Tehran... Forget Democrazy, Give Me Safe Borders, by Sharmine Narwani | Al Akhbar Almost three years after the Arab Spring began its region-wide sweep - ostensibly in search of democratic change - scant attention has been paid to one of its most dangerous consequences: the fraying of borders. Weapons, militias, foreign Special Forces, smugglers, gangs and crooks now regularly traverse borders from the Levant to the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf. And these territorial infractions across Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and other states will inhibit prospects for “democracy” more than any single development in the region... House of Saud May Throw Oily Spanner into US-Iran Talks Gambit, by Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation The Saudi spat with its historic Washington ally has several ways of playing out. Jilted over American «double standards» in the Middle East (how ironic is that?), senior members of the House of Saud, including intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, have hinted that the oil-rich kingdom may shop elsewhere for its billion-dollar weapons toys that it traditionally sources from Washington. Given the parlous state of the US industrial economy, such a loss of exports in a key revenue sector, would be a nasty blow... Russell Brand and the right to vote debate | Jonathan Cook One of the themes of the criticism of Russell Brand for his revolutionary talk and dismissal of the point of voting is that he is spurning a right that his and our forebears struggled for. When he turns his back on the corrupt political system, this line of thinking goes, he dishonours those, like the Chartists and the suffragettes, who “fought and died” to win subsequent generations the ability to choose their political leaders... Israel to drill for oil in the West Bank, by Jonathan Cook | Al Jazeera ...The company.. now believes that the well is sitting on exploitable reserves of as much as 3.53 billion barrels - about a seventh of Qatar's proven oil reserves. Only one cloud looms on the horizon. It is unclear how much of this new-found oil wealth actually belongs to Israel. The well sits on the so-called Green Line, the armistice line of 1948 that formally separates Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories... Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts | Scientific American ...In his new book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover the innate power of human emotion to connect people with each other, which he argues is the path to living the good life... [As Shambhala Buddhism puts it, everyone is "basically good." We know this from our own experience. Why is it then that the scum rises to the top? To understand that requires spiritual awareness, something sadly in short supply in a world drowning in the swamp of materialism.] Israel Attacks Syria and Gaza | Stephen Lendman Israel gets away with daily crimes of war, against humanity and slow-motion genocide. It does so with impunity. It does it because world leaders able to act do nothing. Failure to hold Israel accountable reflects complicity with crimes too great to ignore. They've persisted for decades... Crime of Guantanamo Continuing Under Obama, by Sherwood Ross | OpEd News In the CBS "Sixty Minutes" broadcast that airs November 3rd, a Guantanamo prisoner is heard to cry out, "Tell the world the truth!" and "Let the world hear what is happening." The truth is that President Obama has broken his 2008 pledge to shut Guantanamo down as it has become infamous as a synonym for injustice and torture---torture that is continuing today under President Obama. But there is more to it than that... Deals linked to settlements in occupied territories could be ‘criminal,’ UN expert warns | UN News Centre An independent United Nations human rights expert today warned that financial institutions and real estate companies involved with housing settlements in occupied Palestinian territory – which are considered illegal under international law – may be held criminally accountable. Addressing journalists at UN Headquarters, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, reiterated that the settlements are unlawful according to the Fourth Geneva Convention... Where Is the Ethical Leadership Over Syria? by Desmond Tutu | Palestine Chronicle ...Why is it that any initiative which should ease the pain of Syrians seems so grindingly slow to take hold in the minds of our leaders, let alone be implemented? Impartial humanitarian access is still virtually absent in most of the country. Refugee services in neighboring Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq are still woefully underfunded. We are being promised a peace conference for more than a year. It keeps being pushed back... Introduction to Practicalities of Return, by BADIL Resource Center | Palestine Chronicle The right of return for Palestinian refugees is a fundamental issue in the realization of Palestinian rights, yet it is always labeled as an unrealistic ‘obstacle’ by Israel and within the international community. As a ‘right’ in both legal and moral terms, the right of return is undeniable, but what actually is needed for its implementation? This