MARCH, 2010

March 31, 2010

Stuck between a wall and an occupation, by Nora Barrows-Friedman | Electronic Intifada

Bilal Jadou standing atop a home in the Aida refugee camp.
His house, on the other side of the wall, can be seen off in the distance


  When Bilal Jadou's grandmother was sick last year, and in need of immediate medical care, the family called the Jerusalem emergency service and requested an ambulance -- only to hear on the other end of the line that no Israeli ambulances would be permitted to reach the house without permission from the Israeli military. "Try the Bethlehem ambulance service," the emergency dispatcher told Jadou. When he called the Bethlehem ambulance, they told him to have his grandmother meet them at the other side of the main Bethlehem-Jerusalem checkpoint because they weren't allowed to cross...
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The Middle East Agenda: Oil, Dollar Hegemony & Islam, by Prof. Francis A Boyle | Information Clearing House
   Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America's manifest destiny to rule the world...
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The Victories of Revisionism | Radio Islam

Full text of the speech of Professor Robert Faurisson at the Iran Holocaust Conference

Professor Robert Faurisson interviewed by Iran Television

  Born in 1929 of a French father and a Scottish mother, Robert Faurisson taught classical letters (French, Latin, Greek) before specialising first in the analysis of modern and contemporary French literary texts and, finally, in the appraisal of texts and documents (literature, history, media). He was professor at the Sorbonne and the University of Lyon. Because of his historical revisionist stands, he was effectively forbidden from teaching...
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Palestine's "turbulent priest" delivers a blistering Easter message, by Stuart Littlewood | 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...
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The plague of darkness has struck modern Israelites, by Akiva Eldar | Haaretz

Theodor Meron, whose warnings over settlements went unheedeed

  One of the harshest of the 10 plagues has smitten the children of Israel this Passover, and they are stumbling about in pitch darkness, bumping blindly into anyone in their way as they head toward the edge of the precipice...
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Obama closing in on us, by Eitan Haber | Israel Opinion
Israel now paying price for longtime efforts to get smart with America
  The Americans play no games. The moment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's entourage was told that there will be no joint statement, that the media won't be allowed into the Oval Office, that there will be no photo-op, and that the meeting will be held at a late hour of night, the PM should have realized – and he did – that this won't be a happy funeral...
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Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’?, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig


  The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd...
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Jews Banished 47 Times In 1000 Years - Why? |  Radio Islam

- Why so often?
- Why across such a variety of nations and cultures?
- Why does no other people on earth come near
  to this record of eliciting averse responses?...
[My question is: where will the Jews go when, thanks to the State of Israel, they are again expelled? Given the interconnectedness of today's world it will have to be outer space - Editor.]
 
Report: US homeless number to soar by 2020 | Press TV


  A rights organization's report says the number of homeless senior citizens in the US will surge by a third over the next decade...
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Another Arab Summit: Another Exercise in Political Impotence, by Khalid Amayreh | Uruknet
  Once again, hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims around the world are affronted with another Arab summit conference, which is taking place in Serte in Libya. There, flamboyant dictators, dynastic despots and presidents-for-life have converged on the North African Arab nation to perform an annual futile ritual known as the Arab summit conference...
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Expected Obama Administration Backing for Indonesian State Terror | People's Voice


  Indonesia's National Armed Forces (TNI), especially its thuggish Kopassus Special Forces Command, has a long, sordid human rights record, including political killings and massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilians in East Timor, Aceh, Papua, and elsewhere in the country...
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Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem (video) | Gilad Atzmon
  The Mayor of Jerusalem is in London this week where he's faced protests over the building of 1600 settler homes in East Jerusalem...
Normalizing Relations, by Scott McConnell | The American Conservative
  President Obama’s speeches signal a desire to treat Israel like any other country. Now events have converged to test his resolve...
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Israel is sliding toward McCarthyism and racism, by David Landau | Haaretz

Sheikh Jarrakh protests 'offer hope'

  ...How, then, does a society morph in this way? The answer seems to be, inadvertently. Since last Passover, over the first year of Benjamin Netanyahu's prime ministership, Israel has slid almost inadvertently a long way down the slope that leads to McCarthyism and racism...
[Well, not exactly "inadvertently." It was set up that way.]
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A stark truth: Israeli arms, U.S. dollars, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon
  One does not normally see this truth stated so starkly in places like Time Magazine -- from Michael Scherer's interesting article on AIPAC's current strategy to "storm Congress":..
Read more..

