April 30, 2010 The Democratic Constitution | Adalah On the tenth anniversary of its founding, Adalah is issuing “The Democratic Constitution,” as a constitutional proposal for the state of Israel, based on the concept of a democratic, bilingual, multicultural state. This proposed constitution draws on universal principles and international conventions on human rights, the experiences of nations and the constitutions of various democratic states... Read more... Pledge of Allegiance: A Symbol of Institutionalized Injustice, by Solomon Comissiong | Dailycensored Riddled throughout American society are innumerable institutionally ingrained symbols of America’s hypocritical and repugnant justifications of global injustice. These symbols are among the necessary instruments utilized by the empire to attempt to mold the next generation of plunderers, imperialists, and architects of injustice. The Pledge of Allegiance is merely one of the more hypocritical and duplicitous tools used... Read more... Jonathan Cook on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict | Religious Left Law The journalist Jonathan Cook has some incisive commentary on “the increasingly repressive nature of Israeli society and the prospects for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict” at the New Left Project... Read more... Egypt's UN envoy: Israel must sign the NPT | Israel News Egypt has declared that turning the Middle East into a nuclear weapons-free zone is the key to solving the dispute over Iran's nuclear program and said Israel must sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty... Read more... Stage Being Set For "Dirty Bomb" False Flag, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today Rumors of an upcoming terror attack to be blamed on Iran are moving around the world, “backchannel chatter.” The primary suspect is Israel who is said to have a number of small “suitcase” type nuclear weapons, some primarily “dirty bombs,” possibly supplied secretly by a previous US administration... Read more... America: The Silence of a Nation | YouTube Excerpts from a speech by Chris Hedges The author spoke at the Revolution Books Town Hall Meeting at Ethical Culture Society on January 13, 2009 condemning Israel and USA complicity in Israel's murderous destruction and genocide of the innocent men, women and children of GAZA and the West Bank...Watch... Western Civilization is Doomed, by John Kozy | Global Research The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: Last Gasp of a Moribund Civilization ..."Johnny, what man has done, man can do." Therein lies the fallacy of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Science and technology is a Pandora's Box. Once opened by one man, company, or country, what is emitted soon becomes everyone's... Read more... Three inspiring Palestinian stories and more, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter There were many BDS victories recently and it is hard to keep up. But a notable acceleration of the cultural boycott is inevitable now that both Gil Scott Heron and Carlos Santana have canceled their appearances in Israel... Read more... The Big Bad (Israeli) Wolf is Nothing But a Coward, by Joharah Baker | MIFTAH ..Last Thursday was apparently the "Arrest Palestinian Children Day" for Israel's army. Ahmad Sabbah, a 13-year old boy from Tuqu' south of Bethlehem was also handcuffed and blindfolded before being carted off to an Israeli detention camp. As I read about Ahmad's story, told by his distressed mother, all I could think about was my own son and how this could be him one day... Read more... Israel's tyranny of the majority is dangerous, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz The only democracy in the Middle East is perhaps unique, but it's doubtful if it's the real thing. Results of a poll published in Haaretz yesterday reflect what has been known for a long time: a combination of ignorance, a basic lack of understanding and a fascist mood. An ill and dangerous wind is blowing toward a government that is threatened with collapse... Read more... Is the Israel-Palestine Conflict “ripe” for Obama’s intervention? by Henry Siegman | Foreign Policy In an op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Haass, the President of Council on Foreign Relations, argues that advocates of a more forceful U.S. intervention in the Middle East peace process have exaggerated that conflict's impact on America's interests elsewhere in the region... Read more... Ultra Zionists Take Manhattan, and Demand the Holy Land | Civil Liberties | AlterNet On April 25, over 1000 New York-area Jewish extremists gathered in midtown Manhattan to rally against the Barack Obama administration's call for a freeze on construction in occupied East Jerusalem and to demand unlimited rights to colonize the West Bank... Read more, watch the video "Feeling the hate in New York"... Emails show Goldman-Sachs boasting during meltdown | EU Times Lloyd Blankfein As the U.S. housing turned downward in January 2007, a Goldman Sachs trader wrote in e-mails to a woman he apparently was courting that investments he had sold were “like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor.”..Read more... Radical Muslim group run by Israeli Jews! | SodaHead The Radical "Muslim" Group That Threatened South Park Creators Was Founded and Run by Joseph Cohen, a Former Israeli Radical Who Used to Live in a Settlement in the West Bank. Fundamentalist Jews who pretend to be Radical Muslims, a growing problem... Read more... Palestinians resist threat of eviction in Jaffa, by Carmelle Wolfson | Electronic Intifada Jaffa residents demonstrate against police brutality Amidst the crater-filled roads, crumbling art deco houses, Jewish-Israeli filled hummus joints and flashing blue lights of passing cop cars, Palestinian citizens of Israel are struggling to grasp onto the last neighborhood of Jaffa to remain a Palestinian majority -- Ajami...Read more... UC Berkeley set to vote on historic divestment bill | Electronic Intifada On Wednesday 28 April, the UC Berkeley Student Senate will make a final attempt to pass a bill calling for divestment of university funds from companies that profit from Israel's war crimes and occupation of Palestine... Read more... Rabbis condemn Israel for war crimes committed in Gaza: Open letter to judge Goldstone | Palestine Telegraph As rabbis from diverse traditions and locations, we want to extend our warmest mazel tov to you as an elder in our community upon the Bar Mitzvah of your grandson. Bar and Bat Mitzvah is a call to conscience, a call to be responsible for the welfare of others, a call to fulfill the covenant of peace and justice articulated in our tradition... Read more... Americans remaining ill-informed is inexcusable, by Paul J. Balles | Redress Information & Analysis Paul J. Balles comments on the ironic misfortune that, despite having all the technology to be informed, Americans remain generally ignorant bystanders amid an increasingly antagonistic Congress and a biased, sloppy and uninformative media... Read more... First it forged its passports, now Israel dictates to Germany, by Dr. Daud Abdullah | Middle East Monitor The dust from the Al-Mabhouh murder and forged passports affair has barely settled, yet Israel is again infuriating its European allies. After the furore following Al-Mabhouh's assassination in Dubai, during which Israeli agents used forged passports from several European countries, Israeli officials would have been well advised to stay low, say nothing and do nothing stupid. This simple requirement is apparently too difficult for the Israelis, such is their arrogance... Read more... Linking Gaza with Ireland via video conference | Palestine Telegraph The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in partnership with the Palestinian Students Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) Organized a conference via video with the National University of Ireland “Joloy”.. Read more... Israel finds allies in Europe's Christian fundamentalists | Electronic Intifada Anti-Muslim firebrand Geert Wilders is among Israel's right-wing friends in Europe Flip through any issue of a major newspaper from the past decade and it is a safe bet you will be confronted with a warning about the dangers of religious extremism. So how could the mainstream media have failed to notice the growing influence of fundamentalists on the European Union's relations with one of its nearest neighbors: Israel? The explanation might lie in how the zealots in question are not Islamic but Christian...Read more... Canadian Government Labels Galloway a Terrorist for Aiding Palestinians | Infowars The decision to ban a controversial British MP from Canada was an “exercise in taunting” by senior government officials who disagreed with George Galloway’s views on Afghanistan, lawyers argued during a judicial review Wednesday... Read more... Gaza War Crimes - When Will UC Stop Funding? by Matthew Taylor | BeyondChron When will the University of California stop funding war crimes against Palestinian civilians and the occupation of Palestinian land? How much longer will grieving mothers have to wait for justice?.. Read more... April 29, 2010 U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths | The Onion Flags affected by the recall range from halftime-show Citing a series of fatal malfunctions dating back to 1777, flag manufacturer Annin & Company announced Monday that it would be recalling all makes and models of its popular American flag from both foreign and domestic markets...extravaganza models to the smallest lapel pins Read more... Is Iran Really a Threat? by Ray McGovern | Consortium News Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said publicly that Iran “doesn't directly threaten the United States.” Her momentary lapse came while answering a question at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar... Read more... Boiling Frogs Video Presents Colonel Larry Wilkerson ... an exclusive interview with Colonel Larry Wilkerson on the tyrannical presidency and politics of fear, Israel’s interests versus US interests and the question of loyalties, and more... Read more, watch video... US hegemony, not "the lobby," behind complicity with Israel, by Stephen Maher | Electronic Intifada What really drives decades of US complicity in Israel's human rights abuses? Many of Israel's critics blame an "Israel lobby" for the near-total complicity of the US in Israeli annexation, colonization and cleansing programs in the occupied West Bank...it is important to revisit the flaws in the thesis, and properly attribute US behavior to the large concentrations of domestic political and economic power that truly drive US policy...[This is an excellent conventional analysis of American foreign policy, but it hinges on the dubious distinction between the "Israel lobby" and "the large concentrations of domestic political and economic power that truly drive US policy"] Read more...Reflections of Fidel: The insanities of our era | Granma There is no alternative but to call things by their name. Anyone with minimal commonsense can observe without much effort how little realism remains in the current world... Read more... Financial Reform: Empower the People, by Ralph Nader | Common Dreams On the eve of the portentous Senate debate over the extent to which the financial industry is to be so as to avert future megacollapses on the backs of taxpayers, workers and consumers, a great gap has been left unattended... Read more... Poll: Israelis support gagging critical journalists, activists, by Or Kashti | Haaretz Anarchists clash with police at a rally More than half of Jewish Israelis think human rights organizations that expose immoral behavior by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely, and think there is too much freedom of expression here, a recent survey found...[It's not just a criminal fascist state, but at least 50% of the population are fascists as well. One wonders what the results would be of a similar survey in the U.S.] Read more...Colombia's "Genocidal Democracy" May Have Claimed Over 150,000 Lives, by Dan Kovalik | Huffington Post In his book, Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy, Father Javier Girardo, a Jesuit priest and long-time human rights activist in Colombia, estimated that, between 1988 and 1995, more than 60,000 Colombians lost their lives to the internal conflict in Colombia - most of them at the hands of the state, either in the form of the official Colombian military or the paramilitary forces supported by the state... Read more... Welcome to the New Honduras, Where Right-Wing Death Squads Proliferate | AlterNet Things are back to normal in Honduras The new regime in Honduras is assassinating union leaders, teachers and journalists. Why does the U.S. support it?..Read more... A Word of Greetings to The Eighth International Al-Awda Convention, by Salman Abu Sitta | Window into Palestine We did not surrender - We will never surrender As you know, after the announcement of the Oslo hoax in 1993, all of us were shocked at the degradation of the most fundamental Palestinian Right: the Right of Return. This Right is the only way to reverse the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and to repeal forever the racist policies of Zionism...[See also Al-Awda Points of Unity] Read more...New Zionist order to enhance the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland, by Adib Kawar | Palestine Think Tank Zionist occupation military authority issued an order that shall be put into effect this week, which considers tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who are living in their own homeland as “infiltrators” who deserve expulsion and punishment... Read more... Message by Desmond Tutu on behalf of The Elders On the Occasion of the Fifth Annual Bil'in Conference on Popular Resistance | Bil'in Village ..During our visit to Bil’in last August, many of the Elders saw first-hand the incredible actions the residents of Bil’in — together with committed Israeli and international activists— are taking to resist the Wall and settlements... Read more... Have a safe trip, Mohammed, by Mohammad Darawshe | Haaretz The announcement of MK Mohammed Barakeh of his intention to join the parliamentary delegation to Auschwitz next week has ignited a heated discussion in Israel's Arabic press... Read more... April 28, 2010 Gaza's calm determination, by Norman Finkelstein | Electronic Intifada Young Palestinians climb over the ruins of their destroyed home To preserve my sense of purpose, and keep the Palestine struggle from becoming a lifeless abstraction, I need periodically to recharge my moral batteries by reconnecting with the actual people living under occupation and by witnessing firsthand the unfolding tragedy...after Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip Read more... Iran's disarmament conference: The power of logic | Eric Walberg ..The logic of power is still overriding the power of logic, quipped the head of Iran’s Atomic Organisation Ali Salehi at the “Nuclear Energy for all, Nuclear Weapons for None” disarmament conference in Tehran last weekend, referring to US foreign policy, in particular, nuclear... Read more... U.S. Nuclear Option on Iran Linked to Israeli Attack Threat, by Gareth Porter | IPS The Obama administration's declaration in its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that it is reserving the right to use nuclear weapons against Iran represents a new element in a strategy of persuading Tehran that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites is a serious possibility if Iran does not bow to the demand that it cease uranium enrichment... Read more... Welcome to the Jewish Comedy Club | Gilad Atzmon Last weekend the American National Security Adviser, General James Jones, spoke at the 25-year anniversary gala of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy*. Mindful that the crowd consisted of many Jews, General Jones believed would be an appropriate, friendly gesture to launch his speech with a Jewish Joke. He was obviously wrong... Read more... Eye Witness Reports From Gaza (Video) | Free Gaza News Ewa Jasiewicz was a witness to the horrors in Gaza before and after Israels brutal massacres in December and January during Israel's Operation Cast Lead. Listen to her eloquent speech in Berlin, Germany and watch the images taken by volunteers in Gaza during Israel's brutal assault... Watch... Can the U.S. Beat Israel at their Game? by Jeff Gates | Veterans Today Americans can now see the light at the end of a long dark tunnel—if only they will look. We entered this tunnel in 1948 when an enclave of religious fanatics induced President Harry Truman to portray them as a “state” meriting recognition, aid and protection. We were warned not to do so... Read more... Collapse of the Standard of Living in the USA, by Hiram Lee | Global Research Studies Reveal Declining Living Standards and Increasing Anger A series of recent studies conducted by the Pew Research Center shed new light on the scope of the economic crisis in the US and the level of hostility the majority of the American population holds for the US government...Read more... Ritual terrorism: Hating Obama as a new form of religion, by Bradley Burston | Haaretz When I was young, I was taught that the purpose of religion was to foster compassion through lovingkindness, to seek peace by example, to perform with human hands the work of angels. Then I moved to the Holy Land. If ever the history of religion were written in blood, it was here... Read more... What to Do About the Banks | The Agonist Banking reform measures are moving rapidly through the U.S. House and Senate, so much so that bills may be voted on as early as next week. This is one reform effort where even President Obama is engaged from the start with ideas and recommendations. As with health care, the two chambers have different proposals they are looking at, so now is the time for interested citizens to put forth their own views... Read more... The New Secessionists, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig Acts of rebellion which promote moral and political change must be nonviolent. And one of the most potent nonviolent alternatives in the country, which defies the corporate state and calls for an end to imperial wars, is the secessionist movement bubbling up in some two dozen states including Vermont, Texas, Alaska and Hawaii... Read more... DC's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians" for 2009 | Judicial Watch ..As many of you know, it has become something of a New Year's tradition for Judicial Watch to comb through its files for the year to determine which politicians earn the dubious distinction of being the most corrupt in Washington. The following is Judicial Watch's 2009 "top ten" list in alphabetical order:.. Read more... Egypt a ticking time bomb: The Arab world's leading nation has become a political and cultural backwater, by Eric Margolis | OpEd News As battered air travelers struggle to recover from Iceland's volcanic big bang, another explosion is building up. This time, it's a political one that could rock the entire Mideast, where rumours of war involving the U.S., Syria, Israel and Iran are intensifying... Read more... Next bubble: $600 trillion?, by Jerome Corsi | World Net Daily Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland As interest rates begin to rise worldwide, losses in derivatives may end up bankrupting a wide range of institutions, including municipalities, state governments, major insurance companies, top investment houses, commercial banks and universities...Read more... Darfur aid dollars funding West Bank settlements, by Thomas Mountain | Online Journal Persons working with aid organizations assisting the victims of the Darfur conflict have passed on the news that they have confirmed through their contacts in the so called “Save Darfur Coalition” that millions of dollars raised to help the Darfur refugees have ended up in Israeli bank accounts. These accounts help fund programs that include illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. These sources inside the pro-Israel organizations that control the “Save Darfur Coalition” estimate that over $100 million was raised for Darfur... [The "Save Darfur" campaign was a scheme concocted by a Boston based Zionist crime syndicate called "The David Project"] Read more...Gadhafi to Arab MKs: I'm against Zionism, not Jews. by Jack Khoury | Haaretz Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in March Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi hosted a delegation of Israeli Arabs, including lawmakers, for a dinner meeting on Sunday evening. During the meeting, Gadhafi stressed the importance with which he viewed the delegation's visit, and said: "We are not against Jews, but against Zionism."..Read more... Lebanese PM warns of new Israeli war | Tehran Times Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri says Israel seeks to justify another war on his country through allegations it made about Hezbollah's weaponry... Read more... Megabanks: The Banking Oligarchy That Controls Assets Equivalent To 60 Percent Of America's GNP | Education News Megabanks have assets equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product Today financial power is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. In fact, the six biggest banks in the United States now possess assets equivalent to 60 percent of America’s gross national product. Back in the 1990s that figure was less than 20 percent...Read more... Al-Walaja heroism, conference in Bethlehem and more, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter A sign from Gaza: "Dear Europe, Sorry about that cloud of ash over your heads and that you can't travel anywhere. We feel just the same. Sincerely, Gaza." In news, Israeli soldiers were "reprimanded" for cold-blooded murder of 4 young Palestinians. I guess they would have been jailed for a few days if they first tortured the Palestinians before shooting them... Read more... Police State 4 - The Rise Of Fema | YouTube The grim future foretold in 1984 has become reality. The United States is now recognized globally as one of the most oppressive police states on earth. And it's only getting worse... Read more, watch... Another Olmert aide nabbed | Press TV An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man looks at posters pasted up by political The bribery and fraud cases involving former Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert have most lately led to the arrest of his one-time bureau head. Known as a trusted aide to the former prime minister, Shula Zaken was arrested on Monday at Israel's Ben Gurion airport upon her return from a visit to the United States...opponents of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Read more... Iraq Today: Afflicted by Violence, Devastation, Corruption, and Devastation | Steve Lendman Seven years under occupation, Iraqis still cope with what Refugees International calls "a dire humanitarian crisis that sees huge numbers of displaced (and other Iraqis) struggl(ing) to survive," a situation "for which the US bears special responsibility" but does nothing to correct... Read more... Born in Deception, by William A. Cook | Palestine Chronicle The Jewish Agency for Palestine lied to the American President As Israel attempts today to gloss over the reality of its birth 62 years ago with a sweeping public relations campaign extolling the miraculous “resurrection” of ancient Zion in contemporary times, a new nation seeking only peace with its neighbors, it might be enlightening and valuable to examine the truth...Read more... Iraq, Afghan Wars Drop Bombs On US Image Abroad As Obama's Fame Fades | YouTube U.S. lawmakers are working on how to reverse the countrys flagging image in Muslim nations. President Obama’s election brought a welcome surge in U.S. popularity, but that reputation’s on the slide as the unwelcome wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue... Watch video... When Will Israel Attack the U.S. - Again?, by Jeff Gates | Veterans Today Israel has long been waging war on the U.S. by way of deception. To date, its operatives have worked from the shadows hoping not to be detected. Their duplicity typically includes the displacement of facts with what the American public can be deceived to believe... Read more... April 27, 2010 "Occupied" Pollution | Uruknet There are 121 settlements in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. In many of these, violence against the local Palestinian population is common. In a number, however, it is pollution that is a major problem. Waste-water pollution from settlements destroys crops and trees, pollutes ground and drinking water supplies, and damages land and harms wildlife and the communities dependent on it... Read more... The Alien Menace!, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar A new documentary series created by Stephen Hawking posits the mathematical certainty of extraterrestrial life – but the brilliant theoretical scientist recommends against trying to establish contact. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers [of planets] alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” Hawking says. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” That’s where the sense of caution sets in, because if they’re anything like us – rapacious warlike predators – then perhaps keeping a certain amount of distance is the better part of valor... Read more... Israeli Apartheid and The Nakba | YouTube Watch... Israel's Big and Small Apartheids: Meaning of a Jewish State, by Jonathan Cook | Palestine Chronicle ...Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable -- if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden... Read more... Dear Elie Wiesel: My Response to Elie's "musings" on Jerusalem, by Mike Odetalla | Window Into Palestine ...after reading your so-called "musings" in a rather expensive ad in the New York Times and other publications on the city of my birth, I feel that we can dispense with the formalities because I believe now I know you very well... Read more... Netanyahu: Shalit animation shows true nature of Hamas | Haaretz Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit out at the militant Palestinian organization Hamas on Sunday, after the group released an animted short film depicting abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been captive by Hamas in Gaza for nearly four years, returning to Israel in a coffin... Read more... Gilad Shalit: 3D Animated Video by Hamas | Gilad Atzmon "A work of genius" - Gilad Watch... Tony Blair, Very Close to being Indicted for War Crimes, by Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research While on a speaking engagement in Malaysia organized by "Success Resources Company", former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the object of an articulate protest movement demanding his indictment for war crimes. This was no ordinary protest. Tony Blair has been accused of war crimes in a legal initiative led by the country's former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad... Read more... From Neptune to Gaza, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle My name is Ramzy Baroud, and I am from Neptune ...We Palestinians are cursed in many ways, but blessed in others. We live in a constant state of physical loss and spatial bewilderment. We know where we belong physically and territorially, but we cannot actually be there. The authorities have decided that we don't belong where we have always belonged, the place with which we have always identified. That is the curse: the sense of loss and constant search for the place. But that very curse represents the essence of our blessing as well: the search for meaning, value, sense, purpose...Read more... A danger called Israel, by Gideon Spiro | Occupation Magazine (Kibush) Israel today is on the front line in the international campaign against the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran. Israel does not deny reports that it is conducting exercises with military aircraft, all of them US-made, with the objective of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. An Israeli military action would likely bring the region to the point of nuclear confrontation, the results of which would be a disaster for the whole world... Read more... Pathetic Elie Wiesel, by Michael Warschawski | Alternative Information Center ...I have always asked myself what could justify a Nobel Peace Prize for Elie Wiesel: not only has he done nothing for peace anywhere on our planet, but the only political topic on which he has expressed himself strongly, he unconditionally justified and supported war: the wars of Israel which, by definition, is always the victim and has therefore the right to launch preemptive war in order to avoid a new Auschwitz... Read more... Criminal State: A Closer Look at Israel's Role in Terrorism, video by Anthony Lawson | Rebel News This series is based on an article by Jeff Gates, who is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, merchant banker, educator and consultant to governments worldwide, who served for seven years as counsel to the US Senate Committee on Finance... Watch... What threat did I pose the Israeli soldiers?, by Eva Bartlett | In Gaza The latest in a growing number of non-violent protesters shot by well-armed Israeli soldiers, three unarmed demonstrators –two Palestinians and one international–were injured this afternoon by Israeli soldiers’ firing with live ammunition at a protest east of El Meghazi, central Gaza Strip... Read more... Coffee with Bradley Smith: Elie Wiesel, a ludicrously unreliable survivor | The Holocaust Question Watch... David Rovics - They're Building a Wall | YouTube Watch, listen... Gil Scott-Heron announces cancellation of Tel Aviv concert | Jews sans frontieres Artist won’t play in Israel “until everyone is welcome there” Fans of revolutionary poet and singer-songwriter Gil Scott-Heron welcomed his decision tonight to cancel the concert he had been scheduled to play in Tel Aviv this May. Heron announced the decision during his set at London’s Royal Festival Hall, the opening date of his World tour...Read more... Can Lebanon Come In From The Cold?, by Franklin Lamb | Al-ManarTV Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp - Beirut, Lebanon As of mid-April 2010 there are no fewer than six draft laws, half of them ‘embargoed for now’ being circulated and debated in Lebanon, any one of which if adopted by Parliament, would grant Lebanon’s Palestinians, for the first time since their 1948 expulsion from Palestine, some elementary civil rights including the right to work, to have an ID, and to own a home...Read more... The Lunatics Who Made a Religion Out of Greed and Wrecked the Economy, by Taibbi | AlterNet The SEC's lawsuit against Goldman Sachs is a chance to prevent greed without limits So Goldman Sachs, the world's greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality...Read more... Anti-Wall Protest Expands: Palestinians Blocked Israeli Bulldozers | Israel-Palestine Some 200 demonstrators managed to halt the construction of the Wall in the village of alWalaja for almost three hours this morning. Two protesters – a Palestinian and an Israeli – were arrested. The Israeli dislocated his shoulder during the violent arrest, but is denied access to medical treatment at the police station... Read more... The holocaust debate between Otto Perge and Dr. Laszlo Karsai in Hungary | National Journal In March 2010 the Hungarian parliament adopted an anti-revisionist law making it illegal to dispute the orthodox version of the "holocaust" At the same time, Hungarian nationalist and revisionist Otto Perge suggested a debate on the topic. One of the country’s most prominent "holocaust" scholars, Dr. Laszlo Karsai, accepted the challenge... Read more... April 26, 2010 Spare a thought for a new generation of Palestinian Refugees, by Avigail Abarbanel | Palestine Think Tank ...Brutal insane regimes often do things in steps. They consciously and deliberately desensitise the world to ever-increasing violations so that they can escape scrutiny. It’s the old ‘frog in the pot’ analogy. By the time Israel reaches the worst violations, it will be too late. The world has chosen to turn a blind eye to so much already, and conveniently also chooses to believe Israel’s ‘rational’ and ‘calm’ justifications for what it is doing. The blood of the Palestinians is not only on Israel’s hands, but also on the hands of all the Heads of Government in the Western world who are still placating Israel and are doing absolutely nothing to stop it... Read more... Israel Lobby and War on Iran, by Stephen Sniegoski | Wake Up America! In his Foreign Policy blog, Stephen Walt, co-author of “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” is trying to determine why US leaders are planning to impose more sanctions on Iran or adopt even more drastic military measures...Walt observes that Iran does not threaten the US in any real way and leaves the question unanswered. Of course, Walt could find the reason if he looked at the title of his co-authored book. And if he really could not come up with this answer, he should undergo a medical examination for memory loss... Read more... Inside Job | This American Life (NPR) For seven months a team of investigative journalists from ProPublica looked into a story for us, the inside story of one company that made hundreds of millions of dollars for itself while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us. It includes our original Broadway song "Bet Against the American Dream"... Read more, enjoy the video... Israel Weighs Merits of Solo Attack on Iran | Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (from WSJ) ...The Israeli security establishment is divided over whether it needs Washington's blessing if Israel decides to attack Iran, Israeli officials say, as the U.S. campaign for sanctions drags on and Tehran steadily develops greater nuclear capability... Read more... Upswing in Israeli violence, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | karmalised Imad Rizka critically injured during the weekly Bil’in protest on Friday Things are really getting out of hand in the occupied territories and our reports may have to become more frequent to keep up with the rapidly evolving situation. We must write to let you know what is going on and ask you to take urgent actions on all fronts (media, politicians, on the ground etc). On the last day of the conference in Bil’in, the Israeli army was particularly violent against the demonstrators injuring Palestinians and Internationals...Read more... Monster's Ball: Drawing Back the Veil on the 'Death State', by Chris Floyd | Empire Burlesque Arthur Silber is back, with piercing insights that rip the veil which even self-proclaimed dissenters still draw across the blood-soaked reality of what Silber aptly calls the "Death State" that has long "wrapped the world in flames" (to quote the preferred method of resolving diplomatic conflicts famously voiced by Abe Lincoln's secretary of state) from its mephitic base on the Potomac... Read more... Fox News, Voice Of Israel’s War Machine, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today Few Americans Are Aware That Fox News Is Directly Tied To Likud Extremists In Israel In 1898, America went to war against Spain based only in misdirection by news organizations tied to the sugar industry. Cuba sunk into slavery and dictatorship, eventually becoming a 50 year enemy of America and the Philippine people immediately began a large scale national insurrection against American rule. “Waterboarding,” our current popular method of “non-torture torture” was invented during the Philippine insurrection to question “terror suspects.” Our history books report none of this, of course...Read more... Fisk: Western mainstream media distorting realities | Peninsula On-line Veteran British journalist Robert Fisk struck a chord with the audience at the Four Seasons Hotel yesterday when he pleaded to western journalists to be fair and unbiased towards the sufferings of the people in the Middle East, particularly the Palestinians... Read more... The Democratic Illusion, by Solomon Comissiong | Dailycensored The illusion of democracy within the illegitimate borders of America continues to psychologically obfuscate masses of US citizens. Just as people who are strung out on opiates begin to hallucinate imaging a “reality” that simply does not exist, so too are most Americans as they continue believing that their country is some sort of utopian democracy... Read more... There ain't no escape from collapse | Joe Bageant ...I have come to think the price of admission anywhere in the world, (except in America and Europe, where enough dough will get your ass kissed in any circles) is service to others. We have been indoctrinated by an earth devouring capitalist system to believe otherwise... Read more... Bishop Williamson's Heresy Trial, by Günter Deckert | RePortersNoteBook The County Court is in the same courthouse as the District Court, connected to the jail for suspects who are under investigatory arrest. At the entrance to the courthouse, security is the same as that of the Mannheim Heresy Trials {the trials of Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Sylvia Stolz and others} with magnetic archways and searches of pockets, purses, briefcases, etc., like at the airports... Read more... Israeli Hate Literature for Children, by Tamar Meroz | Tripod The Adventures of Oz Yaoz, Tzuptzik and Danidin Scores of children's books published in Israel encourage hatred and contempt for the Arabs. The principle is identical in all these endless serials: the Israeli hereos defeat the stupid Arabs. There is no control over these books, which are swallowed indiscriminately. Who are the authors of these books and what motivates them?..Read more... In the name of Zionism, by Uri Avnery | Maan News Agency Israelis attend a rally commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Israel is a Zionist State. Everybody knows that. There is no (Jewish) politician in Israel who misses an opportunity to repeat this. Last week, when we celebrated the 62nd Independence Day, we were flooded by a deluge of patriotic speeches. Each of the Ciceros, without exception, declared his total commitment to Zionism...assassination of the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin Read more... Joe Biden: I am a Zionist | Information Clearing House US Senator Joe Biden, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, speaks with Shalom TV CEO Mark S. Golub on Israel and Jewish-related issues in this exclusive interview... [The man is a walking caricature of sycophancy, hypocrisy and treason] Watch...Sowing hate and reaping death, by Rami Elhanan | Occupation Magazine (Kibush) My name is Rami Elhanan. Thirteen years ago, on the afternoon of Thursday the fourth of September 1997, I lost my daughter, my Smadar, in a suicide attack on Ben-Yehuda street in Jerusalem. A beautiful sweet joyous 14 year old girl. My Smadar was the granddaughter of the militant for peace, General (Ret.) Matti Peled, one of those who made the breakthrough to Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. And she was murdered because we were not wise enough to preserve her safety in Matti’s way, the only correct and possible way – the way of peace and reconciliation... Read more... Israel’s Messianic Terrorists, by Patrick Seale | Agence Global Barely a week goes by without news of some act of violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By any definition, what settlers and other religious activists do to Palestinians is terrorism. But it goes unpunished... Read more... Israel Bars Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem From Traveling, by Saed Bannoura | International Middle East Media Center Sheikh Ikrima Sabri Israeli Interior Minister, Elie Yishai, issued a decree on Thursday preventing Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the Imam of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and head of the Higher Islamic Committee from leaving the country until September 27, 2010. Yishai claimed that Sabri’s travel harms the security of Israel, and accused him of incitement...Read more... Leftists to Elie Wiesel: Occupied Jerusalem can't be holy, by Akiva Eldar | Haaretz Jerusalem must be shared by both Israelis and Palestinians, a leftist activist group said Thursday, in response to Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel's ad in the Washington Post last week... Read more... Earth Day In Israel: Apartheid Showing Through The Greenwash, by Stephanie Westbrook | Countercurrents On April 22, as part of the global Earth Day celebrations, homes, offices and public buildings in 14 Israeli cities turned out the lights for one hour in an effort to "increase awareness of the vital need to reduce energy consumption." The Earth Day celebrations included scenes of green fields, wind generators and rainbows projected on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem, the Green Globes Award ceremony recognizing "outstanding contributions to promote the environment" and a concert in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv powered by generators running on vegetable oil as well as volunteers on 48 bikes pedaling away to produce electricity... Read more... Israel's criminal water policy | Gulf News By robbing Palestinians of their resources, Tel Aviv intends to see that they will wither away or emigrate into oblivion The world's most precious resource, when you get down to it, is not oil, but water Since 1967, when it occupied the Palestinian territories, Israel has been progressively robbing Palestinians of their land, thus pauperising them and stultifying their economy. A given. But what seems to have passed largely unnoticed here is the robbery of these people's water supplies, a more reprehensible crime with a more devastating impact on the quality of life in the occupied territories...Read more... Shlomo Sand Speaks | Jewbonics Watch... Israel's Open Secret: Nuclear Armed and Dangerous, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News For many years, Israel's open secret is that it's one of eight known nuclear powers, including America and Russia with about 97% of the world's arsenal according to Helen Caldicott in her book "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer." The others are Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel - North Korea a declared but unverified one... Read more... April 25, 2010 Holocaust Tax Allowance | Gilad Atzmon poor Jews are not I do think that taking Tax from Jews is nothing less than Anti Semitism in practice. After the Holocaust and 2000 years of Jewish suffering we should accept that Jews have the right to hide some money from the tax authorities, just in case the horror repeats itself...Read more... Watch Out for Those Pinko-Commies in Camo: The Real Socialist Threat is the Military, by Christopher Ketcham | Counterpunch ...if we want real socialism for actual persons, we should all join the US military: everything is socialized in the military, the personnel getting socialized medicine and socialized housing and socialized transport and much else (socialized bullets and bombs), the ideal and modus operandi being one of purest collectivism, the training the kind that teaches recognition of hierarchies and obedience in that long chain of command... Read more... Israel Winning Its War on Goats, by Eva Bartlett | Antiwar Nine-year-old Ismail spends every afternoon herding his family’s flock of sheep and goats, a scraggly group of roughly 20 animals. They live in a shanty house district near Tel el Howa in Gaza City, where growth is sparse to nonexistent. "I walk all over to find food for the animals," he says, swishing his stick to move them along... Read more... Netanyahu Commits to Colonizing East Jerusalem: First Palestinian Expelled under new Policy | Juan Cole The new Israeli policy of deporting Palestinians from the West Bank on arbitrary grounds has kicked in with Ahmad Sabah, who has just been deported to Gaza and separated from his family in the West Bank. The measure contravenes the Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of occupied populations, and it also goes contrary to the undertakings Israel made toward the Palestine Authority in the course of the Oslo peace negotiations... Read more... Right of return not negotiable, by Ahmed Moor | Electronic Intifada "To the extent that Israel must exist exclusively for the Jewish people, Washington insiders are now touting a misguided Obama-dictated plan to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Most recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen Solarz took to the pages of The Washington Post to float the idea of an imposed peace, which largely undermines non-negotiable historic Palestinian rights. The authors call for the annulment of the Palestinian right of return, and the creation of a "demilitarized Palestinian state."