short documentary introduces some of the questions around the issue and presents some ideas for possible solutions... The Olive Tree, by Paul Balles | Intifada Palestine This is the olive picking season. Like other harvests, it should be a season of joy. However, the land-grabbing occupiers of Palestine have imbued Israeli youth with the destructive arrogance of conceited, swaggering, self-loving Jews.. Local human rights groups allege that more than 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967... Settler Violence Season, by Yousef Munayyer | The Daily Beast For Palestinians, the olive tree has a special significance. Perhaps more than anything else, it symbolizes their connection with the land, rooted in centuries of Palestine’s fertile soil and tended to by generation upon generation of Palestinian farmers. The autumn, which brings with it the olive harvest, is a highly anticipated and celebrated season for Palestinian agriculture. Anyone who has ever sat at a Palestinian table for a meal knows the centrality of the crop; olives and their golden oil are omnipresent in the Palestinian kitchen. During these months, Palestinians descend on their olive groves for the annual tradition of the harvest and the collection of ripe olives... Cut Zionist genocide, feed Americans instead, by Finian Cunningham | Intifada Palestine Some 47 million poor Americans – one in four children – see their already meager federal food allowances slashed this week. The cuts amount to $4 billion a year over the next decade. That $4 billion figure should ring a bell. It is equivalent to the official annual subvention that the US government sends to Israel – courtesy of the American taxpayer... Beleaguered Palestinian village of Wadi Fuqeen | Redress Information & Analysis Sandwiched between the Apartheid Wall and the illegal Jewish squatter colony of Beitar Illit in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian village of Wadi Fuqeen has been at the receiving end of Israel’s sewage war, which is causing terrible damage to crops and poisoning the land, and has been told that it must close its only recreational park. As if that were not enough, the Israeli occupiers have escalated their harassment of the villagers by issuing demolition orders to farmers – the thieves instructing the rightful owners to destroy their own property... [The Israelis may have been born human, but most of them have voluntarily seceded.] America: A Nation of Fools, by Sami Jamil Jadallah | Veterans Today ...Rather than have other nations send their police here to the USA to train, we send our police to a nation of common land thieves, to a country where administrative detention can last for years without any charges being files, to a country where a piece of paper from the security agency can send you to years in jail without ever having a chance to review or access the evidence against you. You guessed it Israel. Thanks to our indifference we are the richest nation yet with the largest number of poor. Frankly there is something very wrong with us as a nation and as people. Our dignity as workers and as retirees is no more... Nov 2, 2013 Professor Joseph Massad: “Peace Is War: Negotiations, Israeli Settler Colonialism, and the Palestinians” | ICH Columbia Professor Joseph Massad unravels the obfuscatory language of “peace” the Zionist movement and Israel have always used to mask their aggressive and colonial intentions towards Palestine. Watch the video for the full lecture, followed by a question and answer session with the audience in which Massad addresses questions about the current situation in Palestine, armed struggle, the power of the Israel lobby and the achievements of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement... Propaganda & Ignorance in Reporting on Iran, by Nima Shirazi | Muftah Whenever tensions over Iran’s nuclear energy program appear to dissipate and rational, fact-based reporting begins to replace agenda-driven rhetoric in the press, the folks over at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington D.C. think tank that specializes in producing highly speculative assessments of the nuclear capabilities of countries loathed by the U.S. government, release a new study full of hypotheticals, allegations, and innuendo intended to restore alarmism to front pages and TelePrompters... Diplomacy is key to a deal with Iran, by Paul Pillar | The Washington Post There are popular fundamental misconceptions about Iran’s nuclear program: that the Iranian leadership has a fixed goal of acquiring a nuclear weapon, that if left alone Iran would build such a weapon and that this presumed ambition will be thwarted only if the rest of the world imposes enough costs and barriers. These misconceptions infuse much of the U.S. discourse on Iran, as reflected in frequent, erroneous references to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” These mistakes encourage a posture toward Iran that makes it more, not less, likely that Tehran will decide someday to build a bomb... Pro-Israel Groups in Limelight of Iran Policy, by Marsha Cohen | LobeLog Last Tuesday (Oct. 29) administration officials met with what the Israeli daily Haaretz describes as a ”a coterie of Jewish