UK MPs urge review of Israel arms deals | Press TV
UK MPs protest to the use of British parts in US F-16 warplanes purchased
 by Israel, and used against Palestinians in the Gaza war


  A group of British MPs are calling for a review of arms deals with Israel following media reports indicating the certain use of British weapons in the Israeli war against Gaza...
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A Bomber Jacket Doesn't Cover the Blood, by Norman Solomon | Antiwar
  President Obama has taken a further plunge into the kind of war abyss that consumed predecessors named Johnson, Nixon, and Bush. On Sunday, during his first presidential trip to Afghanistan, Obama stood before thousands of American troops to proclaim the sanctity of the war effort. He played the role deftly – a commander in chief, rallying the troops – while wearing a bomber jacket...
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Israel Unveils 'Green' Strategy to Defeat Enemies, by Jonathan Cook | Palestine Chronicle

Landau, national infrastructures minister (L), outlined a vision of a world without oil

  Under cover of a sudden interest in developing new green technologies, the Israeli government hopes to weaken the Gulf states by making their oil redundant and thereby defeating 'Islamic terror'...
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177 Countries and Counting: The Bases of Empire, by David Swanson | Counterpunch
  ...I just read a great book, and not the first, on a topic that as far as I know has never made it onto U.S. television or into any substantive series in any U.S. newspaper, or been an issue in any presidential or congressional election campaign. And yet it deals with one of our largest government programs and one of the primary ways in which the rest of the world knows about or comes into contact with our country...
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March 30, 2010


UK special relationship with US is over, say MPs, by Mark Tran | The Guardian

MPs want Gordon Brown's approach to the US reflect the more
pragmatic tone that Barack Obama has taken towards Britain


  MPs today urged the government to adopt a more hard-headed approach towards the US and avoid the phrase "the special relationship" as Britain's influence over America was likely to diminish. The 14-member cross-party foreign affairs committee said that the phrase coined by Winston Churchill more than 60 years ago no longer reflects political reality and should be dropped...
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Even the New York Times doesn’t believe Netanyahu, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Hart urges the New York Times – and other Western media – to focus on how the logic of Zionism will manifest itself in Israeli policy: a new round of ethnic cleansing, “provoking an all-out confrontation with the Palestinians to give the Israeli military and the armed settlers the pretext for driving the Palestinians off the West Bank”...
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Hamas: Arab leaders killed time in summit | Press TV
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum

  A senior Hamas official has criticized the leaders of the Arab League for what he called their failure to defend the Palestinians during their summit in Libya. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement on Monday that the Arab leaders just "killed time" during their two-day meeting in the Mediterranean city of Sirte...
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The 'Long War' quagmire, by Tom Hayden | LA Times
  Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."..
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Israel imposes nine-day blockade on West Bank | PressTV
A video captures image of Israeli border guards arresting a Palestinian

  Israel imposes a 9-day full blockade of the occupied West Bank starting Sunday night, ostensibly as a security measure for the Jewish Passover festival. The lockdown, on the orders of the Israeli War Minister Ehud Barak, will prevent thousands of Palestinian workers based in the West Bank from reaching their places of work...
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Obama is still Israel's bitch | YouTube
  It is flatly impossible to have or even ask for peace with people while you are simultaneously colonizing them. The whole notion is absurd...
  [Nice to see a young person with political intelligence, awareness and passion - far too rare these days]

America and Israel: a historic choice, by Paul Rogers | Open Democracy
  The serious row between Washington and Tel Aviv is about far more than the construction of homes in east Jerusalem; it goes to the heart of the close military alliance between the two states...
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Sufi leader vows to rid Somalia of al-Shabab | Press TV

Al-Shabab militia fighters taking part in a drill on the outskirts of Mogadishu

  A senior leader of a Sufi group in Somalia has vowed to rid the country of extremists with Wahhabi tendencies who are threatening to topple the country's administration. "Together, we are going to eliminate radicals from the country. We will confront the al-Shabab directly not through the media," Reuters quoted Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama'a chairman Maalim Muhamud as saying on Sunday...
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The Embassy and the Monarch, by Caise Hassan | Shamireaders
  A symphonic orchestration of President Obama's voice calling for the humane treatment of protesters in Iran should be blared through giant speakers in the Abdoun neighborhood of Amman, Jordan. The tune should give its residents some ironic comic relief from the ominous threat amidst them. Abdoun is the home to the U.S. Embassy in Jordan. Embassy is the wrong word to describe it. China, the world's economic superpower, has an embassy in Amman; it is a modest structure, covering perhaps one acre. Saudi Arabia, the U.S.'s totalitarian ally, has an embassy that is the size of a Victorian house on a main street and is guarded by three soldiers.  The American embassy is, at the very least, a fort, and better described as a military base...
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Comprehending Israel’s Big Picture!, by Debbie Menon | Rebel News

  AIPAC and its cohorts have manufactured a broad level of support among the American public, but it is based on a mix of indifference, ignorance and low-level indoctrination, and is therefore extremely soft. The only way to derail Israel's quest for regional hegemony and to break its decades old oppression of the Palestinians is to break United States support for Israel. And the only way to break United States support for Israel is to break the shattered US economy story to the American public and to do it explicitly referencing the reason: "The Powerful Israel Lobby manipulation in United States Government Affairs and Israel Oppression and War Crimes."..
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Jewish Religion Used By Israeli Government For Political Agenda | True Torah Jews Against Zionism

