April 22, 2009  Moving Beyond Two States, by Miko Peled United States envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, kicked off a visit to Israel restating the US commitment to the Road Map and the Two State Solution. However, both of these options have become irrelevant and it is time for the administration to seriously study the possibility of the two nations living together within a single democratic state. This is an option that moderate parties on both sides have discussed for decades, only to be silenced by more militant forces that see this as a zero sum game. The one state option speaks of a single secular democracy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea within which Israelis and Palestinians would live as equal citizens. This would elevate the rights of Palestinians to those of Israelis it will finally allow the two nations to stop bleeding and begin building. It is an ambitious proposition that Israel and its supporters will surely resist at first. However, judging by the facts on the ground, this may well be the only option available for the two nations. In preparation for renewed US involvement in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Israel's newly elected Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu announced his opposition to establishing a Palestinian state. Israel's newly appointed foreign minister went even further and announced that there will be no more peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Adopting a tactic clearly designed to give them room to negotiate, the two are positioning themselves as far to the right as possible in expectation of American demands for concessions to the Palestinians. Judging by the size and the political makeup of Israel's new cabinet, it is safe to assume that no amount of American pressure will convince them to allow Palestinian independence or to halt settlement expansions in the West Bank. When Jimmy Carter published his book “Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid” he insisted that the apartheid did not apply to Israel, only to the occupied territories. But now the West Bank is inseparable from Israel. Because of the large settlement blocks and highways that Israel built over the years, the West Bank can no longer be separated from the rest of the country. So regardless of what solution the US supports, the geography and the demographics no longer allow for the creation of a separate political entity in the West Bank, or anywhere else in historic Palestine/Israel. Try as we may to pretend that Israel is a Western style democracy, it is simply not the case. The government of Israel controls the lives of five and a half million Jews who enjoy the freedoms of a democracy, 1.4 million Palestinians who live as second-class citizens within Israel but with severely limited civil rights and 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who are deprived of all civil and human rights. Of the estimated ten million people living in historic Israel/Palestine today half are Israelis and half Palestinians. To bring a just and lasting end to the conflict the state must be divorced from religious or ethnic identity and provide all citizens equal rights; in other words, a secular, constitutional democracy that will protect the rights of all Palestinians and Israelis but will be the sole proprietorship of neither one. Equality, as history has shown us in the United States, in South Africa and in other multi national, multi ethnic states, can only be guaranteed through laws that protect the rights of every citizen, regardless of race, religion or gender. The Two State Solution and the Road Map are the latest in a series of failed attempts to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict through partition and segregation. The best one can expect from pursuing these options is a dangerously volatile status quo. But the good news is that Israelis and Palestinians discuss the possibility of a single state openly at academic and political forums. Now that the President has announced that he will visit Israel this summer, it is time for the US to join this conversation. - Miko Peled is an Israeli writer and peace activist living in San Diego. His father was the late Israeli General, Matti Peled, who was also the first Israeli military Governor of Gaza. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Link... I'llbe tied up with preparations for my move to Mexico on Monday, andgetting settled once I'm there. New Headlines will be posted as soon asI have things more or less together. Check back in about a week. (Today is Friday, April 24th) ISRAELI NAZISM IS A CLARION REALITY, by Khalid Amayreh | Desertpeace April 20, 2009 Fascists in Israel: A Little Red Light, by Uri Avnery | The Palestine Chronicle Jews ought to deal with it, not deny it  Alan Dershowitz Zionist supremacists from California to Occupied Jerusalem to Sydney are quite nervous these days as they watch many people around the world getting themselves freed, slowly but definitely, from the shackles of Zionist propaganda... [Amen, Mr. Amayreh - a must read] Read more... Word games, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz Lord have mercy: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has relinquished for the moment his demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as "a Jewish state" as a condition for negotiations. He has deigned to postpone the demand until future stages. Listen up, world: Perhaps, just perhaps, Netanyahu will also see fit to utter the forbidden phrase "two states for two peoples." The slogan of yesterday's illegitimate radical left will be heard publicly in Washington from the mouth of Israel's most right-wing prime minister ever, and everyone will sing the praises of the historic turnaround. The diplomatic process will again take wing and the expectations will soar. Peace is just around the corner... Read more... Piracy Off The Promised Land | Global Research Wide publicity has been given to piracy in Somalian waters since Captain Phillips of the American crewed Maersk Alabama was captured. The arrival of a US missile cruiser and US destroyer added the tension and glamour required by the Hollywood confederation. The killing of three young Somalians and the release of the captain provided the blood and the triumph for the star spattered banner...Why is it that little is heard of the piracy off the coast of the Zionist entity and the strip it dominates called Gaza? In contrast to the actions of young Muslim fishermen from an impoverished and broken Somalian nation, the entity carries out its piracy under the title of the Israeli Occupation Force, out of a country with the greatest wealth and with the pretence of a fully fledged legal system. As it turns out, its maritime law is the British Maritime Law of 1856, a hangover from the British Mandate... Read more... Israeli Refusal to Cooperate With United Nations Investigation Represents an Attempt to Shield Alleged War Criminals from Justice | AIC  Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip during the January 2009 offensive The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is concerned at recent Israeli statements implying that the State of Israel will not cooperate with the independent investigation established by the United Nations Human Rights Council. The investigation is led by Justice Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Both tribunals were established by the United Nations Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. The independent fact finding mission is mandated to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law, related to the recent 23 day Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip...Read more... Iran's President Ahmadinejad spoke the truth | Redress Information & Analysis and racist Israel’s apologists turned their backs ...Today, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke the truth at the United Nations conference on racism. He spoke the truth, the absolute truth, but the old imperialist powers of Europe, led by Britain, and their hangers on from the former communist camp, responded by walking out, in a premeditated move aimed at snubbing the Iranian leader. They walked out on the truth in the same way that they have been turning their backs on justice for the people of Palestine for the past 60 years... Read more... The lies must go on and Germany must pay for it, by Dr. Fredrick Töben | Pravda Forum Revisionist historian Fredrick Toben declares he will go to jail rather than pay a fine “I do not feel guilty of having committed any crime because it is my Godly duty to think and to speak about anything I like, of course, in a civilized way. Any law that is immoral, any legal proceeding that has a blatantly railroading effect on an accused, is to be rejected..." Read more... Olmert et al may face arrest in Norway | PressTV  Six Norwegian lawyers are seeking to file a lawsuit against former Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert and other Israeli officials over the Gaza war. The lawsuit which will be filed with the Norwegian chief prosecutor on Wednesday, will call for the arrest and extradition of Olmert, Kadima leader and ex-foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and seven Israeli commanders, AFP reported. The lawyers accused the Israeli officials of committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip and Norwegian courts are obliged to hear cases involving such crimes... Read more... Ahmadinejad - Israel Is A Racist Country | Rense YES - and what he said is and was true, on all counts. The fact that the 'Western representatives' chose not to challenge or debate the issues, proves conclusively that the Iranian president was obviously correct in his allegations. The cowards that walked out of that meeting need to be found and interviewed on international media; so that the world can judge for themselves just how many count themselves above the law and beyond all the norms required to live in the international community of nations... Read more... World Bank Publishes Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development | World Bank ...since 2000, the Israeli-imposed movement and access restrictions, consisting of physical impediments, but also of permitting and decision-making practices, have further impaired Palestinian access to water resources, infrastructure development and utility operations. When combined with governance and capacity weaknesses in Palestinian institutions, these rules and restrictions have resulted in an underdeveloped Palestinian water sector. Even though the PA and many donors have invested in establishing a sustainable and equitable water sector, access to water resources, water infrastructure and institutions remain inadequate. The sector continues to operate in a very inefficient emergency mode, with far reaching economic, social and environmental consequences. Water-related humanitarian crises are in fact chronic in Gaza and in parts of the West Bank... Read more... Wake up and smell the pepper spray. These 3,609 new laws are to control us, not protect us | Mail Online  A woman is attacked by an officer during the G20 protests in London earlier this month ...My God, when did we accept that armoured cars, special snatch squads and armed police were the right level of policing for protests against Government policy? How did we sleepwalk into a situation where our movements, all of our electronic data, even our DNA, is stored on a massive central database? In fact, it was easy for Blairites to con us into accepting the 3,609 new offences they have created since 1997. They tapped into our fears and prejudices so we simply ignored the repeal of our rights. Anti-terror legislation was not too subtly sold as being aimed at evil, dastardly Jihadi-types – not ‘us’...Read more... Ahmadinejad's Webster speech canceled | PressTV President Ahmadinejad was scheduled to deliver a speech at the Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland and later participate in a question and answer session, but the event was cancelled after intense Israeli lobbying, ISNA reported on Monday... Read more... April 21, 2009 Why one state works, by Lama Abu Odeh | Atheo News Read more... The dark religious side of Israel, by Gideon Levy - Haaretz  Hassidic Jews burning food containing leavening before We must admit that this society has rather dark religious aspects. Foreigners landing in Israel might ask themselves what country they're in: Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia? In any case, it's not the liberal, secular and enlightened society it purports to be. Thieves' hands do not have to be hacked off or women's faces covered to be a religious country. Just as an occupying state, which controls 3.5 million people lacking basic civil rights, cannot call itself "the only democracy in the Middle East," so a country that has no bread for a week because of its religion cannot call itself secular and liberal.. the start of the Passover holiday in Jerusalem Read more... Durban Review Conference in Geneva The boycott by a number of Western nations of the Durban Review Conference in Geneva this week and their reasons for doing so, leave one gaping with incredulity. Just like the 2001 Conference in Durban, they are prepared to scuttle this important global enquiry into ongoing racist policies and practices, to save Israel from ignominy. And more likely, fear from having themselves exposed for propping up Israel’s regime at the devastating expense of the Palestinians... [Includes speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] Read more... Israel, Iran and Fear, by Roger Cohen - NYT ...A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine. As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”... Read more... Iran Judge Asks for Review of Case of Jailed Journalist - NYT  Reza Saberi and his wife, Akiko, the parents of the American-Iranian The head of Iran’s judiciary said Monday that he had ordered the “careful, quick and fair consideration of an appeal against the eight-year jail sentence imposed on an Iranian-American journalist, one day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged the chief prosecutor to reexamine the case...journalist Roxana Saberi, entered their home in Tehran on Monday Read more... Israel Review Conference comes to a Close as Durban Review Conference Begins | ODGS Thousands of people have gathered in Geneva from all corners of the globe to attend the Durban Review Conference. Despite official efforts to exclude the voices of the victims, it has brought together many civil society actors struggling against racial discrimination, including those working to end Israel ’s regime of racism and racial discrimination against the Palestinians. The latter have just completed a two-day Israel Review Conference that was held on 18-19 April 2009. The Israel Review Conference brought together over three hundred people from five continents, including human rights activists and experts from South Africa, Malaysia and several European and Middle Eastern countries. The first day of the conference included two main panels that dealt with the applicability of the crime of apartheid to the state of Israel , and the development of legal strategies for obtaining the accountability of Israel and other states for their obligations under international law to respect the rights of the Palestinian people... Read more... THE MYTH OF A JEWISH NATION, by Jonathan Cook | ODGS No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel's biggest taboo. Dr Shlomo Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation, whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel, is a myth invented little more than a century ago. An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more, all equally controversial. In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state... Read more... Cultural Boycott, by Rafeef Ziadah Cultural resistance, consciousness, and Palestinian existence Since its inception Israel has taken great pains to destroy all signs of Palestinian culture and target Palestinians who chose cultural production as their method of resistance. Edward Said explained "Culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration", and it is basic to colonial policy to present the colonized as primitive, backward and uncultured. In 2002, when Israel invaded the West Bank town of Ramallah (which they have done many times before and since), they trashed the Sakakini Cultural Centre. Among the things they destroyed were some of Mahmoud Darwich's manuscripts. At the time Mahmoud Darwich told William Dalrymple of the UK Guardian: "The Israelis wanted to give us a message that nobody and nothing is immune - including our cultural life," he says. "I took the message personally. I know they're strong and can invade and kill anyone. But they can't break or occupy my words. That is one thing they can't do. My poetry is the one way I have to resist them."... Read more... Scurvy Dogs of War, by Jeff Huber - Antiwar ...In a saner American century, the likes of Hanson, Cropsey, Kristol, Bolton, and the rest of the war clowns would have been laughed off the world stage years ago. Bathetically, in the American century we have, the masses, washed and unwashed, take them as seriously as they take professional wrestling and TV evangelists. According to an April 13 Bloomberg story by Jeff Bliss, unnamed "defense officials" say "The U.S. military is considering attacks on pirate bases on land." One can’t help wonder what kind of bases the U.S. military thinks the pirates have: the ones Dr. Evil left behind when Austin Powers chased him out of Africa? I can guarantee you their "bases" look nothing like the embassy we’re building in Baghdad. Somali piracy is a direct result of abject Somali poverty. That’s why the pirate they captured on the recent caper is only 16 years old... Read more... Major scandal erupts involving Rep. Jane Harman, Alberto Gonzales and AIPAC, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington...Harman was captured on an NSA wiretap conspiring with an Israeli agent to apply pressure on DOJ officials to scale back the AIPAC prosecution. But the real crux of Stein's scoop is that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonazles intervened to kill the criminal investigation into Harman -- even though DOJ lawyers had concluded that she committed crimes -- because top Bush officials wanted Harman's credibility to be preserved so that she could publicly defend the Bush administration's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program... Read more... 911 & Sec. 13(1): Coincidence or Collusion?, by Arthur Topham | The Radical Press  Read more... Fidel Castro: The Secret Summit | Counterpunch Neither represented nor excommunicated, only today could I learn what was discussed at the Summit of Port of Spain. They led us all to entertain hopes that the meeting would not be secret, but those running the show deprived us of such an interesting intellectual exercise. We shall get to know the substance but not the tone of voice, the look in the eyes or the facial look that can be a reflection of a person's ideas, ethic and character. A Secret Summit is worse than a silent movie... Read more...  Preble said Washington's military expansionism has turned the US into a "hated symbol of arrogance" Foreign policy expert Christopher Preble expounds on how Washington's military power has turned the US into a "hated symbol of arrogance". In his book titled The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free, Preble criticizes the post-Cold War mindset that has encouraged Washington to seek military control over the world...He instead proposes a new grand strategy that will advance US national security agenda by calling for a new military configuration that requires cooperation instead of confrontation... Read more... Majority in US want Israel to be penalised, by James Zogby - The National Despite claiming continued support for Israel, a majority of US residents want a change in policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A decisive plurality said US aid to Israel is “too much”, and a majority want to see Israel penalised for building new settlements on Palestinian land. These were some of the findings of a Zogby International interactive survey of 4,320 US adults conducted in April for the Doha Debate, a BBC programme based in Qatar... Read more... A Lexicon of Disappointment, by Naomi Klein | The Nation All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack... Read more...  Many of Lieberman's voters 'had taken part in the Gaza War ... Perhaps this Lieberman will indeed disappear, to be replaced by another, even worse Lieberman. Either way, we should candidly confront the phenomenon he represents. If one believes that his utterances sound fascist, one has to ask oneself: is there a possibility that a fascist regime might come to power in Israel?...