leaders.” Only four Jewish organizations were represented: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); the American Jewish Committee (AJC); and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations... [I imagine it would be like meeting with a delegation of ravenous zombies, albeit well-spoken, well-dressed zombies, ready to pounce.] Unmanned: America's Drone Wars | YouTube Highly anticipated documentary from director Robert Greenwald on the impact of the U.S. Drone Wars, at home and abroad... In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false... ...Drones are touted as the most precise and humane weapons platform in the history of warfare. The technological advance is significant, but covert drone strikes carry costs for civilians and local communities even as they become a policy norm. Blinded by the promise of this technology and reports of short-term effectiveness in killing militants, policymakers are failing to ask hard questions of the drones program... ...Covert Drone War provides a full dataset of all known US drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Our analysis has changed the public’s understanding of US actions and revealed that under Obama over 3,000 people, including nearly 500 civilians, have been killed by drones... Read more... ADL's Foxman 'Loses Sleep' Over Signs of U.S. Isolationism on Syria, Iran | Algemeiner Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, warned attendees at the ADL’s 100th anniversary conference on Thursday in New York City that it is “America and its role in the world” today that causes him to “lose some sleep” as U.S. leaders embrace a more isolationist approach to world affairs. Addressing the conference Foxman provided a sweeping analysis of U.S. interaction with the world and drew parallels between today’s approach to Syria and to Iran. “If what we are seeing now is the beginning of a deep change in American foreign policy it will be bad for the Jews,” Foxman said... [“bad for the Jews” – that’s all that matters to these pathetic, paranoid self-obsessed creatures, as they blindly go about ensuring that, yes, it will happen again.] ADL rebukes Kerry, and - Ambassador Power embraces ADL, by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss The other day the Anti-Defamation League rebuked Secretary of State John Kerry for implying that Netanyahu is using “fear tactics” to muscle the United States to act against Iran. The ADL’s director said that it was inappropriate for Kerry to be criticizing Netanyahu publicly– even though Kerry never mentioned Netanyahu’s name. That’s a rule, Israel must never be criticized by the US government. Well, today Samantha Power, who works in the State Department under Kerry, is putting her arms around.. the Anti Defamation League... What is Holocaust denial? | Paul Eisen The IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) has come up with a working definition of what is Holocaust denial. Well that's great because for some time now a lot of people have long time wrestled with that problem. So here below is the piece about the IHRA definition followed by attempts by Daniel McGowan and Barbara Kulaszka... NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations explained by Ewen Macaskill and Gabriel Dance | The Guardian When Edward Snowden met journalists in his cramped room in Hong Kong's Mira hotel in June, his mission was ambitious. Amid the clutter of laundry, meal trays and his four laptops, he wanted to start a debate about mass surveillance. He succeeded beyond anything the journalists or Snowden himself ever imagined. His disclosures about the NSA resonated with Americans from day one. But they also exploded round the world... Snowden Responds to German Parliament Invitation, November 1, 2013 | Cryptome USA Forces Aircraft on Israel | Roi Tov ...the secret part of the meeting between Hagel and Ya'alon, was something like "Listen, we need a favor. We must sell Ospreys, but nobody wants them. Buy a few with our military help money; kill a few Palestinians with them so that they would be labeled 'tested in combat by the IDF.'" "No Problemo, that's what friends are for (and it is your money, you fool!)," Ya'alon said, and added, "do they come with freebies?".. Gerald Clark’s Nakba: A Masterpiece for Palestine | Gilad Atzmon The other day I learned that Gerald Clark, pretty much an unfamiliar name to me, was about to launch a Jazz suite dedicated to the Nakba and the Palestinian people. I was intrigued, I contacted Gerald and offered my help. A day later, the album found its way to my letterbox... The Mind of the Poor, by Lawrence Davidson | To the Point Analyses Most of the poverty in the United States is artificially manufactured. It is poverty created in the pursuit of "free market ideals," expressed in recent times by the imposition of neoliberal economic policies -- the sort of policies that cut taxes on the wealthy, do away with fiscal and other business regulations, undermine the social safety net and erode middle-class stability - all while singing the praises of self-reliance and individual responsibility. As a result we have done very well in making the rich richer and the poor both poorer and more numerous... 