..the enfranchising of the roughly four million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation today does pose a threat to its existence." Read more... Barghouti: it's time to end the historic injustice | Middle East Monitor ... the legal and historical rights of the refugees to return to the land of their parents and grandparents will not become invalid over time, nor will the Israeli occupation authorities destroy those rights. "No matter how long it takes," he said, "Israeli 'facts on the ground' cannot and will not diminish our legal rights." Palestinians, he continued, need to adopt the path of resistance, restore national unity and mobilise international solidarity for their cause... Read more... Palestine's "turbulent priest" delivers a blistering Easter message | Redress Information & Analysis Stuart Littlewood views the Easter message of Gaza’s courageous Fr Manuel Musallam in which he delivered a blistering attack on Israel’s occupation and its rape of the holy sites, and a damning indictment of the silence of the cowards in the West... Read more... Judea Declares War on America’s 44th President, by Michael Collins Piper | American Free Press Outspoken Israeli-born critic of Israel Gilad Atzmon put it bluntly in the title of his March 25 Internet essay: “Judea Declares War on Obama.” Atzmon—whose candor is unswerving—was referring to the recent avalanche of bitter commentary unleashed at Barack Obama by powerful international Jewish organizations that perceive the president’s Middle East policies to be less than supportive of the demands of Israel and the Jewish lobby in America... Read more... 'Gaza infrastructure in state of collapse | al Jazeera Magazine ..."The infrastructure of water and sanitation is in a state of collapse," said John Ging, Director of Operations in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). "There is no legitimate economy anymore. The physical and psychological suffering continues on a daily basis," he said at a press conference at the UN Headquarters in New York... Read more... April 24, 2010 Hard Talk: Zionists occupiers… Heed my call | Uprooted Palestinians Armed Settlers Like most people, I do believe in dialogue and civilized coexistence, like most people I long to live in dignity and freedom in my homeland, like most people I yearn for peace and justice for every human, like most people I like to foster loving and trusting relationships with all decent individuals; however, our problem with the Zionist occupiers is not about hate and distrust as they like to believe, it’s not about security as they constantly declare, nor is it about dialogue or lack thereof!..[If you're only going to read one item from Today's Headlines, read this one] Read more...From Bilin to Beit Jala, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter The past two days witnessed further Israeli war crimes from shooting at unarmed protesters in Gaza, to destruction of land and property, and to raids in the middle of the night. But we also had a good first day of the International conference in Bil'in... Read more... Germany prepares to sue Goldman Sachs | EU Times The Pandora’s box of the SEC’s action against Goldman, which if validated in court will effectively make the issuance of every hybrid CDO product quasi-illegal, will lead to an explosion of lawsuits against virtually any bank that was active in the structured finance space during the housing boom, adding to a fresh round of “non-recurring” charges to bank income statements. Case in point – Welt am Sonntag reports that the German government is considering suing Goldman Sachs, and has asked the SEC for information in its fraud case... Read more... Declare Independence. Free Israel. End the Occupation, by Bradley Burston | Haaretz ..Occupation is an ugly word. That is why people who support the idea of a Jewish state should use the term, and use it often. Because, on this, Israel's 62nd independence day, the Occupation has to be identified for what it has become: Israel's worst enemy... Read more... Thabet to Obama: Palestine for Palestinians, not for Jews | Palestine-Info Thabet organization has rejected a phrase by American president Barack Obama in his "congratulatory" message to Israel on the 62nd anniversary of its establishment on the usurped land of Palestine in which he said that Palestine is the historical homeland of the Jewish people. The Beirut-based organization, concerned with the Palestinian refugees' right of return, said in a statement on Thursday that the phrase was a historical mistake, recalling that his deputy Joe Biden voiced similar mistakes when he visited Israel last month and said that the history of Israel was a story of great accomplishment in an area of barren desert... Read more... US official: Iran military strike 'off the table' | Associated Press The U.S. has ruled out a military strike against Iran's nuclear program any time soon, hoping instead negotiations and United Nations sanctions will prevent the Middle East nation from developing nuclear weapons, a top U.S. defense department official said Wednesday... Read more.. Huge Protests Planned for Showdown on Wall St. and at Banks Across the U.S. to Demand Financial Reform, by Scott Thill | AlterNet A coalition of groups plan multi-city protests at the end of April as public outrage rises over banks' return to massive profits and obscene bonuses... Read more... Are You an Anti-Semite?: My Investment in Israel, by Vijay Prashad | Counterpunch ...My investment in Israel is, however, not simply the same as my interest in other injustices, in other places. There is a particular set of reasons why I am invested in the struggles of the Palestinian against Israeli excesses:.. Read more... A State for All Its Citizens, by Nadim N. Rouhana | Foreign Policy In the conflict studies courses I teach, I expose my students to theories that claim state-sanctioned inequality is a source of perpetual conflict. I know this to be true not only from my academic research, but from personal experience: I also run a small research institution in the northern Israeli city of Haifa that focuses on the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and their relationship with the state. This population, with the silent complicity of the United States, has long been the target of official state policies of discrimination... Read more... The Middle Class Game Is Up: We're Heading to a Slave Labor Planet, by Joe Bageant | AlterNet Thanks to globalization, the American, Australian and European promises of middle-class prosperity are on their way to extinction... Read more... The Business of America Is Kleptocracy, by William Astore | TomDispatch How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft Kleptocracy -- now, there’s a word I was taught to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. It’s a word, in fact, that’s usually applied to flawed or failed governments in Africa, Latin America, or the nether regions of Asia.. It’s not a word you’re likely to see associated with a mature republic like the United States led by disinterested public servants and regulated by more-or-less transparent principles and processes...Read more... Imprisoning Palestinian Women, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News A July 2008 Fact Sheet Series titled, "Behind the Bars: Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons" was jointly prepared by the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC), and Mandela Institute. Along with background information, it covered Israel's obligations under international law, prison conditions where they're held, medical neglect, and their educational rights restricted or denied... Read more... Goldstone criticises S. Africa rabbi | Al Jazeera The Goldstone Report found that Israel and Hamas committed war-crimes in the Gaza conflict Richard Goldstone, the judge who authored a UN report on war crimes in the Gaza Strip, has criticised South Africa's chief rabbi after being effectively banned from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah - a key religious ceremony for young Jewish boys...Read more... Goodbye, America!, by Dr Lasha Darkmoon | Occidental Observer The Christian Zionists and organized Jewry: fools conned by knaves Kevin MacDonald’s review of Wilhelm Marr’s pamphlet, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum, 1879, (“The Victory of Judaism over Germanism”), is a fascinating compendium of pessimistic quotations in which German political pundit Marr concludes gloomily that there was no hope left for Germany. It was finished — yes, as early as the 1870s. The Jews, he lamented, were simply too formidable a foe...Read more... The Murder of Donkeys and Detained Goats by Israel | Kawther Salam On April 13 2010 I wrote an article about animals in Israeli jail. For me as a Palestinian journalist, this was not a new subject or story, but it was new for my readers. It looks like this was the first time that foreigners and the defenders of animals rights hear about the treatment of animals by the IDF – the mistreatment of animals by the IDF is part of the jewish genocide being perpetrated against us Palestinians... Read more... The Jewish diaspora is losing patience with Israel, by Tony Karon | The National ...Addressing students ahead of the vote, the Berkeley professor Judith Butler, who is Jewish, made an important observation. “There is hardly a Jewish dinner table left in this country – or indeed in Europe and much of Israel – in which there is not enormous disagreement about the status of the occupation, Israeli military aggression and the future of Zionism, bi-nationalism and citizenship in the lands called Israel and Palestine. There is no one Jewish voice. And in recent years, there are increasing differences among us.”.. Read more... As Simple as A, B, C!, by Antoine Raffoul | Palestine Think Tank West Bank, Areas A - B - C Israel has always been in the habit of changing its laws to suit its colonial aims in all of historic Palestine (but specifically in areas it has been occupying since the Partition of Palestine in November 1947. These aims centre around the one single core policy which lies at the heart of the Zionist programme advocated by Theodor Herzl in 1897: the establishment of a Jewish State in historic Palestine within 50 years. This Zionist programme would eventually include the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by way of expelling its indigenous Palestinian population and the erasure of any physical presence they have...Read more... Film: “Targeted Citizen” | Gilad Atzmon The film “Targeted Citizen” (15 minutes), produced by filmmaker Rachel Leah Jones for Adalah, surveys discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel.. These interviews are reinforced by the contrasting informality of on-the-street conversations conducted by Palestinian comic duo Shammas-Nahas and punctuated by the hard-hitting rhymes of Palestinian rap trio DAM... Read more, watch... Holiday over for Israel as Obama lays down the law | The National Israel went back to work yesterday after a holiday season that has disrupted most of April. For the Israeli coalition government, however, that return is probably even less welcome than to everyone else, with the country expected to come up with answers to US probing over a peace process with the Palestinians... Read more... Watching the invasion unfold | In Gaza ...“I knew they were going to do something today,” says Jaber Abu Rjila. “I saw the bulldozers line up at the border yesterday and knew today there’d be a party,” making light of his dangerous reality... [The invasion she's referring to is not the holocaust that happened last year, but the one that continues in Gaza almost every day,day after day] Read more...Israel is 62 years old and its indigenous citizens still have second-class status, by Senussi Bsaikri | Middle East Monitor In Israel, the main factor that determines the right of citizenship is "nationality" rather than the place of birth. Such nationality does not apply to all the current residents of the Zionist state because it is based on ethnicity, as stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Law of Return issued in 1950. According to this racist law, Israel is a national home for the Jewish people; all Jews, all over the world, have the right to Israeli citizenship without any official fuss. Non-Jews are not so privileged... Read more... The Negev as Another West Bank, by Yeela Raanan | Occupation Magazine I was taken to court yesterday for sitting in a home in an unrecognized Bedouin village, as the bulldozer was at the wall – ready to demolish the house. The police carried me out of the home and arrested me, and a couple of years later – I was put on trial for `disrupting a policeman`. We gathered – about 40 of us, half an hour before the trial time. We sat outside the courthouse: we were Jews and Arabs – this battle was not a battle of Jews against Arabs – but all of us against powerful injustice... Read more... April 23, 2010 Israeli forces besiege Prisoners Day commemoration, by Mel Frykberg | Electronic Intifada Palestinian children take part in a candlelight vigil commemorating Prisoners Day in Gaza ...The confrontations broke out after military jeeps entered the agricultural village and attempted to break up the commemoration. The village committee had laid out hundreds of chairs and organized music for the celebration when it was stormed by the Israeli military. Youngsters in the village had spent months rehearsing and preparing for the event which included speeches, dances, plays and music...Read more... What Does Israel-Backed UAE Say?, by Kourosh Ziabari | Eurasia Review Speaking or writing as an Iranian citizen makes it difficult to weigh in on the latest remarks made by the UAE Foreign Minister, Abdallah Bin Zayid Al Nahyan, who likened Iran's legal sovereignty of it's Persian Gulf islands to the Zionist regime's occupation of Syria's Golan heights. Putting the nationalistic bias and prejudice aside, some focal points should be considered regarding what the novice FM has grumbled in his latest statements before the Federal Council of Emirates... Read more... End Israel lobbies’ pervasive and damaging influence in US politics, by Debbie Menon | Redress Information & Analysis Debbie Menon argues that Washington’s support for Israel is tragic, immoral and extremely damaging to Americans given that US “congressional representatives continue to put Israel’s interests before the interests of Americans”... Read more... Postcard from Gaza, by Flora Nicoletta | Uruknet Khamis Abu Shaaban in the Municipal Park, Gaza City, 1955 The problem in Gaza is not the lack of food or the humanitarian crisis. The major problem in Gaza is how to keep one's sanity...Read more... Palestinians increasingly back One State | Jerusalem Post ...The latest public opinion survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that while the majority of Palestinians and Israelis prefer a two-state solution to the conflict, Palestinian support for such a resolution has declined in recent months... Read more... US Jews break Israel's "Law of Return" (Video) | Electronic Intifada ...As US Jews, we have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship under Israel's "Law of Return," while many Palestinians have not been able to return home in over 60 years. It is not right that we may "return" to a state that is not ours while Palestinians are excluded and continuously dispossessed... Read more, watch video... The False Religion of Mideast Peace: And Why I'm No Longer a Believer, by Aaron David Miller | Foreign Policy Read more... Birthright to bring 21,000 to Israel [to become "foremost strategic asset of the State of Israel"] | JTA Participation in Taglit-Birthright Israel trips this summer has doubled from the summer of 2009, the group said. Some 21,000 young Jews will take the free 10-day trip to Israel this summer. Thousands remain on waiting lists, the group said in a news release. This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the Jewish educational project. “We set a goal for ourselves that within the next 7-10 years, half of Jewish youth living in the Diaspora will visit Israel through our program,".. [Israel's recruitment of future storm troopers and fifth column funded by U.S. taxpayers] Read more...AIPAC: The Voice of America — Part 1: The Orange and the Pea [Video by Anthony Lawson] | If Americans Knew ...The discrepancy between the power AIPAC wields, compared to the rest of the American population, is immense, and that power benefits one nation: Israel... Read more, watch video... The Arabs, Weak by Choice, by Hasan El-Hasan | Palestine Chronicle Arabs have manpower, natural resources, strategic location and capital to be strong Nation-states living in the area from Morocco to Iraq including the Arabian Peninsula share a distinct culture and history, and speak Arabic, albeit with hundreds of dialects. Arab nationalism is "ingrained in the soul of Arab individuals based on the sentiments of a glorious past", but Arab unity today is needed to deal with challenges posed by the twenty-first century Orientalism. European colonialists divided the region, planted the State of Israel, drew the borders and supported its ruling regimes after stripping them of their Arab legitimacy in favor of tribal and local nationalism; and the region remains hostage to its imperialist past...Read more... What does it take to get liberal Zionists on board with BDS, and is it worth it?, by Ahmed Moor | Mondoweiss Jerry Haber’s call for liberal Zionists to join the broader BDS movement is laudable for what he’s attempting to do. Sadly, Haber’s Zionism informs his writing in a way that largely undermines his professed goal. The current of Jewish paternalism that runs throughout the list translates into both an excessive focus on the importance of the Zionist "peace" camp in Israel, and the adoption of an infantilizing and placatory tone vis a vis the Palestinians... Read more... Today in Palestine!, compiled by Shadi Fadda This is one of several websites that chronicles some of the hundreds of criminal acts, ranging from horrific to merely revolting, committed by the Israeli government, military and "citizens" against the defenseless Palestinian population every day of the week (thousands of incidents if you include what goes on at the checkpoints) - the Editor Read more... Palestinian Factions Meet In Gaza | International Middle East Media Center Palestinian flag with logos of Fatah and Hamas Palestinian factions, including the rival Fateh and Hamas movements, held on Tuesday a meeting in northern Gaza to discuss the latest Israeli decision to deport thousands of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank...Read more... Helen Thomas on her one question for Obama | YouTube White House Press Corps longest-serving member says Obama lost credibility when he dodged her question on Israeli nukes... Watch... Don't Tell Them, They Already Know, by Joharah Baker | MIFTAH It has always been my strong conviction that any real change in Israeli politics must inevitably come out of Israel itself and not solely as a result of external pressure. Don't get me wrong, the United States in particular could drastically change the balances of power with the swift stroke of a pen (across its Israel foreign aid check to be precise)... Read more... Hamas vows to carry out more executions, by Mel Frykberg | Electronic Intifada Hamas military courts have been issuing death sentences The Hamas authorities in Gaza have vowed to carry out more executions of those on death row despite intense international criticism and condemnation from both Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups. During the last few days, the Islamic movement has faced a barrage of denunciation following the execution of two Gazan men last Thursday, by firing squad, for alleged acts of treason...against Palestinian prisoners in the Gaza Strip Read more... Letter to a Friend on Israel's Independence Day, by Michael Warschawski | The Alternative Information Center Tonight you celebrate the independence day of the state of Israel. I do not. You probably believe that the Jews deserve a state, that the Holocaust survivors and their children had a right to a safe home of their own, and that the Land of Israel is the natural and legitimate place to fulfill the vision of a state for Jews. As you know, I disagree with you... Read more... Divestment makes Jews uncomfortable because it confronts them with facts that have been suppressed, by Steve Horn | Mondoweiss When divestment is called for, it is often shunned immediately, yet this time around in Berkeley, in the aftermath of the brutal Operation Cast Lead, the political tide has shifted. The debate, at least among liberals, has moved from “If you’re for divestment, you’re anti-Israel or anti-Semitic” to “There may be other, more effective ways as a liberal peace activist to oppose Israel’s human rights violations than divestment.” This is a huge — let me repeat, huge — step in the right direction... Read more... “Introducing the MV Rachel Corrie” | Freegaza News The 1200-ton cargo ship had been abandoned in July 2009, off the coast of Ireland. She was then impounded after an inspection by the International Transport Federation (ITF) discovered her owners had exploited their Lithuanian crewmembers...On March 31, 2010, the Free Gaza Movement bought her at auction for €70,000 and will send her to the imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza loaded with cement, paper, and medical equipment, all banned by Israel from this battered and bruised slice of the Mediterranean... Read more... 'I listen as a lost people tell of their woes in a kind of trance', by Robert Fisk | The Independent These people speak with great and terrifying and justifiable anger ...here in Kuala Lumpur, there was something perverse to my little meeting with the Palestinians of Malaysia – yet more representatives of a lost, occupied Middle Eastern people, washed up on the far side of the earth; the same accents, the same desperation, the same courtesy, the same patience when I unforgivably forgot to offer them tea for almost half an hour...Read more... Gil Scott-Heron: don't go to the moon, by Matthew Cassel | Electronic Intifada Gil Scott-Heron ...By performing in Tel Aviv next month, you will entertain an unjust system that denies the rights of the six million refugees who Handala represents. For more than 62 years these refugees and their descendants have been denied their most fundamental right of return. Performing in Tel Aviv, in the context of your art, would be the equivalent of you abandoning Nell on Earth and taking off for the moon...Read more... Ictu to seek ways to support sanctions against Israel | The Irish Times The Executive council of Ictu [Irish Congress of Trade Unions] is to consider ways in which it can translate into action its support for Palestinian calls for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Attendees at an Ictu conference on the Middle East held in Dublin yesterday discussed possible ways of implementing such a campaign in Ireland... Read more... The Inflated Threat from Iran | Stephen M. Walt Back when I started writing this blog, I warned that the idea of preventive war against Iran wasn't going to go away just because Barack Obama was president. The topic got another little burst of oxygen over the past few days, in response to what seems to have been an over-hyped memorandum from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and some remarks by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, following a speech at Columbia University... Read more... Exaggeration of Iranian Threat Could Have Dire Consequences, by William Pfaff | Truthdig It is a dismaying reflection that the facilitators of major violence thus far in the 21st century have been lies told by democratic governments. The lies are continuing to be told, about the supposed “existential” menace posed by Iran to Israel, America and (if you believe some European leaders) Western Europe... Read more... April 22, 2010 The Nakba is in its 63rd year: Whither Palestine now?, by Muhammad Amara and Abdul Rahman Mari | Middle East Monitor The Palestinian issue is at the centre of the conflict between Israel and the Arab world. Starting with the early Zionists' lobbying around Europe's capitals in the early twentieth century, through Britain's "Balfour Declaration" and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War; the League of Nations Mandate given to Britain, increased Jewish migration to Palestine and terrorism against the British and the Palestinians; and the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel in 1948, the issue played a massively important role in Middle East politics... Read more... Polanski's Ghost Writer | Gilad Atzmon It is somewhat puzzling that director Roman Polanski, who has managed to evade justice for more than three decades, decided to make a film chronicling a disgraced British PM in his attempt to escape the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague... Read more... There Will Be Another War, by Norman Finkelstein | Information Clearing House Watch... 21st Century Mass Expulsion, by Nasim Ahmed | Palestine Telegraph Behind the euphuism, ‘prevention of Infiltration’ lies a horrible truth which Israeli officials are trying desperately hard to conceal. This simple truth is a truth that has been cardinal throughout Israel’s existence and continues to do so. It’s a truth that connects the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and the recent military order that would result in the forced expulsion of many thousands of Palestinians. It’s the truth that Israel was founded on a policy of systematic population transfer and it has been committed to this policy ever since its inception... Read more... An Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People, by Josh Stieber | Michael Moore From Current and Former Members of the U.S. Military ...We write to you, your family, and your community with awareness that our words and actions can never restore your losses. We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions...Read more... Articles And Images Of Israeli Independence vs. Palestinian Nakba, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Desertpeace The articles and images crossing my mind and my computer screen over the past two days are an amalgam of ironies. An ultra orthodox Jew who burned the flag of the Zionist state on Sunday was arrested and charged. True to the Torah ultra Orthodox Jews have traditionally called the state of Israel, founded with the aid of British bayonets and guns as an abomination and a rebellion against the will of God. But recently, the virus of Zionism has spread to infect so many Jews who even claim orthodoxy even as more and more non-Jews and Jews shed the malady... Read more... If Not Us, Then Who?, by Timothy Gatto | Countercurrents Some psychologists say that abuse, whether physical, emotional or sexual, tends to leave a mark on those that were abused, sometimes causing the abused to become abusers. I tend to think that this tendency can also be carried on to groups of people, even entire nations... Read more... US ban on Arab TV | Dawn The United States claims that one of its top foreign policy initiatives is to spread democracy and freedom around the world. But a recent bill in the US Congress has led many to wonder whether the US wants to become one of the world’s biggest hindrances to media freedom... Read more... Begin was right, deportation is a Nazi policy, by Daoud Kuttab | Maan News Agency There is a reason for the fact, that in modern times laws are written by representatives of the people to whom they are applied: Governments and parliaments come and go, but laws often outlive them... Read more... The Arab-Israeli war of narratives, by Gilbert Achcar | Open Democracy The Arab-Israeli war of narratives that has led to Holocaust-denial on the one hand and Nakba-denial on the other opposes two entirely symmetrical visions of the origins of this intractable conflict. In Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Gilbert Achcar traces a complex history of interpretations from Arab responses to the earliest intimations of the Nazi genocide, through the creation of Israel and the occupation of Palestine, to last winter's Israeli offensive against Gaza... Read more... From 1967 to 2006, Israel uprooted an estimated 2.5 million trees in the occupied territories | Palestinian Pundit ...Meron Benvenisti wrote: "The destruction of hundreds of thousands of dunams of fruit-bearing trees does not fit Israel’s self-image as a society that knows how to “make the desert bloom.” And the contention that the green Arab landscape had been destroyed because of the necessity of adapting the crops to the agricultural practices of the Jews only underscores the conclusion that it was not the war that had caused this devastation, but rather the disappearance of the specific human community that had shaped the landscape in accordance with its needs and preferences... Read more... Israeli Soldier Burns Palestinian Teacher With Cigarette | Kawther Salam Say and repeat: “Yasser Arafat is a son of a bitch”. The israeli soldier from the so-called “border police” insisted that a Palestinian teacher from Hebron should say that. The Palestinian teacher was caught and harassed by the IDF soldier while he was on his way back home. The teacher refused the order of the IDF. He did not repeat the sentence which the IDF thug insisted that he must say... Read more... Independence Day, by Baha Hillo | Maan News Agency Palestinians commemorate the 61st anniversary of the Nakba On 19 and 20 April, Israel will mourn what is says were 26,653 Israelis killed in the past 150 years, 22,682 of which were soldiers. The Day of the Fallen Soldier sees hundreds of thousands lay flags on the graves of their lost loved ones, and the Minister of Defense Ehud Barak will speak at official ceremonies around the country... in Aida refugee camp, near Bethlehem Read more... The Arab Sector: Israel's Springboard into the OECD?, by Assaf Adiv | Challenge Magazine Every few months politicians and economists beat their breasts over the fact that Israel's 1.5 million Arabs have so little share in the economy. They are 20% of the population, but they contribute only 8% to the GDP... Read more... Volcanic ash: Gaza and freedom of movement | Palestine Telegraph It’s been over a week since the environmental crisis began in Europe and other parts of the world such as the Middle East, North Africa Canada the US. A cloud of volcanic ash drifting from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano continues to keep airspace shut down; affecting millions of travelers around the world and causing a tremendous crisis in the aviation industry... Read more... Dubai Investigation Exposes Israeli Ops in USA, by Michael Gillespie | Dissident Voice An ongoing investigation by the Dubai Police force into the assassination of a high-level Hamas official in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in January has drawn back the curtains of secrecy and deception to reveal yet again the contours of Israel’s massive and ever-expanding espionage operations in the United States... Read more... Israelis Debate Striking Iran Without U.S. Consent | Wall Street Journal ...The Israeli security establishment is divided over whether it needs Washington's blessing if Israel decides to attack Iran, Israeli officials say, as the U.S. campaign for sanctions drags on and Tehran steadily develops greater nuclear capability... Read more... World fed up with stalling by Israel, says defence chief | The Star Rule over Palestinians must end, Ehud Barak warns Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak sparked controversy Monday when he told Israelis the world is losing patience with Israel's continued rule over the Palestinians... Read more... Bush Insider Reveals Guantanamo Deception: Hundreds of Innocents Jailed, by Bill Quigley | OpEd News ...Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were innocent, the top people in the Bush Administration knew full well they were innocent, and that information was kept from the public... Read more... Upstaging Obama: Iran's Disarmament Conference, by Eric Walberg | Counterpunch The logic of power is still the overriding the power of logic, quipped the head of Iran’s Atomic Organisation Ali Salehi at the “Nuclear Energy for all, Nuclear Weapons for None” disarmament conference in Tehran last weekend, referring to US foreign policy, in particular, nuclear... Read more... Internet Journalism Is “Sort Of Like Terrorism”, by Steve Watson | Prison Planet In the same breath Pulitzer prize winning dinosaur decries use of “loaded” rhetoric Kathleen Parker - Pterodactyl? A Washington Post columnist who appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday described tea partiers as potentially violent and decried internet journalism as “sort of like terrorism”..[A bit ironic as WaPo (along with the NYT and WSJ) is one of the principal mouthpieces for the terrorist state of Israel] Read more...Imprisoning A Courageous Whistleblower: The Case of Bradley Birkenfeld | Stephen Lendman National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) covers his case on whistleblowers.org, saying: "Bradley Birkenfeld commenced serving a three-year and four-month sentence in federal prison on January 8, 2010, a direct result of blowing the whistle on one of the largest tax fraud schemes in US history.".. Read more... Some Questions for the Hierarchy of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) , by Michael Hoffman | Revisionist Review If you have been privy to the reasons Bishop Richard Williamson's Catholic SSPX order has dismissed him as seminary rector, exiled him to London, placed him under a gag order and refused to offer public prayers for his welfare, then you know they have been saying it is because the "Holocaust is not our fight.".. Read more... Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This', by Chris Hedges' | Truthdig Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect... Kandahar Campaign Doomed Before It Begins?, by Gareth Porter | Counterpunch 94 Percent of Kandaharis Support Negotiations With the Taliban An opinion survey of Afghanistan's Kandahar province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed that 94 percent of respondents support negotiating with the Taliban over military confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 percent regard the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers"...Read more... ADL: Prosecute Tea Party “Hate Speech!”, by Rev. Ted Pike | Republic Broadcasting The Jewish Anti-Defamation League says alleged racial slurs by Tea Party protestors against Congress members last month are “hate speech” and not protected by the First Amendment. According to ADL, Tea Party protestors “crossed the line” with racial slurs against black Congressmen. Such slurs, ADL head Abe Foxman contends, “are not constitutionally protected, and require a strong legal response.”.. Read more... Nukes and Temples | Middle East Online Evidently, American presidents wish to continue to guard Israel's nuclear "secret". If the motivation is a simple case of double standard, surely one must be deplored by the submissiveness of the general community. On the other hand, the more inquisitive mind would surely want to prod deeper and question the drive behind the guarding of this "secret"?... Read more... Heart of McDarkness, by Jeff Huber | Antiwar The latest bunker mentality bunk to emanate from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is that he has too many civilian contractors hoofing around on his turf. Back in June 2009, a "civilian surge" was a key component of his strategy. What made him change his mind?.. Read more... The Psychopathology Of Zionism: A review of Joel Kovel's Overcoming Zionism, by Ken Freeland | Shamireaders ..in this man and in this book, I have encountered the 21st century reincarnation of Israel Shahak, that first great (Jewish) writer to expose from within the perfidy and counterfeit nature of Zionist Israel, and its relation to Judaism and to a very checkered Jewish history. Joel Kovel takes up where that late, great scholar left off, but interestingly, while he holds absolutely no quarter for Zionism, he does lead the reader to a reasonably sympathetic understanding of how this pernicious ideology could have developed in the first place... Read more... Hypocrites, by Nahida | Uprooted Palestinians This open letter is an enumeration of guidelines toward a possible PEACE, it is destined for BLIND supporters of ZIONISM who blather "peace" while live in a state of denial. Those who attempt to beautify the ugly fascist racist face of zionism, who apply themselves as a dripping lipstick on the lips of a pig in a futile attempt to revamp its gruesome features... Read more... Israeli president: Iran threatens whole world | AP Iran is a danger to the whole civilized world, not just Israel, President Shimon Peres warned Sunday, setting an especially somber tone for his nation's annual memorial day for soldiers and civilians killed in wars and terror attacks. Alluding to Iran's nuclear program, Peres said the country threatens to annihilate Israel. "On no account must we underestimate these threats," he said. "Nor should our enemies underestimate our capabilities.".. [Gotta love it - the pot calling the tea cozy black] Read more...Israel — The tail that wags the dog, by Hal Sundin | Post Independent I find it difficult to understand why we are allowing our Middle-East foreign policy to be dictated by Israel... Read more... "Israelis" direct Boston police to arrest Veteran | WVNS Three of us protested against the "Holocaust Commemoration" last week at Faneuil Hall and the "Holocaust Memorial" outside Faneuil Hall. This "commemoration" is an annual event in Boston that is openly organized and sponsored by the "Israeli" government in conjunction with large well-funded Zionist pro-war Jewish groups. This "commemoration" is a disingenuous event that does not really oppose injustice or genocide. The purpose of the "commemoration" is to support the Zionist state, the racist "USA" and imperialist wars... Read more... Israel Support Letter Unsupported by Reality, by Jay Barr | Antiwar The Boxer-Isakson "Israel Support Letter" addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and currently signed by 76 senators answers a question no one needed to ask: Does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have the support of the United States Senate? However, unlike the proverbial napkin former AIPAC bigwig Steven Rosen boasted that he could have signed by 70 senators within 24 hours, this particular piece of paper contains a slew of Likud talking points, few of which are supported by reality... Read more... What Anglicans need is another Tutu as top cat | Redress Information & Analysis Stuart Littlewood views the silence of the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, over Palestinian suffering, especially in Gaza, which he had promised to visit but had not been heard to mention since. He contrasts this with Mr Rowan’s fawning over Israel and the Holocaust... Read more... Israeli FM scorns US 'peace' efforts | Press TV Israel's Foreign Minister has claimed Jerusalem (al-Quds) as the regime's "eternal capital", ruling out any peace through negotiation over the occupied land. "Today, I stand before you in Jerusalem (al-Quds), as Israel's foreign minister, and reaffirm late Prime Minister Begin's statement: Jerusalem is our undivided, eternal capital," said Avigdor Lieberman... Read more... Graceful Decline: The End of Pax Americana, by Christopher Layne | American Conservative The United States emerged from World War II in a position of global dominance. From this unparalleled military and economic power came a Pax Americana that has endured for more than six decades. It seemed the sun would never set on the U.S. empire. But America is increasingly unable to play the hegemon’s assigned role... Read more... Irving On Zionist Germany's Thought Crime Persecutions | Rense I am told that in today's Times the poo- obsessed Times columnist Giles Coren has revealed that his doctor has told him that he produces an excess of bile. His writings about me of late suggest that he had no real need to seek medical expertise to learn this... Read more... Zionism And The Birth Of Middle East Terrorism, by Terrell Arnold | Rense Ilan Pappe's book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is the most important work on the history of Palestine that has appeared in decades. Its central focus is the manner in which the Zionists designed and executed a plan to expel the Palestinian people from their homeland, to erase the history of those people from the landscape of the new state of Israel, and to create an ersatz history of the region to tell a false Israeli story... Read more... Zionists invented Modern Terrorism | YouTube Watch... The Trial of the Bishop who Wasn't There, by Markus Haverkamp | On the Contrary A Tragicomedy in a Few Acts and Many, Many Scenes On Friday, 16 April 2010, Pope Benedict XVI's 83rd birthday, the trial against Bishop Richard Williamson of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) took place at the Local Court Regensburg, Germany. All in all roughly forty journalists arrived as well as twenty-odd supporters of Williamson, who had to make do being seated in the back row of the absolutely packed court room. Among the supporters were Lady Michèle Renouf, Günter Deckert and Ursula Haverbeck, as well as many other well known faces. Sadly, there were no members, followers or supporters of the SSPX present that could be identified as such...Read more... April 20, 2010 A Journey through Northern Afghanistan: The Muezzin of the Blue Mosque, by Anna Badkhen | Foreign Policy Mazar-e-Sharif At sunup the other day, a white pigeon flew through the open window of my bathroom and settled, cooing, on the edge of the sink. A good omen, said my young translator, Ramesh. An invitation, I thought. I locked the door to my rental room and set out on foot down the somewhat paved sidewalk toward the Blue Mosque...Read more... A Letter To Janet About Sabra-Shatilla, by Franklin Lamb | Countercurrents Dr. Franklin Lamb is an American who has dedicated the best years of his life and more to the service of Palestinians. This is a letter to his wife Janet, that was published in Counterpunch, on the anniversary of the Sabra & Shatila Massacre, on Sept. 14, 2007. Today is the anniversary of the US Embassy Bombing in Beirut.. A very sad day for Mr. Lamb. Please let him know that you have read his story... Read more... Humanity and Its Absence, by David Kennedy | The People's Voice I have just read your letter to Janet with its heart-rending account of the Sabra-Shatilla massacre. It is good to know there are still people who care about humanity and display a decency that is all too rare among humans, especially the most powerful - those who control such events as the Sabra-Shatilla massacre as described at A Letter To Janet About Sabra-Shatilla... Read more... Support for Palestinian groups needed, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter Some of you have received my emails for over 10 years and know that I share with you stories not found in the mainstream media and then ask you to take actions. Over 50,000 recipients are thus asked to write media or politicians, sign petitions, or engage in Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Peace here is significant to stem the hemorrhage and distorted policies that led to wars in other parts of the world. Your previous actions made a difference and the tide is shifting... Read more... World Jewish leader to Obama: Is U.S. committed to Israel's security? | Haaretz WJC President Ronald Lauder (Daniel Bar-On) World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder has publicly questioned United States President Barack Obama's commitment to Israel's security, in a letter he reportedly drafted with the approval of his close friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... [Does the pit bull on (or rather, off) the leash fear that its endless supply of filet mignon (and human sacrifices) is in jeapordy?] Read more... Israel is debated at California Democratic convention, Harman walks out in huff | Mondoweiss We often note the news that Democratic rank-and-file support for Israel is fading. Well, the California State Democratic Convention yesterday endorsed Congresswoman Jane Harman for reelection from a district around Los Angeles, but before it did so, Harman and her opponent, Marcy Winograd, both appeared before a progressive caucus at the convention, and argued Israel. The Fresno Bee calls the fight the "flashpoint" of the convention... Read more... Baroud's 'Freedom Fighter' is an Icon, by Jim Miles | Palestine Chronicle If you are to read one book on Gaza and Palestine, this is it Ramzy Baroud has written what should become an icon of historical-cultural writing for the people of Palestine. My Father Was a Freedom Fighter is an amazingly powerful and wonderfully well written tapestry of the modern history of Palestine, combining a family history focussed on the individual of Ramzy's father Mohammed with the overall history of the Jewish-Zionist/Palestinian-Arabic conflict in the area...Read more... Israel has finger in African water disputes | The National “Israel plays a major role in inciting African states, especially Ethiopia – from whose heights originate 85 per cent of the Nile’s water – Kenya and Uganda to abrogate previous NBC agreements by providing them with agricultural expertise and investment funds to build dams and keep the water at home.”.. [It's not just in the Middle East that Israel causes great suffering, it's pretty much everywhere] Read more...Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake - it was a con, by Will Hutton | The Observer Goldman Sachs was in the spotlight last November when demonstrators Hiding behind the complexities of our financial system, banks and other institutions are being accused of fraud and deception, with Goldman Sachs just the latest in the spotlight. This has become the most pressing election issue of all...protested outside its Washington offices against executive bonuses Read more... The forgotten plight of Palestinian Christians, by Bassim Khoury | Malta Independent Christians around the world have just finished celebrating the Easter holiday – and thousands did so by making the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem (where the Church of Holy Sepulchre is one of Christianity’s most revered sites). Around 300 pilgrims came from Malta, the largest ever as per Palestinian officials. Yet for many Palestinian Christians who have attempted to make this journey, ongoing Israeli restrictions on movement have made this a particularly discouraging holiday, with many being turned away at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, specifically in Bethlehem where hundreds demonstrated in the week leading up to Easter. The brutality of Jerusalem’s police against worshippers was at its worst with the beatings of Catholics on Good Friday and Orthodox during Saturday’s Holy Fire celebrations... Read more... Hitler's Most Trenchant Speech - Biographer John Toland | Real Zionist News Describing John Toland’s Writings as being “scrupulously accurate,” the New York Times joined literary critics from around the world in praising the renowned historian’s works. The Times’ acclamation of Toland included his biography Adolf Hitler.. Zionism’s ultimate weapon in bludgeoning generation after generation into emotional, if not intellectual, submission... Read more... Take the Money and Run, by Edmund Connelly | Occidental Observer We Westerners really do live in a Jewish world. Jewish control of the media is undeniable, as I’ve written about for years. One area that remains under-treated is the one most people still associate with Jews—and not always kindly: financial matters. Whether a Jewish group evolutionary strategy is responsible for their outsized success with money, whether it is because Jews are “the synagogue of Satan,” as St. John's gospel famously quoted Jesus as saying, or whether it is some other factor, at the end of the day Jewish temporal power comes down to money. And Jews have a lot of it... Read more... Symbolic Identifiers and Jewish Stereotypes | Gilad Atzmon Jews are usually proud to define themselves as Jews. Some Jews may, for instance, proudly carry the Jewish banner (Jews for Peace, Jews for Justice, Jews for Jesus and so on) as if they believe that the ‘J’ word contains special righteous attributions... [And I, another proud "self-hating jew," second the emotion] Read more... For Jerusalem, a response to Elie Wiesel, by Yossi Sarid | Haaretz With great interest I read the beautiful open letter you penned to the U.S. president that appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune on Friday, and which will appear in the New York Times today. From it I learned that you know much about heavenly Jerusalem, but less so about its counterpart here on earth... Read more... Jews stage anti-Zionist rally in al-Quds | Press TV Scores of orthodox Jews have staged a demonstration in al-Quds (Jerusalem) to protest Tel Aviv's policies and its mistreatment of Palestinians. Members of Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City) gathered in al-Quds's Shabbat Square late on Sunday. The demonstrators shouted anti-Zionist slogans and were carrying sings which read "Jews aren't Zionists.".. Read more... The Two-Guantanamo Solution, by Karen Greenberg | TomDispatch It all began in Afghanistan (the War on Terror, of course). It was there as well that, in late 2001, the Bush administration first "took the gloves off," a phrase its top officials then loved to use. So the first torture and abuse of prisoners, including the use of dogs to intimidate, took place there and only then migrated to Guantanamo in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. By 2004, the U.S. was already operating approximately two dozen off-the-grid prisons in Afghanistan and a report in the British Guardian could speak of the U.S. prison system there as “the hub of a global network of detention centers.”.. Read more... And the ‘Shoah’ debate continues… | Rehmat's World When it comes to religion – Western law follows the Qur’anic statement: “There is no compulsion in religion” – except in the case of the Shoah (Holocaust), which Israeli Professor Yeshyahu Leibowictz has defined as the “New Jewish Religion”. As far as I know – no one rational person has ever doubted that both Christian and Jew Nazi soldiers did carry out a grand genocide of Jewish people along with Gypsies and Christians. However, what some scholars do question is the ‘divine figure’ of Six Million Jews killed and some of means used to kill them... Read more... Goldman Sachs defends reputation | Press TV Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive and chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Goldman Sachs, a major Wall Street firm accused of fraud, has denied the charges of deliberately investing in 'toxic mortgages' and reaping huge profits...Read more... Khamenei: US ‘only’ ‘nuclear criminal’ for Hiroshima | Juan Cole The USG Open Source Center translates the speech on Saturday of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to the attendees of a nuclear security conference in Tehran... Read more... Leaving Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan: our education by collateral murder | Redress Information & Analysis Christopher King considers the evidence which indicate that murder of civilians and state-sponsored terrorism are tools of US policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and argues that unless Britain leaves Afghanistan immediately, it will not recover morally or economically and will not be on the path to control its destiny... Read more... April 19, 2010 Illustrations by Carlos Latuff (see below) Rape of Dulcinea | Israel Shamir Elie Wiesel wrote a letter to President Obama demanding hands off Jewish hold on Jerusalem. He recycled his own letter of January 2001, so here is what I answered him then... Read more... Palestinian Women and Children Behind Zionist Bars | Aletho News On a beautiful March day, I was on the way to school in Jerusalem when the bus I was in was stopped at Ras Il-Amoud. The soldiers got into the bus, told everyone to get out and told the bus driver to turn and go back from where it came. Some passengers started arguing with the soldiers, explaining they had jobs or classes to go to, but the soldiers didn’t want to know about that and started shouting and beating those present with their clubs, including me. We were school children and were not a threat to armed soldiers... Read more... "In the eyes of the state, we don't exist here", by Nora Barrows-Friedman | Electronic Intifada One of the homes slated for demolition in Dhammash village ...These attacks on Wednesday highlight the ongoing crisis of expanding Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land - but these policies are not limited to the boundaries of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip...Read more... Showdown for Human Rights in Berkeley, by Rae Abileah | Mondoweiss ...It all went down in Berkeley, California on Wednesday night, April 14, as the world watched... Read more... Chossudovsky: Obama, not Osama, is threat No.1 to global security | YouTube Barack Obama is masking the real issues over nuclear weapons by presenting the idea that nuclear terrorism is a major threat, says Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Canadian Centre for Research on Globalization... Watch... Israel's Stooges Battle for British Votes, by Stuart Littlewood | Palestine Chronicle In the UK the Foreign Office has been under Zionist influence for decades We can already see how disastrously the US election turned out, not just for Americans but the rest of us also. "The US president is simply the voice of the Zionist parasite," writes a friend in Norway. "It is sickening and frightening that Obama is seen toeing the Zionist line. Zionism has the US administration and other western governments by the balls."..Read more... We cannot have a rational approach to the peace process till we decouple the fate of Israel from the Jewish future, by Yakov Rabkin | Mondoweiss Israel: Challenges To Legitimacy And Prospects For Peace Israel has been singularly successful in ensuring her military, economic and political dominance in the region. In recent years, there have been fewer terrorist attacks on Israelis, Palestinians are badly divided, Israel enjoys solid support from major countries, and her scientists are among the Nobel Prize laureates. Israel is about to be admitted to the OECD, the select club of wealthy nations, and her cooperation with NATO augurs well for Israel’s eventual integration into this military alliance. Yet, in spite of these remarkable achievements Israel remains insecure: she fears delegitimation...Read more... Marwan Barghouthi marks 8th anniversary of imprisonment | Maan News Agency Thursday marked the 8th anniversary of the abduction and imprisonment of Marwan Barghouthi by Israeli forces, in honor of which the detained PLC member presented a summation of the current Palestinian situation... Read more... Global Peace and Justice Groups Threaten Israel's Legitimacy | Stephen Lendman Saying global peace and justice groups threaten Israel's legitimacy, its recent series of articles, policy papers, and presentations counterattacked - a combination of damage control and rethink despite legitimate criticism showing Israel delegitimizes itself, and no amount of policy paper makeover will change it. Only Israel can do that, but in its 62 year existence never tried... Read more... Palestinian doctor spreads message of life, death and peace, by Oakland Ross | The Star Israeli shells killed three of his daughters, but a Palestinian father refuses to hate Right to left: Mayar (15), Aya (13), and Besson Abuelaish (21) If anyone in the Middle East has earned the right to hate, it is a Palestinian father, physician and, now, first-time author by the name of Izzeldin Abuelaish...Read more... Renewed attacks on human rights groups in Israel | JNews A new report and billboard campaign launched by Israeli group Im Tirtzu (the Second Zionist Revolution) accuses at least twelve Israeli human rights groups of support for or involvement in the indictment of Israeli officials for serious violations of international law in courts overseas, under the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’... Read more... Jewish Critics of Zionism and of Israel’s Treatment of the Palestinians, by Edward Corrigan | Dissident Voice It may surprise some but most of the strongest critics of Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians are Jewish. However, as Michael Selzer writes, “Zionism is a complex phenomenon, adequately understood by only a small percentage of its critics and by even a smaller percentage of its supporters.” As Professor Yakov M. Rabkin writes, “According to a sarcastic remark of an Israeli colleague, ‘Our claim to this land could be put in a nutshell: God does not exist, and he gave us this land.’ Indeed, secular nationalism and religious rhetoric lie at the root of the Zionist enterprise.”.. Read more... Hasbara or Za’bara, by Salman Abu Sitta | Palestine Think Tank Dr. Salman Abu Sitta To maintain a façade of moral code, you do not kill a friend, you kill an enemy. You do not rob another man’s house, you recover your long-forgotten property. These are the principles adopted in all wars and conflicts. That is why it was always the mission of the aggressor to depict the target of killing, i.e. the enemy, as an evil, bad person or people who deserve to be defeated, and if killed, that would be a natural end for their bad behaviour...Read more... Palestinians face a the third wave of expulsions, by Oraib Rantawi | Middle East Monitor When he began his first period in office in 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received advice from a group of scholars and experts. Under the chairmanship of Richard Perle, one of the staunchest of US Zionist neo-conservatives, the group aimed to formulate an alternative strategy to Oslo-Taba, which was associated with the Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres... Read more... Not all settlers and Palestinians want each other to disappear, by Linoy Bar-Gefen and Meron Rapoport | Haaretz Rabbi Menachem Froman of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa ...It was as if the fog served as camouflage, a hiding place behind which a few dozen settlers and Palestinians were concealed. They had crowded together in the hall of a local school, ostensibly to talk about joint prayers for rain - which came even without the prayers - but in essence to talk about themselves. This time, for a change, within earshot of the other side...[Sanity can crop up in the unlikeliest places. This is a development well worth keeping track of.] Read more... Cause for concern in Germany, by Eldad Beck | Israel News Shimon Stein, Israel's outgoing ambassador to Berlin, is worried by the growing trend in Germany to question Israel's right to exist Shortly before leaving Berlin, Shimon Stein, Israel's ambassador to Germany, summed up his seven-year term as "interesting, challenging, productive, and frustrating."..Read more... FLOOR FIGHT! It’s On! Challenger Winograd Takes Harman To CA Democratic Convention Floor | SpeakEasy Marcy Winograd and supporter, Jim Hightower, at ...In an impressive feat against blue-dog incumbent Congresswoman Jane Harman, primary challenger and progressive democrat, Marcy Winograd, has secured more than the needed number of votes to pull Harman’s Democratic Party endorsement recommendation and open the contest to debate today, Sunday, the last day of the convention...California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus event [One for the books: a decent Jew takes on one of the Jewish traitors in a contest for a seat in Congress] Read more...A Carefully Crafted "F**k You:" An Interview With Nonviolence Theorist Judith Butler | AlterNet "The issue is to become less ferocious in our commitments, to question certain forms of blind enthusiasm, and to find forms of steadfastness that include reflective thought.".. Read more... Interview with Carlos Latuff: I Don't Trade Ideology for Money | Intifada Palestine Read more... Ahmadinejad: Israel has nukes while Iran banned from nuclear energy | Haaretz Israel's nuclear arsenal is safeguarded by the United States, while Iran is prevented from establishing its peaceful nuclear energy program, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at the opening of the First International Conference on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in Tehran... Read more... April 18, 2010 One Voice: manufacturing consent for Israeli apartheid, by Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada The American effort, started by the Bush Administration.. to impose an Israeli-friendly How do Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege see their world, especially after Israel's massacre of more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in the occupied Gaza Strip three months ago? Two recent surveys shed light on this question...Palestinian leadership has failed, according to new surveys of Palestinians [Almost a year ago, and the only direction appears to be backwards...] Read more... Does The Holocaust Prove The Christian God Is Dead?, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today Today, in Germany, Bishop Williamson of the city of Regensburg, was convicted of saying that Jews were not killed in gas chambers. He was fined 10,000 euros for this crime of politically unpopular speech... Read more... How Obama Must Deal With Israeli Avoidance Methods, by Nadia Hijab | Counterpunch As Barack Obama seeks leadership of the nuclear nonproliferation cause this week, the long shadow cast by the Arab-Israeli conflict is close by. And a proliferation of peace plan advice is coming his way, inspired by reports that his administration may be planning to issue its own plan... Read more... Dying for a Mistake: Fatal Math, by Missy Beattie | Counterpunch On April 22, 1971, Viet Nam veteran John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Many of the statements made, then, are painfully pertinent to the situation in which we are criminally involved in AfPak-Iraq, today. Just substitute a few proper nouns and, there, you have it, the grim and undeniable truth... Read more... Iran engages the U.N. on 9/11 | Voltaire A number of press agencies reported on the existence of a letter that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on 13 April 2010... Read more... Israel Lobby Leadership Losing It | Jim Lobe ...as M.J. Rosenberg pointed out.. “a clear majority of the American Jewish community supports the Obama approach to U.S.-Israel relations, with only 37% disapproving,” according to a recent poll.. by the American Jewish Committee. It’s pretty clear that the right-wing leadership of the organized Jewish community believes that a major crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations — perhaps the most important in 35 years, as Amb. Oren himself reportedly warned (and then unconvincingly denied) last month — is really upon us... Read more... Kucinich: White House Assassination Policy Is Extrajudicial, by Jeremy Scahill | The Nation There has been almost universal silence among Congressional Democrats on the Obama administration's recently revealed decision to authorize the assassination of a US citizen.. One of the few Democrats to publicly address the issue.. is Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. "I don't support it--period,".. Read more... Goldman Sachs charged with fraud by SEC | Reuters Goldman Sachs Group Inc was charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its marketing of a subprime mortgage product, igniting a battle between Wall Street's most powerful bank and the nation's top securities regulator... Read more... Israel’s stooges battle for British votes, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis Stuart Littlewood considers the British shadows of the US administration’s pro-Israel spivs and pimps – the Conservative and Labour parties – and argues that the unexpected rise in fortunes of Britain’s third main party, the Liberal Democrats, is likely to make its leader Nick Clegg, who is no rabid Zionist, a target of US-Zionist smears... Read more... The Binding Of The Jewish Mind | The Ugly Truth “I have been sent to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and to release the oppressed.” ...Having risen to the forefront of power within the Western world (and in particular in America) they hold the power of the purse and media, the law-making power of Congress, the war-making power of the US military and anytime they want can call the president of the United States, tell him to bomb the be-Jesus out of some other country they don’t like and he will do it with a smile on his face and without any questions…Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the Jewish community, wherever they may be found…- Jesus of Nazareth Read more... It’s Yours If You Want It (To Honor Tax Slavery Day), by James Ostrowski | Lew Rockwell ...The American people hold the keys to their own jail cells between their ears and can leave the prison of tyranny any time a sufficient number of them choose to be free... Read more... Civil rights group: Israel has reached new heights of racism, by Yuval Yoaz and Jack Khoury | Haaretz Racism against Israel's Arab citizens has dramatically increased in the past year, including a 26 percent rise in anti-Arab incidents, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel's annual report... Read more, watch video... The Kyrgyz Great Game | Robert Dreyfuss The Great Game for influence in Central Asia, pitting the United States against Russia (with China as a more-than-just-interested observer) has taken a sharp turn in Russia's favor, in the wake of the Russian-induced regime change in Kyrgyzstan... Read more... Dr. Strangelove, Made in Israel, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar One would expect the Air Force’s top civilian adviser to be someone who has spent some time in the US military or who has a very particular educational or skills set that brings something special to what is, after all, a very senior and sensitive position. Not so. Dr. Lani Kass, who is the senior Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General Norton A. Schwartz, was born, raised, and educated in Israel and then served in that country’s military where she reached the rank of major... Read more... The secret war - and the hidden lair of the Taliban | The Independent Patrick Cockburn investigates the insurgents' mountain hideaway – and a little-known conflict that has killed thousands Soldiers sort through a tunnel built and used by the Pakistani Taliban in the Bajaur area The Pakistani army has fought successfully to control mountainous frontier areas once ruled by the Pakistani Taliban, but it remains reluctant to attack the cross-border safe havens of the Afghan Taliban despite American pressure...Read more... Ron Paul and the Libertarian Moment, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar The news that a Rasmussen poll has Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) running in a dead heat against President Barack Obama in a hypothetical Paul-Obama face-off for the White House has the pundits fuming. Ben Smith, over at Politico, can hardly contain his annoyance: the poll "is a useful reminder of how totally flaky early polling is," he rants... Read more... Alfred McCoy, Our Man in Kabul: America and the Dictators | TomDispatch The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe... Read more... Prisoners' day in Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter Friday, we had demonstrations in a number of locations in Palestine mostly in honor of prisoners (11,000 kidnapped Palestinians held in Israeli jails). The demonstration in Al-Ma'asara went smoothly even though the night before the Israeli army came in at 1 AM to raid and scare the family of Mohammed and Hassan (their brother is in an Israeli jail). The demonstration was joined by scouts from Sur Baher and other areas in Jerusalem (a sign of Palestinian unity)... Read more... Israel's manufactured outrage over a presidential palace, by Stephen Maher | Electronic Intifada Israel has gone out of its way in recent months to goad the Palestinians into confrontation The headlines were ablaze last week after the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that it would build the new presidential compound on a street named after Yahya Ayyash. Ayyash, whose nickname was "The Engineer," was a Hamas military commander who orchestrated several attacks against Israeli civilian targets in the mid-1990s in response to the 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshipers at Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque...Read more... As democracy unravels at home, the west thuggishly exports it elsewhere, by Simon Jenkin | The Guardian While the US and Britain slide towards oligarchy, the forced elections in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought no good The west's proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been democracy. That is, not real democracy, which is too complicated, but elections. They have been exported at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to "nation-build" these states and hence "defeat terror". When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: "It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote."..Read more... The Largest Crime Syndicate In Human History: The Jewish State (podcast) | The Ugly Truth Israel’s “Legitimacy” - hear author Jeff Gates of www.criminalstate.com discuss the largest crime syndicate in human history–The Jewish state... Listen... IDF to Barenboim: No to Gaza Concert | Tikun Olam If there’s a lyric to accompany this post it would be Elvis Costello’s What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding? Except we’d have to adapt it a bit to today’s news: “what’s so dangerous about a classical music concert in Gaza?”.. Read more... ASUC Fails to Override Divestment Bill Veto | Daily Californian After upward of nine hours, more than four dozen speakers, and countless moments of excited applause and tense anticipation, the ASUC Senate ultimately did not overturn the veto of a bill early Thursday morning urging divestment from two corporations that supply the Israeli military with materials and equipment used in alleged war crimes, instead electing to postpone a final decision on the bill's fate... [Justice will ultimately prevail, but it seems to require almost infinite patience] Read more...Otherwise Occupied: Can Israeli bureaucrats make job decisions at UNRWA?, by Amira Hass | Haaretz To the credit of the Interior Ministry, it must be said that it is not impressed by big names. The case before us involves a 41-year-old U.S. native whose resume is laced with prestigious institutions like Harvard University and Oxford University, work in the United States regarding labor laws and immigration, and consulting for the greatly respected South African Constitutional Court. This is Leila Hilal, whose application to reenter Israel for work was denied... Read more... Accelerating Fascism in Israel | Stephen Lendman Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arabs never had rights in a state affording them solely to Jews. Now even they're at risk as democratic freedoms fast erode on their way to extinction; to wit, free expression, a right without which all others are endangered... Read more... Banksters Rally Round Fed To Keep Bailout Trillions Secret, by Steve Watson | Infowars The largest commercial banks in the U.S. are ready to go all the way to the Supreme Court to block the public release of details pertaining to the Federal Reserve’s 2008 secretive $2 trillion bailout... Read more... No-one saw, no-one heard: 300 Palestinian olive trees uprooted, by Avi Issacharoff | Haaretz ...Damaged live saplings could be seen littering the ground. Some were ripped out of the soil, and other had their slim trunks broken. The destruction appeared to have been well-organized, as trees were uprooted across a wide swathe and that required the cooperation of at least several people. The assailants apparently did not resort to saws of axes, but used their bare hands... Read more... Donkey, Horse and Cat in Israeli Jail | Kawther Salam Stories and aberrant practices like these do not happen anywhere in the world but only in Israel, where the mentally ill zionists reign supreme. This latest story is not the imagination of the writer, or told by an ordinary person or by somebody accused of lying or slander, but it was seen and confirmed by fifteen peace activists and religious Christians... Read more... Humor Dept: Wife of Israeli Ambassador Causes Trouble in Cairo | Kawther Salam Edna, the wife of Israeli ambassador Ytizhaq Levanon (son of Shula Cohen, a former prostitute and mossad agent), caused a big problem between the security and health authorities at the Cairo International Airport because of a lapdog which she was hiding in a box as she entered the VIP lounge of the airport together with her husband after their arrival from Tel Aviv last Tuesday. The security authorities demanded that the ambassador’s wife take the dog out of the box... Read more... Bishop Richard Williamson: Holocaust Denial and Jewish Influence on the Catholic Church | Occidental Observer John Paul II at the Western Wall in Jerusalem ...So keen are they to seek the pardon and approval of Jews that relativist Catholic theologians seem ready to accept the notion of Deicide not by, but of the Jews. The religion of the Holocaust is spreading from the Synagogue to the Cathedral. And Holocaust denial is its gravest sin...