[Uri, it already happened - in 1948. You just didn't see it as fascism then, and still don't, because in your heart of hearts you're still a Zionist. Israel may appear to be quite different from Nazi Germany, but the differences are merely superficial.] Read more... YouTube - A danish scientist Niels Harrit, on nano-thermite in the WTC dust (english subtitles) Niels Harrit and 8 other scientists found nano-thermite in the dust from the World Trade Center...The full report from the scientists can be found here: Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe See also Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction Watch video... Harvard's admissions of gilt - The Boston Globe Can you buy your way into Harvard? Of course you can, if my friend Dan Golden's new book, ``The Price of Admission," is to be believed. You can also buy your way into Duke -- home of the notorious ``development admits , " where fund-raisers collaborate on admissions decisions -- and many other top-tier universities in the country...The most egregious example of pay-for-Crimson is that of Jared Kushner, now the youthful owner of The New York Observer.While Jared was applying to colleges, his dad, New Jersey billionairedeveloper Charles Kushner, pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paidin installments. (Kushner pere pleaded guilty to tax evasion and othercounts in 2004 and recently completed a prison sentence.)... Read more...  Meet aims to combat racism, xenophobia, racial discrimination A UN conference on racism was hit by new boycotts by some governments on Sunday amid concerns that the meeting will be critical of Israel's human rights violations...United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay said Sunday expressed shock and disappointment Sunday at the United States' decision to stay away from the conference...Read more... Displaced Christians want pope to help them return Displaced during war decades ago, the Christians of Biram have never given up their dream of returning to this destroyed village in the hills of northern Israel. They still hold Easter rites, weddings and funerals in a stone church, the only building left standing. Now, they are pinning their hopes on Pope Benedict XVI, who is visiting the Holy Land in May. Biram's former residents and their descendants, some 3,000 Catholics altogether, are asking their spiritual leader to speak for them. They were driven out of during the 1948 Mideast war that surrounded Israel's creation. Most Israeli leaders who dealt with Biram's case refused their repatriation, fearing it would set a precedent for millions of Palestinian refugees seeking to return to former properties. But the villagers argue their case is different because their hamlet was bombed years after the war ended, and that a 1952 court case paved the way for them to return... Read more... On Palestinian Prisoner's Day, thousands of prisoners continue to suffer in Israeli jails | ReliefWeb Each year the 17th of April marks the anniversary of the release of Palestinian prisoners in the first prisoner swap deal of 17 April 1974. This date is commemorated annually in support of those Palestinian who remain in Israeli custody. This year, Palestinian prisoners' day comes at a time when Palestinian civilians are subject to increasingly cruel and inhuman conditions as a result of Israeli human rights violations. In particular, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails continue to be denied their basic rights. Recently, they have been used as political bargaining chips, in flagrant violation of international human rights and humanitarian law. Since their occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) have implemented sweeping arrest and detention policies, in an attempt to ensure Palestinian civilians' obedience and to prevent all forms of resistance. Over nearly 42 years, this policy has resulted in the arrest of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, IOF intensified this campaign; recent years have seen a steady increase in the number of Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli jails... Read more... Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East, by Nadia Hijab | Counterpunch Back in the Bush days we had "the Greater Middle East" -- born on the way to a G8 summit in 2004. To some, the term was a source of humor in a part of the world with little to laugh about. To others, the nomenclature could not counter the perception of American control over the region either directly or through its ally, Israel. Now, in less than 100 days of its existence, the Obama Administration has uncovered a very different Middle East: a more multi-polar region where power is balanced between several actors. This mirrors the global realignment that the new administration is dealing with as a result of the military and economic excesses of its predecessors... Read more... Israel's Arab Students Are Crossing to Jordan, by Jonathan Cook | The Palestine Chronicle Obstacles to Israel's Arab minority participating in higher education have resulted in a record number of Arab students taking up places at universities in neighboring Jordan, a new report reveals. Figures compiled by Dirasat, a Nazareth-based organization monitoring education issues, show 5,400 Arab students from Israel are at Jordanian universities -- half the number of Arabs studying in Israel itself. Despite the fact that most Israeli Arab students in Jordan interviewed by the researchers expressed a preference to attend university in Israel, the numbers heading to Jordan have grown four-fold since 2004... Read more... American Empire Foreclosed?, by Mark Engler | Counterpunch ...Today, the price tag on America’s global military posture looks more imposing than ever. Even under President Obama—whose administration has proposed cutting a few costly and outmoded weapons systems--the United States will spend upwards of a half trillion dollars per year to fund its armed forces and keep up its “Baseworld.” This is what author and foreign policy analyst Chalmers Johnson named the country’s sprawling network of overseas encampments, rarely noticed by citizens at home but bitterly resented by much of the world. The United States officially owns 737 bases worldwide, worth more than $127 billion and covering at least 687,347 acres in some 130 foreign countries. “Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies,” Johnson writes in his 2007 book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. “America’s version of the colony is the military base.”... Read more... April 19, 2009 Economy in Jeopardy: Barack Obama: "Financial Crime Boss", by Stephen Lendman  Since taking office, Obama, wittingly or otherwise, has headed the largest criminal enterprise in history - the mass looting of national wealth to enrich his Wall Street benefactors. He assembled a rogue economic team of Clinton/Robert Rubin retreads - to fix the current crisis they engineered. In a March 13 article, (author and former Republican strategist) Kevin Phillips called them "recycled senior (Clinton administration) Democrats (responsible for the) tech mania, deregulation binge and (1997 - 2000) stock market bubble and crash. (Obama) extend(ed) the (disastrous) mismanagement and pro-Wall Street bias of the 2008 Bush regime bailout." Read more... Neocon Moral Lepers Continue to Defend and Glorify Torture | AlterNet Now that I've had some time to marinate in these depraved memos justifying and finding legal rationalizations for torture, I am convinced that the members of the Bush Administration who directed and authorized all this just willed themselves to believe they were doing the righteous and just thing. Sure, they knew enough to find some thin strand of legal reasoning to cover their naked bodies, but that was seen by them as a brave and forthright act. I don't see another way to live with approving Room 101 techniques like putting someone in a box with a bug unless you've convinced yourself of your own worthiness... Read more... YouTube - Should torturers be prosecuted? This video describes the release of the Bush administration torture documents, has clips of administration officials denying it, and then lists actual torture techniques. Watch... The Arab World and Israel's Nuclear Arsenal | Palestine Think Tank  Dimona The vociferous Israeli campaign against the Iranian nuclear program is undoubtedly a classical example of Israel’s pornographic hypocrisy in this regard. After all, it was Israel that introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East more than four decades ago, with the knowledge and acquiescence of western powers...Read more... A comment on Paul Gottfried’s review of Cultural Insurrections, by Kevin MacDonald Paul Gottfried is outside the mainstream of Jewish intellectuals in being associated with paleoconservatives rather than either the left or the neoconservative right. In my eyes, therefore, he is a force for relative good in a world where paleocons like Pat Buchanan have been relegated to the fringes of intellectual debate in the US and have long rap sheets at powerful, well-endowed organizations like the SPLC and the ADL. Another reason I am predisposed to be positive about Gottfried is that he reviewed Cultural Insurrections respectfully, noting pointedly that there are completely different standards in discussing the activities and influence of other ethnic groups or religions. And he agrees with much of my analysis that Jews have in fact been deeply involved in erecting the culture of critique that now pervades the West... Read more... Ramzy Baroud: Non-Violence in Palestine | Counterpunch  'Where is the call for Israel to embrace non-violence?' ...For decades, the Palestinian struggle for freedom was largely a non-violent movement. With occasional pockets of armed resistance, Palestinians in the occupied territories employed methods of general strikes, demonstrations and the like to express their demands and desires to finally live in freedom. And yet these were the years where Palestinians saw that great majority of their homeland swallowed up into what is now the State of Israel. Land was stolen with no recompense to its owners, prisons burst at the seams with prisoners who never received a trial, houses demolished by the hundreds, entire orchards of olive and fruit trees ransacked and burned. All this was carried out in the confines of an “Intifada-free” society. So, it might be suggested that Palestinians gave non-violent resistance more than a fair shot...Read more... My Last Visit?, by Haitham Aranki | Annie's letters  Hello friends from the beautiful Land of Palestine, I was in Haifa and Yafa yesterday, the Arab sector of Yafa is a heart breaking site, so old and not maintained, I felt so bad looking at the Arab neighborhoods. . It was my last day as an American visiting Palestine, from now on, I will not be able to visit Palestine 48 or Jerusalem, I am becoming a native of the West Bank... Read more... WHEN WILL THE WORLD TAKE ACTION AGAINST ISRAEL? The following scenario should make people seriously think about why we insist on normalising Israel’s behaviour without even thinking about why those rockets are being fired at all. And why indeed are our governments all too ready to back away from the Durban Review Conference on anti-racism in Geneva this coming week, if Israel is NOT the racist state everyone knows it is? - Sonja Read more... Obama's stance worries Israelis | The Age Can Israel still call the United States its best international friend? Apparently not, if you believe the tone of the local media. Watching the drama unfold inside Israel, the increasingly tense dialogue between US President Barack Obama and new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is taking on all the trappings of a duel... Read more...  Somali unity government forces patrol the streets of the capital Mogadishu Somali members of parliament have unanimously voted in favor of the implementation of Islamic Sharia law in the Horn of Africa country. In a morning session held Saturday in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, the 343 members passed the motion officially making Somalia an Islamic state, a Press TV correspondent reported. Deputy speaker of parliament Osman Elmi Boqore, who presided over the debates in the absence of speaker Aden Mohamed Nur, said none of the members had any objections to the new law... Read more... Dudu in Heaven, by Deb Reich | Hagada Hasmalit At the beginning of June, 1967, when my brother Dudu was finally called up, I was tending the bananas. One evening he was there, and the next morning he was gone. I never got to say goodbye... Read more... April 18, 2007 t r u t h o u t | Torture Memos Revealed  A US flag flies over the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay CIA interrogators were given legal authorization to slam an alleged "high-value" detainee's head against a wall, place insects inside a "confinement box" to induce fear and force him to remain awake for 11 consecutive days, according to a closely guarded August 1, 2002, legal memo released publicly by the Justice Department for the first time on Thursday... Read more... Bush memos parallel claim 9/11 mastermind's children were tortured with insects | Raw Story Bush Administration memos released by the White House on Thursday provide new insight into claims that American agents used insects to torture the young children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed... Read more... "Two state solution" equals racism, by John Spritzler In light of Stephen Walt's recent article, "Is Obama turning up the pressure on Israel?" (i.e. pressure for a "two state solution"), it may be good to read (or re-read) this earlier one by yours truly: A New Path For Israel?. The "two state solution" means, in reallity, a "Bantustan solution" in which the "Palestinian state" will be no more "independent" of Israel than Gaza today is "unoccupied" by Israel. Palestinians will continue to suffer from being the victims of ethnic cleansing. They will continue to be denied their right to return to the land where they were born, and to be compensated fully for the property that Zionists stole from them. Israel would still equate opposition to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel with anti-Semitism. Israel would very likely use "making the Jewish state secure against violent anti-Semites" as a pretext to invade the "Palestinian state" and slaughter its people, just as it invaded Gaza after "withdrawing" from it. There is no reason to believe that the "two state solution" will mean less Israeli violence against Palestinians... Read more...  It has been a common mantra now–not for years, but rather decades–”Israel does not spy on the United States” and God help anyone who says different. With the same kind of drama as Khrushchev’s infamous shoe-beating shtick at the United Nations half a century ago, the aforementioned vaudeville number began immediately after that “nice Jewish boy” Jonathon Pollard (working as an analyst for US Naval Intelligence) was caught pilfering and then selling to America’s “bestest buddy” in the whole world –Israel –close to 1 million pages of material with the highest classification that exists in the US intelligence community... Read more... Israhell soldier: We are humans,They are animals, a video from hobareii An Israeli official killed a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Iman Al-Hism in Rafah Refugee camp on the 5th of October in 2004. The official claimed that he killed the child because she might have a bomb in her bag. This assertion demonstrates how easy killing is for an Israeli soldier since it is possible to suspect every child having a bomb in his/her bag. How could we possibly talk about the safety of the Palestinian children if a suspicion like this may be the reason for murder? What is more, he emptied the whole charger of his gun that included 20 bullets onto the girl after he had wounded Iman el-Hism and she had fallen on the ground. 1/3 of the Palestinian civilian people who have been killed since 2000 are children... Read more, Watch... The Illusion of Democracy & The Great Zionist Rip-Off | Window Into Palestine During the massive and sometimes violent demonstrations that marked the G-20 summit in London last week, I noticed a sign that aptly described the fundamental problem facing the West. "Democracy is an Illusion," the sign said. That simple slogan underlines the real problem facing Americans and others who find themselves living in nations that claim to be democratic, and may have once been, but which now clearly serve only the interests of powerful special interest groups while ignoring the will of the people... Read more... t r u t h o u t | Human Body Parts In Iraq, time leaves bloody marks upon each day of the ongoing US occupation. The policies of the Obama administration, adopted from the Bush administration, continue to wreak their havoc on the Iraqi people... Read more... Why AIPAC Took Over Brookings | Dissident Voice Martin Indyk, an Australian and naturalized US citizen, is the former deputy director of research at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Indyk helped establish the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) in 1984 with the support of AIPAC board member and activist Barbi Weinberg. Weinberg “had for over a decade privately wrestled with the idea of creating a foreign policy center.”1 After the establishment of WINEP, Indyk stated that he was still dissatisfied and wished to establish an institution capable of escaping AIPAC’s reputation as a “strongly biased organization.”1 Indyk would later go on to found the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution... Read more... Mondoweiss: Mamdani is persuasive in Darfur debate, Prendergast waffles Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia, calmly presented some of the arguments in his just-published Saviors and Survivors; the Darfur conflict started as a civil war; the Sudan’s government most ferocious repression was in 2003-04; the conflict is now a simmering, complicated stalemate. But, he said, the Save Darfur movement continues to misuse the word "genocide," exaggerates the death toll, implies that the situation is worsening, and calls for Western military intervention. Mamdani continued that Save Darfur’s misleading view of the reality today in Darfur is part of what is blocking a negotiated political solution. By pursuing Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes, the International Criminal Court is making a Read more... Facing a Guantánamo on American soil | freedetainees.org Fahad Hashmi is another American Muslim victim of the U.S. “war on terror.” This 29-year-old Pakistani-American man has been behind bars since June 2006, charged giving material support to al-Qaeda. But the evidence against him amounts to allowing an acquaintance to stay in his London apartment, who later allegedly gave socks and ponchos to al-Qaeda. Fahad was seized in Britain and detained there before being extradited to the U.S., where he has been held in solitary confinement for almost two years. His case is scheduled to go to trial in May. If convicted, Fahad could face up to 70 years in prison... Read more... April 17, 2007 The quintessential Palestinian experience, by Laila El-Haddad | Electronic Intifada  Laila El-Haddad and her daughter, Noor, in the US in 2008 "Its not very comfortable in there is it?" said the stony faced official, cigarette smoke forming a haze around his gleaming oval head. "Its OK. We're fine," I replied wearily, delirious after being awake for 30 hours straight. "You could be in there for days you know. For weeks. Indefinitely. So, tell me, you are taking a plane tomorrow morning to the US?"...Read more... Letter from Mazin 4/16/09 We now know how Nothingyahoo (Netanyahu) intends to pursue the classic Israeli policy of engaging in endless "Peace Talks" without the intention of reaching any peace based on International law. He says to US envoy George Mitchell that his government wants the Palestinians to agree to recognize Israel not just as a state but as “A JEWISH STATE” before beginning to discuss the possibility of a two-state solution. This is like South Africa under apartheid insisting that the ANC recognize South Africa as a White State before beginning to discuss the possibility of giving the blacks a state (a Bantustan). Even without complying with International law and allowing the Palestinian refugees to return, there are 20-25% of the population in Israel who are not Jewish and are already targeted (Israel’s foreign minister who came from abroad and has no connection to the land wants to get rid of the natives). If there is a definition of Chutzpah then this notion of recognizing a racist “Jewish state” as precondition even for talks is it... Read more... AID ROTS OUTSIDE GAZA while Palestinians are desperate for basic needs  The situation in Gaza is quite simply horrendous. The news report below attests to that fact. Just this week the Palestine Return Centre (PRC) in the UK put out a press release about the conditions suffered by refugees who make up the majority of the population in Gaza (most fled to the Gaza Strip from their homes in Jaffa, surrounding towns and villages and Beersheva in the Negev during the 1948 war). “For almost 3 years now; the Israeli siege on Gaza has been unrelenting in its destruction of life in Gaza. Many people have died because they are not even able to travel abroad for treatment while others still continue to suffer while their health conditions tragically deteriorate. An entire population of 1.5 million Gazans, mostly refugees, suffers from the lack of medicine, food, power and fuel . . . Read more... Kerry in Sudan to meet senior officials | PressTV Relations between Khartoum and Washington seem to be easing as the chairman of US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, pays a visit to Sudan. Kerry, accompanied by a US delegation, is to visit Darfur and hold talks with senior Sudanese officials...This is the second visit by a US official to Sudan since president Omar Hasan Al-Bashir was charged with 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' by the International Criminal Court last month. However, Kerry is not to meet al-Bashir during his visit to Sudan... Read more...  