90 Years from Now, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom On the occasion of my 90th birthday, a panel discussion of eminent historians took place in Tel Aviv’s Tsavta hall on the question: “Will Israel Exist in Another 90 Years?” There follows a slightly shortened version of my own remarks. A full video of the discussion with English translation will be published as soon as possible... [Israel has a shorter half life than that. The world will not tolerate such a viper in its bosom for much longer. BTW, Happy Birthday!] An interview with a Palestinian in the Israeli media: Confidence-destroying measures, by Adam Keller | Crazy Country Even though the Palestinian speaks impeccable Hebrew, interviewer and interviewee seem to speak two different languages.. To a society which is in conflict and war, it is natural to believe that our boys are the good guys, and theirs are nasty murderers. Israelis have difficulty understanding why Palestinians regard the thousands of their imprisoned compatriots as national heroes, freedom fighters... Drying up Ideological Wellsprings of Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Nicola Nasser | Palestine Chronicle Gradually, awareness that de-Zionization of the US and European foreign policy as well as the internal policies of the State of Israel has become a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East is steadily taking roots in Israeli and world public opinion and consciousness... Lebanon Haunted by the Ghosts of Civil War: Israel on the Lookout by Ramzy Baroud | CounterPunch Throughout the years, Lebanon’s demographics have experienced periodic influx. But particularly in the last two years, the demographic shift has been so overwhelming due to the flood of Syrian refugees in desperate need for shelter. The situation is highly charged, if not perilous, considering Lebanon’s unmanageable sectarian balances, let alone the direct involvement of Lebanese parties in the brutal Syrian war. If not treated with utter sensitivity and political wisdom, Lebanon’s vastly changing demographics will not bode well in a country of exceedingly fractious sectarian politics... [Uncle Shmuel’s accomplishments: death and destruction, pain and suffering, loss and grief] Despite Iranian Concessions, War Hawks Spread Fear of Deceptive Quest for Nukes, by John Glaser | Antiwar It’s been really hard for Iran hawks these days. With a reformist Iranian president initiating unprecedented diplomacy with the U.S. and offering major concessions on its nuclear program, the best they’ve been able to come up with is that it’s all a sham. Rouhani is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists. He may seem nice on the outside, but he is really evil. This diplomatic push to resolve longstanding disputes with the West is all a ploy so they can build a nuclear bomb and destroy Israel... [Projection, projection, projection. Actually, I kinda hope they’re right. It could save 80 million innocent people from an attempt by the Israelis to destroy their country, as they have done elsewhere.] Big Brother's New Crystal Ball: Washington Develops Online Data Mining Program to Predict Global Political Unrest, by Cyril Mychalejko | OpEd News The outrage regarding Washington's National Security Agency spying, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has spread across the world, upsetting diplomatic relations and threatening to shift balances of global power. Yet beyond this spying network lies another, lesser known pilot operation within the NSA called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's Open Source Indicators Program... ♫ Souad Massi: Nebki | YouTube Group Led By Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Pushes Congress To Undermine Iran Talks, by Ben Armbruster | Think Progress The Republican Jewish Coalition — led by GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson — is asking its members to call their senators and urge them to pass a new round of sanctions on Iran amid efforts from top Obama administration officials to persuade Congress to delay such measures to allow time for negotiations with the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program to “gain traction... [What an ugly, creepy little shmuck] Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Spying on Allies Shows "Institutional Obsession" with Surveillance | Democracy Now! The spat over U.S. spying on Germany grew over the weekend following reports the National Security Agency has monitored the phone calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel since as early as 2002, before she even came to office. The NSA also spied on Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, after he refused to support the Iraq War. NSA staffers working out of the U.S. embassy in Berlin reportedly sent their findings directly to the White House. The German tabloid Bild also reports President Obama was made aware of Merkel’s phone tap in 2010, contradicting his apparent claim to her last week that he would have stopped the spying had he known... International scholars and authors criticize Brian Klug as keynote speaker at Jewish museum Berlin | BICSA ..This is hilarious. The Holy Inquisition is all in a kerfluffle that a heretic has been invited inside the sanctum sanctorum. The sacred task of enforcing ludicrous dogma is so taxing. “And I could have been at Madame Sophie’s enjoying myself, but we have our onerous duty to perform. Dog is such a severe taskmaster.”