[The Jews have their revenge - after 2000 years the Roman Catholic Church is brought to its knees] Read more...Court upholds arrest of former Jerusalem mayor Lupolianski, by Tomer Zarchin | Haaretz The Petah Tikva District Court on Friday rejected an appeal submitted by former Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski, requesting to abort his five-day remand for alleged involvement in the Holyland case... [A criminal state in every sense] Read more...Israel, the US and Propaganda's Power, by Robert Parry | Consortium News Sometimes, it seems like there are only two groups on earth that don’t grasp the importance of media – the American Left and some tribe in Borneo, though the word is that the tribe may have just bought a radio transmitter, leaving only one group that doesn’t get it... Read more... New moves in the trial of Bishop Williamson for "Holocaust" denial, by Michael Hoffman | Rebel News Bishop Richard Williamson ...I observe that while he is housed and fed at the SSPX house in London and treated decently by the priests with whom he resides, he has been almost completely abandoned by his fellow bishops and priests worldwide, who will not even offer public prayers on his behalf...Read more... Video interview: Judge Goldstone | Al Jazeera Shortly after delivering his findings, Judge Richard Goldstone spoke to Al Jazeera on the results of the fact-finding mission and Israel's response to it... Watch... Televised election debate another shining example of Britain's commitment to democracy, by Tim Coles | Redress Information & Analysis Tim Coles explains why Britain’s first ever televised election debate between the leaders of the three main parties – stilted, characterized by omissions and obfuscations and pandering to prejudices – was a meaningless spectacle... Read more... April 16, 2010 Ethnic Cleansing By Any Other Name, by Yousef Munayyer | Sabbah Report The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Israel maintains authoritative jurisdiction over the happenings in the West Bank via its military apparatus. Decisions governing the simplest aspects of Palestinian life, from traveling from one area to another to building a home, ultimately lie under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Military's High Command in the West Bank. In October of 2009, amendments were made to military orders governing the legitimate presence of persons in Occupied Palestinian Territory. The changes, effective six months after the signing of the orders, are beginning to take effect... Read more... Your Tax Dollars at War: More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military, by Dave Lindorff | CommonDreams If you're like me, now that we're in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military... Read more... How Bush tried to Stop Predatory Lending, by Mike Whitney | Information Clearing House When the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations convenes on Tuesday, they'll be presented with a mountain of evidence showing that Washington Mutual intentionally issued subprime mortgages that they knew would fail, and then bundled the loans into securities so they could be sold to investors. The senate's year-and-a-half long investigation, has strung together hundreds of e mails and other internal documents that will prove beyond a doubt that the now-defunct bank was engaged in industrial-scale fraud... Read more... JINSA Flag & General Officers Ad | JINSA Online Read more... "They Killed the Wounded and Drove Over Their Bodies": Iraqis Speak About Wikileaks Video, But Who Is Listening?, by Liliana Segura | Alternet By now we’ve heard plenty of people’s opinions on the now famous WikiLeaks video showing the U.S. military killing 12 Iraqi civilians — from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Stephen Colbert to Josh Stieber, a former soldier turned conscientious objector who would have been on the mission over Baghdad that day. But missing from the discussion have been the voices of Iraqis themselves, those who witnessed the slaughter, and especially those whose loved ones were killed... Read more... A Banana Republic With No Bananas | Washington's Blog Experts on third world banana republics from the IMF and the Federal Reserve have said the U.S. has become a third world banana republic. Are they right?.. Read more... Grassroots organizer targeted by PA, Israeli forces, by Nora Barrows-Friedman | Electronic Intifada Israeli authorities pull Mousa Abu Maria away from a visitor during Mousa Abu Maria, father of a newborn baby and co-coordinator of the grassroots Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP) in the occupied West Bank village of Beit Ommar, was used to the sound of boots running on the ground and surrounding his home in the middle of the night.. But when Abu Maria looked outside the window this time, it wasn't Israeli forces shouting at him to come outside. It was a squadron of heavily-armed Palestinian Authority (PA) police...a court appeal of his administrative detention, Jerusalem, July 2008 [Shades of Vichy France] Read more...Obama hints that Two-State Solution may be Impossible | Juan Cole President Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that despite the expenditure of substantial political capital by his administration it may be that no progress will be made on Israel-Palestine peace... Read more... The U.N. Partition Plan and Arab 'Catastrophe', by Jeremy Hammond | Uruknet ...During one of its hearings, the Arab representatives expressed their view with regard to the Zionist "recourse to terrorism", which was that "This aggressive attitude . . . will not fail to give rise in turn to the creation of similar [terrorist] organizations by the Arabs." The Arab delegates also declared that "against a [Jewish] State established by violence, the Arab States will be obliged to use violence; that is a legitimate right of self-defence.".. Read more... IsraHell - The Fox, Liver Man and Bibi | Gilad Atzmon Jordan on verge of changing policy toward Israel, by Osama Al Sharif | Arab News King Abdallah of Jordan had harsh words for Israel in his statements to the Wall Street Journal last week. The interview received considerable attention in media and policy circles in both Israel and the United States, not least because of the “rebuke” the monarch directed toward his western neighbor. The criticisms, coming from one of the most moderate Arab rulers, were unfamiliar to the Israelis... Read more... The West Bank expulsion order is merely the latest step in a long process, by Ahmed Moor | Mondoweiss The Israeli army order that permits Israel to ethnically purge the West Bank of non-Jews (Palestinians and foreigners who are not Jewish) is the next rational step in the evolution of the Jewish state... Read more... Israeli Apartheid in al-Naqab | P U L S E A water tank destroyed by the government in former demolitions in Twail abu-Jarwal. The Government of Israel is putting me on trial next week.. for expressing my displeasure at the brutal home demolitions in the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages. The government and its acting bodies do not want any resistance to the implementation of their racist policies, and therefore wish to scare and intimidate those who speak out…Now the villagers use only smaller plastic containers, that were also destroyed yesterday Read more... The right to deport, by Amira Hass | Haaretz When Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, who was commander of the IDF's units in Judea and Samaria, signed a military order six months ago in which 10 different variations of the Hebrew root for the word "deport" appeared, it seemed neither he or the faceless army jurists who formulated the edict verified which week the order would come into effect. As it turned out, the amended "order to prevent infiltration (into the West Bank)" coincided with the saddest of April's days... Read more... You Will Not Be Alone, by Judith Butler | The Nation What follows is the text of a speech Professor Butler will give on Wednesday, April 14, to the students of the University of California, Berkeley. On March 18, Berkeley's Student Senate voted 16-to-4 to divest from General Electric and United Technologies because of their role in harming civilians as part of Israel's illegal occupation and the attack on Gaza... Read more... UK's discriminatory criminalization of dissent, by Sarah Irving | Electronic Intifada London police are accused of leveling discriminatory "We are very angry, very afraid, very sad, very upset. My wife, she is depressed. When she sees police in the street she's very frightened. They destroyed our life," says Badi Tebani...charges against Muslim Gaza solidarity protesters Read more... Breaking Ranks, by David Rovics | Counterpunch ...The truth is in our country the rich and the big corporations are hardly taxed, while the working class and the small businesses bear the lion's share of the tax burden, and this is the program of both the RNC and the DNC. In our country neither party really supports social programs that could seriously lift our people up because both parties are too busy spending much of our money on nuclear bombs, corporate kickbacks and armies of private mercenaries. Both parties rule by a system of legalized bribery, called lobbying, that would land politicians in other ostensibly democratic countries in jail... Read more... The Federal Reserve Created This Financial Mess And Now They Expect Us To Pay Higher Taxes And Have A Lower Standard Of Living So We Can Pay Interest To Them | Economic Collapse When you watch the mainstream news, how often do you hear them identify the Federal Reserve as the ultimate source of all of our financial problems? Never? Well, there is a good reason... Read more... Depleted uranium is destroying life, by Jerry Mazza | Infowars I have long heard sound-bites or seen passages about depleted uranium that sounded more than dire. But given my own cognitive dissonance, and the fact that I was writing about many other dire topics at the time, I filed depleted uranium in my cranium for future investigation, which, given the human aversion to bad news, could have been never. But never was over in an exchange of emails about nuclear missiles in Israel’s arsenal... Read more... 'Israeli regime worse than apartheid' | Press TV Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat says Israel has turned into a regime worse than South Africa before the collapse of apartheid. "Never in the darkest hours of South African apartheid were the blacks prevented (from using) roads that whites were using,"..[Let's just call it a down payment on what's coming to these collaborators] Read more...McCain Wants to “Pull Trigger” On Iran, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars ...McCain, like the vast majority of the district of criminals crowd, does not bother to back up his accusations about Iran with any facts... [The devil's obedient servants just can't wait for WWIII] Read more, watch...Election 2012: Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41% | Rasmussen Reports Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is – virtually dead even... Read more... Conservative and Liberal Pillagers Master the Art of Pandering, by Morris Davis | Huffington Post If it was a crime to misappropriate a word or phrase -- to treat it like you own it and toss it around arbitrarily whenever it suits your purposes -- then some prominent conservatives and liberals would be serving hard time. Of course there don't seem to be any real consequences when there's literal theft in the world of politics, so it's a pipe dream to imagine there would be any consequences for pillaging the vocabulary, but it's still a good thought... Read more... Did banned media report foretell of Gaza war crimes?, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis Jonathan Cook views the possibility that a banned report by Haaretz journalist Uri Blau – suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in 2008 – contained vital information warning of Israeli intentions to commit war crimes and revealed the aims of a so far unimplemented phase of the Gaza attack involving expelling some of Gaza’s population to Egypt... Read more... April 15, 2010 Obama's Lies about Iran, by Margaret Kimberley | Palestine Think Tank The Peace Prize winner in the White House continues to beat the drums of war with Iran, in perfect synch with the corporate media orchestra. “The New York Times was made privy to what has been called a ‘parlor game,’ of ‘Imagining an Israeli Strike on Iran’” – apparently in the spirit of the old motivational slogan, “If you can conceive it, you can achieve it.”.. Read more... Return to "Indian Country": The Global War on Tribes, by Zoltan Grossman | Counterpunch ...the main targets of the wars are predominantly “tribal regions,” and the old frontier language of Indian-fighting is becoming the lexicon of 21st-century counterinsurgency. The “Global War on Terror” is fast morphing into a “Global War on Tribes.”.. Read more... Did Banned Media Report Foretell of Gaza War Crimes?, by Jonathan Cook | Antiwar An Arab member of the Israeli parliament is demanding that a newspaper be allowed to publish an investigative report that was suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in winter 2008. The investigation by Uri Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead... Read more... Parsing Petraeus, by Nadia Hijab | Counterpunch The ripples from General David H. Petraeus' testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee continue to spread. Mingled with excitement (or apprehension) about the administration's tough words in response to recent Israeli expansionist plans, it may signal an end to America's unconditional support for Israel... Read more... Liberals Smear Wikileaks, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar Mother Jones and Colbert go after Wikileaks Activists intent on releasing evidence of crimes committed by a powerful government are harassed and followed by police and intelligence agents: a restaurant in which they are meeting comes under surveillance, and, subsequently, one of their number is detained by the police for 21 hours. Their leader is followed on an international flight by two agents: and, in a parking lot of foreign soil, one of their number is accosted by a "James Bond character" and threatened. Computers are seized...Read more... An immaculate conception?, by Joseph Massad | Electronic Intifada Salam Fayyad predicts the birth of a state in 2011 The Palestinian Authority is pregnant! Indeed, it is the unelected and American-imposed Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who is pregnant. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in a recent interview that "the time for this baby to be born will come ... and we estimate it will come around 2011." Unlike females of the human species but like female whales, the gestation period for male Palestinian collaborators with the Israeli occupation extends at least to two years...Read more... Peace Activists Extend an Olive Branch to the Tea Party to Talk About War, by Medea Benjamin | Huffington Post On Tax Day, Tea Party members from around the country will descend on the nation's capitol to "protest big government and support lower taxes, less government and more freedom. CODEPINK, a women-led peace movement advocating an end to war and militarism, will be sending some representatives... Read more... Gods and Monsters: Fighting American Wars From On High, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch The Greeks had it right. When you live on Mount Olympus, your view of humanity is qualitatively different. The Greek gods, after all, lied to, stole from, lusted for, and punished humanity without mercy, while taking the planet for a spin in a manner that we mortals would consider amoral, if not immoral. And it didn’t bother them a bit. They felt -- so Greek mythology tells us -- remarkably free to intervene from the heights in the affairs of whichever mortals caught their attention and, in the process, to do whatever took their fancy without thinking much about the nature of human lives... Read more... War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it, "collateral murder," are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001... Read more... Another great interview by George Kenny on Electric Politics: "Whither the Israel Lobby?" | Vineyard of the Saker George Kenny is clearly on a roll! Only a week ago he had a fantastic show about Bosnia and now he follows up with yet another truly excellent interview with Jeffrey Blankfort on the topic of the Israel Lobby. Listening to these two interviews, I was reminded of the words of George Orwell "In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"... Read more... America's Loose Nukes in Israel, by Grant Smith | Antiwar Israel decided this week to send Minister for Intelligence Affairs Dan Meridor to the Nuclear Security summit. This U.S. bid to secure vulnerable nuclear stockpiles against non-state actors is both closely watched and furiously spun. Israel avoided exposing Prime Minister Netanyahu to embarrassing scrutiny of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons arsenal... Read more... The Boomerang Effect | Gilad Atzmon ...in Britain the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum. Thanks to the ‘The Holocaust Educational Trust’ our children are guaranteed to learn how bad the Nazis were. This is probably much easier for our kids to acknowledge than to look into the ways in which the embarrassing legacy of the British Empire reverberates throughout almost every contemporary disastrous conflict on this planet... Read more... Does Israel's Crackdown on Journalists Suggest a "Crisis of Legitimacy"?, by Jared Malsin | Huffington Post I know something about how Israel's security forces treat journalists who they believe to be hostile. In January I was held for over a week in a dingy detention center at Israel's Ben Gurion airport before being deported... Read more... U.S. Group to Join International Aid Flotilla to Gaza | Free Palestine Movement California-based Free Palestine Movement recruiting prominent Americans to challenge Israeli siege, bring humanitarian supplies and human rights volunteers to Gaza... Read more... Coordinated Campaign Aimed to Stifle Academic Discussion about Israel Raises Critical Questions, by Dorit Naaman | CAUT Bulletin ...The dominant model historically, and the sole one in the international community since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, was a two-state solution. But as the partition process was derailed, a democratic one-state model has resurfaced. Although the possibility of a one-state bi-national solution was very much in the minds of venerated Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber, B’nai Brith has determined that discussing alternative models is tantamount to destroying Israel... Read more... A seminal series of lectures on the US Empire | Vineyard of the Saker ...It is hard for me to refrain from hyperbole in praising these lectures, so I will go ahead and say it as I feel: simply put these lectures are "The Key" to the understanding of the nature of capitalism, the nature of the regime in power in the USA since 1776, the goals and methods of US foreign and domestic policies, the nature of the power structure of the US government and state and the reasons for the US Global Empire... [Sounds like he's the anti-Strauss] Read more...ICAHD Director Jeff Halper letter endorses Berkeley divestment | KABOBfest As the head of an Israeli peace and human rights organization, The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), I would like to add our voice to those who have urged you to overrule the veto of the Senate President and reaffirm the decision to divest in companies profiting from the Israeli Occupation... Read more... Israeli activists to J Street: ’stop trying to gain political capital at the expense of dedicated peace activists', by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss The following form letter has been circulating on an Israeli activist listserv criticizing J Street's leadership for their stance on the Berkeley divestment bill:.. [J Street is just a kinder, gentler mask covering the same old ugly ZioNazism] Read more...Propagandistic anti-Semitism report raises The Linkage Issue, by Max Blumenthal | Mondoweiss The Tel Aviv University/Stephen Roth Institute's newly released study on anti-Semitism in 2009 is getting loads of media attention. Among the many outlets that have reported its findings are the AP, CNN, and Haaretz. "Anti-Semitic incidents Doubled Last Year," blared the AP headline... Read more... Genocidal in Effect, If Not Intent: Martin Kramer, Harvard and the Eugenics of Zion, by Jeff Klein | Counterpunch People were outraged when Martin Kramer’s support for measures to limit the births of “superfluous young men” among Palestinians in Gaza was circulated in the US recently. Kramer, Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and lately a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, had made the remarks in a presentation at the annual Herzliya Conference in Israel in January. Pro-Palestinian activists and human rights supporters called his proposal an incitement for genocide; students at Harvard argued that such racist ideas had no place at their University... Read more... Why Do They Single Out Israel? | John Spritzler "How come you single out Israel for its faults, but never criticize other governments for doing things just as bad?" This is what apologists for the Israeli government say to those, like myself, who criticize it. Their not-so-subtle implication is that critics of the Israeli government are really just motivated by antisemitism and therefore their views should not be given credence... Read more... April 18, 2010 One Voice: manufacturing consent for Israeli apartheid, by Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada  The American effort, started by the Bush Administration.. to impose an Israeli-friendly How do Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege see their world, especially after Israel's massacre of more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in the occupied Gaza Strip three months ago? Two recent surveys shed light on this question...Palestinian leadership has failed, according to new surveys of Palestinians [Almost a year ago, and the only direction appears to be backwards...] Read more... Does The Holocaust Prove The Christian God Is Dead?, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today Today, in Germany, Bishop Williamson of the city of Regensburg, was convicted of saying that Jews were not killed in gas chambers. He was fined 10,000 euros for this crime of politically unpopular speech... Read more... How Obama Must Deal With Israeli Avoidance Methods, by Nadia Hijab | Counterpunch As Barack Obama seeks leadership of the nuclear nonproliferation cause this week, the long shadow cast by the Arab-Israeli conflict is close by. And a proliferation of peace plan advice is coming his way, inspired by reports that his administration may be planning to issue its own plan... Read more... Dying for a Mistake: Fatal Math, by Missy Beattie | Counterpunch On April 22, 1971, Viet Nam veteran John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Many of the statements made, then, are painfully pertinent to the situation in which we are criminally involved in AfPak-Iraq, today. Just substitute a few proper nouns and, there, you have it, the grim and undeniable truth... Read more... Iran engages the U.N. on 9/11 | Voltaire  A number of press agencies reported on the existence of a letter that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on 13 April 2010... Read more... Israel Lobby Leadership Losing It | Jim Lobe ...as M.J. Rosenberg pointed out.. “a clear majority of the American Jewish community supports the Obama approach to U.S.-Israel relations, with only 37% disapproving,” according to a recent poll.. by the American Jewish Committee. It’s pretty clear that the right-wing leadership of the organized Jewish community believes that a major crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations — perhaps the most important in 35 years, as Amb. Oren himself reportedly warned (and then unconvincingly denied) last month — is really upon us... Read more... Kucinich: White House Assassination Policy Is Extrajudicial, by Jeremy Scahill | The Nation There has been almost universal silence among Congressional Democrats on the Obama administration's recently revealed decision to authorize the assassination of a US citizen.. One of the few Democrats to publicly address the issue.. is Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. "I don't support it--period,".. Read more... Goldman Sachs charged with fraud by SEC | Reuters Goldman Sachs Group Inc was charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its marketing of a subprime mortgage product, igniting a battle between Wall Street's most powerful bank and the nation's top securities regulator... Read more... Israel’s stooges battle for British votes, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis Stuart Littlewood considers the British shadows of the US administration’s pro-Israel spivs and pimps – the Conservative and Labour parties – and argues that the unexpected rise in fortunes of Britain’s third main party, the Liberal Democrats, is likely to make its leader Nick Clegg, who is no rabid Zionist, a target of US-Zionist smears... Read more... The Binding Of The Jewish Mind | The Ugly Truth  “I have been sent to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and to release the oppressed.” ...Having risen to the forefront of power within the Western world (and in particular in America) they hold the power of the purse and media, the law-making power of Congress, the war-making power of the US military and anytime they want can call the president of the United States, tell him to bomb the be-Jesus out of some other country they don’t like and he will do it with a smile on his face and without any questions…Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the Jewish community, wherever they may be found…- Jesus of Nazareth Read more... It’s Yours If You Want It (To Honor Tax Slavery Day), by James Ostrowski | Lew Rockwell ...The American people hold the keys to their own jail cells between their ears and can leave the prison of tyranny any time a sufficient number of them choose to be free... Read more... Civil rights group: Israel has reached new heights of racism, by Yuval Yoaz and Jack Khoury | Haaretz Racism against Israel's Arab citizens has dramatically increased in the past year, including a 26 percent rise in anti-Arab incidents, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel's annual report... Read more, watch video... The Kyrgyz Great Game | Robert Dreyfuss The Great Game for influence in Central Asia, pitting the United States against Russia (with China as a more-than-just-interested observer) has taken a sharp turn in Russia's favor, in the wake of the Russian-induced regime change in Kyrgyzstan... Read more... Dr. Strangelove, Made in Israel, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar One would expect the Air Force’s top civilian adviser to be someone who has spent some time in the US military or who has a very particular educational or skills set that brings something special to what is, after all, a very senior and sensitive position. Not so. Dr. Lani Kass, who is the senior Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General Norton A. Schwartz, was born, raised, and educated in Israel and then served in that country’s military where she reached the rank of major... Read more... The secret war - and the hidden lair of the Taliban | The Independent Patrick Cockburn investigates the insurgents' mountain hideaway – and a little-known conflict that has killed thousands  Soldiers sort through a tunnel built and used by the Pakistani Taliban in the Bajaur area The Pakistani army has fought successfully to control mountainous frontier areas once ruled by the Pakistani Taliban, but it remains reluctant to attack the cross-border safe havens of the Afghan Taliban despite American pressure...Read more... Ron Paul and the Libertarian Moment, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar The news that a Rasmussen poll has Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) running in a dead heat against President Barack Obama in a hypothetical Paul-Obama face-off for the White House has the pundits fuming. Ben Smith, over at Politico, can hardly contain his annoyance: the poll "is a useful reminder of how totally flaky early polling is," he rants... Read more... Alfred McCoy, Our Man in Kabul: America and the Dictators | TomDispatch The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe... Read more... Prisoners' day in Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter Friday, we had demonstrations in a number of locations in Palestine mostly in honor of prisoners (11,000 kidnapped Palestinians held in Israeli jails). The demonstration in Al-Ma'asara went smoothly even though the night before the Israeli army came in at 1 AM to raid and scare the family of Mohammed and Hassan (their brother is in an Israeli jail). The demonstration was joined by scouts from Sur Baher and other areas in Jerusalem (a sign of Palestinian unity)... Read more... Israel's manufactured outrage over a presidential palace, by Stephen Maher | Electronic Intifada  Israel has gone out of its way in recent months to goad the Palestinians into confrontation The headlines were ablaze last week after the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that it would build the new presidential compound on a street named after Yahya Ayyash. Ayyash, whose nickname was "The Engineer," was a Hamas military commander who orchestrated several attacks against Israeli civilian targets in the mid-1990s in response to the 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshipers at Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque...Read more... As democracy unravels at home, the west thuggishly exports it elsewhere, by Simon Jenkin | The Guardian While the US and Britain slide towards oligarchy, the forced elections in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought no good The west's proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been democracy. That is, not real democracy, which is too complicated, but elections. They have been exported at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to "nation-build" these states and hence "defeat terror". When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: "It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote."..Read more... The Largest Crime Syndicate In Human History: The Jewish State (podcast) | The Ugly Truth Israel’s “Legitimacy” - hear author Jeff Gates of www.criminalstate.com discuss the largest crime syndicate in human history–The Jewish state... Listen... IDF to Barenboim: No to Gaza Concert | Tikun Olam  If there’s a lyric to accompany this post it would be Elvis Costello’s What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding? Except we’d have to adapt it a bit to today’s news: “what’s so dangerous about a classical music concert in Gaza?”.. Read more... ASUC Fails to Override Divestment Bill Veto | Daily Californian After upward of nine hours, more than four dozen speakers, and countless moments of excited applause and tense anticipation, the ASUC Senate ultimately did not overturn the veto of a bill early Thursday morning urging divestment from two corporations that supply the Israeli military with materials and equipment used in alleged war crimes, instead electing to postpone a final decision on the bill's fate... [Justice will ultimately prevail, but it seems to require almost infinite patience] Read more...Otherwise Occupied: Can Israeli bureaucrats make job decisions at UNRWA?, by Amira Hass | Haaretz To the credit of the Interior Ministry, it must be said that it is not impressed by big names. The case before us involves a 41-year-old U.S. native whose resume is laced with prestigious institutions like Harvard University and Oxford University, work in the United States regarding labor laws and immigration, and consulting for the greatly respected South African Constitutional Court. This is Leila Hilal, whose application to reenter Israel for work was denied... Read more... Accelerating Fascism in Israel | Stephen Lendman Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arabs never had rights in a state affording them solely to Jews. Now even they're at risk as democratic freedoms fast erode on their way to extinction; to wit, free expression, a right without which all others are endangered... Read more... Banksters Rally Round Fed To Keep Bailout Trillions Secret, by Steve Watson | Infowars  The largest commercial banks in the U.S. are ready to go all the way to the Supreme Court to block the public release of details pertaining to the Federal Reserve’s 2008 secretive $2 trillion bailout... Read more... No-one saw, no-one heard: 300 Palestinian olive trees uprooted, by Avi Issacharoff | Haaretz ...Damaged live saplings could be seen littering the ground. Some were ripped out of the soil, and other had their slim trunks broken. The destruction appeared to have been well-organized, as trees were uprooted across a wide swathe and that required the cooperation of at least several people. The assailants apparently did not resort to saws of axes, but used their bare hands... Read more... Donkey, Horse and Cat in Israeli Jail | Kawther Salam Stories and aberrant practices like these do not happen anywhere in the world but only in Israel, where the mentally ill zionists reign supreme. This latest story is not the imagination of the writer, or told by an ordinary person or by somebody accused of lying or slander, but it was seen and confirmed by fifteen peace activists and religious Christians... Read more... Humor Dept: Wife of Israeli Ambassador Causes Trouble in Cairo | Kawther Salam Edna, the wife of Israeli ambassador Ytizhaq Levanon (son of Shula Cohen, a former prostitute and mossad agent), caused a big problem between the security and health authorities at the Cairo International Airport because of a lapdog which she was hiding in a box as she entered the VIP lounge of the airport together with her husband after their arrival from Tel Aviv last Tuesday. The security authorities demanded that the ambassador’s wife take the dog out of the box... Read more... Bishop Richard Williamson: Holocaust Denial and Jewish Influence on the Catholic Church | Occidental Observer  John Paul II at the Western Wall in Jerusalem ...So keen are they to seek the pardon and approval of Jews that relativist Catholic theologians seem ready to accept the notion of Deicide not by, but of the Jews. The religion of the Holocaust is spreading from the Synagogue to the Cathedral. And Holocaust denial is its gravest sin...