Some pirates operating off Somalia's coast claim to act as coastguards Somali pirates have accused European firms of dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast and are demanding an $8m ransom for the return of a Ukranian ship they captured, saying the money will go towards cleaning up the waste. The ransom demand is a means of "reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years", Januna Ali Jama, a spokesman for the pirates, based in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, said. "The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas."...Read more... Egypt: Decree Ends ID Bias Against Baha'is | Human Rights Watch The new decree from Egypt's Interior Ministry recognizing the right of adherents of "non-recognized" religions to obtain necessary identification documents and access to basic services is an overdue and positive step, Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) said today. The decree ends an official policy of coercing Egyptian Baha'is into misidentifying themselves as Muslims or Christians... Read more... Is Geithner's Hedge-Fund Bailout Illegal? | Mother Jones  In recent months, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other regulatory officials have made much ado about those "toxic" securities the Wall Street demons concocted by bundling together thousands of mortgages and dicing them up a dozen different ways to sell to investors. The big problem, as we've all learned by now, is that it's next to impossible to figure out what the accursed things are worth...Now take a deep breath and let's boil it all down. Our treasury secretary hopes to circumvent laws enacted to protect the economy by subsidizing a bunch of multimillionaire investors—ostensibly to help regulators fulfill their most basic job description—in a bid to prop up bankers who cooked their books to support a gambling binge and still refuse to admit they lost. Or maybe they haven't. In a game thus rigged, there are only two sure-fire losers: you and me... Read more... April 16, 2007  Benjamin Netanyahu's promise of "economic peace" means the beginning of a new stage of colonization The Israelis have offered the Palestinians many types of "peace." Their first attempt to reach out to the Palestinians was in 1948 with an offer of a "racist peace." Ethnic cleansing was the basis of a "racist peace" where Zionist terrorists drove out two thirds of the Palestinian population from their homes. Its logic was that expulsion would end strife between Zionists and Palestinians (by eliminating one side) enabling the Zionists to enjoy peace in an ethnic Jewish haven. The Palestinians, stubborn as they were, refused a racist Zionist state as the basis for "peace." Israel relentlessly extended its hand to the Palestinians offering them a "military peace" instead. Deterrence was the basis of a "military peace" where a Zionist state armed to the teeth would instill fear in the hearts of the Palestinians... Read more... The Very Eye of the Storm, by Akiva Eldar This article, from last week's Haaretz, was prominently placed on the front page of the well-read weekend section. It reviews the process of settlement and dispossession in Silwan, the Palestinian village in East Jerusalem just outside the walls of the Old City, which has been re-named "The City of David" by those seeking to annex it to West Jerusalem. Agressive settlement by Jewish settlers, backed by foreign money passing through a shadowy public/private NGO; the acquiescence and support of the government; arrests and harrassment of the current residents; and building up bogus archaeological and biblical claims; while slowly and deliberately creating facts on the ground - this has all been done before. Silwan is being Hebron-ized before our eyes. The article alludes, though not specifically, to the Israeli and Palestinian coalition of archaeologists, academics, residents, community activists, and lawyers who are fighting this process. Two years ago, no one had heard of Silwan, and now, as Akiva Eldar says, it is "The Very Eye of the Storm." Whether that will save it from the fate of other Arab localities that have been slowly erased is up to all of us. - Rebecca Vilkomerson, Jewish Peace News Read more... Who is this Netanyahu threatening world peace?, by Jerry Mazza | Online Journal Associate Editor  Read more... VIVA PALESTINA UNDER SCRUTINY FOR AID TO GAZA | AFP Just when it seemed that the Viva Palestina convoy from London to Gaza had successfully completed its mission, a new development greeted the British MP George Galloway when he returned home after announcing yet another convoy to Gaza from the US leaving on 4 July. Now it seems that the British Charity Commission has frozen £100,000 of aid money raised for the suffering Palestinians in Gaza because it claims “concerns” over Viva Palestina’s structure and the million pounds raised for Gaza when it never sought charitable status in the first place... Read more... 'Israel unlikely to assist UN war crimes probe' - Haaretz  South African judge Richard Goldstone is to lead a UN probe into alleged Gaza war crimes Israel is "very unlikely" to cooperate with a UN agency's probe into whether Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in the recent Gaza war, a government official said Wednesday...[They're just full of surprises, aren't they?] Read more... Defending the Indefensible: Israel, Gaza, and Idolatry | ICH A tell-tale sign of having become the victim of propaganda is the eruption of anger, name-calling, calumny, scapegoating, and insinuations when confronted with facts, ideas, or arguments that pose a threat to the unmasking or refutation of said propaganda. The provocation of such a vehement reaction is itself a deliberate product of the propagandist, for it is the implantation of a built-in, defense mechanism effectively precluding awareness of not only the mendacious character of the propaganda, but also its very existence in the mind of the victim. The amount, intensity, and sophistication of the propaganda that surrounded, distorted, and cloaked the Israeli attacks on Gaza in December of 2008 is staggering. Nevertheless, some things just cannot be hidden... Read more... Spies, Spies Everywhere, and Not a Trial in Sight | WRMEA  Ben-Ami Kadish walks out of federal court, in New York April 22, 2008, after being arrested In its Nov 20, 2008 edition, the Jewish weekly Forward reported that indicted former AIPAC foreign policy director Steve Rosen and former AIPAC Iran specialist Keith Weissman are taking radically different courses while they await the beginning of their repeatedly delayed trial. Weissman, according to the Forward, is tending “in a more left-wing direction focusing on Palestinian needs.” Another report even had him wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headdress. (Weissman reportedly believes he will be convicted.) But not the diamond hard-line Steve Rosen, who finally has succeeded in pushing himself into the public eye with “a new blog, public speeches and articles on Middle East policy,” the Forward notes. Rosen, along with his slick defense lawyer Abbe Lowell and pro-AIPAC Judge T.S. Ellis III, constitute a formidable force against Washington’s efforts to curb AIPAC’s power, and in favor of Israel’s determination to subvert U.S. policy...on charges related to giving Israel secrets on nuclear weapons, fighter jets and missiles Read more... Yitzhak Laor & Yagil Levy on Soldiers' Testimonies In the first op-ed below, Yagil Levy sees nothing new about the type of wanton, excessive violence reported recently by Israeli soldiers following Israel's assault on Gaza. It has been practiced, he says, since before the state's foundation. Soldiers' violence levels, he goes on to claim, are crucially (though not exclusively) affected by the competitive culture within the military. The internal dynamic within a given unit either encourages and worsens, or tends to contain, violence levels. According to Levy, competitiveness is fiercer-making excessive violence more rampant-among conscripts whose future and chances of social mobility depend heavily upon their military service. This is the case, he says, for conscripts from the social periphery, including the lower classes and religious Jewish-nationalist groups (and settlers' groups among them). Levy thus ascribes higher levels of wanton violence to units staffed mainly with working class and religious conscripts than to units staffed mainly with middle class conscripts. While it conforms comfortably with prevalent stereotypes, such an hypothesis requires careful factual support, which the op-ed fails to mention or refer to. On one reading it can be understood to clear the (supposedly more liberal?) middle class of charges of brutalization. "It's not us, it's them" this hypothesis implies the less educated, immoderate, etc. poor and religious fanatics, an implication which I find untrue and problematic... Read more... The Politics of Faith, by Joharah Baker | The Palestine Chronicle  'It is unfortunate that even the religious significance of Palestine must be tainted by politics.' ...Politics enters everything, even this slideshow of faith. To be fair, there were other mentions of Jerusalem’s religious distinction further down after an elaborate historical description of the Western Wall. Here is the last line. “Other holy sites in Jerusalem include the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. “ I was appalled. How is it that the place where Christ is said to have been crucified and subsequently resurrected not be given proper recognition? How could the supposed rock where Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven, thus revered as Islam’s third holiest site not be given space? As I continued to click through the slide show, I was sure I would at least come upon Bethlehem, where Christ was born. That for sure, was a “journey of faith” any devout Christian was sure to make. Again, I was disappointed and appalled. Was it because the editors would have to mention that Bethlehem was located in Palestine? Or that it was occupied by Israel?...Read more... Obama's Bubble of Ignorance: Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It | Kathleen and Bill Christison To a greater degree than perhaps ever before, Washington today is engulfed in denial about Israel and its stupefying behavior, about its murderous policies toward the Palestinians, about the efforts of Israel and its U.S. defenders to force us to ignore its atrocities. Blinders have always been part of the attire of U.S. policymakers and politicians with regard to Israel and Israeli actions, but in the wake of the three-week Israeli assault that laid waste to the tiny territory of Gaza -- an assault ended very conveniently just before Barack Obama was inaugurated, so that he has been able to act as though it never occurred -- the perspective from which Washington operates is strikingly more blinkered than ever in the past... Read more... Investigating Israeli War Crimes in Gaza, by Stephen Lendman Independent investigations and convincing testimonies, on both sides, provide compelling evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. It's time to hold the guilty accountable.  US supplied illegal Phosphorous bombs rain down in gaza In February, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights showed conclusively how Israel violated core international law principles by indiscriminately attacking civilians in spite of IDF claims such instances were justified. Amnesty International accused Israel of war crimes and called on the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has a long record of acting as an imperial agent even while at times fulfilling its mandate "to protect the human rights of people around the world...stand with (them) and uphold political freedom (by) bring(ing) offenders to justice." It partly did this in a report titled "Rain of Fire" by citing "Israel's Unlawful Use of White Phosphorous in Gaza....over populated areas, killing and injuring civilians, and damaging civilian structures, including a school, a market, a humanitarian aid warehouse and a hospital.". It called on the UN Security Council or Secretary-General to appoint an independent international commission to investigate credible war crimes allegations, including use of illegal weapons....Omitted from the report were over six decades of mass slaughter and destruction, a process amounting to genocide. Also not mentioned was the full impact of 22 days of attacks, Gaza still under siege, and the West Bank under military occupation. Unlisted was the death and injury toll; civilian shootings in cold blood; the vast number of homes, government buildings, hospitals, ambulances, fishing boats, crops, schools, mosques, businesses, UN buildings and shelters, entire infrastructure and neighborhoods, and all other wanton destruction. Silence as well on the incalculable toll on 1.5 million Gazans and continued assaults against them...Read more... Foundations of Contemporary History - Dissecting the Holocaust | CODOH Introduction to the Online Version, by Richard A. Widmann Foundations of Contemporary History was the first entire book posted to CODOHWeb back in 1998. At the time, revisionists around the world were very disturbed by the actions of the Federal Republic of Germany. The original edition of this book, published in German as Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte was made illegal in Germany. Police raided the publisher, printer, editor, distributors, wholesalers, and even multi-copy purchasers. A judge ordered that all copies be confiscated and burned. The editor, Germar Rudolf adopted the nom de plume Ernst Gauss, in order to avoid arrest. What was so horrible, so outrageous about this volume that the German government would violate human rights to squash it? Grundlagen was in fact the most up-to-date collection of leading revisionist theory on the Holocaust. Clearly the English-speaking world needed to read what was contained in this volume - both for the sake of the history of the Holocaust and for the sake of intellectual freedom. A small team set to work on the task. Work was required translating, proof reading, and coding a 400 page volume into HTML. Nothing like this had ever been done before. Piece by piece, article by article the work was completed. In its entirety, Grundlagen rose like a phoenix and was given new life on the Internet. The battle for free speech was in full swing. The book burners in Germany would face a cyber-challenge from across the Atlantic... Read more... The other face of fascism | Al-Ahram Weekly GOOD AND BAD NEWS FOR THE ARTS IN PALESTINE | AFPLieberman's ascent to power is not only a dilemma for Arabs and the US, but also for the Jewish lobby, writes Muqtedar Khan. "American Jews... are dismayed by Lieberman, mostly because he represents values that we abhor" -- Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism  A foreign minister is to the rest of the world the face of the nation he or she represents. They epitomize the values and politics of the nation and personify its culture, identity and values. Israel has a new face now and that face is the ugly visage of fascism. Currently it travels under the name Avigdor Lieberman. Let me introduce Mr Lieberman to you. He is under investigation for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He was convicted of beating a 12-year-old child in the face. The audiences who come to his campaign events chant "death to Arabs". He has called for drowning thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the sea and the assassination of Arab parliamentarians. He has advocated a plan to ethnically cleanse Israel of all Arabs. In brief, he is a potentially corrupt, a hate filled and violent demagogue apt to confuse incitement for campaigning. The man thinks that, "minorities are the biggest problem in the world"... Read more... The Case of Dr Fredrick Töben Dr Fredrick Töben is a sixty-four year old Australian scholar; he was arrested at Heathrow Airport on October 1 and is currently detained in Wandsworth Prison, London. His prison number is XF 9993. Is Dr Töben a terrorist? An international hit man? A drug dealer perhaps? Is he wanted for rape, burglary, criminal damage? A parking ticket? None of these things. Dr Töben was arrested on an international warrant issued by "democratic" Germany for an "offence" that is not a crime in China - that "repressive" country we all heard so much about during the recent Olympics. Nor is this "offence" a crime in Iran - the country the hawks in the Bush Administration want America to bomb. Nor is this "offence" a crime in Britain. Nor, incredibly, was this "offence" committed in Germany. Dr Töben's crime is to hold a dissenting opinion on certain events that occurred in Europe more than sixty years ago, and to have the temerity to express it on his Australian website... Read more... You are being lied to about pirates | San Francisco Bay View  Somali pirate “ships” are small, but the ships they seize are huge. Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side...They held one gigantic tanker for months until ransom was paid. Read more... Settlers to Ethiopian troops: Niggers don't expel Jews - Israel News Border Guard officers of Ethiopian descent report rising number of racially motivated verbal attacks from Hebron youths; Druze officers also suffer racist remarks Not only do they serve long and tiring hours in the reserve forces, and not only are they forced to deal with violent clashes with settlers, but now, Border Guard officers of Ethiopian descent are also faced with rising racism... Read more...  With all the terrible news coming through every day about the indignities and violations suffered by Palestinians under occupation , this good news story seems to have slipped under the radar screen. A Palestinian educational, non-governmental, non-profit organisation, the Tamer Institute for Community Education has received the world’s largest prize for children’s and young people’s literature – the 2009 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for its promotion of reading in Gaza and the West Bank. The jury’s reasons are as follows:.. Read more... April 15, 2007 The Futility of Peace Talks with Israel, by Khalid Amayreh | Al-Jazeerah  Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whose term in office officially expired in January but remained at the helm of the Ramallah regime in order to spite off Hamas, reportedly has phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to wish him a happy holiday. The courtesy call, as described by Abbas’s office, has been interpreted by observers in occupied Palestine as a preliminary sign of flirting between the fascist-minded Netanyahu and the beleaguered PLO leader. If true, Abbas would be embarking on yet another odyssey of self-depreciation and national betrayal, one that would further undermine the Palestinian national cause... Read more... Democracy Now! | "We Didn't Create a Paradise in Iraq; We Created a Hell", with Nir Rosen As tens of thousands of Iraqis rally in Baghdad to mark the sixth anniversary of the fall of the city to US troops, we speak to independent journalist Nir Rosen, who is just back from Iraq... Read transcript, Watch... Israel's Racist in Chief, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig  It was unthinkable, when I was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem two decades ago, that an Israeli politician who openly advocated ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, as well as forcing Arabs in Israel to take loyalty oaths or be forcibly relocated to the West Bank, could sit on the Cabinet. The racist tirades of Jewish proto-fascists like Meir Kahane stood outside the law, were vigorously condemned by most Israelis and were prosecuted accordingly. Kahane’s repugnant Kach Party, labeled by the United States, Canada and the European Union as a terrorist organization, was outlawed by the Israeli government in 1988 for inciting racism... Read more... Onward, Christian Zionists | Alternate Focus This is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand what Christian Zionism is, and how it relates to Dispensationalism, Christian Fundamentalism, Evangelical Christinity, the Rapture, and last but not least, Israeli and Jewish Zionism. The forces thus arrayed against humanity are not to be underestimated, and cannot be fought without a thorough comprehension of who they are and what they believe. Watch... YouTube - Gaza 2009: Operation Cast Lead Some things you may not know about the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli government... Watch... SPIEGEL Interview with Iranian President Ahmadinejad: 'We Are Neither Obstinate nor Gullible'  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says: "We have no interest in building a nuclear weapon." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke with SPIEGEL about what he expects from US President Barack Obama, why America's new Afghanistan strategy is wrong and why Iran should have a spot on the UN Security Council...Read more... The True Haters | Patrick J. Buchanan ...The ordeal of this American Dreyfus began 30 years ago. In 1979, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at Justice, goaded and guided by Yuri Andropov’s KGB, was persuaded that Demjanjuk was “Ivan the Terrible,” a huge, brutal, sadistic guard at Treblinka, who bashed in babies’ heads and slashed off women’s breasts, as he drove hundreds of thousands of Jews into the gas chambers. Demjanjuk’s defense was simple: I was never at Treblinka... Read more... Let's Skip Gaza: Pope's PR Blunder, by Stuart Littlewood | The Palestine Chronicle  The Pope announced to American Jewish leaders that he plans to visit Israel So the Pope won't be visiting Gaza on his trip to the Holy Land next month. The Holy Father's spokesman has told the Israeli press that he’ll refrain from visiting Gaza regardless of attempts to persuade him otherwise. ‘Refrain’ is a telling choice of words: "the Pope will refrain from visiting Gaza...." It smacks of abstinence, as in abstaining from having sex. Setting foot in Gaza would be so sinful that it is forbidden...Read more... Neoconned Again | The American Conservative After successive elections unseated the Republican majority and sent John McCain to defeat, neoconservatism seemed like a spent force. Francis Fukuyama wrote wistfully about life “After Neoconservatism” in 2006. Ian Buruma described the McCain campaign as the neocons’ “last stand” and harrumphed that they “will not be missed.” One would expect neoconservatives to be friendless and circumspect, grumbling about Obama’s inevitable failure as they slump away from Washington. Instead, they are jubilant, palling around with liberals again, enjoying renewed respect. Obama is their hero. Read more... Marching to Israel's Drummer, by William A. Cook | The Palestine Chronicle  'Those who live by deception must reconstruct truth to conform to their distortion.' Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's new Prime Minister, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, ordered the new President of the United States to complete two “great missions” on behalf of Israel: “fix the economy” lest Israel not be able to collect its annual alimony of 3 billion plus the 30 billion promised by the Bush administration, and “prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” lest Israel’s monopoly on such weapons be challenged in the Mid-East. The interview is a primer into the mentality of Israel’s new government. As always with any utterances from Israeli officials, one has to translate the assertions from the reality. Let’s consider his pronouncements in their order of utterance...Read more... Pakistan is a Molotov cocktail just waiting for a match | The Daily Star Pakistan seems like a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match. Its ruling elite bickers over politics, while out on the streets Taliban insurgents step up their suicide attacks. Its military plays the role of national conciliator even as it worries about Muslim revolutionaries in its own ranks. Meanwhile, the United States, Pakistan's historic friend and benefactor, is symbolized in the popular mind by unmanned drones that cruise over the Western frontier assassinating Taliban militants by remote control... Read more... Mondoweiss: Man who says he is former AIPAC member puts up billboards decrying Gaza as monstrous inhumanity  I keep braying that Gaza is a watershed moment in American political life and American Jewish life. The billboard is one of ten being put up in New Mexico by an Albuquerque-based grassroots org (the Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel). Here is their press release. The group looks to be multicultural, and led by two Jews, Lori Rudolph and Rich Forer. Forer says that he is a former member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who has been shaken from ideological slumbers in the last couple of years by the Israeli New Historians. He has learned that Jewish schoolchildren are "grossly misinformed" about the conflict and are taught to demonize Palestinians. Gaza was a "monstrous act of inhumanity," he continues, and Israel must act sincerely to restore the dignity to both peoples... Read more... ONE THIRD OF THE HOLOCAUST A holocaust denial movie, in 30 episodes, on the subject of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Banned at Youtube... Watch... ISRAEL’S WALL – FOR PALESTINIANS OR JEWS? by Arthur Topham  Read more... Should Palestinian citizens vote in Israel's parliamentary elections? | EI ...Obviously, broaching the question of boycotting the parliamentary elections requires one to touch on a range of issues that are difficult to cover adequately in a brief article. Nonetheless, I believe that viewing the elections as a crutch that cannot be dispensed with in any circumstances (i.e. as a necessity), as some seem to think, is shortsighted. Nor do I believe, as others do, that boycotting the elections is a simple, magical cure for the multitude of difficulties that the Palestinian citizens face inside Israel. These are the two prevailing approaches within the Palestinian community inside Israel... Read more...  CIA Director Leon Panetta has consistently stated over the past several months that agency interrogators who participated in the Bush administration's sadistic torture practices should not be subject to "any investigation, let alone prosecution," because they were following legal advice provided by the Justice Department... Read more... Israel's Strikes on Sudan: Globalizing Politicide | Counterpunch Three times since the start of 2009, including on 17 January and 11 February, Israel has attacked the sovereign state of Sudan. Reports vary, but it seems clear that Israel executed the bombings using American-supplied F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and unmanned drones and killed or injured at least 50 people. These attacks represent obvious violations of international law. Not as obvious, but more importantly, the attacks also represent a renewed globalizing of Israel’s policy of politicide. They are the most recent instances of Israel making global its policy of destroying the national existence of the Palestinians. As such they represent a very real and increasing threat to individual and international peace and security, particularly to the people of the post-colonial south, but also those of the imperial north... Read more... April 14, 2007  Trying to maintain sanity here in this madhouse of Israeli apartheid is not easy. Gaza has dropped off the world news because the slaughter rate is no longer 50 civilians per day but only the weak and sick are starving and dying under siege. When Gaza is mentioned it is in a different context (like the Hizballah operative who was trying to help the resistance in Gaza through Egyptian territory and is causing a diplomatic row with ripples across the Middle East). But the International media is not focused on the endless suffering either in the occupied Gaza strip or the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Israel continues its assault on the natives everywhere (including Bedouins in the Negev and villagers in the Galilee). The policy has not changed with the change of governments or presidents: Zionists build Jewish infrastructure and towns with one hand and with the other demolish the existing life and livelihood of the native people... Read more... Don't Flash the Yellow Light: Mixed Messages from Washington Could Lead to Catastrophe in Iran, by Roane Carey | Tomgram Israel has been steadily ratcheting up pressure on the United States concerning the grave threat allegedly posed by Iran, which seems poised to master the nuclear fuel cycle, and thus the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. The new Israeli prime minister, Likud Party hawk Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned President Barack Obama that if Washington does not quickly find a way to shut down Iran's nuclear program, Israel will... Read more... Scores of Israeli settlers storm the Aqsa Mosque and police arrest one Palestinian worshiper - International Middle East Media Center  Witnesses said the setters lead by radical leaders stormed the place while protected by the Israeli police, when Palestinian worshipers tried to stop them police officers attacked them and arrested one Palestinian man. Palestinians say police also harassed other worshipers who were conducting their midday prayers at the Mosque. This is not the first such attack. Last Thursday groups of right-wing Israeli extremists attempted to enter the courtyard of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's old city... Read more... Remembering What NOT Many of We the People Ever Knew about "Never Forget," Deir Yassin, 9/11 and Israel Too By Eileen Fleming, author of Memoirs of a Nice Irish American Girl's Life in Occupied Territory Deir Yassin was once a peaceful Palestinian village on the west side of Jerusalem. On April 9, 1948 the lives of over 100 innocent men, women, and children ended by the hand of Jewish terrorists from the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Deir Yassin is 1,400 meters to the north of Yad Vashem, the most famous Holocaust memorial, where the world is taught to “Never Forget.”... Read more... ADL assails Michigan State University's Tutu invitation | AUPHR Michigan State University announced last week that retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu would give this year's commencement address. Two days later, the Anti-Defamation League [sic], a Jewish advocacy organization, filed a protest. In a letter to Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon, two ADL officials wrote that Tutu, whose opposition to apartheid in the 1980s won him the Nobel Peace Prize, had made statements about Israel that "conveyed outright bigotry against ... the Jewish people." They said a proposed cultural and academic boycott of Israel, which Tutu supports, was "based on ideas that are anti-Semitic and should be anathema to any institution of higher learning truly committed to academic freedom." They asked MSU to reconsider the invitation. Simon responded this week. She said no... [Finally, an American university president with some guts and integrity] Read more... War-shocked Gaza children 'want to die' | Australian Broadcasting Corporation  Caught in the middle: Little has changed in Gaza since the war in January, with thousands of families still living in tents and homes and schools still just rubble and ruins. But life for many children has never been the same since Israel launched its offensive three months ago...Palestinian boys wounded by an Israeli tank shell wait for treatment at Shifa hospital in Gaza Read more... 2010 Winter Olympics Way off subject, but very funny Enjoy... Chop Shop Economics and Stealth Zionism, by Karin Friedemann Causing $64 trillion of liquidity to vanish from the world financial system and then manipulating the US government to reward the perpetrators with bailout money requires the presence of the “right people” in government, academia, and finance industries. In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein argues that Milton Friedman or Chicago School influenced policy makers routinely used catastrophes to facilitate rewriting of national economic rules to benefit a select subset of the world’s hyperwealthy. President Obama, whose economic background is all Chicago School, brought the Friedmanites including National Economic Council Director Larry Summers back into government. Summers came under recent public scrutiny because 2008 White House financial disclosure reports reveal he collected favours from the very financial institutions that received huge taxpayer bailouts. “The document provided for Summers, who serves as one of the president’s closest confidants, underscores just how close some of these officials are to the industry over which they now have oversight,” writes Sam Stein in the Huffington Post... Read more... Plugged into the world | Hour Ex-CBC head honcho Tony Burman is behind Al-Jazeera's global outlook  Burman: "Al-Jazeera is an international channel" As bombs fell on the Gaza Strip in late 2008, major news media around the world scrambled to report directly from the conflict zone as Israeli authorities barred major international press from entering Gaza. But Al-Jazeera English rose above the fray - the only major English-language news service with a fully functioning news bureau operating from the centre of the conflict, with extensive media teams based both inside Gaza and throughout Israel...Read more... The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon In 2001, Portugal became the only EU-member state to decriminalize drugs, a distinction which continues through to the present. Last year, working with the Cato Institute, I went to that country in order to research the effects of the decriminalization law (which applies to all substances, including cocaine and heroin) and to interview both Portuguese and EU drug policy officials and analysts (the central EU drug policy monitoring agency is, by coincidence, based in Lisbon). Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense... Read more... UK ‘Terror Plot’ Led by Man US Claimed to Kill Months Ago | Antiwar 'High Value' Target Still Getting Blamed for Plots Six Months After US Claimed Killing  In November 2008, one of the many US drone strikes in North Waziristan killed five people. This was not unusual. What was is that the US claimed the killing of British citizen Rashid Rauf in the attack. Rauf was previously arrested in 2006 in connection with the “liquid explosives” plot in Britain. Now, Britain’s MI5 is calling Rauf al-Qaeda’s “Director of Operations” in Europe and claims he was behind a reported plot to bomb shopping centers in Manchester, England... Read more... April 13, 2007 One-State Supporters Make a Comeback, by Helena Cobban | IPS Many Palestinians and some important voices in what remains of Israel’s now-battered peace camp have concluded that it is now impossible to win the ‘two-state solution’ envisaged by Bush and Obama. This has led to the re-emergence in both communities of an old idea: that of a single bi- national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, in which both Hebrew-speaking Jewish Israelis and Arabic-speaking Palestinians would have equal rights as citizens, and find themselves equally at home. That goal was advocated most eloquently in the 1930s and early 1940s by Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and other intellectuals at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, most Israelis moved away from it after Israel was established as a specifically Jewish state in 1948... Read more... Ben-Gurion and the Massacre of Deir Yassin | Palestine Chronicle  'The massacre of Deir Yassin added to the mass exodus ..' The minutes of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 12 June 1938 records a chilling statement made by David Ben-Gurion: “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it”. Ben-Gurion, an ardent Zionist was a migrant from Poland where he was born in 1886. Since his arrival in Palestine as a 20-year old, Ben-Gurion was destined to be heralded as not only the founder of the State of Israel and its first prime minister, but also as the mastermind of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine... Read more... In truth, Israel is not a democracy, by Jerry Levin | Birmingham News Birmingham Jewish Federation Executive Director Richard Friedman, in recent writings in The Birmingham News, continues to claim "the Jewish state" of Israel is a "tiny and humane democracy struggling against Islamic fanaticism in the Middle East (and so) deserves our support and admiration." As the anniversary of Israel's momentous, violent and controversial establishment nears, I am challenging those assertions. It is true tiny Israel is struggling to protect its noncombatant citizens from potentially deadly rocket attacks by its tinier violent opponent, the militant wing of Hamas, as well it should. But what Friedman's arguments on behalf of Israel obscure is the Jewish state's historic and violently abusive and predatory treatment of non-Jewish citizens living inside Israel or its non-Jewish subjects hanging on in the West Bank and Gaza... Read more... “Rest has Come to the Weary…”, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom ...Barack Obama told the Turkish people this week that they must come to grips with the massacre of the Armenians committed by their fathers, while at the same time reminding the Americans that they must confront the genocide of the Native Americans and the black slavery exploited by their own forefathers. I believe we can do this regarding the catastrophe that we have caused the Palestinians. I am convinced that this is important, indeed essential, for our own national mental health, as well as a first step toward eventual reconciliation. We must acknowledge and recognize the consequences of our deeds and repair what can be repaired – without rejecting our past and the songs that express the innocence of our youth. We must live with this contradiction, because it is the truth of our lives... Read more... The Demjanjuk Affair -- The Rise and Fall of a Show Trial (book review) | IHR An Evil Campaign to Frame an Innocent Man  Already acquitted by the Israeli courts, the 89 year-old John Demjanjuk is once again being On July 29, 1993, John Demjanjuk was acquitted by the Israeli Supreme Court of the charge of being the sadistic Treblinka guard "Ivan the Terrible." This book, written by his Israeli attorney, deals with the pivotal Israeli chapter of his 16 year ordeal. The title says it all, in a nutshell. It is a scathing and uncompromising account of the "trial of the century." Its author, a fervent Zionist and Israeli patriot, spares none of the many players in the Demjanjuk affair, not even the "Ukrainian goyim" who paid for his fees. It is a highly personal account in which the defense counsel, and not the accused, is the star attraction in a courtroom drama that riveted a worldwide audience. An experienced criminal lawyer and expert in identification cases, with a penchant for adventure (he successfully defended the notorious gangster Meyer Lansky), Sheftel decided to join the defense team after being shown the highly suggestive and biased photo spread used to identify John Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible." On a more personal level, he was motivated to take on the case because he was convinced that "the one and only purpose of this move was to conduct a special 'Israel-style' show trial, to teach Israeli children the story of the Holocaust and heighten Holocaust awareness among the public."...put through hell, this time in Germany — all to satisfy the revenge lust of Holohoaxer wack-jobs Read more... Paul Grenville - Israel's Key Vulnerability | Palestine Think Tank Israel has once more sent out a message to the Islamic and Arab world with its onslaught on Gaza that the struggle for the Middle East will be uncompromisingly bloody and violent. It was the same message in the summer of 2006 with the invasion of the Lebanon, with the Qana massacre of 1996, with the invasion and the 18 year occupation of the Lebanon in 1982 to 2000, and all the way back to 1948. For those who abjure violence in their personal lives, and for those, like me, who have never carried or used a gun, the boycott campaign is an important tool of nonviolent struggle against the Occupation of the West Bank, and the racist polity within the ever shifting borders of Israel, the borderless state in Occupied Palestine... Read more... Why Steve Rosen is Suing AIPAC, by Grant F. Smith | Dissident Voice The Samson Gambit On March 2 former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) foreign policy chief Steve Rosen filed a civil lawsuit in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Rosen accuses his former employer, directors, and outside public relations firm of libel and slander. Rosen seeks damages of $5 million from AIPAC and punitive damages of $500,000 each from former board members and the public relations firm Rational PR, L.C. An analysis of Rosen’s civil complaint reveals how his “Samson’s gambit” of threatening to pull down the walls of justice over the heads of the Israel lobby may prevail in getting criminal espionage charges dropped within the next two months... Read more... Obama seeks $83.4 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan wars as total costs near $1 trillion  President Barack Obama meets with Gen. Ray Odierno at Camp Victory in Baghdad President Barack Obama asked Congress on Thursday for $83.4 billion for U.S. military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, pressing for special troop funding that he opposed two years ago when he was senator and George W. Bush was president...['Camp Victory'? Give me a break. Though I suppose if the U.S. gets tokeep permanent bases in the country it could be labeled a successfuladventure.] Read more... Judiciary Chairman Conyers Publishes Report Documenting Bush Abuses Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) announced the publication of the final version of the Democratic Committee staff report on systematic abuses of presidential power during the Bush administration. The report, titled “Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush,” contains 50 separate recommendations designed to correct the imbalanced separation of power that characterized the George W. Bush presidency. Chief among Conyers’ recommendations include continued congressional investigations like those the Judiciary Committee has pursued concerning Karl Rove’s interactions with the Justice Department, a blue ribbon commission similar to the panel proposed in Chairman Conyers’ H.R. 104, and independent criminal probes to be conducted by federal prosecutors... Read more/ Link to Report... Wall: A Monologue, by David Hare | NYRB ...Have you ever known anything of which 84 percent of people were in favor? And yet there it is, over four fifths of a nation—can you imagine that figure?