.. Israel Attacks in Syria | Roi Tov Basing an analysis on a breaking news item is risky; yet, this time it was justified despite the only two sources I found being based on the same report. Today, October 31, 2013, the largest paid Hebrew newspaper (Yediot Ahronot) and a leading portal well connected to army sources (walla!) reported on a successful attack on a military base near the port of Latakia in Syria. They claim that Russia al-Yum, a Russian channel in Arabic, quoted the same source. At the time these lines were written, there was no confirmation of the event by Western sources... UK’s devotion to racist Israeli regime, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis A letter from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) recently flopped into my Inbox for forwarding to MPs, urging them to write to the Foreign Office and ask what action was being taken to address the growing humanitarian disaster in Gaza. I edited it slightly and added, to my own MP, that we do mean “action” not the usual mealy-mouthed drivel from Messrs William Hague and Alistair Burt. “It is high time the British government demonstrated human decency and discharged its humanitarian obligations in the Holy Land. Lack of meaningful action to end the suffering is an utter disgrace not only on HMG [Her Majesty's Government] but the entire British people.”.. Britain must apologise for the Balfour Declaration | Redress Information & Analysis Ever since UK Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour pronounced the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 1917, promising a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, Palestinians have endured ongoing violation of their basic human rights. With only 67 words, seismic changes were forced on the Palestinians, making contradictory, irreconcilable and ambiguous promises: one nation promised another nation the land of a third nation... ♫ Harald Peterstorfer´s "Garden of Love" by RIJA feat | YouTube Palestinian Child Could Face A Life-Term, by Saed Bannoura | International Middle East Media Center A Palestinian child, identified as Mohammad Mahdi Suleiman, 15 years of age, could face a life-term by an Israeli court for “throwing stones at the soldiers, and endangering their lives”.. The Israeli Prosecution said it intends to ask for the highest penalty that could reach up to a life in prison, the Wa’ed Society for Detainees has reported... [Why don’t they just get it over with and kill ‘em all? That’s what an Israeli friend of mine (ex-Shin Beth) suggested when we first met. Guess he was testing my response. His conversation has been much more nuanced since then.] Read more...Remove all sanctions against Iranian people! | Veterans News The comprehensive US/EU sanctions attacking the lifeline of Iranian economy is a criminal war of choice against the Iranian population. Far from the claims of sanctions as diplomacy aimed at the resolution of the conflict over Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions are inflicting, both by design and default, unendurable pain and destruction on Iranian people, Iran’s infrastructure and civil society institutions. The sanctions on Iran, if they continue as before, would be moving on the same deadly trajectory as in Iraq, both in the accumulative rate of death and destruction and as a prelude to military attack... Refusing To Understand Iran, by Dan Lieberman | Eurasia Review ...Although Iran’s detractors view Iran’s support for the Palestinians as a hypocritical and anti-Israel political maneuver, this view is nonsensical. Iran’s response to Israel’s seizure of Palestinian lands and its oppression of the Palestinian people are no different than the United Nations and world view, only more vocal. Iran also fears Israel will eventually take control of the Haram/al Sharif and displace the Muslim world’s third holiest site from its 1500 year old position. Israel’s occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights and its continuous enmity with Assad’s Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.. naturally disturb the Shi’a Mullahs in Iran who have close ties with Hezbollah and Syria. How could it be otherwise?.. Assad: Foreign powers must end rebel support | Al Jazeera The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has said he is open to peace talks but insisted that they would not go ahead unless foreign nations stopped supporting rebel fighters.. "The Syrian people are the only ones who have the right to decide on Syria's future, and any solution or agreement must have the acceptance of the Syrian people, and reflect their desires," Assad told Brahimi... [No chance – won’t fly – far too reasonable for the Empire and its rabid lackeys to accept] Germany and Brazil want UN vote on NSA spying | DW Germany and Brazil are in agreement: spying by the NSA has gone too far. With a UN resolution they want to protect privacy in the digital age... |
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