  "All over the world, Jews who are true to the Torah are outraged by this ongoing Zionist ploy, in which the Zionists attempt to create the impression that the holy Torah is behind their hard-line, nationalistic goals," said Rabbi Leopold Klein, a spokesman for True Torah Jews. "It is crucial at this time to clarify the Torah's true position on this matter, as well as review the past sixty years in the history of Sephardic Jewry and the Shas Party. "Judaism is a faith and the Torah is at the core of that faith; Zionism is a political movement that is inherently anti-Torah and, consequently, anti-Judaism. Since its inception, Zionism has brought untold pain and suffering upon Jews all across the globe"...
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Israel fears Obama heading for imposed Mideast settlement, by Ari Shavit | Haaretz

Netanyahu, Obama and Abbas last year

  U.S. President Barack Obama's demands during his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Tuesday point to an intention to impose a permanent settlement on Israel and the Palestinians in less than two years, political sources in Jerusalem say. Israeli officials view the demands that Obama made at the White House as the tip of the iceberg under which lies a dramatic change in U.S. policy toward Israel...
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Israel unveils “green” strategy to defeat enemies, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis
  Under cover of a sudden interest in developing new green technologies, and with strong support from US neo-conservatives, the Israeli government hopes to weaken the Gulf states by making their oil redundant and thereby defeating “Islamic terror”, Jonathan Cook reports...
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Is a serious Israel-EU crisis in the works?, by Barak Ravid and Anshel Pfeffer | Haaretz

Foreign Ministry Director-General Yossi Gal

  Israeli government sources say it is likely that after the current diplomatic crisis and pressure by the United States regarding the Palestinian issue, Israel will soon face an even more serious row with the European Union. A government source in Jerusalem said this was the concern voiced during a conference call between Foreign Ministry Director-General Yossi Gal and seven of Israel's ambassadors in important world capitals...
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Erdoğan calls Israel stance on united Jerusalem ‘madness’ | Today's Zaman

  Slamming Israel’s policy of considering the whole of Jerusalem as its united capital as “madness,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also stated that Israel is breaching international law by building homes in East Jerusalem, adding to pressure for a halt in construction in areas Palestinians want for their future state...
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Israeli minister talks of new war on Gaza | Press TV
Israel's Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz

  A senior Israeli minister has threatened that Tel Aviv will "liquidate" Hamas sooner or later, adding that Israel may even launch a new offensive on the Gaza Strip. Israel's Finance minister Yuval Steinitz said Tel Aviv has not set a timetable for when it will eliminate the Palestinian movement, but he underscored that it would happen sooner or later. He said Israel cannot tolerate the movement becoming stronger. Steinitz did not rule out the possibility of a new invasion of Gaza, saying Tel Aviv had no choice, but to take such action...
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Pope Pius XII and Bishop Williamson vs. Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust Fundamentalists: Whom Do You Believe?, by Professor O'Connell | Shamireaders
  To put it bluntly, Pope Pius XII did not believe then or at any time later in his life that a program of extermination of the Jews ever existed. In summary, if 20,000 or more people a day were being killed at Auschwitz, Pius XII, with his contacts there, would have known about it. In other words, if, in addition to the Jewish Ordeal of World War II, the Holocaust actually happened, and he said nothing about it, then he deserves our condemnation. However, if the reverse is true, that is, that there was no Holocaust, as the Allied aerial photography clearly indicates, then it is the Holocaust Fundamentalist accusers of the Beloved Pontiff who deserve our scorn...
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The Gertler Steinmetz Bling Bang Torah Gang: Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo, by Keith Harmon Snow | OpEd News
  Maurice Templesman is one of big funders of Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, always working the CIA and Mobutu to instill terror and steal minerals, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all are hidden by Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.[1] But while Africans are victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending they are the saviors. Who is responsible?...
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March 29, 2010


Background Paper: Israeli policies in East Jerusalem | JNews
  East Jerusalem’ is not only the Old City. The eastern section of Jerusalem is larger than the western section (77 square kilometers vs. 45 square kilometers); it contains more than half the city`s residents, Jews and Arabs. It also includes one refugee camp (Shu’afat)...
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The apartheid walls of Jerusalem breached on Palm Sunday, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  Wow, what a day: over 100 native Palestinian Christians and Muslims and internationals including Israelis, breached the tight security separating the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem from the occupied city of Jerusalem. Donkeys and people arrested!..
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Netanyahu and Obama are at point of no return, by Akiva Eldar | Haaretz
  ...The messages coming to the White House from Riyadh and Amman, then, were starkly clear: If you don't rein in your Israeli friends, Tehran won't be the only Middle East capital where American flags will burn...
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Jerusalem's religious heart | Al Jazeera