[The Jews have their revenge - after 2000 years the Roman Catholic Church is brought to its knees] Read more...Court upholds arrest of former Jerusalem mayor Lupolianski, by Tomer Zarchin | Haaretz The Petah Tikva District Court on Friday rejected an appeal submitted by former Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski, requesting to abort his five-day remand for alleged involvement in the Holyland case... [A criminal state in every sense] Read more...Israel, the US and Propaganda's Power, by Robert Parry | Consortium News Sometimes, it seems like there are only two groups on earth that don’t grasp the importance of media – the American Left and some tribe in Borneo, though the word is that the tribe may have just bought a radio transmitter, leaving only one group that doesn’t get it... Read more... New moves in the trial of Bishop Williamson for "Holocaust" denial, by Michael Hoffman | Rebel News  Bishop Richard Williamson ...I observe that while he is housed and fed at the SSPX house in London and treated decently by the priests with whom he resides, he has been almost completely abandoned by his fellow bishops and priests worldwide, who will not even offer public prayers on his behalf...Read more... Video interview: Judge Goldstone | Al Jazeera Shortly after delivering his findings, Judge Richard Goldstone spoke to Al Jazeera on the results of the fact-finding mission and Israel's response to it... Watch... Televised election debate another shining example of Britain's commitment to democracy, by Tim Coles | Redress Information & Analysis Tim Coles explains why Britain’s first ever televised election debate between the leaders of the three main parties – stilted, characterized by omissions and obfuscations and pandering to prejudices – was a meaningless spectacle... Read more... April 16, 2010 Ethnic Cleansing By Any Other Name, by Yousef Munayyer | Sabbah Report  The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Israel maintains authoritative jurisdiction over the happenings in the West Bank via its military apparatus. Decisions governing the simplest aspects of Palestinian life, from traveling from one area to another to building a home, ultimately lie under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Military's High Command in the West Bank. In October of 2009, amendments were made to military orders governing the legitimate presence of persons in Occupied Palestinian Territory. The changes, effective six months after the signing of the orders, are beginning to take effect... Read more... Your Tax Dollars at War: More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military, by Dave Lindorff | CommonDreams If you're like me, now that we're in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military... Read more... How Bush tried to Stop Predatory Lending, by Mike Whitney | Information Clearing House When the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations convenes on Tuesday, they'll be presented with a mountain of evidence showing that Washington Mutual intentionally issued subprime mortgages that they knew would fail, and then bundled the loans into securities so they could be sold to investors. The senate's year-and-a-half long investigation, has strung together hundreds of e mails and other internal documents that will prove beyond a doubt that the now-defunct bank was engaged in industrial-scale fraud... Read more... JINSA Flag & General Officers Ad | JINSA Online  Read more... "They Killed the Wounded and Drove Over Their Bodies": Iraqis Speak About Wikileaks Video, But Who Is Listening?, by Liliana Segura | Alternet By now we’ve heard plenty of people’s opinions on the now famous WikiLeaks video showing the U.S. military killing 12 Iraqi civilians — from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Stephen Colbert to Josh Stieber, a former soldier turned conscientious objector who would have been on the mission over Baghdad that day. But missing from the discussion have been the voices of Iraqis themselves, those who witnessed the slaughter, and especially those whose loved ones were killed... Read more... A Banana Republic With No Bananas | Washington's Blog Experts on third world banana republics from the IMF and the Federal Reserve have said the U.S. has become a third world banana republic. Are they right?.. Read more... Grassroots organizer targeted by PA, Israeli forces, by Nora Barrows-Friedman | Electronic Intifada  Israeli authorities pull Mousa Abu Maria away from a visitor during Mousa Abu Maria, father of a newborn baby and co-coordinator of the grassroots Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP) in the occupied West Bank village of Beit Ommar, was used to the sound of boots running on the ground and surrounding his home in the middle of the night.. But when Abu Maria looked outside the window this time, it wasn't Israeli forces shouting at him to come outside. It was a squadron of heavily-armed Palestinian Authority (PA) police...a court appeal of his administrative detention, Jerusalem, July 2008 [Shades of Vichy France] Read more...Obama hints that Two-State Solution may be Impossible | Juan Cole President Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that despite the expenditure of substantial political capital by his administration it may be that no progress will be made on Israel-Palestine peace... Read more... The U.N. Partition Plan and Arab 'Catastrophe', by Jeremy Hammond | Uruknet ...During one of its hearings, the Arab representatives expressed their view with regard to the Zionist "recourse to terrorism", which was that "This aggressive attitude . . . will not fail to give rise in turn to the creation of similar [terrorist] organizations by the Arabs." The Arab delegates also declared that "against a [Jewish] State established by violence, the Arab States will be obliged to use violence; that is a legitimate right of self-defence.".. Read more... IsraHell - The Fox, Liver Man and Bibi | Gilad Atzmon  Jordan on verge of changing policy toward Israel, by Osama Al Sharif | Arab News King Abdallah of Jordan had harsh words for Israel in his statements to the Wall Street Journal last week. The interview received considerable attention in media and policy circles in both Israel and the United States, not least because of the “rebuke” the monarch directed toward his western neighbor. The criticisms, coming from one of the most moderate Arab rulers, were unfamiliar to the Israelis... Read more... The West Bank expulsion order is merely the latest step in a long process, by Ahmed Moor | Mondoweiss The Israeli army order that permits Israel to ethnically purge the West Bank of non-Jews (Palestinians and foreigners who are not Jewish) is the next rational step in the evolution of the Jewish state... Read more... Israeli Apartheid in al-Naqab | P U L S E  A water tank destroyed by the government in former demolitions in Twail abu-Jarwal. The Government of Israel is putting me on trial next week.. for expressing my displeasure at the brutal home demolitions in the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages. The government and its acting bodies do not want any resistance to the implementation of their racist policies, and therefore wish to scare and intimidate those who speak out…Now the villagers use only smaller plastic containers, that were also destroyed yesterday Read more... The right to deport, by Amira Hass | Haaretz When Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, who was commander of the IDF's units in Judea and Samaria, signed a military order six months ago in which 10 different variations of the Hebrew root for the word "deport" appeared, it seemed neither he or the faceless army jurists who formulated the edict verified which week the order would come into effect. As it turned out, the amended "order to prevent infiltration (into the West Bank)" coincided with the saddest of April's days... Read more... You Will Not Be Alone, by Judith Butler | The Nation What follows is the text of a speech Professor Butler will give on Wednesday, April 14, to the students of the University of California, Berkeley. On March 18, Berkeley's Student Senate voted 16-to-4 to divest from General Electric and United Technologies because of their role in harming civilians as part of Israel's illegal occupation and the attack on Gaza... Read more... UK's discriminatory criminalization of dissent, by Sarah Irving | Electronic Intifada  London police are accused of leveling discriminatory "We are very angry, very afraid, very sad, very upset. My wife, she is depressed. When she sees police in the street she's very frightened. They destroyed our life," says Badi Tebani...charges against Muslim Gaza solidarity protesters Read more... Breaking Ranks, by David Rovics | Counterpunch ...The truth is in our country the rich and the big corporations are hardly taxed, while the working class and the small businesses bear the lion's share of the tax burden, and this is the program of both the RNC and the DNC. In our country neither party really supports social programs that could seriously lift our people up because both parties are too busy spending much of our money on nuclear bombs, corporate kickbacks and armies of private mercenaries. Both parties rule by a system of legalized bribery, called lobbying, that would land politicians in other ostensibly democratic countries in jail... Read more... The Federal Reserve Created This Financial Mess And Now They Expect Us To Pay Higher Taxes And Have A Lower Standard Of Living So We Can Pay Interest To Them | Economic Collapse  When you watch the mainstream news, how often do you hear them identify the Federal Reserve as the ultimate source of all of our financial problems? Never? Well, there is a good reason... Read more... Depleted uranium is destroying life, by Jerry Mazza | Infowars I have long heard sound-bites or seen passages about depleted uranium that sounded more than dire. But given my own cognitive dissonance, and the fact that I was writing about many other dire topics at the time, I filed depleted uranium in my cranium for future investigation, which, given the human aversion to bad news, could have been never. But never was over in an exchange of emails about nuclear missiles in Israel’s arsenal... Read more... 'Israeli regime worse than apartheid' | Press TV  Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat says Israel has turned into a regime worse than South Africa before the collapse of apartheid. "Never in the darkest hours of South African apartheid were the blacks prevented (from using) roads that whites were using,"..[Let's just call it a down payment on what's coming to these collaborators] Read more...McCain Wants to “Pull Trigger” On Iran, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars ...McCain, like the vast majority of the district of criminals crowd, does not bother to back up his accusations about Iran with any facts... [The devil's obedient servants just can't wait for WWIII] Read more, watch...Election 2012: Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41% | Rasmussen Reports Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is – virtually dead even... Read more... Conservative and Liberal Pillagers Master the Art of Pandering, by Morris Davis | Huffington Post  If it was a crime to misappropriate a word or phrase -- to treat it like you own it and toss it around arbitrarily whenever it suits your purposes -- then some prominent conservatives and liberals would be serving hard time. Of course there don't seem to be any real consequences when there's literal theft in the world of politics, so it's a pipe dream to imagine there would be any consequences for pillaging the vocabulary, but it's still a good thought... Read more... Did banned media report foretell of Gaza war crimes?, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis Jonathan Cook views the possibility that a banned report by Haaretz journalist Uri Blau – suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in 2008 – contained vital information warning of Israeli intentions to commit war crimes and revealed the aims of a so far unimplemented phase of the Gaza attack involving expelling some of Gaza’s population to Egypt... Read more... April 15, 2010 Obama's Lies about Iran, by Margaret Kimberley | Palestine Think Tank  The Peace Prize winner in the White House continues to beat the drums of war with Iran, in perfect synch with the corporate media orchestra. “The New York Times was made privy to what has been called a ‘parlor game,’ of ‘Imagining an Israeli Strike on Iran’” – apparently in the spirit of the old motivational slogan, “If you can conceive it, you can achieve it.”.. Read more... Return to "Indian Country": The Global War on Tribes, by Zoltan Grossman | Counterpunch ...the main targets of the wars are predominantly “tribal regions,” and the old frontier language of Indian-fighting is becoming the lexicon of 21st-century counterinsurgency. The “Global War on Terror” is fast morphing into a “Global War on Tribes.”.. Read more... Did Banned Media Report Foretell of Gaza War Crimes?, by Jonathan Cook | Antiwar An Arab member of the Israeli parliament is demanding that a newspaper be allowed to publish an investigative report that was suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in winter 2008. The investigation by Uri Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead... Read more... Parsing Petraeus, by Nadia Hijab | Counterpunch The ripples from General David H. Petraeus' testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee continue to spread. Mingled with excitement (or apprehension) about the administration's tough words in response to recent Israeli expansionist plans, it may signal an end to America's unconditional support for Israel... Read more... Liberals Smear Wikileaks, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar Mother Jones and Colbert go after Wikileaks Activists intent on releasing evidence of crimes committed by a powerful government are harassed and followed by police and intelligence agents: a restaurant in which they are meeting comes under surveillance, and, subsequently, one of their number is detained by the police for 21 hours. Their leader is followed on an international flight by two agents: and, in a parking lot of foreign soil, one of their number is accosted by a "James Bond character" and threatened. Computers are seized...Read more... An immaculate conception?, by Joseph Massad | Electronic Intifada  Salam Fayyad predicts the birth of a state in 2011 The Palestinian Authority is pregnant! Indeed, it is the unelected and American-imposed Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who is pregnant. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in a recent interview that "the time for this baby to be born will come ... and we estimate it will come around 2011." Unlike females of the human species but like female whales, the gestation period for male Palestinian collaborators with the Israeli occupation extends at least to two years...Read more... Peace Activists Extend an Olive Branch to the Tea Party to Talk About War, by Medea Benjamin | Huffington Post On Tax Day, Tea Party members from around the country will descend on the nation's capitol to "protest big government and support lower taxes, less government and more freedom. CODEPINK, a women-led peace movement advocating an end to war and militarism, will be sending some representatives... Read more... Gods and Monsters: Fighting American Wars From On High, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch The Greeks had it right. When you live on Mount Olympus, your view of humanity is qualitatively different. The Greek gods, after all, lied to, stole from, lusted for, and punished humanity without mercy, while taking the planet for a spin in a manner that we mortals would consider amoral, if not immoral. And it didn’t bother them a bit. They felt -- so Greek mythology tells us -- remarkably free to intervene from the heights in the affairs of whichever mortals caught their attention and, in the process, to do whatever took their fancy without thinking much about the nature of human lives... Read more... War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it, "collateral murder," are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001... Read more... Another great interview by George Kenny on Electric Politics: "Whither the Israel Lobby?" | Vineyard of the Saker George Kenny is clearly on a roll! Only a week ago he had a fantastic show about Bosnia and now he follows up with yet another truly excellent interview with Jeffrey Blankfort on the topic of the Israel Lobby. Listening to these two interviews, I was reminded of the words of George Orwell "In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"... Read more... America's Loose Nukes in Israel, by Grant Smith | Antiwar Israel decided this week to send Minister for Intelligence Affairs Dan Meridor to the Nuclear Security summit. This U.S. bid to secure vulnerable nuclear stockpiles against non-state actors is both closely watched and furiously spun. Israel avoided exposing Prime Minister Netanyahu to embarrassing scrutiny of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons arsenal... Read more... The Boomerang Effect | Gilad Atzmon  ...in Britain the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum. Thanks to the ‘The Holocaust Educational Trust’ our children are guaranteed to learn how bad the Nazis were. This is probably much easier for our kids to acknowledge than to look into the ways in which the embarrassing legacy of the British Empire reverberates throughout almost every contemporary disastrous conflict on this planet... Read more... Does Israel's Crackdown on Journalists Suggest a "Crisis of Legitimacy"?, by Jared Malsin | Huffington Post I know something about how Israel's security forces treat journalists who they believe to be hostile. In January I was held for over a week in a dingy detention center at Israel's Ben Gurion airport before being deported... Read more... U.S. Group to Join International Aid Flotilla to Gaza | Free Palestine Movement California-based Free Palestine Movement recruiting prominent Americans to challenge Israeli siege, bring humanitarian supplies and human rights volunteers to Gaza... Read more... Coordinated Campaign Aimed to Stifle Academic Discussion about Israel Raises Critical Questions, by Dorit Naaman | CAUT Bulletin ...The dominant model historically, and the sole one in the international community since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, was a two-state solution. But as the partition process was derailed, a democratic one-state model has resurfaced. Although the possibility of a one-state bi-national solution was very much in the minds of venerated Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber, B’nai Brith has determined that discussing alternative models is tantamount to destroying Israel... Read more... A seminal series of lectures on the US Empire | Vineyard of the Saker ...It is hard for me to refrain from hyperbole in praising these lectures, so I will go ahead and say it as I feel: simply put these lectures are "The Key" to the understanding of the nature of capitalism, the nature of the regime in power in the USA since 1776, the goals and methods of US foreign and domestic policies, the nature of the power structure of the US government and state and the reasons for the US Global Empire... [Sounds like he's the anti-Strauss] Read more...ICAHD Director Jeff Halper letter endorses Berkeley divestment | KABOBfest  As the head of an Israeli peace and human rights organization, The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), I would like to add our voice to those who have urged you to overrule the veto of the Senate President and reaffirm the decision to divest in companies profiting from the Israeli Occupation... Read more... Israeli activists to J Street: ’stop trying to gain political capital at the expense of dedicated peace activists', by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss The following form letter has been circulating on an Israeli activist listserv criticizing J Street's leadership for their stance on the Berkeley divestment bill:.. [J Street is just a kinder, gentler mask covering the same old ugly ZioNazism] Read more...Propagandistic anti-Semitism report raises The Linkage Issue, by Max Blumenthal | Mondoweiss The Tel Aviv University/Stephen Roth Institute's newly released study on anti-Semitism in 2009 is getting loads of media attention. Among the many outlets that have reported its findings are the AP, CNN, and Haaretz. "Anti-Semitic incidents Doubled Last Year," blared the AP headline... Read more... Genocidal in Effect, If Not Intent: Martin Kramer, Harvard and the Eugenics of Zion, by Jeff Klein | Counterpunch People were outraged when Martin Kramer’s support for measures to limit the births of “superfluous young men” among Palestinians in Gaza was circulated in the US recently. Kramer, Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and lately a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, had made the remarks in a presentation at the annual Herzliya Conference in Israel in January. Pro-Palestinian activists and human rights supporters called his proposal an incitement for genocide; students at Harvard argued that such racist ideas had no place at their University... Read more... Why Do They Single Out Israel? | John Spritzler "How come you single out Israel for its faults, but never criticize other governments for doing things just as bad?" This is what apologists for the Israeli government say to those, like myself, who criticize it. Their not-so-subtle implication is that critics of the Israeli government are really just motivated by antisemitism and therefore their views should not be given credence... Read more... April 14, 2010 BDS at Berkeley Archbishop Desmond Tutu to UC Berkeley: Divesting is the Right Thing To Do | Salem-News  ..It was with great joy that I learned of your recent 16-4 vote in support of divesting your university’s money from companies that enable and profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights. Principled stands like this, supported by a fast growing number of US civil society organizations and people of conscience, including prominent Jewish groups, are essential for a better world in the making, and it is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power... Read more... Open Letter to Berkeley Students on their Historic Israeli Divestment Bill | Naomi Klein ...It comes as no surprise that you are under intense pressure to reverse your historic and democratic decision to divest from two companies that profit from Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory. When a school with a deserved reputation for academic excellence and moral leadership takes such a bold position, it threatens to inspire others to take their own stands... Read more... Singling out Israel is the right thing to do, by Yaman Salahi | Berkeley Daily Planet Two weeks ago, UC Berkeley's student senate made a historic 16-4 decision to divest from General Electric and United Technologies, two American companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. A week later, the student body president vetoed the bill, citing its “focus on a specific country,” Israel. His veto echoed identical claims by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, that “in a world filled with human rights abuses across Africa, Asia and the Americas, the UC Berkeley students vote to single out Israel for censure is hypocritical.”.. Read more... One Marine’s ‘Liberty Walk’ for the Rest of Us, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig  I met Ernest Logan Bell, a 25-year-old Marine Corps veteran, as he walked along Route 12 in upstate New York with a large American flag strapped to the side of his green backpack. There was a light drizzle and he was wearing a green Army poncho. Bell was on a six-day, 90-mile-long self-styled “Liberty Walk” from Binghamton to Utica in a quixotic campaign to challenge Democratic incumbent Rep. Michael Arcuri in the 24th Congressional District... Read more... COIN of the Realm, by Jeff Huber | Antiwar ...Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare gave us the false promise of easy conquest through gadgetry. COIN promises us nothing but a Long War foreign policy as concocted and conducted by fools and fanatics like Gates, Clinton, Petraeus, McChrystal, and Odierno. Why do we follow such people? A better question: why does the man we elected to be commander in chief tolerate them?.. Read more... Israeli groups fight orders allowing army to jail West Bank residents, by Rory McCarthy | The Guardian  Israeli human rights groups say that Palestinians and any foreigners living in the West Bank could be deemed 'infiltrators' and deported within 72 hours or jailed for seven years if they are found without the correct permit under the new orders... Read more... Hardly Existential, John Mueller and Mark Stewart | Foreign Affairs Thinking Rationally About Terrorism Many people hold that terrorism poses an existential threat to the United States. But a look at the actual statistics suggests that it presents an acceptable risk -- one so low that spending to further reduce its likelihood or consequences is scarcely justified...Read more... More cause and effect in the War against Terrorists, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon  Afghan protesters burn tires to block a road during an anti-American protest The extreme paradox of our actions in the Muslim world is now well-documented: namely, the very policies justified in the name of fighting Terrorism (invasions, occupations, bombings, lawless detentions, etc.) are the precise ones that most inflame and exacerbate that threat...in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, April 12, 2010 Read more... Israelis Could Expel Thousands of Palestinians from Palestine, by Juan Cole | Informed Comment ..The Israeli right has long favored “transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing) as a means of dealing both with Palestinian-Israelis and with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Given the extreme-right character of the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, it is no cause for wonder that practical steps are now being taken toward expulsions and deportations of anyone who even peacefully opposes the government’s systematic colonization of the West Bank... Read more... Alarming Racism in Israel | Stephen Lendman Mossawa Center Calls the Current Knesset the Most Racist in History Mossawa means equality, the Mossawa Advocacy Center promoting it for Israel's Arab citizens - about 1.5 million, comprising 20% of the population. Established in 1997, it "strives to improve the social, economic and political status of (Israeli Arabs), while preserving their national and cultural rights as Palestinians." It also promotes gender equality "in all spheres of society."..Read more... Iran Reacts To Becoming A U.S. Nuclear Target | Race For Iran  As we noted last week, the Obama Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, issued last Monday, included a provision asserting a U.S. prerogative to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapons states that Washington deems not be in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Following the release of the Nuclear Posture Review last week, both President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates clearly stated that this new provision in America’s declaratory posture regarding the use of nuclear weapons was aimed at Iran, along with North Korea and other potential “outlier” states... Read more... Action is essential to prevent another round of ethnic cleansing in Palestine | Middle East Monitor An ominous political storm is gathering across Palestine and the Middle East following the announcement of an Israeli military order due to come into effect this week. The order will pave the way for the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank on the pretext that they are "infiltrators" or "illegal" residents. If enacted, this may well lead to the largest single act of ethnic cleansing conducted in Palestine since 1948... Read more... Bookstore chain removes leftist book from shelves | Israel News Tzomet Sfarim stops distribution of The National Left after right-wing sources put pressure on management. Book contains harsh criticism of settlers, settlement enterprise... Read more... Affecting and Affected | Eva Bartlett In Gaza  Abu Basel (right) is one of the long-termers, having served over 20 years as a medic in Gaza “Who will take care of people if not us? Someone has to do this work. Without medics, who will care for the injured? Everyone has something to contribute,” he replied to the question ‘why do you do such dangerous work?..Read more... When "Barack" Decides To Head A Barrack, by Kourosh Ziabari | Eurasia Review "The continued presence of all options on the table"; this is the disappointing message which a Nobel Peace Prize laureate dispatches internationally. In his latest interview with CBS news, American President Barack Obama refused to rule out the possibility of a military strike against Iran by harking back to the famous catchphrase of former U.S. President George W. Bush who once devised, regarding Iran's nuclear program, the popular sentence of "all options are on the table"... Read more... University of Ottawa Activist Student Persecutions: The Case of Marc Kelly | Stephen Lendman On October 21, 2008, for the first time in school history, the University of Ottawa Faculty of Science, without cause, deregistered undergraduate Marc Kelly, an exemplary student, expelling him for the semester and preventing him from completing the final three courses he needed to graduate... Read more... Zionism, Ruin of the Soul, video by Sameh Brill | Palestine Think Tank  Natan Sharansky welcoming "imported" Israelis for Our fantastic Sameh Brill has come up with another of his great "Hidden Truth Series" videos that compiles documents to tell the story of what is behind what happens. In this number, Obama and his views on Israel, (with some Israeli views on Obama that are less than flattering), the expulsions of Palestinians from their own homes in from East Jerusalem, but not only there..."natural growth" on Palestinian land Watch... Mossad Operation Threatened against Reporter, by Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice An Israeli journalist who went into hiding after writing a series of reports showing lawbreaking approved by Israeli army commanders faces a lengthy jail term for espionage if caught, as Israeli security services warned at the weekend they would “remove the gloves” to track him down... Read more... Kyrgyzstan: Another colour revolution bites the dust, by Eric Walberg | Media Monitors "...what is this nonsense about how “vital” this base is to the US? It’s been there ten years. Just how long does it expect to stay? Could the answer be “For ever”? The current Kyrgyz line is that the agreement will be reviewed to make sure it isn't "against the interests of the people or for bribes", government spokesman Almazbek Atambayev said after a visit to Moscow. "The United States plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan next year. We will approach the transit centre issue in a civilised way and resolve it with the US leadership." So the US probably has another year there with grudging Russian approval.".. Read more... 'US nuke threat is state terrorism' | Press TV  Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammad Khazaee Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammad Khazaee describes the US threat of using nuclear weapons against other countries as state terrorism..He called for a frank fight against terrorism, saying, "Certain countries should not use the case as a political instrument to promote their expansionist goals and dispatch troops to remote parts of the world and to the Middle East in particular."..Read more... Katyn and “The Good War”, by Patrick J. Buchanan | The American Conservative The decapitation of the Polish government last weekend, including President Lech Kaczynski and the military leadership, on that flight to Smolensk to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, brings to mind the terrible and tragic days and deeds of what many yet call the Good War. From Russian reports, the Polish pilot waved off four commands from air traffic control to divert to Moscow or Minsk... Read more... Welcome to Orwell’s world, by John Pilger | New Statesman Obama's lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'.".. Read more... U.S. puppet cuts his strings, by Eric Margolis | Toronto Sun Henry Kissinger once observed that it was more dangerous being America’s ally than its enemy. The latest example: the U.S.-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who is in serious hot water with his really angry patrons in Washington... Read more... Deport the Palestinians to Where They Came From – Israel, by Ahmed Amr | Palestine Chronicle  More land and less Palestinians by any means necessary It was bound to happen. The Israelis have decided to opt for outright ethnic cleansing. As of April 13, 2010 - the Israelis military will be accorded the power to deport any Palestinian or any foreigner in the West Bank if their papers ‘aren’t in order.’ The IDF has already made it clear that the order will not apply to Israeli citizens in the West Bank - you know - the illegal Jewish settlers...Read more... Turkey to Challenge Israel, Support Hamas, by Maayana Miskin | Israel National News Turkey is planning a gesture that will challenge Israel and provide support to Gaza's Hamas leaders next month. A flotilla of ships funded by Turkey will approach Gaza in May, in an attempt to challenge Israeli control at sea - or, as organizers put it, “break Israel's illegal blockade on Gaza.”.. Read more... Israel, War and Water, by Jim Miles | Palestine Chronicle  Israel recognized the environmental threat, and is using its military to control it There is a global crisis emerging concerning the allocation, uses, and abuses of fresh water. This is a combination of misuse by humans and the increasing violence and changing frequency of various weather conditions as the global climate heats up. Along with the heating are other factors such as the acidification of the oceans as they uptake more carbon than the life forms living there can deal with it in such a short time span. Agriculture becomes threatened, potable water for domestic use becomes scarcer, and although fresh water should be a right enshrined in the UN Charter, it is increasingly becoming both a military and corporate target...Read more... Bush Was Right: The Constitution is Just a G.D. Piece of Paper, by Kurt Nimmo | Prison Planet Article VI, clause 3 of the United States Constitution states the following: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution... Read more...April 13, 2010 Doug Christie Takes Powerful Free Speech Message to the University of Ottawa | The Radical Press  Douglas Christie – Canada’s Freedom Of Speech Lawyer Read more... Hamid Karzai, R.I.P., by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar The war in Afghanistan, which George W. Bush started and Barack Obama pledged to win, is over – and we lost. No one realizes this, quite yet, but give them time – because the fruits of our defeat are already a veritable cornucopia. And the reason can be summed up rather neatly in two words: Hamid Karzai... Read more... The ‘mind-blowing’ surge of wealth inequality in America, by Sahil Kapur | True/Slant  [Just in case anyone was wondering who's in charge these days..] Read more...False Dichotomy | Charlie Davis Liberals with guns: scarier than Tea Partiers Melissa Harris-Lacewell is a professor at Princeton University, as so subtly alluded to in the above excerpt from her latest drivel for The Nation, and she's concerned about the "legitimacy" of the state -- a legitimacy she assumes but doesn't explain -- which she notes some backwards reactionaries have had the temerity to challenge in the age of Democratic government...Read more... Polish Plane Crash: Accident or Katyn Massacre II?, by Tom Mysiewicz | The Radical Press “Rabbis absent themselves from flight at last moment because they say they could not fly to say prayers on the Sabbath”  I’ve long supported normalization of relations between Poland and Russia. Mainly because I see Poland being set up for a replay of 1939, with similar bad consequences for it... Read more... Your Taxes and War, by Jo Comerford and Tom Engelhardt | Antiwar If you’re an average American taxpayer, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, since 2001, cost you personally $7,334, according to the "cost of war" counter created by the National Priorities Project (NPP). They have cost all Americans collectively more than $980,000,000,000. As a country, we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark soon. These are staggering figures... Read more... [Given the expenditure in money and blood, one has to think that our enemies must be the very embodiment of evil. But there's a free, easily performed action that would actually get rid of them - stop voting for them.] Read more...My beautiful Palestine, by Samah Sabawi | Al-Ahram Weekly  A Palestinian David uses a slingshot to throw stones at the symbol of the Israeli Goliath A few days ago, my father e-mailed me a photo of my mum and him standing proudly next to my newest sibling; a young olive tree they've planted in their garden in Queensland, Australia. I was moved beyond belief looking at that photo and thinking of my beautiful Palestine...Read more... WWI, Xenophobia And Suppressing The Political Opposition | Wendy McElroy The years surrounding America's involvement in World War I (WWI) were a watershed for how the United States treated "foreigners" within its borders during wartime. Immigrants had flooded the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, almost a third of Americans were either first- or second-generation immigrants... Read more... Who REALLY Owns The Media In 2010?, by Brother Nathanael Kapner | Real Zionist News  “Not A Single News Item will reach the public without our control,” states the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. “Even now this is attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies whose offices are entirely ours and will give publicity only to what we dictate to them,” the Protocols continue... Read more... Bitten By Our Zionist Parasite, by Edward W. Miller | Coastal Post Freedom of speech, press and media are the underpinnings of a true democracy. We in Marin have been most fortunate to have enjoyed for the past 34 years, the COASTAL POST, a locally produced paper, published in Bolinas by Don Deane. Deane who, in an effort to bring all sides of all issues to his readers, has established a stable of outstanding local writers, and continues to reach abroad for contributors... [A small but great independent publication] Read more...Susan Abulhawa's interview on Swedish TV: "Mornings in Jenin" | YouTube View... To be a German, by Michael Colhaze | Occidental Observer  ...History is written by the victors, and even those who knew better clenched their teeth, shrugged, thanked God for their miraculous survival and busied themselves with clearing away the rubble. While those who were already duped into believing their implicit guilt thought it a reasonable price for a full belly and tried to look forward and never backwards again... Read more... Is Israel Controlling Phony Terror News?, by Gordon Duff and Brian Jobert | Veterans Today Who says Al Qaeda takes credit for a bombing? Rita Katz. Who gets us bin Laden tapes? Rita Katz. Who gets us pretty much all the information telling us Muslims are bad? Rita Katz? Rita Katz is the Director of Site Intelligence, primary source for intelligence used by news services, Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. What is her qualification? She served in the Israeli Defense Force. She has a college degree and most investigative journalists believe the Mossad "helps" her with her information. We find no evidence of any qualification whatsoever of any kind. A bartender has more intelligence gathering experience... Read more... Holocaust Day, by Roy Tov | Rebel News  On Love and Compassion Indoctrination bells are ringing. A few days before the Holocaust Day, Israeli newspapers began their yearly rite of publishing articles explaining what that day is about. All articles are quite obvious, but one of them caught my attention. It didn’t state anything new. It didn’t throw light on an oversight. Simply, it summarized the Israeli official position as if it was written by a political police agent, including the religious and numerical aspects. The religious arguments made it irresistible...Read more... Man sentenced for ‘Jewish lobby’ list | JTA A Rome court has sentenced a man to six months in jail for having posted a list of 162 academics on his blog and describing them as members of an alleged "Jewish lobby." In a verdict handed down April 8, Paolo Munzi, 42, was convicted of defamation... [What's with the Italians? On the one hand they elect Silvio Berlusconi, who makes millions lying, and on the other put someone in prison for telling the truth.] Read more...It's A Place Called Palestine (music video) | Gilad Atzmon View... Ron Paul: President Obama Is Not A Socialist | TPMDC  Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) Near the end of the third day of this year's Southern Republican Leadership Conference, it was time for Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) to take the stage. Paul, fresh off his victory in the CPAC straw poll, gave a characteristically fired-up speech that took on the views of the Republican party establishment...Read more... Why Netanyahu Canceled His DC Visit, and Why the GOP Is Applauding, by Daniel Levy | Huffington Post ...The reasons cited by Israeli officials for their PM's Washington no-show were last-minute concerns that Israel's own nuclear program -- or in official lingua franca, non-NPT signatory status -- would be raised by certain summit attendees -- notably, Egypt and Turkey. It is an explanation that fails to meet even the lowest bar of plausibility -- unless Benjamin Netanyahu has been moonlighting as Sleeping Beauty for the last decade or more... Read more... The Forgotten Child Of The Holocaust | Desertpeace  Sunday evening at sundown, sirens will sound throughout Israel to commemorate the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day. On Monday, ceremonies will be held in various cities, the main one being at Yad Vashem, the memorial park in Jerusalem. Friday was the anniversary of the massacre at Deir Yassin, the start of the ‘other holocaust’, known as the Nakba. There were no sirens to signify this as the Nakba is the ‘forgotten child of the holocaust’... Read more... Is It Time To Replace The American Dream?, by Jeremy Rifkin | AlterNet Today's youth find little value in the caricature of human nature as rational, calculating