—saying something completely bizarre. The Berlin Wall was built to keep people in. This one, they say, is being built to keep people out...Except, of course, they don't call it a wall. They call it a fence... Read more... The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means, by Mark Danner - The New York Review of Books  When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry.... These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek. If it hadn't been for what we did—with respect to the...enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees...—then we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the US.... - Former Vice President Dick Cheney, February 4, 2009 [Sorry for belaboring the obvious, but maybe we should put Cheney on the rack]Read more... NYC ballot initiative for a real 9/11 investigation, by John Spritzler The official story of 9/11 is that 19 Muslims under the direction of Osama bin Laden entered into a conspiracy to carry out the attack. It is, thus, a conspiracy theory. But is it the right conspiracy theory? The 9/11 Truth movement thinks it is the wrong conspiracy theory because too many facts contradict this official story (a story that includes the claim that Muslims brought down three skyscrapers by ramming planes into two of them, and that miraculously the passport of the hijackers' leader escaped a fireball to land safely on the ground unburnt.) The link above is to the organization that aims to place a binding ballot question on the New York City ballot that, if passed (and they say polls indicate 66% support already), would mandate the creation of a Commission, independent of the government at any level and with independent funding directly from public contributions, to investigate 9/11... Read more... April 12, 2007 Zionist Colonial Enterprise Superseded Judaism | The Palestine Chronicle Zionism had 'calamitous consequences for Palestinians and the Jewish religion' Jewish people are observing the Passover tradition of escaping slavery in Egypt and enjoying freedom. While they celebrate their ancient struggle against slavery and claim having Jewish moral superiority, they at the same time accept terrorizing, starving, strangulating, detaining and humiliating another people on a daily basis and occupying and colonizing their lands under false narratives. Last time I read the Ten Commandments that were given to Moses by God in the form of two stone tablets, according to Judaism, the sixth and eighth commandments prohibit murder and stealing. Murdering a human being is a capital sin according to God, but the Israelis murder Palestinians and steal their lands and properties every day... Read more... The Two Faces of Barack Obama by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar ...Like Americans, the Europeans want to believe – but they see the two faces of Barack Obama too clearly, and the contrast is too apparent to be denied. The gullible Americans, who take things at face value, still believe their new president represents a real change, a challenge to the status quo, while the more sophisticated Europeans are quick to pick up on Obama’s inconsistencies – made all the more glaring by his habit of pairing two mutually contradictory stances on the same issue. This includes not only coupling missile "defense" in Eastern Europe with the prospect of a nuclear-free world, but also the recent launching of his "Af-Pak" initiative. Although dressed up as a diplomatic offensive, this is essentially a military offensive aimed at widening the war in Afghanistan to include portions of Pakistan... Read more... Obama's New World Order: Michael Hudson's analysis of the financial crisis, by Stephen Lendman This article addresses Washington's financial coup d'etat in the context of discussing Michael Hudson's important, very lengthy and detailed..one titled: "The Financial War Against Iceland - Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare." It reviews its key information in advance of Hudson's April 14 scheduled appearance on The Global Research News Hour to discuss... Read more... Israel Investigated, But Will It Repent?, by Ramzy Baroud | The Palestine Chronicle Any variation of the words 'Palestine' and 'massacre' are sure to yield millions of results on major search engines on the World Wide Web. These results are largely in reference to hundreds of different dates and events in which numerous Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army or settlers. But references to massacres of similar nature precede the state of Israel itself, whose establishment was secured through the ever-expanding agenda of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. Throughout its history, this bloodletting project has been carried out for once specific purpose, that being the illegal acquirement of land and the suppression or extermination of those who dare to resist... Read more... Former congressman says getting evenhanded legislation past the Israel lobby was like 'pulling teeth from a rhinocerous without anesthesia | Mondoweiss Here's a wonderful event. Wayne Gilchrest, former congressman from Maryland, holds forth two days ago, at a forum on Capitol Hill, about the Israel lobby's role in blocking a "more objective" policy in the Middle East. Watch this video and you'll see a sober, thoughtful 62-year-old public servant and Vietnam vet laying it on the line about the corruption of our foreign policy by a special interest group... Read more/ Watch... Morality Play, by Liel Leibovitz | The Nation ...overall, during my service and after, I continued to believe that the army took the sacred notion of human life seriously. This is no longer the case. In the past two months, a torrent of news reports out of Israel have done much to portray a radically different picture of the IDF: violent, callous and increasingly religious, an army unlike the one in which I served more than a decade ago... Read more... Living Large and in Charge, by Robert Scheer | Truthdig It was Lawrence Summers, as much as anyone, who in the Clinton years prevented the Not surprisingly, Lawrence Summers is convinced that he deserved every penny of the $8 million that Wall Street firms paid him last year. And why shouldn’t he be cut in on the loot from the loopholes in the toxic derivatives market that he pushed into law when he was Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary? No one has been more persistently effective in paving the way for the financial swindles that enriched the titans of finance while impoverishing the rest of the world than the man who is now the top economic adviser to President Obama...regulation of the hedge funds that are now at the center of the explosion of the derivatives bubble Read more... The UN vs. Israel: The Gaza Fallout | The Nation The appointments of universally respected human rights experts to lead two separate, independent United Nations investigations into Israeli attacks on Gaza in December and January may have put Israel on a new collision course with the UN just as the United States is moving to resume cooperation with the organization on human rights issues... Read more... Avigdor Lieberman, Israel, Palestine and the Middle East peace process | The Guardian ...In Israel, Lieberman appeals to a volatile mix of nationalism and racism that scapegoats Palestinians and blames them for all of Israel's ills. As a settler living illegally in the occupied West Bank, his contempt for international law begins at home. But Lieberman is not the full story. The real story is still Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's new prime minister. Does he endorse Lieberman's comments, and if not, will he rein Lieberman in? The answer seems to be yes to the first, and no to the second... Read more... Little hope in Gaza aftermath | BBC NEWS The shortage of building materials means many families are still living in tents Most of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinians are impoverished and are not allowed to leave by their Israeli and Egyptian neighbours. It is hard to think of another place in the world that can be as oppressive. But considering that Gazans have so much experience of war, loss and bloodshed, it is remarkable that the human spirit here is so resilient. But it has been severely tested by everything that has happened this year. Life was hard enough anyway before the January conflict, mainly because of the blockade imposed by Israel and supported by its allies. Eighty per cent of Gaza's population lives in poverty, defined here as an income of less than $2 daily. But since the Israeli offensive things have got much worse. The UN says that 35,000 people don't have running water. More than 20,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged... Read more... Is Obama even more Dangerous than Bush?, by Doug Page | Dissident Voice Sixty-nine Million of us voted for President Obama because he promised hope and change from the disasters of the Bush Administration. Countless millions of human beings around the planet joined us in our relief and our elation when he was elected. An unthinking uncritical “Obamamania” among most of his supporters continues to prevail so far. This is dangerous for them, for President Obama and for all of us. Without critical analysis and pressure from his millions of supporters, Obama will stumble into disaster. We have carefully watched the new President’s first 100 days and we are appalled. We find that Obama has continued Bush policies affecting the abuses of Wall Street banks, and allowing Wall Street wrongdoers to manage our economy and the “recovery.” ... Read more... Obama Team Debates Stance on Israeli Attack Threat, by Gareth Porter and Jim Lobe | IPS A recent statement by the chief of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), Gen. David Petraeus, that Israel may decide to attack Iranian nuclear sites has been followed by indications of a debate within the Barack Obama administration on whether Israel's repeated threats to carry out such a strike should be used to gain leverage in future negotiations with Tehran... Read more... Who are the Jews?: The emerging Masada syndrome | Redress Christopher King suggests that American support for Israel and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may stem from a desire for Israelis “to stay where they are” because Washington does not want millions of extremist, racist Jews migrating to the USA in the event of a one-state solution and the return of dispossessed Palestinians to Palestine. You will be aware that the entity calling itself the “State of Israel” was founded on Palestinian land by terrorism, has been murdering Palestinians while stealing their land, water, houses and orchards for over 60 years, yet claiming that its own citizens are victims of Palestinian terrorism when Palestinians resist... Read more... Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, center, and Dick Cheney look on About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture...as President Bush spoke before signing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 Read more... Clark drops Holocaust scholar - The Boston Globe Clark University canceled a campus talk scheduled for later this month by controversial Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein, saying his presence "would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding," and would conflict with a similar event scheduled around the same time... Read more... April 11, 2007 George Galloway in California On Sunday I had the rare privilege (for an American) of hearing George Galloway speak in person. Held at a local Muslim Community Association, it was quite the scene. The crowd exceeded a thousand people, certainly the largest crowd for any indoor political event I've attended in many years (if not ever). When Galloway arrived, he was mobbed - surrounded by people getting their picture taken, autographs, shaking hands, etc. His recent Viva Palestina convoy of 100 trucks to Gaza no doubt played a major part. I was surprised to hear that, if I remember correctly, this was the 19th city Galloway had spoken in on his current tour. Aside from his being refused entry to Canada, I was unaware he was on such an extensive tour. I'm guessing many of these engagements were organized through mosques and other Muslim organizations, without extensive public publicity... Read more, Watch videos... A Harsh Reality for Palestinians - NYT The right-wing coalition of the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, does not bode well for Palestinians in Israel. With the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, the extremists are going after the indigenous population and threatening us with loyalty tests and the possibility of “transfer” into an area nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority... Read more... Is Kevin MacDonald Right? | Jewcy.com Kevin MacDonald has been described as the “Marx of the Anti-Semites.” Google around the slimier regions of the web and you’ll see that his trilogy of books on Jews - A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Assimilation and its Discontents, and Culture of Critique—is celebrated in the nastiest Jew-hating environs on the net. And MacDonald himself is a hardcore American nativist in the Charles Lindbergh mold. None of which necessarily means that MacDonald’s academic arguments are wrong. He's a tenured professor of psychology, his theories have received some support from well-respected colleagues, and there’s no getting around the fact that his Jewish trilogy is as fascinating as it is alarming, a sui generis look at Jewish history and psychology with the help of modern evolutionary theory... Read more... Netanyahu To The West – Destroy Iran Before Israel Destroys You In early February 2009, a mere few days before the elections in Israel that delivered into Benjamin Netanyahu’s hands the launch codes to several hundred nuclear weapons aimed at every major capital in the Western world, former U.S. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller predicted that upon assuming the seat of power Netanyahu’s first priority would be “strategic conversation” with America’s new president, Barack Obama. Miller further predicted that the aim of this “very serious” conversation would be to “scare the daylights out of the president”, the ultimate objective of which would be mobilizing–not only the United States, but indeed the entire “international community”–into addressing the Iranian situation in a manner deemed “acceptable” to the Jewish state and her agenda... Read more... From Deir Yasin to Beit Hanun, by Khalid Amayreh | uruknet Israel has well-established traditions of murder and lies. The so-called "Jewish state," one can safely argue, has been an ongoing crime against humanity ever since the forefathers of Zionism claimed that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. Hence, Zionism will always be a criminal concept if only because its ultimate implication is the uprooting and expulsion of an entire people from its ancestral homeland in order to be replaced by another people. Zionism has never changed its mind, heart, or even skin. It remains a virulent malignancy based on murder, lies, deception and bellicosity. In a certain sense, this is within the "normal order of things," given the racist nature of Zionism. Indeed, concepts such as Justice, peace, and humanity are alien to Zionism, an atheistic and idolatrous ideology based on Jewish supremacy. In light, Israel ’s main function will always be to perpetuate the uprooting, expulsion and dispersion of the victims. This is why it is impossible to even imagine the possibility of peace with Zionism. In fact, it is easier to have peace with cancer than with Zionism... Read more... Palestinian Nationalism, by Dan Lieberman | Dissident Voice Academic symposiums usually clarify history and knowledge to a select group who absorb the history and knowledge in order to impart the history and knowledge to others. The 2009 Annual Symposium of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies accomplished more than being a routine academic program. Its April 2-3 symposium on Palestine & the Palestinians Today, at the Washington DC Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, alerted an attentive audience to situations that many didn’t realize and to realities that all should know. A series of conferences revealed a nature and debate of the Middle East conflict that is not apparent in daily media reports... Read more... Gaza is still an open-air prison, says Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams | The Guardian Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, meeting Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin in the Gaza Strip Gaza is still an open-air prison, Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams said today during a visit to the Middle East. The West Belfast MP called for an end to the Israeli blockade on building materials and urged the state to enter into negotiations with Hamas, which rules Gaza. Adams held talks in the region with Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, and is due to travel to the West Bank to meet the Palestinian Authority. "This is a total denial of the rights of the people of Palestine. This is an open-air prison," the Sinn Féin president said. "People can't travel out of here, they can't travel in."...Read more... US Hypocrisy on North Korea: Let's Talk About Israel's Nukes, by Jeremy Scahill | Common Dreams ...Obama used the launch in his major address in Prague, which has been characterized as an anti-nuclear speech. "Rules must be binding," he said of North Korea's launch. "Violations must be punished. Words must mean something." Many countries around the world certainly see hypocrisy in the Obama administration's position on North Korea. Israel has repeatedly been condemned by the UN for its occupation of Palestinian lands. Moreover, it has hundreds of nuclear weapons with estimates ranging from 200-400 warheads. What's more, Israel and the US are in league with North Korea in the small club of nations that have refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Other nations include: China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Pakistan. In his Prague speech, Obama said his administration "will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification," saying, "After more than five decades of talks, it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned." All of this must be kept in context as the "crisis" with North Korea continues to unfold. US hypocrisy on the nuclear issue takes away credibility the US has in its condemnations of North Korea, or Iran, for that matter... Read more... Italian, Scottish activists plan aid convoys to Gaza | Maan News Agency Two solidarity convoys will arrive in besieged Gaza Strip via Egypt in the coming three weeks, a Palestinian official in Gaza reported. According to Adel Zu’rub, the spokesperson of the official anti-siege committee in Gaza, the first convoy, led by Scottish lawmaker Pauline McNeill, will arrive next Tuesday via the Rafah border crossing. The convoy is carrying medical supplies. A second 100-vehicle convoy will set out from Milan, Italy, travelling to Alexandria, Egypt, by boat and then continue to Gaza, aiming to arrive on 3 May. The Italian effort is also carrying medical supplies... Read more... An Open Letter from Jewish Peace Activists: On Anti-Semitism, Boycotts, and the Case of Hermann Dierkes Petition We are peace activists of Jewish background. Some of us typically identify in this way; others of us do not. But we all object to those who claim to speak for all Jews or who use charges of anti-Semitism to attempt to squelch legitimate dissent. We have learned with dismay the allegations regarding Hermann Dierkes, a trade unionist and leader of the Left Party (DIE LINKE) in the German city of Duisburg. Dierkes, in response to the recent Israeli assault on Gaza expressed the view that one way people could help Palestinians obtain justice would be to support the call of the World Social Forum to boycott Israeli goods, so as to put pressure on the Israeli government. Dierkes has been subjected to widespread and vitriolic denunciations for anti-Semitism, and accused of calling for a repeat of the Nazi policy of the 1930s of boycotting Jewish products. Dierkes responded that “The demands of the World Social Forum have nothing in common with Nazi-type racist campaigns against Jews, but aim at changing the Israeli government’s policy of oppression of the Palestinians."