The area of the Old City in East Jerusalem known as the Temple Mount to Jews
 and al-Haram al-Sharif, or The Noble Sanctuary, to Muslims is deeply sacred to both
 religions, making it a potential flashpoint in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians


  The site is home to the gilded 7th-century Dome of the Rock, built in 691 AD over the spot where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven after his Night Journey as mentioned in the Quran. In 705 AD, the al-Aqsa mosque was constructed adjacent to the Dome of the Rock; both structures are considered part of the Noble Sanctuary, which Muslims believe is the third holiest site after the cities of Mecca and Medina in modern Saudi Arabia...
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Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence, by Kevin Ryan | Infowars
  Careful investigation leads one to notice that a number of intriguing groups of people and organizations converged on the events of September 11th, 2001. An example is the group of men who were members of Cornell University’s Quill & Dagger society...
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On The Road To Canossa, by Uri Avnery | Media Monitors
  ...In order to enter into serious negotiations with the Palestinians, as demanded by Obama, Netanyahu will have to dismantle the existing coalition and invite Livni in. Until that happens, he will be left standing at the gate of Canossa...The struggle between the king and the pope did not end with the humiliating scene at Canossa. It went on for a long time. The battle between Netanyahu and Obama will be decided much more quickly...
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Six Jewish Companies Own 96% of the World's Media | Pak Alert


  “You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel…” Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache...
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Israeli soldiers leave Gaza after fierce clash | Antiwar
  Israel withdrew its troops from the Gaza Strip Saturday after some of the fiercest gunbattles with Palestinian militants in the Hamas-run territory since last year's military offensive...
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Helen Thomas on her one question for Obama | Real News
  In part one of his interview with Helen Thomas, longest-serving member of the White House Press Corps, Paul Jay asks her about her first question for President Obama. The question, asking President Obama to name all the countries in the Middle-East that have nuclear weapons, was avoided by the President, who claimed to not want to "speculate". Thomas claims that knowledge of Israeli nukes is very public in DC and Obama's answer shows a lack of credibility. She explains the importance of this question for U.S. policy in the region. Finally, she confides that she has not been called on by the President since that day, but that if she does, she will ask him whether or not he has found any more information about nukes in the Middle-East since their last encounter...
Watch...

Chertoff Joins Defense Firm that Defrauded U.S. | AllGov

  Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security chief who’s not been shy about exploiting terrorist threats for the benefit of his clients, has decided to join a top defense contractor that defrauded the U.S. government. The one-time head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President George W. Bush is now a board member of BAE Systems, the United Kingdom-based defense corporation that agreed to pay $447 million in fines to the American and British governments to settle allegations of corruption, including bribing a top Saudi Arabian official...
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Chavez: Clinton thinks US owns 'the continent'
  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez scorns US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as an ancient thinker, charging her with interfering in Venezuelan domestic affairs. "She still considers herself the imperial lady. She is behind the times," Chavez said during his visit to Ecuador on Friday. "She still thinks the United States is the owner of this continent"...
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Mossad's One Million Helpers World-Wide, by Martin Webster | Occidental Quarterly

For any Jew, treason is just a phone call away

  ...Sayanim are Jews who live in and hold the citizenship of lands outside Israel who are recruited clandestinely by Mossad to help with its operations, i.e. providing ’safe houses’, transportation, access to communications networks and other facilities, official documents, etc., etc...
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Palestinians increasingly back 1-state | Jerusalem Post
  Palestinian support for a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel is declining, a joint Palestinian-Israeli study has found. 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...
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Hillary's Drug War: "It's Just Strengthening the Biggest Cartel", by Mike Whitney | Information Clearing House
  Al Jazeera has put together a 3-minute video which asks whether the Mexican government is "favoring" the country's most powerful drug gang, the Sinoloa Cartel. After watching the video, you'll wonder who's really running the country? Can one gang really have this much power? And what does it say about US policy towards Mexico; is the financial aid really improving security or just making matters worse?..
Read more, watch...

Russian math genius Perelman refuses $1m prize | Press TV


The Russian math genius Dr Grigori Perelman

  The Russian math genius Dr Grigori Perelman has turned down a one-million-dollar prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. The 44-year-old Russian, who solved the world's toughest math problem, refused the $1 million prize for his lack of interest in money or fame...
[The exception proving the rule?]
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Children of Gaza | Channel 4 (UK) video | Australians for Palestine
  ...the cruelty continues day after day without relief – to our own eternal shame it should be said, because we have done nothing to stop it.  While Israel perpetrates this wholesale inhumanity on its doorstep, we regurgitate the nonsense about Israel’s security when blind Freddy can see the disparity between its mighty army and the desperate attempts at resistance by a people condemned to live in a hellhole... - Sonja Karkar
Read more, watch...
 