and utilitarian. They prefer to think of human nature as empathic... Read more... Why Does the U.S. Let Israel Get Away With Having a Nuclear Arsenal?, by Ira Chernus | AlterNet The Obama administration says it wants to reduce nuclear weapons, yet it goes along with Israel's evasions, blocking the path to a nuclear-free Middle East... Read more... Israeli soldiers Fire “the skunk” into Houses in Nabi Salih, by Joseph Dana | Uruknet  The weekly protest against the stealing of farm land took place once again yesterday in Nabi Salih. The IDF escalated its repression of the protest by firing a highly toxic chemical called the "skunk" into several houses in the village of Nabi Salih in an effort to break the resistance that is forming. The skunk has been used against other protests throughout the West Bank but never, to my knowledge used in houses... Read more, watch... Bill Moyers Journal: Obama's Bad Gamble on Afghanistan - 100,000 Soldiers Used as Chips for a Bet the US Can't Win | AlterNet We are losing lives for no purpose. The perpetuation of this unnecessary war exacerbates the problems in the Islamic world... Read more... Reassessing resistance | Al-Ahram Weekly By force of arms or by force of morals? Palestinians are looking again at the meaning and tactics of resistance, writes Saleh Al-Naami... Read more... They've Stolen Our Road! | Palestine Monitor  We sat with Jamal and Susan and in their home in Shufa. Their seven children peeped in from time to time, daring each other to go and speak to the foreigners. Jamal explained how the road to their village has literally been stolen by some Israelis who live in a nearby illegal settlement... Read more... “We, The Jewish People, Control America" | Pak Alert Press Amidst all the bombs raining down upon the civilian population of the world’s largest outdoor concentration camp known as Gaza, another bomb - 1000 times as devastating as those detonated over Japan in 1945 - was dropped on the American people but which did not make much discussion in the mainstream news, despite the shock waves it caused in political circles worldwide... Read more... IOF shoots demonstrators and journalists | MADA  ...he went to cover a peaceful demonstration against the confiscation of lands in Beit Safa, then the Israeli army came and closed the area. declaring it a military zone, and ordered all the demonstrators to immediately evacuate the area, and when they refused the Israeli soldiers arrested them and arrested about fifteen protesters and foreigners... Read more... The Nakba denial: concealing catastrophe, by Tammy Obeidallah | Al-Ahram Weekly Despite Israel's attempts to obliterate their memory, Palestinians who suffered the Exodus are commemorated the world over... Read more... Brave Palestinian journalist arrested for filming protests, by Kiera Feldman | Mondoweiss The latest news from Bil’in: Haitham Al Khatib was arrested while filming at today’s demonstration, held on the anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre. Details below... Read more... The Worm is in the Can | Uprooted Palestinians  Imagine for one moment the corridors of power and influence, from presidential palaces to military command centres, being populated by the likes of the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacists etc, who utter such racist nonsense that one race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, that they are more apt at ruling the world's affairs!.. Read more... We will not go down (Song for Gaza), by Michael Heart | YouTube This is a song of hope for the Palestinians in Gaza... [Finally, an American singer/songwriter putting it to music] View...Time to engage Iran | Al-Ahram Weekly Only genuine engagement can stop Iran becoming the world's tenth nuclear-armed state, writes Graham Usher... Read more... Talking Palestine to power, by Sonja Karkar | Electronic Intifada  Israel claims exceptionalism no matter how extreme its crimes Today, there is no excuse for not knowing the truth about Palestine, especially what is happening in Gaza. Even taking into account the disinformation spread in mainstream media, there are enough glimpses one gets of a ravaged Gaza and a brutalized people that should compel us to ask questions. There are enough websites and blogs easily available for anyone to learn more, even if it requires sifting through and evaluating the available information...Read more... Beware this Israeli alternative to the two state solution, by Bilal Al-Hassan | Middle East Monitor A new plan has emerged from Israel that realigns the Zionist state from being an aggressive occupier to being a partner with its Arab neighbours. In a strategic reorganisation of the region, similar to the World War I Sykes-Picot Agreement which carved up the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces, the new plan establishes Israel in the heart of the Arab world with the blessing of Arab countries and the support of the international community... Read more... Obama imposed ‘peace plan’ would deny basic Palestinian rights, by Alex Kane | Mondoweiss Reports in the New York Times and Washington Post that the Obama administration is considering presenting its plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a lot of buzz and pushback from supporters of Israel. However, the reports do not address the fundamental question: what would the plan mean for Palestinians and Israelis?.. Read more... April 12, 2010 Israel Finds a New Way to Play the Victim, by Ira Chernus | Antiwar  A report released by the United Nations last year says that Israeli settlers, angered over the destruction of Jewish outposts, could exact revenge on up to a quarter million Palestinians in the West Bank. It’s not just vague speculation... Read more... One Last Plea Before We Sail | Uruknet Our four boats are purchased or refurbished, flagged and registered. The cargo ship is now named the MV Rachel Corrie with the blessing of the Corrie family. Children in Gaza and the occupied West Bank will name the other two boats, and we will let you know what they chose. We are hard at work collecting the cargo… cement, books for children and universities, paper for printing books, water filtration equipment, and medical equipment, all being denied the people of Gaza by Israel’s brutal blockade... Read more... Framing Obama's peace framework, by Marwan Bishara | Imperium  The leak is now credible..the Obama administration is considering proposing its own framework for a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Frustrated by its failure to freeze Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and subsequent failure to get the negotiations back on track, the US government is putting the two parties on notice: Define the contours of a solution by autumn and negotiate its details, or we shall do it for you... Read more... Israel viewed as world's sixth nuclear power | Yahoo! News Israel, whose prime minister withdrew Friday from next week's US-hosted nuclear summit, is viewed as the sixth country to have acquired nuclear weapons -- a title it has neither denied nor confirmed. Analysts at British defence specialists Jane's believe the Jewish state has between 100 and 300 nuclear warheads, putting them among the more advanced nuclear weapons states and roughly on a par with Britain... Read more... Israel knows apartheid has no future, by Mustafa Barghouti | Ma'an News  After decades of military rule over Palestinians and theft of our land, Israeli leaders are increasingly seeing the writing on the wall. They are at least acknowledging reality, if not yet grappling with the consequences... Read more... Evidence That Iran Is Developing Nukes?: Don’t Expect Any This Time Around, by Mark R. Crovelli | Lew Rockwell Scarcely a day goes by anymore without some cocksure Israeli cabinet member or loudmouthed American "diplomat" sounding the alarm that Iran is covertly trying to develop nuclear weapons. We hear ominous warnings that the Western world will suddenly be at risk of complete annihilation by those crazy Ayatollahs, should they succeed in their quest to develop the bomb. "No one will be safe!" they cry... Read more... Response to Jewish groups condemning student senate bill at UC Berkeley calling for divestment, by Sydney Levy and Yaman Salahi | Australians for Palestine  A coalition of nearly 20 Jewish groups, ranging from the right-wing David Project and the Jewish National Fund to the liberal J Street, is distributing a misleading statement condemning a Student Senate bill at UC Berkeley. The ground-breaking bill calls for divestment from companies that profit from the perpetuation of the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. They refer to the bill as “dishonest” and “misleading” and “based on contested allegations.” Yet it is their letter that is both dishonest and misleading... Read more... Behind the Afghan Fraud, by Conn Hallinan | Antiwar All frauds have a purpose, mostly to relieve the unwary of their wealth, though occasionally to launch some foreign adventure. The 1965 Tonkin Gulf hoax that escalated the Vietnam War comes to mind. So, what was the design behind "Operation Moshtarak," or the "Battle of Marjah," in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, the largest U.S. and NATO military operation in Afghanistan since the 2003 invasion?.. Read more... The Ghosts of Deir Yassin, by Sonja Karkar | Australians for Palestine  "Waiting for Justice" by Dora McPhee Israel has long played on its “heroic” beginnings to stir up support for its less than heroic exploits today. The problem is that those heroic beginnings have always been a fiction. Israel’s bloody birth and subsequent actions were crimes against humanity which continue to this day. The veneer of Israel’s manufactured “legitimacy” cannot hide the rot eating away at the core of its existence—its original sin of violent dispossession and its current colonialist and apartheid policies...Read more... Lessons of Collateral Murder, by Josh Stieber | Contagious Love Experiment If you watch “Collateral Murder” and are shocked, this is a perfectly natural reaction. How the discussion about it is framed however, makes a world of difference. Speaking as a former soldier who was in the company on the ground in the video, who would have been in this video had I not angered my leaders and was left out of this mission, I am disappointed that this video has been used by some to cast such stronger moral indignation on the soldiers shown without looking at the deeper implications... Read more, watch... Holocaust survivor: why I support Palestinian rights, by Suzanne Weiss | Australians for Palestine  In Canada, Holocaust Memorial Day has been established by Heritage Canada to be on April 11. It is a good opportunity to review what we learn from the Holocaust experience and how we apply these lessons to the troubled situation in the Middle East... Read more... Reuters Chief Spikes Story on Killing of His Own Staffers In Baghdad | Gawker David Schlesinger, the editor in chief of Reuters, declined to run a story by one of his own reporters containing claims that the 2007 killings of two Reuters staffers in Baghdad by U.S. troops may have been war crimes... [Well, you're not supposed to mention it - not at all politically correct - but Schlesinger just might be a Jewish name, mightn't it?] Read more...Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, threatens to block Nato offensive | Times Online  Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrives at 10 Downing Street The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has cast doubt over Nato’s planned summer offensive against the Taliban in the southern province of Kandahar, as more than 10,000 American troops pour in for the fight. Karzai threatened to delay or even cancel the operation — one of the biggest of the nine-year war — after being confronted in Kandahar by elders who said it would bring strife, not security, to his home province...Read more... Gaza's power plant shuts down completely | Palestine Telegraph Engineer Kanaan Obaid, Vice President of the Palestinian Energy Authority, said this morning that the power plant in the Gaza Strip faced a complete shut down due to fuel and equipment shortage... Read more... 'Nonviolent resistance best for Palestine' | Press TV  Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi A Palestinian legislator says nonviolent popular resistance is the most effective means of resistance against the Israeli apartheid regime...Read more... The No-Pay Movement | Matt Taibbi Since I started covering the financial crisis a year and a half ago, I’ve been getting a lot of letters that say things like, “This all sucks. But what should we do about it? If you don’t have any answers, what’s the point?” I don’t want to get into this too much since I have more on this coming out in my book, but I would like to point out some of the answers other people are providing to this question... Read more... Landau Calls For Cutting Water Supplies In West Bank | International Middle East Media Center  Israeli Infrastructure Minister, Uzi Landau, threatened that Israeli would cut water supplies if the Palestinians do not install water treatment plants. His statement disregarded the fact that Israel is not allowing the Palestinians to built water treatment facilities... Read more... International Arrest Warrants Awaiting Scores of Top-Ranking Israeli Officials, by Richard Walker | American Free Press International laws are making it increasingly difficult for Israeli diplomats, intelligence officers, generals and even former top military officers to travel the globe without being arrested on international warrants. Judging by the sheer number of outstanding warrants, any Israelis deemed to have committed crimes against Palestinian civilians are now at a higher risk than ever of being seized at airports and handed over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague... Read more... ECESG Slams Threats Against Activists Participating In Gaza Solidarity Ships, by Saed Bannoura | International Middle East Media Center  the Dignity The European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG) strongly denounced threats made against activists who intend to participate in the upcoming convoy of solidarity ships heading to the besieged and improvised Gaza Strip... Read more... How Israel Gagged on its own Gag Order, by Gila Svirsky | JNews Anat Kam is finding out the price of speaking truth to power This story is a testament to the Internet. And to Anat Kam, the whistleblower, who is widely regarded in Israeli security circles as a traitor and will probably soon be charged with treason...Read more... The Persistence of a Palestinian Family, by Antoine Raffoul | Palestine Think Tank  This narrative is being written today Thursday, the 8th of April 2009, here in London (the city that gave the world The Balfour Declaration which offered Palestine as a national home for the Jews). On the very same day in 2009, a photo was taken in USA, (the country which offered Israel its 'eternal' friendship) of these Palestinian brothers and sister who are the subject of this narrative. The same day, but 60 years earlier, in 1949, in Al-Mina (the Lebanese fishing port of Lebanon's second largest city, Tripoli), a Palestinian father had gathered the same children for a photo shoot to commemorate one year since their expulsion from Haifa on the morning of 8 April 1948, also a Thursday, like today... Read more... "I believe that Hamas should be treated as a political actor", by Richard Falk | Middle East Monitor ...It is a scandalous refusal to take seriously the pledge after World War II of 'never again.' The liberal democracies in Europe and North America have allowed their hatred of Hamas to be a justification for inflicting and sustaining a humanitarian catastrophe on an entire civilian population denied even the option to become refugees... Read more... Deir Yassin's inextinguishable fire, by Dina Elmuti | Electronic Intifada  The author's mother standing near the site of the Deir Yassin It's as if the very moment I passed by Bab al-Amud or Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City, I was transported back in time to a forbidden place, a place I was forced to feel as though I was illegally trespassing through just by gazing at it, a place now belonging to others. "This place you talk about no longer exists. It's been long gone." That's what they continue to say with such impunity and disregard, but those sentiments of deterrence wouldn't stop me...massacre more than 60 years after it happened Read more... IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank, by Amira Hass | Haaretz A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years... Read more... On the Legitimacy of the State - Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar | Israeli Occupation Archive  Stephen Shalom, Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar An illuminating exchange between Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar on the important question of the legitimacy of the state, and how it applies to Israel and other nation states. Presented in the context of the current wave of accusations that critics of the Israeli occupation, and of Israel’s systematic and ongoing violations of international law, are “delegitimizers” — a recently coined term created by Israeli propaganda experts as part of an effort to, in their words, “delegitimize the delegitimizers.”..Read more... Stop Being and Funding the Evil We Deplore, by Medea Benjamin | OpEd News ..As Americans on conscience, we can't stand by and allow these killings to continue. Here are some actions we should we be calling for:.. Read more... Youth despair as Gaza jobless rate hits 60 per cent | Gulf News  Palestinian youths examine damage at the site of an overnight Young people in Gaza are desperately trying to leave the blockaded enclave. The blockade has raised unemployment to one of the highest rates in the world, putting it at about 60 per cent. After graduating from university, young adults have failed to get employed and in order to find work elsewhere they have to jump through hoops just to leave Gaza...Israeli army airstrike in Gaza City Read more... First class state, second class citizens?, by Silvia Nicolaou-Garcia | Middle East Monitor ..A recent Haaretz article by Moshe Arens highlighted the Zionist state's treatment of its Arab minority citizens and why it should be at the top of Israel's agenda and not sidelined. Another article in the Guardian revealed how the higher birth-rate of birth of Israel's Arab population will lead to a demographic shift in the "Jewish" state. Inevitably, this has exposed the unequal treatment Israeli Arabs get from "their" government. Israel's discriminatory domestic policies can no longer go unchallenged... Read more... IDF Soldiers Target Peaceful Protests in the Buffer Zone, by Max Ajl | t r u t h o u t  Palestinian youth peacefully protest Israeli policies on Land Day ...I was near the Nahal Oz crossing, east of Gaza City in the northern segment of the Gaza Strip, close to where Israel used to bring diesel fuel into the Gaza Strip. It was Land Day. The sharp pop of bullets beginning to fly through the air grew louder as I drew closer to the group of shebab and cameramen stationed there, watching the youth below...Read more... The Accomodationists: Memo to Liberals on the White House Death Warrants | Chris Floyd Let us hear no more excuses for Barack Obama. Let us hear no more defenses, no more special pleading, no more extenuations. Let us have no more reciting of the "pressures" he is under, of the "many obstacles" that balk him in his quest to do us good, of the "bad advisors" who are swaying him to unworthy acts against his will. Let us be done at last with all these wretched lies, these complicitous self-deceptions that are facilitating atrocity and tyranny on a monstrous scale... Read more... April 11, 2010 The un-Christian Christians who embrace Israeli Apartheid, by Khalid Amayreh | Palestine Think Tank  Millions of Christian Zionists think that by blindly supporting Israel's apartheid policies against the tormented Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, they are upholding the truth and doing the right thing in the sight of God... Read more... Greenspan's Testimony: Two hours of buck-passing, by Mike Whitney | OpEd News Alan Greenspan's performance before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was a real Oscar winner. At no time, was the ex-Fed chairman in trouble, and he was able to showcase the full repertoire of fake emotions for which he is renowned..It was vintage Greenspan from start to finish; the tedious jabber, the crusty rejoinders, the endless excuse-making... Read more... A new political option for confronting Israel, by Hasan Abu Nimah | Electronic Intifada Arab states should give Israel a choice -- respect international law or continue its racist policies in isolation  As more people recognize that the "peace process" has come to an unbridgeable impasse, there is debate. Some, especially those who prospered from the path of failed negotiations, argue that there is no alternative to continuing with the US-brokered "peace process." Others intimate that a third intifada might be the solution and there have even been warnings of regional war. Others still suggest the Arab states should withdraw their eight-year old Arab Peace Initiative... Read more... In Israel, reality hides under a 'top secret' stamp, by Akiva Elda | Haaretz It was spring 1983, the height of the first Lebanon War. A young officer appeared at my door and placed two documents in my hand that had been stamped "Highly Classified.".. Read more... Israel's 9/11 "To Do" Checklist | Goon Squad 1. On 9/11/2001, set off the world's biggest false-flag against our ally, friend, financial backer, weapons depot and all around gullible sucker, the USA using Arab patsies, MOSSAD agents, mercs, CIA cutouts, katsas running White House and Pentagon traitors and our world-wide system of sayanim.... Check...2. ... Read more... The Coming European Debt Wars, by Prof. Michael Hudson | Global Research EU Countries sinking into Depression  Government debt in Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs that are set to explode. The mortgage debts in post-Soviet economies and Iceland are more explosive... Read more... Israeli Arabs urged to try 'reverse discrimination' against Jews, by Jonathan Cook | The National A leading Arab human-rights lawyer in Israel has suggested a novel and provocative approach to dealing with routine discrimination practised by Jews against Israel’s Arab minority: Arabs should start discriminating against Jews... Read more... Olbermann on Obama's assassination program, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon  There are many legitimate criticisms voiced about Keith Olbermann, but he deserves substantial credit for his coverage last night of a story that is as self-evidently significant as it is under-covered: Barack Obama's assassination program aimed at American citizens... Read more, watch... "Di Bombs" Music Video - Ikwunga | YouTube This is a socially conscious music video by the First Afrobeat Poet Ikwunga. It addresses the ills of war that plagues our beloved African continent. Watch... How Not to Run an Empire | Foreign Policy Ignoring human rights in favor of stability is backfiring not just in Kyrgyzstan, but all over Central Asia -- big time  This week's uprising in Kyrgyzstan didn't appear out of nowhere. For the last several years, many of this Central Asian country's people have felt betrayed by a government that came to power promising democracy and reform, but in their eyes delivered repression and nepotism instead... Read more... BBC Video: Evidence of Israel's nuclear weapons (Banned/Censored) | Gilad Atzmon The story of Mordechai Vanunu...(my music in the background) Watch... US to retain 90 nukes on Iran border | Press TV  A US B-2 bomber dropping a B61 thermonuclear bomb As Washington and Moscow sign a new arms reduction treaty, skepticism arises in Turkey as to whether those cuts will include US atomic warheads stored in the country...Read more... The Dangers and Difficulties of Reporting from Gaza: Two Journalists Recount Their Experiences | Democracy Now We speak with two journalists who have covered Gaza extensively about the dangers and difficulties of reporting from the Occupied Territories: Mohammed Omer, an award-winning Palestinian journalist who was interrogated and beaten by armed Israeli security guards on his way back home to Gaza after receiving the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London in July of 2008, and Ayman Mohyeldin, the Gaza correspondent for Al Jazeera English, who was one of the only international journalists reporting from inside Gaza during the twenty-two-day Israeli assault last year... Read transcript, watch episode... Iran conference seeks world without nukes | Press TV  Iran is preparing to hold an international conference on nuclear disarmament on April 17th and 18th..The conference comes as the international community is deeply disturbed by thousands of nuclear warheads in Western countries including the United States as well as Israel's stockpile of 200 nuclear warheads... Read more... The photographs tell the story... | Information Clearing House Is This Media manipulation on a grand scale? Yes, the occupation has begun.Read more... Can Lebanon Come in from The Cold, by Franklin Lamb | Palestine Chronicle  Ein el Helwe Refugee Camp, Lebanon More than six decades after their expulsion from Palestine, Lebanon's unwanted refugees just might be granted some basic civil rights...Read more.. Obama's Brave Nuke World | Stephen Lendman At the same time the Pentagon issued its new Nuclear Posture Review, Obama officially ordered the murder of a US citizen, Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki - accused of terrorism and an Al Qaeda connection without evidence... Read more... Israel, a New Decade, by Ran HaCohen | Antiwar  ..Most Israeli artists are careful not to express themselves critically about Israel’s policies, definitely not to say a word against the country’s deep militarism and racism..The deep racism of the Israeli psyche is on the rise. The 1990s, at least in hindsight, marked some liberalization of the public discourse; the first decade of this century crushed it, and now the mildly critical, left-liberal discourse hardly exists in the mainstream. No wonder the liberal left has just 3 seats out of 120 in the Knesset... Read more... Hamas urges trial of Israeli war criminals | Press TV As Palestinians observe the anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, Hamas calls on the global community to bring Israeli war criminals to justice. In a statement, a copy of which was obtained by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) on Saturday, Hamas has called on international, Arab and Palestinian courts and organizations to arrest and try Israeli war criminals... Read more... Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: The Most Dangerous Man in the World, by Saul Landau | Counterpunch In 2005, teaching a history class to university juniors and seniors, I mentioned the Vietnam War. I noticed glazed looks in the eyes of several students. I asked a young woman born about a decade after that war had ended: “You know when the Vietnam War occurred, right?” She wrinkled her brow, bit her lip and said, hesitatingly: “Wasn’t it after the Greco-Roman era?”.. Read more... On "Dual Loyalty", Stephen M. Walt | Foreign Policy Robert Satloff doth protest too much  If you would like to read a textbook example of a dust-kicking operation, please look at Robert Satloff's heated response to my recent post explaining the problems that can arise when top-level foreign policy officials have strong attachments to a foreign country. I seem to have struck a nerve... Read more... The great US foreign policy flaw, by Mark Weisbrot | The Guardian Of all the misunderstandings that guide US foreign policy – including foreign commercial policy – perhaps the most important and long-lasting is the failure to recognise or understand what national self-determination means to most people in the world. Or why it might be important to them. Our leaders seem to have learned very little since their disastrous war in Vietnam, which ended 35 years ago... Read more... Ed Koch's lying tongue, by Khalid Amayreh | Uprooted Palestinians  Ed Koch is a delusional Zionist supremacist who is desperately struggling to maintain the relevance of Zionist mythology, especially in Europe and North America. And like all Zionists, the former New York mayor, seems to have little regard if any for truth and honesty... Read more... Alex's Farewell Interview with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts | Infowars Alex welcomes back to the show economist and nationally syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts, who recently announced his journalistic retirement in an article entitled “Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It.”.. Watch... Reuters shuns story on US chopper killing staff | al Jazeera Editor-in-chief of Reuters News David Schlesinger has refused to publish a story by one of his own reporters which claims that the 2007 killings of two Reuters staffers in Baghdad by US troops may have been war crimes... Read more... April 10, 2010 Political Prisoners in Venezuela?, by Eva Golinger | Venezuelanalysis  When politicians and political actors commit crimes, can they hide behind cries of persecution? As international organizations backed by Washington condemn the Chavez administration for alleged political persecution, the facts shed light on the difference between activism and crime... Read more... The Anat Kamm Affair: The Dark Underbelly of Israel's Security State, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis Next week 23-year-old Anat Kamm is due to stand trial for her life -- or rather the state’s demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is charged with spying. Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel’s security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too... Read more... A New Wind Blows in Egypt, by Rannie Amiri | Global Research Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei is becoming the Middle East’s progressive voice  “Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view. It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it's been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping.".. Read more... Nuking the Mullahs, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar Back in August 2005, I broke the story that Dick Cheney and the Pentagon were working on a contingency plan to use tactical nuclear weapons in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The nukes would be used because they were the only effective way to destroy the hardened sites, many of which are located deep underground. I also reported that the contingency plan would kick in if there were another major terrorist attack against the United States, whether or not Iran was actually involved. It would use the terrorist action as a justification for taking preemptive action and employing nukes would serve as a warning to Iran that any retaliation would result in possible additional nuclear strikes... Read more... Israel's Negev 'frontier', by Ben White | Al Jazeera  Palestinian Bedouins are protesting against discrimination by the Israeli government On this year's Land Day, tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel marched in Sakhnin, an Israeli city in the Lower Galilee, to protest against past and present systematic discrimination. But with the focus on Israel's policies of land confiscation, there was significance in a second protest that day. In the Negev..over 3,000 attended a rally at al-Araqib, an 'unrecognised' Palestinian Bedouin village whose lands are being targeted by the familiar partnership of the Israeli state and the Jewish National Fund...Read more... How Wikileaks shone light on world's darkest secrets, by Archie Bland | The Independent How does a website run by just five full-time staff generate so many scoops? When the Ministry of Defence first came across Wikileaks, staffers were stunned. "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands," one of them wrote in an internal email in November 2008. "Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted... it is huge." The website, an online clearing house for documents whose authors would generally prefer them to stay in the private domain, has since been banned from the MoD's internal computers, but it did no good: eventually, that email ended up on Wikileaks. And when a US Army counter-intelligence officer recommended that whistleblowers who leaked to the site be fired, that report ended up on Wikileaks too...[Could this turn out to be how the next revolution starts?] Read more...Under the beautiful valley, by Danny Felsteiner | Electronic Intifada  The Silwan neighborhood seen from the Old City of Jerusalem Sometimes when I walk in Wadi Hilweh, Jerusalem's beautiful valley, I imagine Hilweh, the legendary Palestinian grandmother for whom this valley is named, treading up the main road in the year 1947 on the way back from her olive grove with a heavy wicker basket perched on her head. If you listened carefully, you could hear her cursing her bad knees. The next scene is Hilweh sprawled on the ground, blood and olives streaming down the valley. The bullet that had pierced her heart made its way from the rifle of a young sniper from one of the Zionist militias...Read more... 'NYT' distorts history of nonviolent resistance, by Alex Kane | Aletho News On the front page of the New York Times today, there is a large photo of West Bank Palestinians planting trees, “part of a new, nonviolent approach to assert their land claims,” as Times correspondent Ethan Bronner says. While it’s good that the Times is covering nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation, it’s an article rife with omissions, mischaracterizations and distortions, all par for the course from the Times when it comes to Israel/Palestine... Read more... The Veils of Illusion: Dracula's Army, by Richard Neville | Counterpunch ...In Afghanistan and Iraq the invaders have committed numerous atrocities: shooting unarmed locals at check points, on the street, even while they're tilling fields. We've bombed wedding parties, raided homes at midnight and murdered occupants of all ages, lying about it. We've stormed hospitals in Fallujah, unleashed chemical weapons (phosphorous), left a trail of depleted uranium … We've flattened the offices of Al Jazeera (twice), shoved “suspects” in dungeons, hid inmates from the International Red Cross and tortured prisoners to death …. and it’s still happening, day after day, with Drones wiping out remote villages, shredding their families, assassinating anyone we choose... Read more... Indoctrinating Israeli Youths to be Warriors, by Stephen Lendman | Palestine Chronicle  The military is physically present in schools and school activities The modern roots go back to Zionism's founding at the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in 1897, its program being: "Establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Eretz Yisrael." Five decades later, it was accomplished by dispossessing indigenous Palestinians, denying them the right to their land, creating a new Jewish identity, legitimizing Jews as rightful owners, and using superior military force to assure it against defenseless civilians, no match against their powerful adversary...Read more... What would happen if Israel stopped fighting the world?, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz So where did you spend Passover? Tens of thousands of Israelis were in Sinai. They ignored the Counter-Terrorism Bureau's warning, yet returned home safe and sound. Other Israelis - wait until you hear this - visited Cairo. I repeat: Cairo! They too returned tired but happy. They too did not heed the warnings. Haaretz's foreign news editor, for example, went to Egypt with his wife and four small children for the holiday. He identified himself as an Israeli everywhere he went, and believe it or not, was made to feel welcome... Read more... Iraq War Vet: "We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us", by Dahr Jamail | t r u t h o u t  What is happening in Iraq seems to reflect what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls "atrocity-producing situations." He used this term first in his book "The Nazi Doctors..."Atrocity-producing situations," Lifton wrote, occur when a power structure sets up an environment where "ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities...This kind of atrocity-producing situation ... surely occurs to some degrees in all wars, including World War II, our last 'good war.' But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly prone to sustained atrocity - all the more so when it becomes an occupation.".. Read more... America: The Grim Truth, by Lance Freeman | Information Clearing House Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin. If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker. I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home... Read more... Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See | CBC What democracy is all about, by Uri Blau | Haaretz  Haaretz reporter Uri Blau The telephone call I received about a month ago should not have been a surprise. "Your apartment in Tel Aviv has been broken into," the voice on the other end of the line said. "Everything's in a mess and it's not clear what has been taken." Half an hour later, sweating in a Bangkok phone booth, mosquitoes flying around me, I spoke to the policeman who came to the apartment. "Looks like they were looking for something," he said...Read more... Ethnically Cleansing Palestinians, by Chris Hedges (video) | Information Clearing House The author spoke at the Revolution Books Town Hall Meeting at Ethical Culture Society on January 13, 2009 condemning Israel and USA complicity in Israel's murderous destruction and genocide of the innocent men, women and children of Gaza and the West Bank... Watch... AIPAC: We'll take over Cal's student government | eats shoots 'n leaves The American Israel Public Affairs Committee {AIPAC] has launched a drive to take over student government at the University of California at Berkeley, the organization’s Leadership Development Director announced at last week’s annual conference in Washington... Read more, watch video... George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent' | Times Online  Two detainees are escorted to interrogation by US military guards at Guantánamo Bay George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times...Read more... As Rahm Eyes Exit: Financial Reform Bids Collapse Into Farce, by Andrew Cockburn | Counterpunch Word from the White House is that Rahm Emanuel is still fishing around for a lucrative berth in the financial industry (“money first, then the deal” he reportedly barked at a recent industry caller discussing business possibilities in the private sector) so we needn’t hold our breath too hard waiting for the administration to bring law enforcement, or even its emasculated sibling “regulation reform,” to Wall Street anytime soon. Not that the banks have ever really felt threatened, given the contemptuous ease..with which they were able to gut the reform bill spawned last in the House of Representatives... Read more... April 9, 2010 Shadow lands: Pakistan - a nation under attack, by Robert Fisk | The Independent  In 2005, 216 people were reported killed in violence in Pakistan. By 2009, it was 25,000 American drones overhead, Taliban troops on the offensive, and the horrifying rise of child kidnapping – Pakistan is in pieces, writes Robert Fisk, in a devastating portrait of a country thwarted by violence and corruption...Read more... Obama mulls new Mideast peace plan, by Natasha Mozgovaya | Haaretz ..."Everyone knows the basic outlines of a peace deal,"..The official added that if such a plan would be launched would rely on past progress on issues such as borders, Palestinian "right of return" and Jerusalem, with one of the officials claiming that "90 percent of the map would look the same" as in former negotiations... Read more... 