... Read more... Artists Against Apartheid VII | Tadamon An evening featuring celebrated musicians from Montreal united against Israeli apartheid - April 12th Read program... Viva Palestina US: ‘We aim for $10 million in aid and 500 vehicles for Gaza.' Fresh from the success of the Viva Palestina aid convoy which took over 100 vehicles to Gaza from Britain , George Galloway MP has linked up on his US tour with the Vietnam veteran and peace campaigner Ron Kovic to launch a similar, but bigger venture from the States. Galloway announced the initiative at a 1000-strong meeting in Anaheim , South California , rounding off a packed-out, coast to coast speaking tour highlighting the Palestinian cause. “There's a new atmosphere in the US over Palestine ,” says Galloway , “the phenomenal response to this tour demonstrates that.” Ron Kovic, whose story was immortalised in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July , will be the co-leader of the convoy, which will form up in Egypt and make its way to the Rafah crossing and into Gaza Organisers are aiming for 500 vehicles and $10 million of aid. “And what better day to head off,” says Galloway , “Than July 4 – Independence Day!” Watch video... THE 10TH LONDON PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL April 24th - May 8th 2009, Barbican Cinema & SOAS Link...So what have the Palestinians got to complain about?, by Mark Steel | The Independent When you read the statements from Israeli and US politicians, and try to match them with the pictures of devastation, there seems to be only one explanation. They must have one of those conditions, called something like "Visual Carnage Responsibility Back To Front Upside Down Massacre Disorder". For example, Condoleezza Rice, having observed that more than 300 Gazans were dead, said: "We are deeply concerned about the escalating violence. We strongly condemn the attacks on Israel and hold Hamas responsible." Someone should ask her to comment on teenage knife-crime, to see if she'd say: "I strongly condemn the people who've been stabbed, and until they abandon their practice of wandering around clutching their sides and bleeding, there is no hope for peace."... Link... April 10, 2007 Detention As A Means To Political Silencing: The Case Of Theater Artist Samieh Jabbarin The house-arrest for an indefinite period of time of Jaffa-based theater artist Samieh Jabbarin signals a sharp escalation in the harassment of citizens engaged democratically and legally in expressing their political views. The case of Samieh Jabbarin exposes the close cooperation of the Israeli Security Services, police and Attorney General's office. A crass attempt is being made to incriminate a peace-seeking social-political activist by fabricating charges of violence. Unfortunately, the courts of justice have not yet put a halt to this mode of action... Read more... ...here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil: “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.” I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there... [What's going on at the Zionist paper of record? Did the forces of truth, justice and peace stage a coup?] Read more... "A Match Made in Tel Aviv", by Leon Hadar | Cato Institute Imagine that after Boris Yeltsin was elected president of a free post-Communist Russia in 1991, the Poles, residents of a former province of the Soviet empire, elected former Communist boss Edward Gierek as their new head of state. Then suppose that, upon entering office, he called on Moscow to forget about rapprochement with the West and prepare for military confrontation. Improbable as it seems, some version of this scenario is playing out here. After their humiliating defeat in the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, the vanquished neoconservative legions won a major political victory in one of the provinces of the American empire when the parliamentary election in Israel brought to power a veteran neocon activist. He is calling on Washington to forget about changing U.S. policy in the Middle East and prepare for a military confrontation with Iran... Read more... The Official End of Obama’s Honeymoon, by Matt Taibbi ...When Enron buys a seat at the table to conduct energy policy under the Bush administration, everyone knows what that is. When Reagan hires notorious union-busters to run the NLRB, everyone knows what that is. And when we hire investment bankers to run banking policy, and put investment bankers in charge of handing out bailout money to investment banks, we ought to know what that is. But for some reason we don’t seem to see it the same way, not as clearly. In my mind this officially ends the Obama honeymoon. I can maybe see one or two of these creeps in key positions. But this many — it’s an undeniable pattern... Read more... Iraqi shoe thrower is world’s 3rd most powerful Arab | Arabian Business The Iraqi journalist who hurled a shoe at President George W Bush has been named as the world’s third most powerful Arab, in a list to be published by Arabian Business. The annual Power 100 guide to the world’s most influential Arabs places Muntadar Al Zaidi as the highest new entry in this year’s list... Read more... The Pentagon's privilege review team: Liberty central's civil liberties villain of the week | The Guardian Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed face the incredible prospect of a six-month jail sentence in America after writing a letter to President Obama detailing their client's allegations of torture by US agents. The privilege review team – officials from the US department of defence who monitor and censor communication between Guantánamo prisoners and their lawyers – have previously been accused of using their powers to suppress evidence of the abuse and mistreatment of detainees... Read more... The Global Political Economy of Israel ...The book is more about how global capitalism works internationally than in Israel per se, although that is used as a very modern example given the state was founded only recently. It's more economic analysis than historical revisionism etc. but in the process they do a fair bit of economic revisionism using original source materials exhaustively researched from stuff from decades ago not available on the web - at least not when they did much of their research 10+ years ago. In short, they explain how capital can be defined really as power or 'the commodification of power'; how capitalist power involves harnessing cultural, media, governmental, military as well as financial streams, and how the game works in both expansionary as well as contracting phases. Intelligent stuff. A bit heavy going, but intelligent, and although they reveal just how corrupt the whole thing is, they maintain a steady objective non-polemic tone throughout, which is refreshing. (Both Jews, one living in Israel.) On their site they have some shorter pieces that do a good job summarizing their main view in only 10-20 pages...[an email from a friend] Read more... April 9, 2007 Gilad Atzmon - Aaronovitch's Tantrum and the Demolition of Jewish Power | Palestine Think Tank Last Wednesday, I participated in a panel that could have been a breakthrough debate on issues having to do with ‘Antisemitism’. The event was part of The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival and it took place at Oxford University. The discussion was moderated by the legendary BBC reporter Martin Bell. On the panel we had Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch. They were there to elaborate on the case of ‘new antisemitism’. Interestingly enough, Aaronovitch and Cohen were prominent advocates of the illegal war in Iraq through the British press. They are also notoriously famous for their Islamophobic ranting; as if this is not enough, they were also caught supporting the latest Israeli deadly campaign in Gaza. I was there to argue that antisemitism is a spin, it is a myth, I was there to deliver a very simple message: there is no such a thing as antisemitism... Read more... Jeremy Scahill: How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget? | Counterpunch Much of the media attention this week on President Obama’s new military budget has put forward a false narrative wherein Obama is somehow taking his socialist/pacifist sledgehammer to the Pentagon’s war machine and blasting it to smithereens. Republicans have charged that Obama is endangering the country’s security, while the Democratic leadership has hailed it as the dawn of a new era in responsible spending priorities. Part of this narrative portrays Defense Secretary Robert Gates as standing up to the war industry, particularly military contractors. The reality is that all of this is false... Read more... Palestinians gather around a crater caused by an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip At a time when Western governments refrain from using their power to stop Israel's ongoing violations of international law, many civil society organizations silently watch the moral corrosion of their governments. At the "Israel Review Conference" in Geneva this month and the Russell Tribunal slated for early 2010, however, civil society will use its power and call Israel to account...Read more... The Pragmatism of Ethnic Cleansing, by Steven Salaita | Antiwar Barack Obama's election victory has inspired a windfall of comment, most of it euphoric, with some grumbling from the political Right and the small quarters of the Left that remain unimpressed, so I am hesitant to contribute to the chatter. There is one element of Obama's victory, however, that has received less attention than it deserves, and that is his profound commitment to an extreme form of Zionism. I do not wish to spend this essay condemning Obama for that commitment; I have done so elsewhere, and others have offered eloquent condemnation already, though such a perspective hasn't yet managed to penetrate the liberal-Left... Read more... PM feared Galloway's message | Toronto Star Anyone who has ever seen George Galloway in action knows why he had to be stopped at the border. He definitely poses a threat – although not the security one alleged by the Harper government. Rather, Galloway, a five-times elected member of the British Parliament, poses a threat to Stephen Harper's ability to sell Canadians on our involvement in the Afghan war and Read more... Rotting in denial, by Khaled Amayreh | Al-Ahram Weekly T-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers, describing graphically the murderous acts During Israel's latest aggression on the Gaza Strip, Palestinians widely reported the indiscriminate killing of civilians along with numerous war crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli army. Now Israeli officers and soldiers are confirming the allegations and adding witness detail. Will the world finally listen and constitute a war crimes tribunal for Gaza and its victims?...the soldiers committed against Palestinian civilians Read more... Patrick Cockburn: What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam | Counterpunch ...The American confrontation with Islam post 9/11 always had more to do with opposition to foreign intervention and occupation than it did with cultural differences; the most ideologically religious Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia supported the US and it is doubtful how far al-Qa'ida fighters were motivated primarily by religious fanaticism. The chief US interrogator in Iraq, Major Mathew Alexander, who is credited with finding out the location of the al-Qa'ida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says that during 1,300 interrogations he supervised, he came across only one true ideologue. He is quoted as saying that "I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the No 1 reason they had decided to pick up arms and join al-Qa'ida was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay."... Read more... April 8, 2007 Israeli settler "MANIACS" attack Palestinians again | Palestine Telegraph Wednesday morning heavily armed Israeli settlers invaded Safa village, north of Hebron, backed by Israeli Occupation soldiers. The settlers approached residential areas and opened indiscriminate fire. Twelve Palestinian victims were treated for gunshot wounds. Fifteen others were treated for smoke inhalation. Local youth from the neighboring villages of Beit Ummar and Surfir were held in check by occupation soldiers after responding to distress calls sent via mosque loudspeakers. The settlers finally ended their carnage spree, stealing Palestinian livestock as they left... Read more... In an unprecedented move, the Obama administration is readying for a possible confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by briefing Democratic congressmen on the peace process and the positions of the new government in Israel regarding a two-state solution. The Obama administration is expecting a clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel... [This "confrontation" is more than slightly surrealistic - a tiff between the hard-nosed, openly belligerent fascists and their patrons in the U.S. administration, who would prefer to pretend to be more civilized about the whole thing. American proponents of no-nonsense genocide, like Elliot Abrams, will throw all their weight behind Netanyahu and Lieberman, while the Obama Team - Zionists all - will wag their fingers in a silly pretense of umbrage. You could help counter this insidious Punch and Judy show by writing to the Post - see link to Write Now.] Read Haaretz article... Massive abduction of Gazan fishermen by the Israeli navy | Fishing Under Fire Eight fishermen (including two minors) from the Salateen area in the North of the Gaza strip, have been abducted, and four hassakas (small fishing boats) have been stolen this morning, at about 7am, by the Israeli navy. According to witnesses the fishermen were only about 100 meters from the coast... Read more... RUSSELL TRIBUNAL ON PALESTINE In the Foreword to Bertrand Russell’s “War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam”, Noam Chomsky says: “It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as ‘a crime under international law’ in the principles of the Charter of Nuremberg. This is, in essence, the challenge posed to us by the Russell Tribunal.”... Read more... Israeli exporters forced to slash prices due to boycott Israeli exporters have been forced to cut prices in part because of a worldwide boycott of Israeli products in protest of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, a leading industry association reported this week. Israeli exporters have been “losing foreign markets and customers because of the global economic crisis and a growing anti-Israel boycott of locally made products following Operation Cast Lead.”... Read more... YouTube - The Biggest Robbery Of The 20th Century This is the biggest of it's kind, a day light robbery. The world is watching but can not and will not do anything about it. A crying shame. Watch... YouTube - Jordan's refugees live in despair Jordan, home to thousands of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees who fled their homes in search of a better life, have ended up living in appalling conditions. Watch... A Palestinians-free Jerusalem - IslamOnline Ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jews stand over "The Israeli occupation is seeking to Judaize Al-Quds (Jerusalem), to practice ethnic cleansing upon our people in Jerusalem, hoping to establish a 'Jerusalem' empty of the Palestinian existence," says..Sheikh Salah, a Palestinian activist from the town of Umm Faham inside the 1948 Green Line, has been a fierce critic of Israeli occupation authorities' polices of expelling Palestinian families from Jerusalem which he describes as "piracy and bullying."...a spring in the Jerusalem mountains Read more... Urgent Appeal: In Gaza a Siege fire instead of Ceasefire | Palestine Telegraph The European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza, (ECESG) calls upon all International Organization working on the Gaza Strip to intervene immediately. The siege is not only suffocating the people of Gaza and depriving them of basic necessities, it is also breaking international law. In the wake of the siege, which shows no sign of abating after three years, numerous international condemnations and desperate pleas have been shamelessly rejected by the Israeli authorities... Read more... April 7, 2007 'Tell Her the Truth', by Tony Kushner & Alisa Solomon | The Nation While some British critics greatly admired the play, which was presented by a Jewish director with a largely Jewish cast, a number of prominent British Jews denounced it as anti-Semitic. Some even accused Churchill of blood libel, of perpetrating in Seven Jewish Children the centuries-old lie, used to incite homicidal anti-Jewish violence, that Jews ritually murder non-Jewish children. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the Jerusalem Post that the "horrifically anti-Israel" text went "beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse." We emphatically disagree. We think Churchill's play should be seen and discussed as widely as possible... Read more... The Assault against Gaza -- More Facts | Jewish Peace News A medical fact-finding mission on Israel's assault against Gaza, continues to indicate the urgent need for an independent, international investigation. The communique below describes the mission, quotes briefly from its report, to which it also links, and lists three pressing practical conclusions entailed by the mission... Read more... Video: Reel Bad Arabs, with Jack Shaheen Hollywood's relentless vilification of Arabs Watch... YouTube - The people of Gaza are starving This is a 1:30 min. description of the prison that is called Gaza and an innovative project of nonviolent internationals to sail there this summer to break Israel's siege. Watch... Gilad Atzmon - The Lady Between the Queen and the Tribe | Palestine Think Tank "Lady" Cosgrove In spite of the fact that I monitor Israeli press and Jewish activism on a daily basis, I must admit that almost once a day I come across something new and refreshing about my ex-brethren. As it happened, yesterday I learned about an organisation named the “International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists” (IAJLJ). An association with such a name didn’t take me by complete surprise. By now I am used to the concept of ‘primarily-Jewish’ organisations and associations. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t take any of us by surprise, Israel, as we know, is the ‘Jews-only’ state. Furthermore, Israel’s very few sporadic vocal opponents within the Jewish world tend for some reason to operate also in similar racially orientated primarily Jewish political settings such as ‘Jews For Peace’, ‘Jews for Justice in Palestine’, ‘Jewish Independent Voice’, etc...Read more... Students say: No business with apartheid Israel | IAC A divestment teach-in at Temple University on March 5 put technology to use for Palestine as students here spoke directly with students from the Hampshire College divestment movement in Massachusetts through the power of Skype, an Internet telephone program. Temple Students for Justice in Palestine hosted the teach-in as part of Boycott Israeli Apartheid week. The panel featured Godfrey Sithole, a member of the African National Congress and veteran of the 1980s movement to divest from South Africa, and Adam Horowitz from the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation of Palestine... Read more... Lieberman and the New Israeli Government: Who's the Boss?, by Uri Avnery On the first day of the new Israeli government, the fog cleared: it’s a Lieberman government...Already on his first day he made clear that he – he and not Netanyahu or Barak – will set the style of the new government, both because of his strong political position and his massive personal presence and provocative character. He will maintain this government as long as it suits him and overthrow it the moment he feels that new elections will give him supreme power... Read more... Chris Floyd: Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan | Counterpunch While the usual gaggle of sycophants and media hive-minders -- along with some ordinarily perspicacious analysts -- tell us that Barack Obama literally changed the course of human history by disgorging a great load of thrice-chewed cud about nuclear disarmament in Prague this week, the high-tech drone war the great hero of peace is waging inside the sovereign territory of America's ally, Pakistan, is helping drive tens of thousands of people from their homes and killing civilians almost daily... Read more... Eric Holder and Colin Powell: Profiles in Cowardice | Counterpunch I used to take a certain pride by association with prominent Bronxites who have “made it.” Cancel that for Attorney General Eric Holder and former secretary of state Colin Powell. Why would they want to whitewash torture, given what blacks have suffered at the hands of torturers in this country and abroad? And why is it that they seem to value more their entrée into a privileged white-dominated ruling class than doing the right thing? How else to explain their stunning reluctance to hold torturers accountable and thus remove the stain of torture from our nation’s soul and reputation?.. Read more... Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir defied an international arrest warrant ..Mr. Bashir has been a busy man since his indictment for seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on March 4. His visit to Qatar's capital is the fourth time in two weeks that he has defied the standing international warrant for his arrest, coming after visits to the neighboring countries of Eritrea, Egypt, and Libya. Bashir is the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the ICC, but nonetheless has enjoyed an outpouring of support from Arab and African leaders. Their hostile reaction to the indictment of one of their own, say diplomats and analysts, is driven by a combination of concern for the indictment's consequences for Sudan's stability, resentment of the selective precedent it sets, and worries about national sovereignty... by attending the opening session of the Arab Summit in Doha Read more... Goodbye, Bill of Rights by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar Those who hoped that the change promised by candidate Barack Obama would include repeal of the various acts that have stripped Americans of their constitutional rights should be disappointed. Benjamin Franklin supposedly wrote, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The citation is likely apocryphal, at least in terms of its attribution to Franklin, but it is useful shorthand for the unfortunate abandonment of many of the liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution as a consequence of 9/11. The trauma of 9/11 created an opportunity for those seeking to centralize executive power, an objective of recent presidents from both political parties. Many Americans initially accepted that there had to be some abridgment of fundamental liberties while fighting a multi-faceted and unconventional war against terrorism, but few realize just how much the constitutional rights that all citizens take for granted have been eroded. History also teaches us that once a right is suspended, in all likelihood it is gone forever... Read more... Missive from a perplexed diplomat, by Akiva Eldar - Haaretz Since Avigdor Lieberman's taking office I am beside myself. I am two years shy of retirement and I thought this might be the time to tell our so-called leaders what I think of them, to slam the door in their face and go home... Read more... April 6, 2009 A One State Solution Looms, by Nadia Hijab Ehud Olmert's nightmare is at hand. Not only does the former Israeli prime minister now really have to fight those corruption charges. He also faces the realization of his fears that the Palestinians might give up on a two-state solution in favor of a struggle for equal rights that would mean, as he put it, the "end of the Jewish state." Yo, Ehud, that struggle is a growing movement, and it isn't a threat to Jews - on the contrary, Jews are very much a part of it... [with commentary from Sonja Karkar and video link] Read more... Barbaric Israel, by Margaret Kimberley | Black Agenda Report Despite the best efforts of the American corporate media, the Israeli lobby, and compromised politicians, the true nature of Israel’s barbarity towards the Palestinian people is not easily hidden. The massacres of Gaza’s civilian population that were recently carried out by the Israeli Defense Force created a turning point in worldwide public opinion. Only the Israeli and American governments try to deny that war crimes were committed. The IDF barred the world’s media from witnessing the killings of more than 1,400 people. Every norm of civilized behavior and international law was violated, including the Geneva Conventions prohibition of acts of revenge against civilian populations. Israel kept the borders of Gaza sealed, and would not even allow the population to flee and save their lives. The IDF takes the term “shooting fish in a barrel” very seriously... Read more... DON'T ASK PALESTINIANS TO RECOGNISE ISRAEL'S RIGHT TO EXIST - Letter by Hanna Kawas Thank you for writing the article "Airwaves of hope" that featured my volunteer work on Voice of Palestine. Your reporting was generally positive and accurate except where you state: "But Kawas, who says he acknowledges the right of Israel to exist as a state, .". I believe either you misunderstood what I told you, or the insertion of this statement was an editorial decision not to offend the pro-Israel propaganda machine. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain why such a statement is unfair, offensive and upsetting to me and to the vast majority of Palestinians... Read more... Ask Secretary Clinton Why the US Continues to Deliver Arms to Israel | Amnesty Int'l Read more... Robert Scheer: In for a Penny, In for $2.98 Trillion | Huffington Post The good news on the government's "No Banker Left Behind" program is that according to the special inspector general's report on Tuesday, the total handout to date is still less than 3 trillion dollars. It's only 2.98 trillion to be precise, an amount six times greater than will be spent by federal, state and local governments this year on educating the 50 million American children in elementary and secondary schools. The bad news is that even greater amounts of money are to be thrown down what has to be the world record for rat holes... Read more... Politics and humanitarianism: An Interview with Mahmood Mamdani | Boston Globe ..A political scientist and anthropologist, he is best known for "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim" and "When Victims Become Killers." His latest book, "Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror", meticulously exposes the tangled roots of the current conflict and the global forces at play in Darfur. Q. Is there a link between this book and your previous work? Read more...A. There are several; the most obvious is an understanding of the way in which the Cold War almost seamlessly morphed into the war on terror. Another connection - with my work on the Rwanda genocide and on the effect of colonialism in Africa - is the way in which identities are imposed from above... Joachim Martillo discusses Mamdani's book... Western Relief Agencies in Darfur: Shocking Facts - IslamOnline People supporting Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir The Sudan Government's decision to expel 13 foreign aid agencies from Darfur has provoked much controversy over this step's futility as far as the making of an appropriate peaceful atmosphere in Darfur is concerned. It might backfire and provide the west with reasons to severely punish the Sudan on the basis of allegations that such a decision would be detrimental to the displaced people in Darfur's relief camps. The decision was followed by the Sudanese government's proclamation of dispensing with all the other western organizations and instructing them to leave within one year. This, again, has led to questioning both decisions' impact on the relief work in Darfur. Does Khartoum have an actual plan to replace such organizations without creating gaps that could lead to rekindling the human crisis in Darfur?...attend a rally in Al Fasher, northern Darfur March 8, 2009 Read more... Will the Debtors Fight Back?: The IMF Rules the World | Counterpunch Not much substantive news was expected to come out of the G-20 meetings that ended on April 2 in London – certainly no good news was even suggested. Europe, China and the United States had too deeply distinct interests. American diplomats wanted to lock foreign countries into further dependency on paper dollars. The rest of the world sought a way to avoid giving up real output and ownership of their resources and enterprises for yet more hot-potato dollars. In such cases one expects a parade of smiling faces and statements of mutual respect for each others’ position – so much respect that they have agreed to set up a “study group” or two to kick the diplomatic ball down the road... Read more... Down Where the Predators Live: Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones | Counterpunch Read more... Iran: Bibi's `Wedge' Issue, by Richard Silverstein | Tikkun Jeffrey Goldberg published an interview with Bibi Netanyahu which he conducted just before the latter became Israel’s new prime minister. I’m beginning to think that the Israeli right uses the Iran nuclear issue in much the same way that the Republicans use social issues like abortion and gay marriage. For Republicans these are “wedge” issues which move the faithful to fear, anger and action. For the Bibi-ists, it’s the same. Drumming up fear of nuclear apocalypse in the guise of the “mad mullahs” is like ringing a bell for Pavlov’s dog: Israelis and Diaspora Jews who fear for Israel’s safety respond instinctively and viscerally when they read code words like Holocaust, Munich, extermination, apocalypse, mass death, nuclear annihilation, 1938. I don’t know about you, but I’m extremely uncomfortable when a foreign leader attempts to dictate what a U.S. president’s political agenda should be:.. Read more... April 5, 2009 BBC World to air Doha debate held in US BBC World News will air a special session of The Doha Debates from Washington DC on Sunday at 0010, 0710, 1510 and 1910 GMT. The debate held at Georgetown University in Washington DC last week discussed the motion, 'This house believes that it's time for the US administration to get tough on Israel'. The motion was carried with a majority of the participants voting in its favour at the end of the session. Chaired by Tim Sebastian, the award-winning BBC correspondent and interviewer, the debate featured four experts who argued for and against the US's treatment of Israel at a time when President Obama's administration is seeking to implement fresh initiatives in the Middle East. The guest panel included former speaker of the Israeli Knesset Avraham Burg; founder of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer; Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz; and President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dr Dore Gold. Source... New town may be death blow to hopes for Israel peace - The Times Well,here it is for all those who still believe that two states – Israel andPalestine - is the solution to peace. It never was the solutionbecause Israel never had such intentions. One has only to look at themap above to see the truth of that. The path of the Apartheid Wallitself clearly demarcates just what Israel has in mind and if theillegal E1 settlement project in East Jerusalem goes ahead, Northernand Southern Palestine will be permanently divided with no access toJerusalem, the commercial centre that has served them for centuries.Any illusion that there is still a chance of stopping the Israeliproject, is just that – an illusion. As James Hider says in hisarticle “All the pieces are in place. Land has been leveled forhousing, the roundabouts indicate that more roads will soon spread outacross the wooded hills and the existing road network hints at thefuture shape of Jerusalem . . . the almost completed flyover crossingthe Jerusalem to Jericho highway, which links E1 to Ma'aleh Adumim,[seals] the gap of Jewish suburbs around East Jerusalem.” So justexactly what is everyone talking about when they say that they arecommitted to the two-state solution? It’s another case of “the Emperorhas no clothes”: if our leaders won’t say it, we must. - Sonja Karkar Link to Times article... Not an analogy: Israel and the crime of apartheid | EI Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron demonstrate against Israeli "apartheid," 30 March 2009 In recent years, increasing numbers of individuals around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week ( http://apartheidweek.org/). Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians. This has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in which Palestinians were identified as victims of racism (the US, Israel, Canada and Italy have already announced that they will not participate because of the potential for criticism of Israel)...Read more... Why Single Out Liebermann?: The treatment of the new Israeli Foreign Minister by Western media is unfair and hypocritical While Western media usually refrain from criticising Israeli politicians, there is one notable exception: former Russian night-club bouncer Avigdor Lieberman. The new Israeli Foreign Minister is usually described as 'anti-Arab' or even racist, which is a term that – under normal circumstances – cannot be used to describe Israelis without attracting a bombardment of 'anti-Semitism' accusations by Jew know who. So what’s different in Lieberman’s case? Lieberman thinks that ethnic Arab Israeli who don’t support the Jewish state should not be allowed to become members of the Knesset. They should have their Israeli citizenship revoked and be kicked out of the country, he says. Lieberman is against a two-state solution and suggested on more than one occasion to expel all non-Jewish Israeli citizens. I honestly don’t know what the fuss is all about. If wishing to rid the Jewish state of non-Jews is racist, isn’t the whole concept of the ‘Jewish state’ too? And if Israel is allowed - in the process of its creation - to kick out 1 million Arabs and ever since refuse them their UN guaranteed right of return, what's the problem with completing the job and adding another 1.5 million?... Read more... April 4, 2000 On the road to apartheid, by Jeff Halper | ABC Jeff Halper It was appropriate that April 1 marked the first day of the new Netanyahu-Lieberman-Barak government. For the notion that Israel acts against the Palestinians out of concern for its security, that it maintains its Occupation of 42 years for defensive reasons, that it really attacked Gaza in such a vicious and disproportional way because of an actual security threat or that it genuinely wants peace is increasingly seen by thinking people as an April Fool's joke...Read more... 'A Case for the One-State Solution', by Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid-Southern California Zionism is committed to the belief that it is a good idea to establish, in the country of Palestine, a sovereign Jewish state that attempts to guarantee, both in law and practice, a demographic majority of ethnic Jews in the territories under its control. -Uri Davis The modern state of Israel is an outcome of the Zionist ideology. When, in the late 1890's, the founding fathers of the modern Jewish state first formulated their desire to establish a Jewish state in the land of Palestine they did not have in mind the idea of sharing that land with its indigenous population, the Palestinians. Hence they have propagated the notion that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without a land". As such, Zionism is both a colonial and racist ideology, as its purpose is not merely to exploit the local Palestinian people, but to remove them from their land and replace them with a new and foreign settler community...Read more... Boycott news goes mainstream | Jews sans frontieres I already reported the fact that Israeli exporters are reporting that business is down on account of the boycott Israeli goods (BIG) campaign. I noticed the BBC reporting the same thing on its website a few days ago:.. Read more... An unhelpful discourse on Israel, by Jeff Halper The uproar in the organized Jewish community over the prospect of my speaking in Australia is truly startling to an Israeli like me. Granted, I am very critical of Israel’s policies of Occupation and doubt whether a two-state solution is still possible given the extent of Israel’s settlements, but this hardly warrants the kind of demonization I received in the pages of The AJN. Opinions similar to mine are readily available in the mainstream Israeli media. Indeed, I myself write frequently for the Israeli press and appear regularly on Israeli TV and radio. Why, then, the hysteria?... Read more... The Israel Lobby | YouTube For many years now the American foreign policy has been characterized by the strong tie between the United States and Israel. Does the United States in fact keep Israel on its feet? And how long will it continue to do so?... Read more/Watch... Antony Lerman: Is Oliphant's cartoon antisemitic, or just offensive? | The Guardian [Maybe "major American Jewish groups" just hate everybody, but most of all - themselves] Read more... Israel on Trial, by George Bisharat | NYT CHILLING testimony by Israeli soldiers substantiates charges that Israel’s Gaza Strip assault entailed grave violations of international law. The emergence of a predominantly right-wing, nationalist government in Israel suggests that there may be more violations to come. Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians also constituted war crimes, but do not excuse Israel’s transgressions. While Israel disputes some of the soldiers’ accounts, the evidence suggests that Israel committed the following six offenses:.. [Needless to say, "major American Jewish groups" immediately launched the usual paranoid, all out, vicious offensive against Bisharat] Read more... Is the Power of AIPAC on the Decline?: Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo? | Counterpunch Jay Forrester, the father of System Dynamics, famously observed that people intuitively recognize leverage points in complex systems – and they just as intuitively tend to push them the wrong way. Recent actions by Israel and its primary supporter in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) seem a perfect example. Their apparent victories are likely, in the cold light of history, to be seen as a string of self-inflicted injuries that helped tip the world toward a just peace in the Middle East... Read more... The Ukrainian Holocaust and Jewish Pride | Occidental Observer November 22, 2007 was the 75th anniversary of the mass murder of up to 10 million Ukrainians by Stalin’s political police, the dreaded NKVD. This bureaucracy was the apogee of political correctness, murdering tens of thousands of farmers and small-town people because the region resisted collectivisation. The practice of mass political murder was initiated by Lenin immediately after Trotsky brought him to power. Stalin inherited and extended the practice and its apparatus. Until after the Second World War the senior ranks of the NKVD were disproportionately Jewish. These were secular Jews who as good communists rejected divisions of ethnicity and race as products of bourgeois society. Nevertheless they retained their identity as Jews; they knew who their ancestors were... Read more... 'Too Big to Fail' Is Too Big - Period, by Jim Hightower | AlterNet The "too big" claim forms the rationale for the diversion of regular people's money into rich people's pockets... Read more... John Pilger - Fake faith and epic crimes These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves”... Read more... April 3, 2009 Israeli warplanes overfly southern Lebanon Israeli warplanes have flown in batches over Lebanon, fueling speculations that Tel Aviv is seeking to wage another war against the country. The Lebanese army said in a statement that sixteen Israeli warplanes over flew the county's southern towns for more than an hour on Wednesday, The Jerusalem Post reported. Ten jets flew in batches over southern border towns and villages and then headed north. Another six warplanes flew over the Mediterranean off the southern city of Sidon and off the coastal town of Jounieh and the city of Byblos in the north before heading east. The incident came in violation of a UN resolution that ended a 33-day Israeli war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006... Read more... Finally, Talking the Lobby’s Role in America, by Karin Friedemann Most Americans would prefer to keep their lights on than to personally finance Israel’s existence. It finally seems acceptable, even within polite circles, to discuss the role of the Israeli Lobby on US foreign policy. AIPAC’s recent success in deposing the almost National Security Chief Chas Freeman stimulated much free thought worldwide. Freeman made it clear that he blamed certain “unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country whose aim is to prevent any other view other than its own from being aired.” Freeman further stated, “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonour and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.”