Israel's inclusion in economic organization a threat to democracy, by Shir Hever | Electronic Intifada
  Membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes 30 of the world's most developed countries, does not provide money or any special economic benefits. Yet it is easy to see why the Israeli government attributes great importance to Israel becoming one of its members. For Israel, membership in the OECD would mean a victory of legitimacy, and a major setback for the worldwide movement calling on Israel to be held accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people...
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Israeli Settler Violence against Palestinian Civilians in the Occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, by Zulaikha Abdullah | Middle East Monitor


“The holy martyr, Baruch Goldstein, is from now on our intercessor in heaven. Goldstein did not act as an individual;
 he heard the cry of the land of Israel, which is being stolen from us day after day by the Muslims.
He acted to relieve that cry of the land..The Jews will inherit the land not by any peace agreement but only by shedding blood!”


  Israel invaded the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967 and has occupied it since. The occupation is illegal according to international law which also stipulates that it is illegal for Israel to build settlements and populate this occupied territory with its own civilian population. Since 1967, successive Israeli governments have followed a policy of settlement expansion as either a strategic and demographic security measure or as what they consider the natural fulfillment of the Zionist project. 121 settlements have been built in the West Bank and 12 in East Jerusalem. Additionally, there are over 100 unrecognized or unofficial settlements known as ‘outposts’. While all settlements are illegal under international law and have been condemned by numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions, ‘outposts’ are considered illegal even under Israeli law...
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Violence Will Not Kill The Non-Violent Popular Resistance | Palestine Monitor
  “What we can daily testify to is the growing violence carried out against Palestinian civilians both by Israeli settlers and military, a violence which is daily undermining the physical security of Palestinians”. With these words Dr Mustafa Barghouthi opened his speech during a press conference on Monday, referring to the tragic weekend which claimed the lives of four young Palestinians in Iraq Burin and Awarta, Nablus municipality. The victims, all teenagers, were shot to death by the Israeli Army over a 24 hour period...
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Face Off: The Zionist Fanatics vs the U.S. | Christopher Bollyn

  ..."Bibi" Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, is a disciple of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the most radical, racist, and militant form of Zionism.  Jabotinsky was the Zionist who called for an "Iron Wall" to be built in Palestine.  The West should know that there can be no appeasement with such fanatics who are devoted to an ideology of Jewish supremacism and Greater Israel...
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U.S. Plunges Central America Back To Era Of Coups And Death Squads | Global Research
  March 24th of this year was the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of El Salvador. His killing drew attention to the murderous rampages of death squads in that nation and throughout Central America as no other slaying had, although hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras before and during the 1980s by paramilitary formations usually led by graduates of the U.S.'s School of the Americas and covertly funded by the same nation's Central Intelligence Agency...
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NATO Tries to Silence a Truth-Teller in Afghanistan After Killing Pregnant Women | Rethink Afghanistan

  Last week, I spoke with Afghanistan-based journalist Jerome Starkey about his reporting on special forces raids that killed civilians and NATOs surprising–and disappointing–response. This video contains disturbing images, and an even more disturbing story of violence, and an attempt to silence a truth-teller. It shows why its absolutely essential that we keep pushing back against the Pentagon’s message machine...
Read more, watch...

Thoughts on Obama and Health Reform in the United States, by Fidel Castro | Global Research
  Barack Obama is a fanatical believer in the imperialist capitalist system imposed by the United States on the world: "God bless the United States," at the end of his speeches...The current administration’s militarist policies, its plunder of natural resources and unequal exchange with the poor countries of the Third World are in no way different from those of its predecessors, almost all of them extremely right-wing, with some exceptions, throughout the past century...
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How Washington Murdered Privacy at Home and Abroad, by Paul Craig Roberts | Counterpunch
  ...The American sheeple quietly accepted the complete destruction of their right to privacy. Encouraged by success in smiting the American people, Washington has now destroyed the privacy of Europeans. Indeed, the "freedom and democracy" government spies on the entire world and sends drones into foreign countries to murder people disapproved by Washington. Washington denounces other governments for human rights violations while itself violating human rights every day...
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Treason by Members of the United States Congress | YouTube
  It must have been realised that the letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signed by nearly 300 members of the U.S. Congress, affirming their commitment to Israel, would be widely publicized and fall into the hands of that illegal Apartheid State, so the writing and signing of that letter should be considered an act of treason...
Read more, watch...