'Two-State Solution': Israel's 'Final Solution' to its 'Palestinian Question' | Gildas Sapiens  The strategy of the Israeli government, in case a 'Two-State Solution' is imposed on it by international pressure, has become increasingly clear in the last few years:.. [This is a persuasive interpretation of what Israel and its Western lackeys actually mean when they talk about "a Palestinian State."] Read more...What Does Holocaust Denial Really Mean?, by Daniel McGowan | Dissident Voice In April 2007 the European Union agreed to set jail sentences up to three years for those who deny or trivialize the Holocaust. More recently, in response to the remarks of Bishop Richard Williamson, the Pope has proclaimed that Holocaust denial is “intolerable and altogether unacceptable.” But what does Holocaust denial really mean?.. [Israeli hegemony is a two-headed hydra - a secular political ideology (Zionism) and the new religion of the West (the Holycause). The monster can be slain only by cutting off both heads simultaneously] Read more...US military aid to Israel violates domestic, international law, by Nahida Gordon | Electronic Intifada  Should the US government, based on international and domestic law, The Middle East Study Committee of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has published "Breaking Down the Walls", a report to be submitted to the church's 219th General Assembly this July. Some of the report's 39 recommendations have drawn harsh criticism. The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared in a 22 February action alert that "adoption of this poisonous document by the Presbyterian Church will be nothing short of a declaration of war on Israel and her supporters"...cut military aid and cease the transfer of weapons to Israel? [Bring it on] Read more... The Muted Plain: Anticipating the Wake of the Wikileaks Revelation, by Chris Floyd | Empire Burlesque So, thanks to Wikileaks.org, Americans now know that their soldiers often gun down civilians in occupied countries during reckless missions based on little or no intelligence (in every sense of the word). This will no doubt come as a great shock -- yea, a veritable political earthquake -- in a land where the top commander in what is now its chief war just recently confessed that his troops were slaughtering an "amazing" number of civilians who posed no threat whatsoever... Read more... Netanyahu's Ring and the Legitimacy of Zionism, by Ahmed Amr | Palestine Chronicle  Did I forget to mention the Prime Minister’s name? You can’t make this stuff up. It was a Monday, the first day of spring in 2010, a time usually reserved for a little fresh air. Alas, the Prime Minister of Israel was dispensing noxious fumes in a speech to AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobbying conglomerate that is considered the single most effective arm-twisting organization in Washington. Did I forget to mention the Prime Minister’s name? It’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The significance of that factoid will become apparent as we move along...Read more... The United States takes the matter of three-headed babies very seriously, by William Blum | Information Clearing House The BBC reported last month that doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the United States during its fierce onslaughts of 2004 and subsequently, which left much of the city in ruins. "It was like an earthquake," a local engineer who was running for a national assembly seat told the Washington Post in 2005. "After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was Fallujah." Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe... Read more... For Israel's Arabs, Land Day is our narrative and our justice | Haaretz  A boy riding on the shoulders of an Israeli-Arab man during a demonstration I remember the events of Land Day 1976 in particular detail. I was taking part in the demonstration in the center of Taibeh, just opposite the taxi station, when police began dispersing us with clubs, then shot and killed one of the demonstrators, Rafat Zohiri, in cold blood. As on all such days marked by the Arab population of Israel, discussions on Land Day revolve around the question of Arab citizens' place in Israeli society and also on our insistence on commemorating Nakba Day, Land Day and the riots of October 2000 every year...marking Land Day in the northern Israel on Tuesday Read more... The Strange Love Affair of the U.S. and AIPAC, by Dan Lieberman | Dissident Voice Imagine you are a representative of the highest government agencies. You encounter a group that places a foreign power above your own government’s interests and redirects and undermines your policies. Would you go to their convention, popularize them, obsequiously placate them and demonstrate you mean no harm to their sinister behavior? Sounds incomprehensible?... Read more... The Shylocks meet the Fagins | Gilad Atzmon  Once again Israel is at the center of an organ-trafficking scandal after donors complained they were not paid for their kidneys. Six Israeli suspects have been arrested, among them two lawyers and a 62-year old 1973 war hero Brigadier-General (res.) Meir Zamir. It seems the ring advertised mainly in Israeli papers in Arabic trying to attract impoverished Palestinians... Read more... Israel police uncovers organ trafficking ring in north, by Eli Ashkenazi and Jack Khoury | Haaretz Police on Tuesday arrested six men suspected of being involved in an organ trafficking ring in northern Israel. Among the suspects are an IDF reserves brigadier-general and two lawyers... [Well, it's OK if it's "good for the Jews," neh?] Read more... The Battle of the 'Empty Intestines': Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails stage hunger strike | Middle East Monitor  In the fist initiative of its kind for several years, the anti-Zionist Prisoner's Movement has planned a bold and coherent series of measures against the systematic, pervasive and persistent violation of prisoner rights within Israeli jails. The initiative, which comes from within the prisons themselves, consists of a progression of escalating non-violent 'battles' waged by thousands of prisoners being held in more than 10 Israeli prisons and three detention camps under the most appalling conditions... Read more... Israel bars Gandhi's grandson from entering Gaza | Aletho News The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) on Tuesday barred Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, from entering Gaza Strip. Gandhi expressed absolute sorrow for not being able to visit Gaza, adding that he was deeply depressed over the scenes of repression he witnessed in the Palestinian lands. He said that the Israeli talk about a Palestinian state in light of those de facto conditions was “meaningless”, adding that the separation wall, settlements and bypass roads were more horrific than what he imagined before visiting Palestine... Read more... Land is at the core of the conflict in the Middle East, by Dr. Buthayna Shaaban | Middle East Monitor  The pain of the Arab people across the Middle East continues to increase, but it does not attract the attention of world leaders, or prick their consciences beyond an invitation for the Israelis and Palestinians "to talk in proximity". Events have racial undertones that are covered up, as is the truth of what is happening on the ground... Read more... Israel knows apartheid has no future, by Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi | Electronic Intifada  After decades of military rule over Palestinians and theft of our land, Israeli leaders are increasingly seeing the writing on the wall. They are at least acknowledging reality, if not yet grappling with the consequences. In 2007, Ehud Olmert, then prime minister, declared: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights [also for the Palestinians in the territories], then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.".. Read more... Visiting the Galilee and north Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter It was strangely uplifting to spend two nights and three days in the Galilee, North Palestine. We visited good friends, made new friends, saw 3000 year old olive trees, walked in the ruins depopulated villages, and shopped and ate in Palestinian towns which survived 62 years of colonial apartheid. We crossed from Bethlehem to occupied East Jerusalem with a wave of an Israeli soldier's hand (who did not bother to check papers of an Israeli car. A few minutes later we crossed the Green line (borders before 1967) that is neither marked or guarded. The imaginary green line had long disappeared since Israeli colonies go deep into the occupied West Bank... Read more... Failure of Attempts to Discredit the Goldstone Report and its Authors, by Dr. Hanan Chehata | Intifada Palestine  Destroyed school and mosque in Rafah, Gaza, 12 January 2009 There has been a prolonged and concerted campaign to discredit anyone who is brave enough to speak out against the Zionist policies of Israel. The list of academics, lawyers, activists, politicians and private citizens who have been lambasted by Zionists for daring to speak out against Israel is absurdly long and is growing every day. It is becoming almost comical how one can predict the tag of “anti-Semite” being flung at anyone who dares even raise a minor point of concern over Israel’s growing list of human rights abuses and breaches of international law...Read more... Debate in Israel on Gag Order in Security Leak Case | NYT A young Israeli journalist is scheduled to go on trial in Israel in mid-April on accusations of serious security offenses, possibly including espionage, according to Israelis familiar with the case... [Somebody at the NYT is probably going to be fired for violating the standing gag order against anything that can be construed as critical of Israel appearing in the pages of the premier Zionist rag.] Read more...Sarah Gillespie: Singer songwriter with a difference | Arab News  Sarah Gillespie Singer songwriters come and go in the hedonistic music business, many after a few hits become icons for a short while and then fade out without trace. However, once in a while someone comes along who one knows will play an important role not only in the music world but also be at the forefront of the demand for change, Sarah Gillespie is one such person...Read more... April 8, 2010 "Israel Did 9-11" - U.S. Military Expert Supports Bollyn Thesis | Christopher Bollyn  "...the Zionists are playing this as truly an all-or-nothing exercise, because if Dr. Alan Ned Sabrosky, an expert author on military and foreign policy matters, is making huge waves in the 9-11 truth community with his interviews in which he says that he is 100 percent certain that 9-11 was a Mossad operation carried out to usher in the Zionist-designed War on Terror - and that he has conveyed this information to the highest levels of the U.S. military...they lose this one, if the American people ever realize what happened, they're done." Read more... US Committed Atrocities in Afghanistan, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News After General Stanley McChrystal took charge of US/NATO Afghan forces last June, systematic atrocities escalated sharply after promises of kinder, gentler killing (an oxymoron), winning hearts and minds, and fewer civilian casualties as a "paramount" objective - now much higher the result of more than a fourfold increase in night raids, targeting civilians, including children, while they sleep... Read more... U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch ...When it comes to the U.S. drawdown in Iraq and the build-up in Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of unbelievable... Read more... This is Not the Time for More "Quiet Diplomacy" with Israel: Kick Up the Volume on Palestine, by Joshua Broiller | Counterpunch It’s important that we learn from history by comparing U.S. support for Israel with U.S. support for a previous apartheid state. Desmond Tutu has helped people make such connections. In 2008, Desmond Tutu wrote a report for the UN Human Rights council that detailed the 2006 murders of 18 members of a single Palestinian family living in Beit Hanoun. Tutu concluded that these reckless attacks by the Israeli military possibly constituted war crimes and should be investigated further. In 1984, regarding South Africa, he testified before the U.S. congress: “You are either for or against apartheid and not by rhetoric...You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.".. Read more... Iraq slaughter not an aberration, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon  Previously classified footage of a July 2007 attack by U.S. Apache helicopters ...A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars...that killed a Reuters journalist and several other non-insurgents, published on WikiLeaks Read more... Michigan Radio Update | If Americans Knew We thought we should keep you informed on the situation with Michigan's most listened to public radio service, Michigan Radio, with three major Michigan radio stations... [It is through such seemingly small actions over time that the tipping point will be reached] Read more... All's Fair in Law and War, by Greg Felton | Dissident Voice Good evening, and welcome to Face of the Nation. Our subject tonight: freedom of expression and criticism of Israel. Every Canadian knows that freedom of expression is guaranteed under Article 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Without freedom of expression, there would be no freedom to dissent, and without the freedom to dissent, there would be no individualism, and without individualism there would be no democracy...Tonight’s show focuses on the new concept of “lawfare,” a term recently coined by zionists to charge Israel’s critics with abusing freedom of speech to single out Israel for criticism... Read more... As Iraq Threatens to Come Apart, US Problems in Afghanistan Mount, by William Pfaff | Antiwar Washington once again finds itself dangerously entangled with the hostile policies, nationalistic interests and supporters, and personal ambitions of a foreign figure whom it counted on to serve American interests. This time it is in Afghanistan, the latest in what, alas, must be described as America’s quasi-imperial foreign military adventures... Read more... The Major Jewish American Organizations Defend Israel's Humiliation of America, by James Petras | Atlantic Free Press  The ultimate shabbas goy ...Whatever the insults and crimes of the moment, the conflict between Israel and the US is not about Netanyahu’s hyper-arrogance or a new series of Jerusalem land grabs, or even the frothy spittle on Vice President Biden’s face. It is, in essence, about the relation between states or, better still, the relation between peoples where one group (Israeli Jews and their powerful one percent fifth column agents in the US) exacts tribute and imposes wars in its own interests on another group (the US tax payers, soldiers, workers and businessmen)...Read more... Israel And Apartheid: By People Who Knew Apartheid | Lawrence of Cyberia André Brink, one of South Africa's leading authors, whose opposition to the apartheid regime resulted in his novels becoming the first books in Afrikaans to be banned by the government...John Dugard, South African Professor of International Law; formerly Special Rapporteur on Palestine to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights...Breyten Breytenbach, South Africa's preeminent Afrikaner poet, who was convicted of treason in South Africa in 1975, and served seven years in jail for his opposition to apartheid...Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of Cape Town; headed post-apartheid South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission... Ronnie Kasrils, South African Member of Parliament. Member of the ANC Executive Committee 1987-2007; South Africa's Minster for Intelligence Services 2004-2008, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry (1999-2004), and Deputy Minister of Defense... Read more... US military covering up civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Stephen Soldz | OpEd News The recent news brought news of two incidents in two countries where US troops killed civilians and then lied to cover up the evidence. These are but the latest of a steady stream of lies from military and Pentagon sources about the killing of civilians... Read more... Minding the Gap: Judaism between Law and Ethics, by Ariella Atzmon | Gilad Atzmon  To talk about ethics is no easy task. In contemporary liberal democracies we are witnessing a severe tendency towards dismissing ethics and morality in favor of legal maneuvers. Contrariwise, referring to the ethical judgment as a vigilant act, attributable to the transcendental subject rather than to the empirical individual, hints at the uncanniness of human existence... Read more... Just Another Atrocity, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar Mass murder as routine The video released by Wikileaks showing US helicopters picking off civilians as our airmen chortle with glee is shocking everyone. Everyone but me, that is. Perhaps I’m suffering from some sort of moral exhaustion: I’ve just about gone numb after living through and constantly writing about the past decade of American war crimes...Read more... The Edict of Expulsion of 1290, expelling the Jews from England, by Geoffrey H. Smith | Heretical ...Most of the Jews went from England to France, while others wandered to Spain, Germany and Flanders. That fateful year for Jews, 1290, saw the first general expulsion from any country of that era. As chronicled in recorded history, Edward I was the first to order wholesale banishment of the Jews, with such awesome and long-lasting effect. His example was followed sixteen years later in France, by Philip de Bel, and two centuries later by Ferdinand and Isobel of Spain... [It doesn't take a biblical prophet to see what's coming. The most recent expulsion of the Jews - the 40th or so, depending on who's counting - occurred, for the usual reasons, in Germany in the mid-20th Century. Given the crimes committed since then by Israel, enabled by the Zionist fifth columns and their bought and paid for politicians in the Western democracies, and the inevitable awakening of the people in spite of the near total Zionist control of the mainstream media, the next expulsion is foreseeable in the short term. But who will accept them this time? Where will they (we, in my case) go - Alpha Centauri?] Read more...April 7, 2010 Why There Are No 'Israelis' in the Jewish State, by Jonathan Cook | Palestine Chronicle  Citizens classed as Jewish or Arab nationals A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as 'Israelis', a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country’s self-declared status as a Jewish state...Read more... The Mighty Pen of Edward Said, by Ron Jacobs | Dissident Voice In 1994, David Barsamian and Edward Said published a set of interviews Barsamian had conducted with Said in the years previous. This collection was titled The Pen and the Sword and was recently republished by Haymarket. I remember reading the book as soon as it came into the library I worked at then and being impressed by the clarity of thought contained therein... Read more... WikiLeaks Video: Collateral Murder, Baghdad July 12, 2007, by Michael Collins | Dissident Voice WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured... Read more, watch... The Jerusalem Quartet: Cultural Ambassadors of the State of Israel - and liars | Scottish PSC  A written statement (30 Mar 2010) by Jerusalem Quartet in response to disruption of their Wigmore Hall concert the day before states: "The demonstrators were mistaken because we are not representatives of the Government of Israel. We are Israeli citizens, but have no connection with or patronage by the Government." The statement said much more which was untrue, but the above point is crucial. It is understandable that the Jerusalem Quartet attempt to distance themselves from the State of Israel, and therefore the criticism that comes with their status as Cultural Ambassadors of an apartheid state. Unfortunately, facts can be a nuisance for those seeking to defend the indefensible. Let’s look at them:.. Read more... Gaza Freedom March | YouTube In December 2009, over 1300 people from 43 countries gathered in Cairo on their way to Gaza to join in a mass, non-violent freedom march with the people of Gaza to call for an end to the illegel blockade and siege on Gaza by Israel. The government of Egypt (supported by the governments of the United States and Israel) did not permit the freedom marchers to enter Gaza or even leave Cairo and the freedom marchers took to the streets of Cairo... Watch... Human Rights Hypocrisies, by Saul Landau | Counterpunch A 2006 BBC poll showed the United States as the “biggest global peace threat.” BBC summarized their survey: “People in European and Muslim countries see US policy in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran's nuclear programme.” June 14, 2006. This poor rating contrasts with the State Department’s image of our country as the world’s leading human rights advocate. Do State officials read these polls? Or US newspapers?.. Read more... Fayyad's Subversion of Right of Return, by Iqbal Jassat | Palestine Chronicle  Salam Fayyad desires to obliterate the memory of the Nakba A tweet on twitter by the editor of the Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah 'Fayyad just gave away your right of return' alerted me to access the link and discover that indeed, the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister has done the unforgivable...Read more... Rhythms of resistance, by Giles Trendle | Al Jazeera It may not be armed struggle, but music is an important weapon of cultural resistance and a means of safeguarding national identity for those Palestinian musicians living inside Israel and occupied east Jerusalem. "As Palestinians of 1948, we have struggled to stay on our land," says Rim al-Banna, a singer from Nazareth in the Galilee region of northern Israel. "The mere fact that we have stayed here is itself resistance and endurance. If we did not stay here we wouldn't have had the ability to talk about the Palestinian cause." "Through my art, I stay here and resist," says singer Reem Talhami. "My resistance is my art, and my art is my war.".. Read more, watch, listen... National debt seen heading for crisis level Health care may have been the last big bang of the Obama presidency. With ferocious speed, the financial crisis, recession and efforts to combat the recession have swung the U.S. debt from worrisome to ruinous, promising to handcuff the administration... Read more... The Iraq war: still a massive mistake, by Malou Innocent | CS Monitor There’s a growing narrative that Iraq’s solidifying democracy makes the seven years of US war and occupation a worthy enterprise. Some observers have even spun Iraq’s March 7 elections as proof that democracy promotion via military occupation can succeed. Don’t believe the hype. The Iraq war remains a mistake of mammoth proportions. And Iraq’s election represents a pyrrhic victory, as the economic, political, and moral costs of the occupation far outweigh any benefits... Read more... How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig  Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be destroyed... Read more... Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing, by Andy Worthington | FFF The story of Abu Zubaydah - a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn - has always been absolutely central to the “war on terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years... Read more... McCrackers, by Jeff Huber | Antiwar To amend a line made immortal by Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip Pogo, we have met the evildoers and they are us. It would be nice to think that we managed to change the vector of American foreign policy with the 2008 elections, but the New American Century is still afloat and running full steam ahead. All we’ve done is trade Rumsfeldian arrogance for McChrystalline oiliness... Read more... Not Just Guantánamo: The Ongoing Torture of Syed Fahad Hashmi, by Bill Quigley | Counterpunch Today in New York City, the U.S. is torturing a Muslim detainee with no prior criminal record who has not even gone to trial. For the last almost three years, Syed Fahad Hashmi has been kept in total pre-trial isolation inside in a small cell under 24 hour video and audio surveillance. He is forced to use the bathroom and shower in full view of the video. He has not seen the sun in years. He takes his meals alone in his cell. He cannot see any other detainees and he is not allowed to communicate in any way with any prisoners. He cannot write letters to friends and he cannot make calls to anyone but his lawyer... Read more... April 6, 2010 Palestinian worker burnt by Israelis | Palestine Telegraph  Settlers attacking Palestinian woman in Hebron Monjed Besharat, 26, a Palestinian who works at “Keryat Shmoonah”, was attacked by 3 Israelis who threw boiling water on his face causing him 3rd degree burns...[Everyday life in Palestine] Read more...Three Essays from Redress Information & Analysis Was Israel ever legitimate? Jeff Gates views the fraud that underpins Israel’s claim to “legitimacy” and argues that the perpetuation of the myth of Israel’s legitimacy constitutes a real and present danger to United States national security and wellbeing... Read more... Reversing Israel's faux legitimacy Paul J. Balles considers Israel’s false claim to legitimacy, how it can be undone and the probable counter-response from Israel and its Zionist allies and lobbyists around the world... Read more... Rule by law or defiance William A. Cook considers what might have been had the Jews decided to work within international law, rather than defy it and seize most of Palestine by force and through ethnic cleansing, and live side by side with the Palestinians the indigenous inhabitants of the Palestine... Read more... Afghanistan as a Drug War, by Alfred McCoy | TomDispatch The Opium Wars in Afghanistan  Read more... An Indispensable Compendium on the Police State, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars Alex Jones’ latest documentary, Police State 4: The Rise of FEMA, is nothing short of encyclopaedic. It is a sprawling compendium of facts that breaks down an irrefutable fact — the United States has become a high-tech police state... Read more, watch trailers... Chechnya: Who checkmates whom? | Daily Mirror Monday's terror attacks in Moscow and Wednesday's police station blast in Dagestan show that Russia's problems in the North Caucasus are far from over. It may lead to the third Chechen war. For it was a similar bombing campaign in 1999 that prompted the then Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, to send troops again to Chechnya and launch the second Chechen war... Read more... The Myth Called The Islamic World, by B. R. Gowani | Countercurrents The term “Islamic World” frequently appears in print and the electronic media thus creating an impression that such an entity exists. Especially after September 11, 2001, the term has taken on a menacing look and evokes great fear in the minds of many people; thanks to the propagandist nature and the global reach of the Western media... Read more... Interviewing Khaled Meshal on Palestine, Goldstone, International Law and Israel Peace Process | The Washington Note  On the 17th of October this year, I interviewed Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in his offices in Damascus, Syria on a wide range of topics. I did the interview as part of a launch effort for a new political blog, The Palestine Note, which is releasing the interview today... Read more, watch... Bringing Democracy to the Arabs, by Patrick Seale | Agence Global The Arab world can boast of exceptional assets -- a world religion revealed in the Arabic language; a land area extending from the Atlantic to the Gulf; great oil and gas resources; ancient cities bearing striking witness to past civilizations; a young and vigorous population eager for change. But one crucial attribute is missing -- democracy. The Arab Reform Initiative (ARI) has set out to expose -- and remedy -- this deficit. It is a bold attempt by an independent network of 10 Arab think tanks to pinpoint abuses, reward serious effort, and promote real democracy across the Arab region. The premise it has adopted is that people are the source of power... Read more... We look at Iran and see ourselves, by Avner Cohen | Haaretz ...The public discussion in Israel about a nuclear Iran is simplistic, inadequate, confused and confusing. It reflects to some degree our own biases. We come from a culture of national security in which nuclear opacity has been exploited to the hilt to create a specific model of deterrence. The result is that when we look at Iran we see ourselves: how we would behave in a similar situation. But Iran is not Israel exactly, and the Israeli experience does not necessarily reflect Iran's behavior... Read more... Lines of occupation: The post-Zionist poetics of Yitzhak Laor, by Joshua Cohen | Harper's Magazine How great is the God Who allows a poet to be born at the same moment as his nation! Let us praise Him! Let us praise Him with flute and timbrel! Let us praise Him by criticizing Israel! Yitzhak Laor—Israel’s most celebrated dissident, and perhaps its greatest living poet—was born in 1948 a month before the founding of the Jewish State... Read more... PFLP denounces Fayyad's betrayal of the right of return | Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine  ...he PFLP's statement, issued on April 2, 2010, said that the right of return is sacred and inviolable, and that Fayyad's comments violate our national rights and our national consensus, as well as international law and all principles of human rights, noting that Palestinian refugees are entitled to return to their homes and lands from which they were forced in 1948, not merely to "the future State of Palestine" as envisioned by Fayyad in his April 2 interview with Ha'aretz... [Hang in there - time is on your side.] Read more...Only an imposed solution, by Zeev Sternhell | Haaretz The events of the past few weeks in the territories, Jerusalem and Washington provide laboratory proof of a truth that many people have known for years - without a forced solution, there will be no peace agreement with the Palestinians... Read more... The Story of Palestine from A to X (video) | Uruknet Highlights of how Israel displaced Palestine, the issue's religious roots and how the conflict continues today... Watch... Witnesses: Butcher shop raided by police in Jerusalem | Maan News Agency ...Dawood Tiryaqi, the owner's brother-in-law who was in the butcher’s shop at the time, said several groups of Israeli police forces were on their way to Al-Qadisiyya street near Bab Hutta when they suddenly stormed the shop and "started beating us with clubs and spraying pepper spray at us."...Tiryaqi said police claimed the assault was sparked by "stares" from shop patrons directed at the officers... [Numerous such incidents happen every day. This is just another example.] Read more...De facto State, by Jim Miles | Palestine Chronicle  Yaari argues that the Gaza campaign was a 'punitive action.' Part of the dilemma in Palestine is that the more the 'peace' process is delayed, moving nowhere, the more Israel gains in the way of confiscated and settled land. There are two basic solutions: either a one state solution (whether bi-national or otherwise); or a two state solution with Palestine existing on some remnant of land left over from Israeli settlement. A recent combination of events/ideas has left me wondering if the one state solution is perhaps the only remaining solution if not the de facto situation now...[No need to "wonder;" it's obvious.] Read more...An exclusive interview with Grant F. Smith (video) | Sweet Silence How Israel's Lobby Challenges Rule of Law in America This week the Iranian satellite television channel PressTV is broadcasting a 25 minute interview with IRmep director Grant F. Smith about the Israel lobby's history of challenges to rule of law and governance in the United States...Watch... Out From the Shadows, by Philip Weiss | The American Conservative AIPAC confronts its worst fear: daylight In that radical handbook on the workings of American society, the Wizard of Oz never recovered once Dorothy pulled back the curtain of her own innocence. One would like to believe that AIPAC will never recover from a brutal spring that has exposed its real interests to the American public. Even supporters of the Jewish state have criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for fully taking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s side in his battle with Barack Obama over settlements, and during its recent annual conference, the lobby looked wobbly and defensive...Read more... Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies, and Con-Artists: Bush to Obama, by Francis Boyle | ZSpace  Leo Strauss, aka Dr. Strangelove ...These pro-Israeli Neo-Cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Hobbist/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in its Department of Political Science for many years...Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago's Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur completely with Professor Drury's devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process that has been inflicted by Chicago's Straussian Neo-Con cabal. Strauss was a protégé of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on anyone, including the Jews. Chicago's Neo-Cons are Neo-Nazis...Read more... Peace for Israelis and Palestinians? Not without America's tough love, by Jonathan Ben-Artzi | Christian Science Monitor An Israeli student explains why the US should act on moral outrage over Israel’s discriminatory policies before it’s too late ...Increasingly, students are questioning the morality of the ties US institutions have with the unjust practices being carried out in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories. Students are seeing that these practices are often more than merely “unjust.” They are racist. Humiliating. Inhumane. Savage...[He doesn't mention it but apparently Ben-Artzi is Netanyahu's nephew] Read more...Are Federal Officials Above the Law?, by Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF ...When Obama was a presidential candidate, he emphasized to American voters that President Bush’s warrantless surveillance of Americans was “unconstitutional and illegal.” But once Obama got into office, he silenced his tune, especially in lawsuits that were brought by victims of this criminal action... Read more... Muqtada al-Sadr Holds the Keys to Power: Iraq's New Kingmaker, by Patrick Cockburn | Counterpunch  In a demonstration that the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is Iraq's new political kingmaker his supporters are holding a referendum today and tomorrow to choose the next Iraqi prime minister. The referendum has no legal standing but it shows the confidence of the Sadrists after they unexpectedly won at least 39 seats in the 325-member Iraqi parliament. They have demanded that prime minister Nouri al-Maliki step down as the price of their support for a government led by his party... Read more... Why there is no mainstream investigative journalism about the Israel lobby | Mondoweiss ...The former executive editor of the New York Times, Max Frankel, is vetting editorials to protect the Jewish state; my old newspaper the New York Observer is telling me to take a hike because I want to write about the Israel lobby; the Atlantic is killing Walt and Mearsheimer; Wolf Blitzer and Dan Senor used to work for the lobby and are now all over cable; and Jeff Goldberg used to be an Israeli soldier and is interviewed on Meet the Press by David Gregory, who is studying Hebrew. Ethan Bronner’s son goes into the IDF, and Bronner is the lead reporter for the New York Times???!! And on it goes, it never stops... Read more... The Bomb-Bomb-Iran 'Parlor Game', by Robert Parry | Consortium News Normally, if two countries with powerful nuclear arsenals were openly musing about attacking a third country over mere suspicions that it might want to join the nuclear club, we’d tend to sympathize with the non-nuclear underdog as the victim of bullying and possible aggression... Read more... April 5, 2010 They Were Just Following Orders, by Laurence M. Vance | Lew Rockwell  Who in the world would do such a thing? Who would nail the Son of God to a cross and crucify him? Of all the horrible things that soldiers have done throughout history, this is certainly the most reprehensible. Oh, but they were just following orders. Apologists for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most people who are indifferent to these wars, and even many of those who oppose them all generally agree on one thing: We should never condemn the soldiers; they are just following orders... Read more... Palestinian aspirations are clear, but what does Israel want?, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz Does anybody know what Benjamin Netanyahu wants? Has anybody ever understood what his predecessors wanted? Where are they headed? And where are they leading us? One after another, Israeli politicians have been asked these questions, only to reply with the standard rejoinders: "You don't expect me to answer this question" or "Let's leave this for the negotiations." Vague answers, obfuscations, evasive and noncommittal cliches... Read more... Israel: total boycott against total occupation, by Antoine Raffoul | Redress Information & Analysis Antoine Raffoul argues that as the Israeli occupation is total and is sustained with the help of almost every institution and enterprise in the country, so must the boycott of Israel be all-encompassing and uncompromising... Read more... Israel Gags News on Extrajudicial Killings, by Mel Frykberg | Antiwar An Israeli journalist remains under house arrest and another lives abroad after they broke news on Israeli undercover units carrying out assassinations or "targeted killings" of non-combatant Palestinian political opponents... Read more... Egyptian police arrest publisher of pro-ElBaradei book | Reuters  Egyptian police have arrested the publisher of a book on former UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei and his calls for political change in Egypt ahead of elections this year and next, a security source said. ElBaradei, who returned to Egypt in February after 12 years as head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has said he would consider running for president if certain conditions were met... Read more... The Palestinians are winning the legitimacy war: will it matter?, by Richard Falk | Redress Information & Analysis Richard Falk argues that a Palestinian victory in the legitimacy war with Israel would not necessarily produce the desired political results and that it is vital that the Palestinians exercise "patience, resolve, leadership and vision, as well as sufficient pressure" if they are to win their just rights... Read more... Simpsons in IsraHell, check it out before it is taken down | Gilad Atzmon A comical glimpse into Israeli collective madness. If it wasn't so tragic, it would be funny. Watch... Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US | Christian Science Monitor Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person. This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades, his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the Israel lobby... Read more... Celebrating the Land; Celebrating Palestine, by Reham Alhelsi | Voice from Palestine  The Palestinian calendar is full of special days. Growing up, day after day and year after year, we were introduced to these special days, and with time more such days joined our calendar. Almost every month there is something to commemorate; a day to commemorate the Nakba of the Palestinian people, a day to remember the martyrs killed by the Israeli occupation army, a day to remember every crime committed by Israel and its allies against the people of Palestine... Read more... Israel and the “delegitimization” oxymoron, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis Alan Hart argues that in law the foundations upon which Israel claims legitimacy do not actually exist and that “only the Palestinians could give it the legitimacy it craved”. He says that “what delegitimizes Israel is the truth of history”, which is why “Zionism has worked so hard … to have the truth suppressed”... Read more... How to Victimize a Community: The British Government’s Approach to “Counter-terrorism”, by Shahid Bux | Dissident Voice Revelations published yesterday by the liberal arm of the British press provide yet more evidence of the systemic repression and targeting of the British Muslim community. An article in The Independent claimed that “…personal information concerning the private lives of almost 1,000 British Muslim university students is to be shared with US intelligence agencies in the wake of the Detroit bomb scare.” The article goes on to add that the homes of more than 50 students have been visited by police officers without a single arrest... Read more... Activists support rehabilitation of historic natural springs destroyed by settlers | International Solidarity Movement  Repairing the historic natural springs in Wadi Qana A group of internationals, including two ISM activists, joined supporters from Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank in assisting the villagers of Qarawat Bani Hassan repair and rehabilitate the historic natural springs which lie in the nearby Wadi Qana. The springs which issue at the base of the wadi feed into a series of reservoirs cut into the stone, said to date from Roman times...Read more... Twilight Zone: From 'wanted' to welcome, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz Bilal al-Ahmar returned home a few weeks ago. For nine years, he hadn't been back to his house, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. His elderly mother now lives on the first floor; the second floor is home to his brother Abed, Abed's wife, Jewish American lawyer Allegra Pacheco, and their three children... Read more... Ethnic cleansing of Palestine - a premise for the construction of Israel? (video) Watch... "What Compels You to Do That?": Teaching English As Activism in Hebron, by Rebecca Kirzner | The Only Democracy? I teach English in Hebron. There. It’s said. The seemingly innocuous statement that generates an onslaught of questions, quizzical looks, and widened eyes. To be fair, it’s the type of statement that one does not often hear from a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey, living in Jerusalem... [There are many heroes and they are not all Palestinians] Read more...Israel Lobby Gets Congress to Stick It to Turkey, by MJ Rosenberg | Huffington Post Yesterday the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the Armenian genocide resolution. That is the bill, kicking around for years, that recognizes the Armenian genocide as precisely that - genocide. The Turkish government has always strongly opposed the resolution, arguing - unconvincingly, in my opinion - that the slaughter of the Armenians occurred in the context of war and was not an attempt at their intentional eradication... Read more... Israel breaks into school in Ramallah | Palestine Telegraph  Israeli occupation forces broke into Abood Secondary School in west of Ramallah and tried to detain a number of its students under the pretext of throwing stones after a day of killing one of the school students. Samar Redawna, 16, a student in Abood Secondary School was killed as an Israeli settler ran over her on Thursday... Read more... Eyewitness Report on the Judaization of East Jerusalem, by Letty Cottin Pogrebin | Huffington Post From now on, I can never say I didn't know. This, thanks to Hagit Ofran, director of Peace Now's "Settlement Watch," who spends four hours schlepping us around East Jerusalem to see Palestinian properties that have been expropriated by the Israeli government or by Jewish settlers. We're a six-member delegation from Americans for Peace Now, the U.S. counterpart of Ofran's group, and we've come to assess the damage... Read more... Where were you for the seger?, by Neri Livneh | Haaretz ...Five years ago, on this very road - how terrifying the memory - a large rock was hurled at the car window of the woman who drove me to Jerusalem this week. But this time, we never feared for a moment. When we have seder night, the Palestinians have seger night - and not just on Passover, either... Read more... The Next Civil War, by Bob Burnett | OpEd News The Civil War ranks as the most costly of US wars, with 625,000 deaths and a comparable number of injuries. Now the Republican Party is stoking the fires of insurrection and for thousands of right-wing zealots a new civil war seems a political necessity... Read more... "No Special Relationships", by Philip Giraldi | Campaign For Liberty In his farewell address George Washington recommended that the United States chart a course that would be unique among the nations of the world. He and the other Founding Fathers had just triumphed in a revolution that challenged in part the right of Kings to wage wars based on their own personal interests or due to rivalries with other nations. Washington understood that the complex alliances that both stitched together and divided the great powers of Europe had resulted in a nearly continuous series of wars starting in the sixteenth century, bringing death to millions and economic ruin. Washington advised the American people to avoid the quarrels of foreigners in his Farewell Address of 1796... Read more... April 4, 2010 Easter Sunday Message from Father Manuel, the Pastor of Gaza | Australians for Palestine  Easter mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem ...Israel has devastated and tortured us in their many wars. We ask you to see the wounds of innocent Palestinian people and to be compassionate towards the Palestinian holocaust that you witness with your own eyes and touch with your own hands, and to know those who perpetrated this crime against our children. Search with us for justice that is the mother of peace. Protect us and safeguard our Holy Sites. . . May Christ’s compassion revive our love for God even though it is currently in ‘intensive care’.”..Read more... Al-Nakba Denial: Concealing the Catastrophe, by Tammy Obeidallah | The Ugly Truth On May 15, 1948, one day after the British mandate over Palestine ended, the Jewish state of Israel was officially created. That date marked the beginning of a 62-year exile for 750,000 Palestinians, who along with their descendants now comprise the world’s largest refugee population at nearly five million people. Palestinians and people of conscience all around the world commemorate al-Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic. The Palestinian population within what is now Israel—one quarter of which are internally displaced from villages decimated by the Israeli army and Zionist militias—mark al-Nakba by marching through the places where their villages once stood... Read more... Clark to Al-Manar: US Wars on “Terrorism” were the Essence of “Violence” | Al Manar  Clark in earlier days Former United States Attorney General William Ramsey Clark said Friday that the US policy has led to many tragedies including the Palestinian cause. “This tragedy is represented by the unjustified and wrong detention of the Palestinian people by Israel. This issue should be addressed and the prisoners shall be set free. Human Rights should be considered.”..Read more... Who's afraid of 9/11 conspiracy theories?, by Maidhc Ó Cathail | Redress Information & Analysis “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” – Queen Gertrude, Hamlet Maidhc Ó Cathail views some of the more intriguing facts as reported in the mainstream media implicating Israel in the 9/11 attack on the New York Twin Towers..Whenever someone insists too strongly about something not being true, we tend to suspect that maybe it is. In their denials of involvement in 9/11, do Israel’s apologists “protest too much”?..Read more... Hamas urges international intervention over Israeli threats | Press TV  A Palestinian man inspects the damage at one of the targets of overnight Israeli The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has called for international intervention in a bid to prevent another Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip. The plea comes after Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom warned on Friday that Tel Aviv would launch another large-scale military operation against the Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip in the near future...airstrikes in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis on April 2, 2010 Read more... Lieberman: Abbas urged Israel to topple Hamas in Gaza war | Press TV Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says the Acting Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas urged Israel to topple Hamas in last year's Gaza war... [That would be consistent with past words and actions of the Vichy HQ in Ramallah] Read more...Seaborne aid convoy to be sent to Gaza | Press TV  A new aid convoy is scheduled to be sent to the besieged Gaza strip by sea under the slogan of "Freedom is the Last Port." The decision was made in meeting held by Turks, Arab and international activists in Istanbul on Friday. According to the head of the Turkish Relief Foundation (IHH) Bulent Yildrim, a convoy consisting of 20 vessels will leave Turkey next month... Read more... The So Called 'Only Democracy in the Middle East'? | Gilad Atzmon In Israel, the so called ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, a journalist has been held under house arrest since December for leaking a story of Israeli barbarism. In the Jewish Democracy another prominent Journalist had to run for his life for telling the truth about Israel’s murderous policies and its chief war criminals... Read more... Photo Essay ~~ They Died So That We Can Live, And Their Spirit Lives On | Desert Peace  “In memory of those who fell on Land Day. They died so that we can live, and their spirit lives on” For a quarter of a century, the Palestinian minority in Israel has celebrated Land Day on 30 March 30 as a protest against Israel’s discriminatory policies toward its one million Palestinian citizens and to underline its collective and individual rights. Land Day, or Yoam al-’Ard in Arabic, is also a commemoration of the bloody confrontations with state “security” forces that took place in 1976 when six Palestinians were killed and some 100 injured...View... Israeli forces in action Good Friday, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter They finally released our 10 friends yesterday from Israeli jails on bail pending "trial". Those kidnapped from the peaceful march in Bethlehem area on Palm Sunday attended a press conference in Ramallah and passed by Beit Sahour late last night. Each is to appear in front of a military judge later this month. Yet, the Friday regular demonstration in Al-Ma'sara was large and daring... Read more... Damned as anti-Semite, Geo. Marshall predicted that Israel would become US tarbaby | Mondoweiss ..The man who broke the Petraeus story now publishes "Petraeus wasn’t the first," in which he defends the reputation of former Army chief of staff and Sec’y of State George Marshall, who warned that Partition would create endless trouble for the U.S. This cost Marshall in the reputation mills, even though he’d won WW2 for us. A publisher in NY told Perry that Marshall was an anti-Semite, and Richard Holbrooke wrote as much in print, Perry says, but the charge is unfair. Marshall was merely "prescient"... Read more... Tuwani versus Havat Ma'on: Microcosm of Israeli Apartheid, by Khaled Amayreh | Uruknet ..Havat Ma’on, originally an army outpost, is inhabited by 300-400 fanatical settlers, some originating in places as far as Moscow and Baltimore. Indoctrinated in the Jewish messianic ideology, the settlers..believe they have a mandate from God to harass, torment and kill "goyem" or non-Jews.... Read more... A rare voice of courage: journalist Gideon Levy interviewed, by David Cronin | Electronic Intifada  Gideon Levy Gideon Levy is a rare voice of courage in an Israeli media generally supine towards the political establishment. Since 1988, he has written the "Twilight Zone" column for the Israeli daily Haaretz, documenting unflinchingly the myriad cruelties inflicted on the Palestinian people under occupation...Read more... Let's talk, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz ...Come and talk with leaders who declared war on the few remaining peace activists left in their society. Talk with those who shoot demonstrators and arrest them in their homes. Come and talk with a society whose peace camp leader, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered because of his desire for peace with you. Come and talk with a prime minister who once stood at Zion Square in Jerusalem while protesters brandished doctored photographs of Rabin wearing an SS uniform and said nothing. Come and talk with a country that replaces its government at a dizzying pace, a country in which just two of its prime ministers, in the twilight of their terms in office, were ready to offer you semi-reasonable, minimal proposals before their successors disavowed those offers as if they had never existed... Read more... When 'We the People' Lost America, by Len Hart | The Existentialist Cowboy Includes the video A Conversation with E.L. Doctorow We have forgotten what it was like in this country during the Reagan administration. A great reminder may be found in the words of E.L. Doctorow, writing in 1989, who summed up the legacy left to Bill Clinton by the conservative administrations of Ronald Reagan/Bush:.. Read more, watch... Left-Wing Icon: America Is Still Headed Towards Fascism Under Obama, by Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet Are liberals finally starting to understand the real enemy – the two party monopoly?  When left-wing icon Naomi Wolf warned that America was heading towards fascism under George W. Bush, characterized by illegal surveillance, arbitrary detention of suspects, and paramilitary martial law, she was lauded, but when she continued to issue the same warning as a result of Obama’s failure to reverse any of those policies, many on the left abandoned support for her... Read more... Open Letter to Berkeley Students on their Historic Israeli Divestment Bill, by Naomi Klein | Common Dreams On March 18, continuing a long tradition of pioneering human rights campaigns, the Senate of the Associated Students of the University of California, Berkeley (ASUC) passed "A Bill In Support of UC DIVESTMENT FROM WAR CRIMES." The historic bill resolves to divest ASUC's assets from two American companies, General Electric and United Technologies, that are "materially and militarily supporting the Israeli government's occupation of the Palestinian territories"-and to advocate that the UC, with about $135 million invested in companies that profit from Israel's illegal actions in the Occupied Territories, follow suit... Read more... Fractures in the U. S. / Israeli Relationship?, by M. Shahid Alam | Counterpunch ...What has occasioned this open rift between two spouses in a heavenly marriage? There have been tiffs before between them, but never before has a US administration told Israel that its policy endangers American troops or American interests in the Middle East? This talk is serious. It belies decades of rhetoric that has boosted Israel as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East... Read more.. Benevolent Occupier Allows Clothes to Reach Victims | KABOBfest  As a gesture of its peaceful intentions, Israel yesterday announced to great fanfare that it would allow shoes and clothes into the besieged Gaza Strip for the first time in three years. Israeli spokesmen said the import of the dangerous materials was designed to ensure Gazans don’t fall too behind in the latest fashion trends, and also to ostensibly clothe naked Palestinian males who might pose a serious danger to innocent Jewish girls... Read more... Is America Becoming a Third World Country in Innovation?, by K. Gajendra Singh | Rebel News Includes the article When It Comes to Innovation, Is America Becoming a Third World Country?, by Arianna Huffington | Huffington Post ...When I last visited US in 1995 , I spent considerable time waiting at the airports and saw middle class US travelers , badly dressed in misshapen bodies , a result of fast food and BT seeds which Indian ministers are insistent on introducing into India presumably for a consideration .Those who form opinions about the Americans by watching Bay Watch and other Soap Operas believe how healthy and wholesome they are . But the reality is quite different...Read more... The McCain-Lieberman Police State Act, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News If enacted, it will advance what this writer addressed in a December 2007 article titled, "Police State America - A Look Back and Ahead," covering numerous Bush administration laws, Executive Orders (EOs), National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, edicts, and various illegal acts targeting designated domestic and foreign adversaries, dissent, civil liberties, human rights, and other democratic freedoms... Read more... 28 Nations Helped US to Detain Suspects, by Sherwood Ross | Uruknet Twenty-eight nations have cooperated with the U.S. to detain in their prisons, and sometimes to interrogate and torture, suspects arrested as part of the U.S. "War on Terror.".. Read more... Israeli Police Break Into Media Office In East Jerusalem, Attack Locals and Visitors | International Middle East Media Center  The Israeli Police attacked on Thursday Wadi Hilwa Media Center, in Silwan’s Wadi Hilwa neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, and violently attacked employees and visitors, leading to several injuries... Read more... Afghanistan as a Drug War, Alfred McCoy | TomDispatch ...Since Afghanistan now grows the opium poppies that provide more than 90% of the world’s opium, the raw material for the production of heroin, it’s not surprising that drug-trade news and war news intersect from time to time. More surprising is how seldom poppy growing and the drug trade are portrayed as anything but ancillary to our Afghan War. Fortunately, Alfred McCoy has been focused on the drug trade -- and the American role in fostering it -- in Southeast, Central, and South Asia for a long time... Read more... Children of Gaza (video) | P U L S E A moving, must-see video that first aired on Channel 4 (UK)’s Dispatches on 15 March. BAFTA-winning filmmaker Jezza Neumann follows the lives of three children for over a year. The children are amazing: well-spoken, reflective, resilient, understandably vengeful and fearful, but very endearing. The toll this inhumanity has taken is also clear... Watch... Mahmoud Abbas' Humiliating Plea, by Rannie Amiri | Countercurrents The recently concluded 22nd Arab League summit hosted by Colonel Muammar Qadhafi in his hometown of Sirte, Libya, certainly met pre-summit expectations: a significant number of no-shows (more than a third of Arab heads-of-state failed to attend), a delegation that threatened to walk out, dire warnings issued on the consequences of Israel’s expansion into East Jerusalem, and bellicose rhetoric to accompany it all... Read more... The Gaza Strip: Hamas hangs on | The Economist Hamas has done well to survive but it is threatened by rivalry among Islamists  After four gruelling years under siege, the Gazans—and the Islamist movement, Hamas, that governs them—are still managing against the odds to survive. Some even prosper. The tunnels that snake under Gaza’s border with Egypt have multiplied so fast that supply sometimes exceeds demand. So stiff is commercial competition that tunnel-diggers complain that their work is no longer profitable. As a British parliamentary report recently noted, Israel officially allows Gaza to import only 73 of more than 4,000 items that are available in the strip... Read more... A ‘Regrettable’ Event in East Jerusalem, by Noam Chomsky | In These Times The Israeli government agreed that Palestinians can call whatever fragments of Palestine are left to them "a state" if they like—or they can call them "fried chicken." Yet again the flashpoint is East Jerusalem, seized by Israel in the 1967 war - this time, a proposed 1,600-apartment complex in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood. And yet again the aftermath has led to the death of Palestinians by Israeli gunfire...Read more... Palestinian Prisoners Forum: Israeli Occupation arrested 80 children from Hebron last month | Middle East Monitor The Palestinian Prisoners Club in Hebron said that the rate of arrests of Palestinians from the Hebron district is the highest of all of the Palestinian governorates, in the context of the Occupation's wave of arrests since the beginning of the year... Read more... Barghouti: Palestinian Terrorist or the Next Mandela?, by Yermi Brenner | Huffington Post ...Barghouti's popularity amongst Palestinians only grew since he was arrested by the Israeli military on April 15th 2002. He was convicted of organizing suicide attacks that murdered twenty-one Israelis, and sentenced to five life sentences, which he is serving in Hasharon Prison, 20 km north of Tel Aviv. This video report..investigates who is Marwan Barghouti, and could he really be a key player in Middle East conflict if he's released from prison... Read more, watch... Communal Groups Mobilize Against ‘Delegitimizers’ of Jewish State, by Nathan Guttman | The Forward Targets See New Push as Effort To Discredit Legitimate Criticism  CODEPINK’s Nancy Kricorian says she does not aim to delegitimize Israel The term, used to describe a broad spectrum of anti-Israel protests, has become a major rallying point for the American Jewish community and is the up-and-coming cause for Jewish organizations. In particular, supporters of this emerging advocacy effort point to the campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction — BDS — Israel as a primary marker distinguishing “delegitimizers” from genuine critics...Read more... This is not a phony crisis, by Jeffrey Blankfort | Mondoweiss This is not a phony crisis, as a number of critics have been saying. I think the Obama administration has gotten the word from Petraeus and Mullen that Israel has become a liability and it is not about to let Israel’s government of right wing crazies continue to harm US interests in the Middle East. Even former Israeli consul in NY, Alon Pinkas told Ynets News yesterday that to sum up the criticism coming from the US, "Israel is turning from an asset to a burden.".. [When I lived in DC I referred to it as home to some of the dumbest bright people in the world. It took how many decades for them to figure this out?] Read more...Palestinian journalists repeatedly targeted by IDF gunfire during March | Reporters Without Borders Reporters Without Borders deplores the frequency of press freedom violations by the Israel Defence Forces, which routinely fire on Palestinian journalists. At least eight journalists were injured by shots fired by Israeli soldiers during March in the West Bank and Jerusalem... Read more... Netanyahu's Lies and the Politicians Who Swallow Them: The Lobby v. America, by Ramzy Baroud | Counterpunch As I listened to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address an animated crowed of supporters on March 22, I felt physically sick. The man has already displayed time and again a complete lack of moral sense or ethical framework in his words and actions. In his recent arguments, he once again twisted history, manipulated facts and fabricated his own selective, self-interested and highly questionable narrative. Netanyahu, a colonialist from a faraway land, also had the audacity to convince himself and a few others that he had legal, moral and historic rights over my land. While I am the son of a Palestinian family rooted in Palestine since time immemorial, Netanyahu is the son of an immigrant from Lithuania. While he giddily robs more Palestinian land in Jerusalem, I live in exile... Read more... April 2, 2010 If you are a supporter of One Democratic State... You are warmly invited to attend and/or help to organize the upcoming Second Conference on One Democratic State to be held in Haifa May 28-30... Read more... Who's Afraid of a One-State Solution?, by Dmitry Reider | Foreign Policy As Israeli-Palestian peace talks remain at an impasse, a radical solution gains steam  In light of the ongoing deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, leaders such as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni have raised the specter of a one-state solution. Their intention, of course, is to scare some sense into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his intransigent coalition partners. But, as this once-taboo idea becomes a legitimate part of political discussion in the region, some Israeli intellectuals are making the case that this is not something to fear, but a path toward a viable resolution to the region's long-running crisis... [I can easily imagine that in 2020 people will be shocked to recall that in 2010 it is was still referred to as "a radical solution"] Read more...The FBI Deputizes Business, by Matthew Rothschild | Common Dreams Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does - and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law... [One more nail in the coffin of the good old USA] Read more...Afghanistan: The Secret War, by Manlio Dinucci | Voltaire  Michael Furlong..diverted money from an official budget to pay General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, is worried: the Special Operations Forces are "responsible for a large number of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and operate by their own rules"...private contractors for identifying targets for assassination Read more... Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies | Joe Bageant ...It took me over fifty years to figure out there is no running away, or finding some perfect life. We just exchange one set of problems for another. I ran away to the US Navy to escape a small redneck town. I ran away to the West Coast to become a hippie. I ran to homestead in Idaho on an Indian reservation, I later ran back into the straight world, mostly out of fear for financial security. And when it became personally undeniable that America had become a lonely totalistic empire, whose heart is a bank vault, and that I would not survive its enforced loneliness, masked by gunpoint cheer and state authorized messages of "hope," and loudspeakers above the workhouse extolling the "work ethic," well, it was either be somewhere else or die inside... Read more... U.S. Policy Toward Palestine and Israel Takes Center Stage | AAPER  The donkey from Delaware During the month of March, world attention toward relations between the United States, Israel and the Palestinians reached a level not seen in many years. On March 3, U.S. Special Envoy to the Arab League endorsed the U.S.-backed "proximity talks", thus encouraging the Palestinian Authority to enter into "indirect negotiations" with Israel. Though the "proximity talks" were seen by many as a step backward, the Obama Administration hailed it as an important breakthrough. This, however, was not meant to be...Read more... Israel's Extrajudicial Assassinations: Alternative Reading of the Al-Mabhouh Murder, by Ramzy Baroud | Global Research The killing of Palestinian activist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on January 19, 2010 was clearly a well-planned, violent and sadistic act, committed by Israeli assassins in the supposed safety of a sovereign country...It is disgraceful enough that the assassins used ‘fraudulent’ European passports, as well as credit cards linked to an American bank to carry out their plans. But more upsetting is the fact that this cruel and calculated action has inspired little more than expressions of ‘outrage’. Have we become this resigned to Israeli impunity? What about the sanctity of life, the sovereignty of nations and the respect for international law?.. Read more... FCC Adviser Advocates State-run Propaganda “Megaphone” to Counter Alternative Media, by Kurt Nimmo | Prison Planet  FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has addressed the National Broadband Plan in FDR-esque overtones In order to counter alternative media, an adviser to the Federal Communications Commission has suggested using your tax money — or rather money the government borrows from bankers and then expects your children to pay off — to create “public media” that will serve as a “filter” and a “megaphone” for a network of government-funded journalists competing with other, non-government-backed reporters...Read more... Lovelock: 'We can't save the planet' | BBC News Professor James Lovelock, the scientist who developed Gaia theory, has said it is too late to try and save the planet... Read more... El Baradei: Western policy in Mideast a total failure | Israel News  El Baradei lashes out at West Former IAEA chief slams Western support for tyrants, calls for policy based on dialogue, understanding...Read more... Iran, Israel and an Obama miscalculation in the works? | Alan Hart President Obama’s apparent desire to move forcefully against Iran with new sanctions within weeks, not months, makes me wonder if he is calculating that he will be in a better position to put some real pressure on Israel, and possibly bring about regime change there, if he can successfully bully Iran into playing the game his way. If that is what Obama is thinking, he could be setting himself up (or is being set up?) for another humiliation... Read more... The old America is fading, by Garrison Keillor | Salon  In spring one has hopes for the beloved country. But an old guy like me can't keep the doubt from creeping in... Read more... April 1, 2010 55% of illegal Israeli settlers in Jerusalem al-Quds | Press TV  A general view of the Ma'ale Zaytim settlement in occupied East Jerusalem (al-Quds) On the anniversary of the Land Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics announces that more than 85% of Palestinian land remains under Israeli control, adding that 55% of illegal settlers reside in Jerusalem (al-Quds)...Read more... Several very dangerous Islamic terror networks uncovered in the USA (video) | Vineyard of the Saker [Happy April Fools Day!] Watch... Words! Words! Words! The shackles that bind the US to Israel, by Sonja Karkar | Redress Information & Analysis Sonja Karbar reminds us that beyond Washington’s superficial admonishing of Israel over its humiliation of the Obama administration lie the unbreakable shackles that paralyse the US and prevent it from translating its words into real action to rein in the Zionist monster... Read more... French justice minister threatens Israel critics with jail | Press TV  Read more... Inspiring images of resistance to apartheid, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter We now have three videos up on youtube for the historic march that breached the apartheid walls on Palm Sunday insisting on right of freedom of movement for Palestinians. Ten people of the original 16 are still held by the occupation forces (as were the donkey and horse used in the event!)... Read more... Visions of Palestine's present and future in "Invictus" and "Avatar"  Palestinians dress as Avatar's Na'vi people at a protest against Israel's wall ...Invictus and Avatar inspire reflection on the past, present and future hopes of our nation. The response to these movies among audiences around the world underscores the amount of sympathy around the world for moral struggles that ensue after the creation of an unjust reality, a sympathy Palestinians have been slow at garnering. But if Martin Luther King Jr.'s proclamation was right, "the arch of the moral universe is long, but it is tilted towards justice," we Palestinians may have some hope...Read more... Museum of Tolerance Desecrates Graves, by John Taylor | Antiwar Rabbi Marvin Hier’s Los Angeles-based "Museum of Tolerance", part of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is building a $150 million branch in Jerusalem. The Museum, whose mission is confronting "global anti-Semitism, extremism, hate …and promoting unity and respect among Jews and people of all faiths," is being built atop part of the Mamilla Muslim cemetery, some of whose burials date to the 11th century. The graves, which may contain the remains of soldiers who fought with Saladin against the Crusaders, are being uprooted to make way for Rabbi Hier’s new museum... [One wonders what planet these people are from] Read more...Israel's blood diamonds, by Seán Clinton | Electronic Intifada  ...The diamond industry is a major pillar of the Israeli economy. No other developed country is so heavily dependent on a single luxury commodity and the goodwill of individual consumers globally. Anything that threatens the carefully-nurtured image of diamonds as objects of desire, romance and purity could have serious consequences for the Israel diamond industry and the country's ability to continue funding its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, the construction of illegal colonies and other associated criminal activities that render it the pariah of the modern age... Read more... "Our President Is Deceiving the American Public": Pentagon Papers Whistleblower on President Obama and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq | Democracy Now We are joined by a man who played a major role in efforts to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak out against US militarism until the present day... Read transcript, watch show... My Beautiful Palestine, by Samah Sabawi | Electronic Intifada  My beautiful Palestine transcends space and time ...My father always told us “To be a Palestinian means you must speak truth to power and you must never give up.” He was always busy teaching us through his poetry and his stories about being good citizens of the world, identifying with the oppressed and standing for the rights of those who have none. He brought home dozens of movies including "Ghandi", and "Cry Freedom" and he sat us down to watch the series "Roots", always discussing the movies and stories afterward. It didn’t matter if it was about abolishing slavery, apartheid in South Africa or non-violent civil disobedience in India, the message was always the same: Palestine is not one battle, it is an epic human story told again and again of how the oppressed stand up against the oppressors...Read more... The Desert Ox, by Jeff Huber | Antiwar As the New York Times reports, former Iraqi prime minister and U.S. sock puppet Iyad Allawi’s apparent victory in his country’s recent election sets up a "period of uncertainty" that may "threaten plans to withdraw American troops." Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq who reminds one of John Candy’s character in the film Stripes, is likely creating seismic events as he jumps for joy... Read more... A New Middle East War?, by Conn Hallinan | Counterpunch When Israeli Minister without Portfolio Yossi Peled said recently that a war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was “just a matter of time” and that such a conflict would include Syria, most observers dismissed the comment as little more than posturing by a right-wing former general. But Peled’s threat has been backed by Israeli military maneuvers near the Lebanese border, violations of Lebanese airspace, and the deployment of an anti-missile system on Israel’s northern border. The Lebanese are certainly not treating it as Likud bombast... Read more... Israel has Breached Peremptory Norms of Humanitarian Law, by Kawther Salam | Palestine Think Tank  Phil Shiner, Supervisor of Public Interest Lawyers, United Kingdom, said during the panel discussion on the Seminar on Assistance to the Palestinian People that the Advisory Opinion was extremely helpful as it had identified three different pre-empting norms Israel had breached, explaining that peremptory norms or jus cogens norms were actions recognized in international law that no State was ever permitted to commit, such as genocide, slavery and denial of the right to self-determination.The opinion was crystal clear that Israel was in breach of international law and set out the obligations of third States... Read more... A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion. One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country’s political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?... Read more... How to Create Shared Threats When You have No Shared Values with Those You Want to Blackmail, by Hazim Bitar | Palestine Think Tank  In the absence of real shared values with a liberal West, Israel, with help of its international sleeper cells, needs to create shared threats or to facilitate them. The cases below are the tip of the iceberg. We may never know the extent of the damage Israel has caused to life and property... Read more... How the Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the FBI, by Anthony Gregory | The Beacon At the close of World War I, the federal government created the General Intelligence Division, an agency that eventually morphed into the modern FBI... Read more... “Britain and America linked to Somali pirates, Somalia still suffers", by Tim Coles | | Redress Information & Analysis Tim Coles argues that British and US policies in Somalia, and London’s and Washington’s support for warlord Abdullahi Yusuf’s Transitional Federal Government, belie their opposition to the Somali pirates... Read more... |
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