... Read more... ISLAMIC RENAISSANCE: THE REAL TASK AHEAD The present age can rightly be described as the age of the predominance of Western philosophical thought and learning. The Western ideas about the nature of man and the universe are strongly upheld all around the world. Having taken shape roughly two hundred years ago, these ideas were continuously affirmed and reinforced by theorists and philosophers. Though politically, the present day world may be divided into a number of blocs, one single philosophical point of view prevails throughout. This attitude has colored all human civilization and culture at the global level... Read more... Arab leaders back 'wanted' Bashir | BBC Arab leaders have concluded their annual summit by showing their support for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who is wanted for war crimes. The Arab League said it rejected the International Criminal Court's decision to issue a warrant for his arrest. President Bashir had earlier spoken at the summit in Qatar, and won strong support from his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad... Read more... Seven Jewish Children--A Play for Gaza | Jewish Peace News Caryl Churchill, a renowned British playwright and feminist, wrote a short play called: Seven Jewish Children--A Play for Gaza. It premiered in London in February and in New York on March 16th, in an event marking the anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death. It was produced at the New York Theatre Workshop, which was the center of a controversy three years ago when it backed off from its decision to produce the play "My Name is Rachel Corrie." The entire text of the play has been printed by the Guardian newspaper , and has been reproduced below. Churchill is giving away free rights to produce the show as long as a collection is made for medical relief in Gaza...I've read it three times (it only takes about five minutes), and each time it has brought me to tears. As someone living in Tel Aviv, raising two daughters, struggling with when and how and what to tell them--I found it devastating and true... - Rebecca Vilkomerson Read more... World Depression: Regional Wars and the Decline of the US Empire, by James Petras All the idols of capitalism over the past three decades crashed. The assumptions and presumptions, paradigm and prognosis of indefinite progress under liberal free market capitalism have been tested and have failed. We are living the end of an entire epoch: Experts everywhere witness the collapse of the US and world financial system, the absence of credit for trade and the lack of financing for investment. A world depression, in which upward of a quarter of the world’s labor force will be unemployed, is looming. The biggest decline in trade in recent world history – down 40% year to year – defines the future. The immanent bankruptcies of the biggest manufacturing companies in the capitalist world haunt Western political leaders. The ‘market’ as a mechanism for allocating resources and the government of the US as the ‘leader’ of the global economy have been discredited. All the assumptions about ‘self-stabilizing markets’ are demonstrably false and outmoded. The rejection of public intervention in the market and the advocacy of supply-side economics have been discredited even in the eyes of their practitioners. Even official circles recognize that ‘inequality of income’ contributed to the onset of the economic crash and should be corrected. Planning, public ownership, nationalization are on the agenda while socialist alternatives have become almost respectable... Read more... Changing the rules of war, by George Bisharat | Electronic Intifada Palestinians pray next to the bodies of seven members of the Salha family The extent of Israel's brutality against Palestinian civilians in its 22-day pounding of the Gaza Strip is gradually surfacing. Israeli soldiers are testifying to lax rules of engagement tantamount to a license to kill. One soldier commented: "That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him." What is less appreciated is how Israel is also brutalizing international law, in ways that may long outlast the demolition of Gaza...who were killed during Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip Read more... Israel demolished 19,000 Palestinian homes since 1967 | Maan News At least 19,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed by Israel, Limes magazine, the Italian geopolitical review publication, reported on Tuesday. The bi-monthly periodical ran a several-page feature on the current upsurge in home demolitions ordered by the Israeli government... Read more... Israel's Illegal Annexation of East Jerusalem, by Stephen Lendman | Global Research So says a confidential EU report revealed on March 7 by The London Guardian's Rory McCarthy. It accuses Israel "of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank (Separation) barrier as a way of 'actively pursuing the illegal annexation' of East Jerusalem." More still, including restrictive permits, "closure of Palestinian institutions," and various other ways to "increase Jewish presence in" the city, "impede Palestinian urban development, and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank" incrementally to annex it. It says plans are now accelerated and have undermined the Palestinian Authority's (PA) credibility as well as weakened support for peace. It calls "Israel's actions in and around Jerusalem....one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making (yet) have limited security justifications." In addition, they're illegal... Read more... Khalid Amayreh - Let the world see Israel's true, ugly face | Palestine Think Tank There is no doubt that the new Israeli government, led by Benyamin Netanyahu, honestly reflects the collective mindset of the Israeli Jewish Zionist society. True, there are Israelis who are averse to racism and fascism, but these are unfortunately very few in numbers and their influence is almost negligible. Indeed, a fleeting glance at the composition of the new Israeli cabinet reveals an extremist coalition of war criminals, pathological liars, racist thugs (both of the Hitlerian and Stalinist styles), and hateful religious maniacs who inhale and exhale hatred 24 hours per day... Read more... What if the Obama Administration Treated Detroit like Wall Street?, by Robert Weissman There'd be no talk of potential bankruptcy, no firing of executives, no demands to shed failing subsidiaries, no demands for honest accounting, no insistence that creditors share some of the companies' pain. And we certainly wouldn't hear about re-writing contracts, heretofore described as sacrosanct. Instead, we'd be hearing about a scheme to get private sector players "now sitting on the sidelines" to invest in absorbing the auto industry's excess capacity... Read more... Cynthia McKinney's Report from the FORUM FOR PALESTINE in Malaysia Hello, as you know I am in Malaysia upon the invitation of former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir and his wife, Tun Dr. Siti. The information presented today in the Forum for Palestine was compelling, so much so that one of the doctors could not contain his sadness, anguish, and love. I say love, because anyone in the medical profession who would take the time to go to Gaza, in the middle of a war, and refuse to leave the Rafah checkpoint until the Egyptian authorities allowed them in demonstrates a pure love of mankind... Read more... Sudan/Darfur is Test Case for Obama’s “Humanitarian” Aggression, by Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir had no choice but to expel the western "aid" organizations that had merged with the American propaganda machine aimed at regime change in Khartoum. Obama operatives like UN Ambassador Susan Rice have for years been "eager to blockade Sudan's ports" and to launch "selective" bombing raids against Sudan. When imperial doctrine claims the right to intervene whenever disasters overtake sovereign countries - and proceeds to create and exacerbate those disasters - then no government is safe against regime change. President Obama "appears to be fine-tuning a ‘humanitarian' interventionist doctrine that is applicable to any point on the planet."... Read more... Will the Tanking Economy Ruin Your Sex Life? | AlterNet From the workplace and the marketplace, the devastating effects of the nearly $12 trillion worth of wealth-destruction over the past 15 months are reaching the bedroom big time. Or put another way, the sexual appetite of many financially-strapped couples seems to be going the way of the hula hoop... [Gaia's response to overpopulation?] Read more... April 2, 2009 America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout, by Chris Hedges Trader outside The New York Stock Exchange In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled...Read more... The Catastrophe - Al Nakba: How Palestine Became Israel | If Americans Knew In the late 1800s a small, fanatic movement called “political Zionism” began in Europe. Its goal was to create a Jewish state somewhere in the world. Its leaders settled on the ancient and long-inhabited land of Palestine for the location of this state... Read more... Ottoman archives show land deeds forged, by Jonathan Cook A legal battle being waged by Palestinian families to stop the takeover of their neighbourhood in East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers has received a major fillip from the recent souring of relations between Israel and Turkey. After the Israeli army's assault on the Gaza Strip in January, lawyers for the families were given access to Ottoman land registry archives in Ankara for the first time, providing what they say is proof that title deeds produced by the settlers are forged... Read more... How some military rabbis are trying to radicalize Israeli soldiers, by Christopher Hitchens | Slate Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical teachings was something new. This is not the case... Read more... Lexicon of Resistance, by Gilad Atzmon | Palestine Think Tank The following is an attempt to present my own personal dictionary of what seems to be the most charged terminology and concepts attached to the Palestinian solidarity and anti-war discourse... Read more... Apartheid and Occupation under International Law, by John Dugard While international law tolerates military occupation, it does not approve it, specifically one that has continued for over 40 years as in the case of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Furthermore, during that time, Israel has introduced two other elements—colonialism and apartheid. Although there are many similarities between apartheid as it was applied in South Africa and Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the systems are not identical. There are features of the Israeli regime in the occupied territory that were unknown to South Africans... Read more... Who Is The Worse Terrorist, Obama Or Osama?, by Gideon Polya President Barack Obama is making the Afghan War Obama’s Afghan War. Careful analysis of UN mortality statistics reveals that 46,000 Afghans have died avoidably in the first 40 days of the Obama presidency, including 32,250 infant deaths due to US war crimes. On 27 March 2009 Obama unveiled a new strategy for Occupied Afghanistan and robot-bombed Pakistan: "The situation is increasingly perilous. It's been more than seven years since the Taliban was removed from power, yet war rages on and insurgents control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan… Understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future…That's the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just."... Read more... Video: Joseph Stiglitz on America's Economic Meltdown Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains what drove the US economy off a cliff and what steps need to be taken to rectify the situation during a Nation Institute panel discussion held to mark the release of a new book: Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina vanden Heuvel and the editors of The Nation... Read more/Watch... Israeli military in PR offensive to explain civilian deaths in Gaza | The Independent The Israeli military has moved to deflect a mounting barrage of criticism over the deaths of hundreds of civilians during its 22-day offensive in Gaza. The public relations drive by the Israeli Defence Force has been given impetus by allegations made by some soldiers that permissive rules of engagement failed to protect civilians. The allegations – currently being investigated by military police – have generated widespread publicity and led senior officers to meet reporters. At these meetings, they have sought to reinforce the military's assertion that, in the words of the Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazy, "the IDF acted morally and ethically. If there were incidents like these, they were isolated." The move also follows a series of reports from groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documenting civilian deaths which they say violated international law... Read more... Israel drops Gaza war crimes probe | aljazeera Israel has said it did everything it could to prevent casualties among Gaza civilians The Israeli military has closed an investigation into claims that Israeli troops shot unarmed Palestinian women and children during its 22-day war on Gaza. Military investigators said on Monday that Israeli soldiers were passing on "hearsay" when they described the alleged incidents, published by Israeli media earlier this month...Read more... VIDEO: THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, by Michel Chossudovsky Causes and consequences of the financial meltdown; The speculative onslaught; Financial fraud and the "bank bailouts"; Bankruptcy of the real economy; Impacts on employment, wages and social services; Towards a spiralling public debt; The economic crisis and its relationship to the Middle East war; The centralization of corporate power; The concentration of wealth; The globalization of poverty - What are the policy alternatives? Watch... Video: Banned MP Galloway Speaks to Canadians | NowPublic ...In his foolish and heavy-handed efforts to preempt an open public discussion about often unpopular and regressive militaristic international policies and support for the USA's and Israel's brutal wars by the inept Harper Conservatives, to which he knew Galloway would be pointing a sharp moral finger, Kenney turned an insignificant speaking tour by one British peace activist into a global spectacle, one which will stand as a monumental embarrassment to Canada for the foreseeable future... Read more/Watch... Geithner's 'Dirty Little Secret'': The Entire Global Financial System is at Risk | Global Research The Geithner Plan, his so-called Public-Private Partnership Investment Program or PPPIP, as we have noted previously is designed not to restore a healthy lending system which would funnel credit to business and consumers. Rather it is yet another intricate scheme to pour even more hundreds of billions directly to the leading banks and Wall Street firms responsible for the current mess in world credit markets without demanding they change their business model... Read more... Letter from Mazin 3/31/09 In my last message I briefly mentioned rumors I heard about two possible reasons for the firing of Dr. Afif Safieh (a longtime Fateh activist and previous PLO representative to the Vatican, to England, to the US and most lately to Russia). Many people here stated to me that it is a political and not personal issue. I have not posted rumors before and what I should have done instead is different.. Thus, it is worthwhile for those of us who are concerned (and not interested in rumors) to write to Mahmoud Abbas directly and ask...In other arenas, many of us here in Palestine are again disappointed that the Arab league met this week and came up with not one concrete action (yet plenty of rhetoric) to stem the Zionist colonization in Palestine, to lift the brutal siege on Gaza, to unify Arab ranks behind practical ways to improve the lots of people in these 22 countries (whose inter-Arab trade languishes at 10% for two decades vs inter-Asian trade which climbed to 40% and still going), or any other meaningful gesture. The amusement factor of Qaddafi's antiqs was the only unpredictable. I kept wishing for one Arab leader to break the mold and simply admit making mistakes and ask his people to come forward and work with him (not under him) to fix the problems and face the daunting challenges ahead. How many of us are ready to lay their lives down for such an honest leader, a real leader (leading by example)!.. Read more... Please tell me, where is Israel headed?, by John J. Mearsheimer Benjamin Netanyahu is in the final stages of putting together Israel's next government, which will be opposed to a two-state solution. Most importantly, the new prime minister and his Likud Party are firmly against a Palestinian state. The Labor Party, which will be part of the governing coalition and which has been identified with the two-state solution for the past two decades, did not insist that Likud support that policy as a condition for joining the government. Its leader, Ehud Barak, merely asked for and got a vague statement saying that Israel was committed to promoting regional peace. Avigdor Lieberman, who heads Yisrael Beiteinu, the other major party in the ruling coalition, is not likely to push to give the Palestinians a viable state of their own. His main concern is "transferring" the Palestinians out of Israel so that it can be an almost purely Jewish state... Read more... Malaysia wants Israel dragged to court ..At a Tuesday forum in London with the theme The Gaza Genocide: The World Community Must Act, Malaysian Foreign Minister Rais Yatim suggested Israeli military aggression against Palestinians to be worthy of prosecution. "We drag a person to court to be prosecuted for his act of having killed someone. We use the maxim mens rea in determining his murderous intent," noted the Malaysian diplomat. "But we simply allow a neighboring state to marauder thousands with guns, air strikes, chemicals and tanks," continued Rais, questioning the impunity Israel has enjoyed for sixty years... Read more... Chavez calls for Bush indictment Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has called on the international prosecutors to indict George W. Bush for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chavez further described an arrest warrant issued for Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir over alleges 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' in Darfur as 'ridiculous' and 'farce'. “So why doesn't the international court indict President Bush, who committed atrocities over eight years, for example, and annihilated the Iraqi people?” he said on Tuesday, at a summit of Arab and South American countries in Qatar... Read more... Netanyahu: Israel may attack Iran soon Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will attack Iran should the US fail to quickly halt Tehran's nuclear program. Setting guidelines for US president Barack Obama, Netanyahu said that "the Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons." If the US fails to quickly achieve the latter, Israel would be 'forced' to attack Iran's nuclear facilities itself, Netanyahu told the Atlantic magazine, shortly before his inauguration on Tuesday... Read more... Only the Protesters Have Any Vision: EU in Tatters, by Eric Walberg | Counterpunch Recall the self-satisfied EU celebrations of recent years – the inauguration of the euro and the famous blue Euro passport, the accession of all the Eastern European and ex-Soviet statelets, the gloating as the euro steadily revalued. Fortress Europe was strong and united at last. The 21st century belonged to the new Old World... Read more... American NLG Lawyers Release New Findings that Israel Violated International Law, US Domestic Law in Gaza | National Lawyers Guild Israel violated international law by targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, misusing weapons, deliberately denying medical care to the wounded and attacking medical personnel, the National Lawyers Guild Delegation to Gaza said today upon releasing a 37 page report containing new evidence on the facts surrounding Israel’s 22 day military offensive in Gaza..“Our findings join a growing chorus of voices—which include Israeli soldiers themselves—asserting that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians during the Gaza offensive,” said Radhika Sainath, one of the attorneys who initiated the seven-day fact-finding delegation to Gaza. “On a number of occasions, Israeli soldiers shot and killed young children as well as unarmed civilians holding white flags—both violations of the laws of war.”... Read more... Jewish judge to probe 'Gaza war crimes' | Jerusalem Post The United Nations on Friday appointed a widely respected South African judge who is a trustee of the Hebrew University to lead a high-level mission to investigate alleged war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead. Israel refused to say if it would cooperate... Read more... Ex-AIG chief: Bailout will not succeed | PressTV 83-year-old Maurice "Hank" Greenberg says AIG mess is not of his making The man who built insurance giant AIG from a startup to a global leviathan says the government's plan to save the company is not working. Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, AIG's chief executive until March 2005, told Congress on Thursday that the largest bailout of the financial crisis had turned into a great burden on taxpayers. "All plans so far advanced by the US government to date have failed, and the current plan, in my opinion, will not succeed," Greenberg testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee... Read more... Gingrich warns of third party in 2012 | CNN Former House speaker Newt Gingrich is warning of a third party mutiny in 2012 if Republicans don’t figure out a way to shape up... [I have what I believe to be a workable plan for just such a third party. If you'd like to know more, please get in touch.] Read more... Chomsky: NATO should immediately disband | PressTV "If the question was 'How ought NATO to develop?' the answer is 'immediate disbandment'," Chomsky told Russia Today when asked about the alliance's development in the future... Read more... Chas Freeman slams 'destructive' Israeli policies | PressTV Former US diplomat Charles W. Freeman says he doubts whether the current Israeli policies can guarantee the regime's survival in the Middle East. "I don't see how Israel can continue to survive in the long term as a state in the Middle East if it is not prepared to deal with respect and consideration with its Arab neighbors specially the Palestinians," Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said in an exclusive interview with Press TV. In mid March, Freeman turned down Director of National Intelligence (NIC) Dennis C. Blair's offer to be the chairman of the body. His abrupt withdrawal came after Freeman, who described "Israeli violence against Palestinians" as a key barrier to Mideast peace, drew fire from the Israeli lobby. "The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth," he wrote in a statement after his withdrawal... Read more... |
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