March 28, 2010


Samson and the 2nd Nakba - A Short Study of the Jewish Hercules | Gilad Atzmon


   As much as many of us enjoyed watching the humiliation of Israel and PM Netanyahu in Washington this week, I am reluctant to suggest that the emerging crisis between America and Israel may also be a red light warning  for all of us. The current crisis may  lead to some devastating consequences as far as Palestine, Iran and the Middle East are concerned...
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"Cabbing" for Israel?, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
  Stuart Littlewood says that the forthcoming UK general election will be an opportunity for the British public to call to account those politicians – Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat – who are “cabbing”, or “stooging”, for a foreign power, Israel...
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New Poll Of American Jews' Views on Israel | J Street
  Please find below a slideshow of the findings of J Street's March 2010 polling of American Jews' views on what role the United States should play in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israel conflicts, some key takeaways below the presentation, and links to the full findings and press release at the bottom of the page...
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“By way of deception, thou shalt do war”, by Paul J. Balles | Redress Information & Analysis
  Paul J. Balles views the use of deception, disinformation and murder by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and notes that “not a single establishment journalist nor Western intelligence agency has given enough credence” to former Mossad operative Victor Ostrovsky's revelations about the agency’s methods “to modify and correct the Mossad-planted line”...
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Moussa: 'Time to face Israel', ME peace 'a failure' | Press TV

Moussa has said the Middle East peace process depends on Israel's freezing settlement plans

  The Arab League chief cautions that the so-called Middle East peace process may be “a complete failure”, calling on Arab states to seek other alternatives. Amr Moussa's warning came on the first day of the Arab League Summit in the Libyan town of Sirte...“It's time to face Israel. We have to have alternative plans because the situation has reached a turning-point,” he said...
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Palestinian Political Prisoners, by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News
  The numbers vary but range at any time from over 7,000 to 12,000 or more. In April 2008, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel cited 11,000, including 345 children and 98 women. Over 1,000 suffered from chronic or other diseases. Around 150 were seriously ill from heart disease, cancer, and other diseases, and 195 or more Palestinians died or were killed in prison since 1967...
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Israel's Passport Farm, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
Tel Aviv's self-isolation campaign rolls on
  ...Isn’t it a shame that, at a time like this — when Israel really is in some very deep trouble with its Western allies — someone like Lieberman is acting as the Jewish state’s spokesman? The clown of the international diplomatic corps, Lieberman’s sinister views are no joke. He once suggested that Israel bomb the Aswan dam: his party is the successor to Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach movement, an openly fascist outfit that advocated violence against and deportation of Israeli Arabs. As a former bouncer and a somewhat thuggish character, it’s not to be expected that Lieberman, a semi-criminal type who has been under a perpetual legal cloud, understands or cares about the trouble Israel is in...
Read more... 

Follow-up on Omar, Land Day, and more, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  ...Land day will be commemorated in hundreds of cities around the world on March 30th as a day to promote boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (act in your area please) as it has been since the first land day in 1976 when Palestinians inside the Green Line (Palestine of 1948) rose-up against the continued unfair land expropriation...
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Latest Israeli offensive into Gaza kills 4 | Press TV
Israeli soldiers

  The number of Palestinians killed in the latest Israeli offensive into Gaza strip has reached to four. Violence erupted again after Israeli forces supported by tanks invaded the southern town of Khan Younis on Friday. Earlier reports said the incursion resulted in the death of two Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers. Two Israeli soldiers, including a high-ranking officer, were killed by Gazan resistance fighters during the incursion. Hamas' military wing, al-Qassam Brigades, has claimed responsibility for the Israeli fatalities...
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When it comes to E Jerusalem, ‘NPR’ misleads and misinforms, by Henry Norr | Mondoweiss
  ...I’ve spent some time looking a little more deeply into NPR’s coverage of East Jerusalem since Israel’s announcement of plans to build 1,600 new housing units there put the area in the spotlight. The network posts transcripts of all its stories, interviews, and talk shows on the Middle East (and nowadays most other stories, too) on its website, and it has a pretty good search engine, so it wasn’t hard to review all 22 broadcasts that have discussed East Jerusalem since the controversy exploded...
[Good information for anyone who might have been under the impression that NPR wasn't part of the Zionist controlled mainstream media]
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Bibi's Hollow Victory, by Patrick J. Buchanan | Antiwar
  "The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital." With this defiant declaration, to a thunderous ovation at AIPAC, Benjamin Netanyahu informed the United States that East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan in the Six Day War, is not occupied land. It is Israeli land and Israel’s forever, and no Palestinian state will share Jerusalem. Israel alone decides what is built, and where, in the Holy City...
Read more...
 
The Era of Terrorism, by Doug Casey | Antiwar
  ...Terrorism is not an enemy – it’s a tactic. You can’t have a war on terrorism any more than you can have a war on artillery barrages, cavalry charges – or a war on war, for that matter. The first step in winning a conflict is to identify the actual enemy. And the fools in DC can’t even do that. But before we look at the future, it’s worth noting that terrorism has long been a favored tool of those in power, going all the way back to ancient times...
Read more...

Deja Vu in Marja, by Andrew Bacevich | America Magazine



  ...It turns out that the Marines are not the first Americans to arrive in Marja intent on putting things right. When Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the Agency for International Develop-ment embarked upon a massive agricultural re-form project there. The purpose of that project was to persuade nomadic Pashtuns to put down roots in Helmand. Domestication, it was thought, would put the kibosh on Pashtun agitation for an independent homeland, a prospect that the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan both found deeply disconcerting...
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Saint Elliott Speaks, by Daniel Luban | LobeLog

  Tablet’s Lee Smith (whom we last saw attempting to expose the machinations of Washington’s “Iran lobby”) has a reverent interview today with Elliott Abrams, the notorious neoconservative operative who was George W. Bush’s top Middle East aide at the National Security Council. Coming on the heels of Smith’s love letter to John Hagee from last week, we are once again forced to ask: why in God’s name did Tablet feel compelled to give this guy a weekly column? Regardless, the Abrams interview is worth reading because it provides a vivid display of the contradictions (to be charitable) or hypocrisies (to be realistic) that pervade Abrams’s thinking...
Read more...

When Was the Last Time You Visited Iraq?, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch
Exporting American Democracy to the World
   First-hand experience is not to be taken lightly.  What, after all, do I know about Iraq?  Only reporting I’ve been able to read from thousands of miles away or analysis found on the blogs of experts like Juan Cole.  On the other hand, even from thousands of miles away, I was one of many who could see enough, by early 2003, to go into the streets and demonstrate against an onrushing disaster of an invasion that a lot of people, theoretically far more knowledgeable on Iraq than any of us, considered just the cat’s meow, the “cakewalk” of the new century...
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Be Sure The Truth Will Find You Out, by Yvonne Ridley | Information Clearing House
  ..it has now emerged that the British Government used spies, lies and community leaders to spew out anti-Palestinian propaganda during the Gaza War. And the proof is there, in black and white, for any of you who care to wade through the weighty document called the Annual Report of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). Most MPs are still too busy trying to tot up the shortfall left by the expenses scandal, to leaf through the document which was quietly slipped into Parliament a few days ago. But hidden among the layers of government-speak there is confirmation that a Government propaganda unit which was originally set up to tackle terrorism was used on a black propaganda exercise. Its aim was simple – to promote Israel and depict the innocents suffering in Gaza as extremists and therefore, anyone helping these people must be themselves regarded as extremist...
Read more...

U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan are committing atrocities, lying, and getting away with it, by Jerome Starkey | Nieman Watchdog


  ...Jerome Starkey recently reported for The Times of London about a night raid on Feb. 12 in which U.S. and Afghan gunmen opened fire on two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials -- an atrocity which NATO’s Afghanistan headquarters then tried to cover up. Now, in a blistering indictment of both NATO and his own profession, Starkey writes for Nieman Watchdog that the international forces led by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal are rarely called to account because most reporters are too dependent on access, security and the 'embed culture' to venture out and see what's happening for themselves...
Read more...

Takeover of US by Israel in its Final Phase, by Phillip Tourney (USS Liberty survivor) | Veterans Today

  ...The Prime Minister of Israel told our Vice president where he could stick his Middle East peace plan a week or so ago. Several days ago this same Prime Minister of Israel then comes to our shores, at our nation’s very White House no doubt and tells the President of the United States the very same thing–“Stick your peace plan where the sun doesn’t shine“–and in person mind you. This VILE ARROGANT ZIONIST little state has been doing this ever since 1948 to every US President and every US Congress. As bad as this is however, what’s worse is that our leaders just lay back and take it. In whose interests do you think they are serving? It sure isn’t America’s...
Read more...
 
Trivializing War, by Cesar Chelala | Information Clearing House
  ...While sitting in front of his computer, he was directing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, carrying powerful bombs to land in distant countries. He presumes, but he is not totally sure, that he has hit the right target. After the bombs exploded four suspected terrorists were killed. Four fewer criminals the U.S. will have to deal with.  A later investigation will later reveal that they were not terrorists but rather they were parents and children on a birthday party. As a result of the attack, four adults and eight children were killed, and several more seriously injured.  Captain Ferguson, of course, was unaware of the consequences of his actions. He only thinks that he has a somewhat tedious but rewarding job, since he is an important piece in the fight against terror. Only later he will know the truth, when the outcry of the victims’ relatives cannot be silenced any longer. The predictable apologies will not bring back the dead to life, nor heal those injured...
Read more...


March 27, 2010


Have a Nice World War, Folks, by John Pilger | Global Research
  Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege...
Read more...

The McCain-Lieberman Police State Act, by Stephen Lendman | OpEdNews
  If enacted, it will advance what this writer addressed in an article titled, "Police State America - A Look Back and Ahead," covering numerous Bush administration laws, Executive Orders, 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...
 
Nearly 300 Congress members declare commitment to 'unbreakable' U.S.-Israel bond | Haaretz
  Nearly 300 members of Congress have signed on to a declaration reaffirming their commitment to "the unbreakable bond that exists between [U.S.] and the State of Israel", in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton..."For decades, strong, bipartisan Congressional support for Israel, including security assistance and other important measures, have been eloquent testimony to our commitment to Israel's security, which remains unswerving."...
[How do you define treason? And isn't there a law against it?]
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Israeli minister says settlement approval 'divine' | PressTV
Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai

  The Israeli interior minister believes 'divine grace' enabled him to approve the expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territories...He criticized Israeli leftists for not wanting the ultraorthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem (al-Quds) to grow any larger. Known as Haredis, the ultraorthodox Jews have earned notoriety for their religious extremism and intolerance...
Read more...

Deathly Gifts of NATO's Merciful Angel, Serbia, by Ljubica Vujadinovic | All Voices
  A leading Serbian expert in the field says the NATO's use of depleted uranium ammunition in it's aggression on Serbia has caused enormous increase in cancer rates and number of newborns with genetic malformations...
Read more...

A History of Israeli-Mossad False Flags Against the USA and others | Goon Squad
Israel, our only 'friend' in the ME, wouldn't attack us, would they?
  OMG! Only a raving loonie and a certified 'anti-Semite' would accuse that 'peace loving' nation of Israel as being behind numerous false-flags, including 9/11 and preparing to set off another one to get Americans enraged so we'll "Shock and Awe" Tehran into oblivion...
Read more...
 
IDF Declares Opposition to Zionism, Support for Palestinians "Revolutionary" and Illegal | Tikun Olam

Ariadna Jove Marti and Bridgette Chappell, ISM peace activists
 and dangers to the State and social order

  Noam Sheizaf has a very good post about the small story involving two international peace activists working in Palestine who were arrested by the IDF and almost deported. They managed to lodge an appeal of their deportation and the government’s defense before the Supreme Court is sweeping, breathtaking and dangerous in the extreme...
Read more...

NATO rejects Russia's demand to destroy Afghan poppy fields | Monsters and Critics
  NATO and Russia clashed on Wednesday over how to tackle the drug problem in Afghanistan, where Western nations have been fighting a Taliban-led insurgency for eight years. The country is the world's largest producer of poppy seeds, a key ingredient in the manufacture of heroin. Russia is keen to pursue an aggressive eradication strategy, while Western allies fear that such an approach risks antagonizing the local population, who rely on selling poppy crops to survive...
Read more...

25 Thousand Tents: Documentary from Al Tanaf Refugee Camp | Palestine Think Tank
  This film was made by two young Palestinian Filmmakers from Yarmouk Refugee Camp. This documentary explores the steadfastness of the Palestinian people in their struggle to survive and return to their homeland Palestine. It documents the lives of Palestinians stranded in Al-Tanaf detention camp in no man's land between the Iraqi-Syrian borders. It explores the lives of Palestinians who first found refuge in Iraq following the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the expulsion of its people in 1948...
Watch...

Rendered Homeless, Family Ordered To Pay Its Expulsion Expenses | International Middle East Media Center

Forced To Live In The Street

  The Jerusalem Center for Social and Economical Rights reported that the Israeli police handed Wednesday a Palestinian family from East Jerusalem an order to pay 13.000 NIS, demanding family members to pay the expenses of their expulsion from their home...
Read more...
 
The Israel Lobby, by Marije Meerman (Video) | VPRO
  For many years now the American foreign policy has been characterized by the strong tie between the United States and Israel. Does the United States in fact keep Israel on its feet? And how long will it continue to do so?...
[A well made Dutch video presenting different points of view, mostly in English]
Watch...
 
Ralph Schoenman: The Underlying Politics of 9/11 (Video) | The Vineyard of the Saker
  Stunning. This is a must watch - an hour long but well worth it - the Editor
Watch...

"We're At a Ground Zero Moment to Save Real Journalism", by Jeremy Scahill | AlterNet


  On March 24, 2010, the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, NY announced that award-winning independent journalist Jeremy Scahill would receive the second annual "Izzy Award." The Izzy, which is named after the legendary muckraker I.F. Stone, celebrates outstanding achievement in independent media...
Read more...

Obama squeezed between Israel and Iran, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times
  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual show in Washington would hardly be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino movie; picture a giant hall crammed with 7,500 very powerful people regimented by a very powerful lobby - plus half of the United States Senate and more than a third of the congress - basically calling in unison for Palestinian and Iranian blood...
Read more...
 
'CIA seeks using Afghan women to promote war' | Press TV

CIA think tank proposes concerns over women's rights, fear
of terrorism as ways to boost support for Afghan war


  The CIA has called for recruiting Afghan women in a public relations bid to persuade Europeans to support war in Afghanistan, a document leaked to the media has revealed. "Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing" the mission for European audiences, particularly in France, according to the CIA analysis, posted on WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website, AFP reported...
Read more...

Fox News, health care, and the right-wing nervous breakdown | Media Matters
  Watching Fox News personalities recently come unglued as the realization set in that (surprise!) Democrats might actually have the votes to pass health care reform -- and noting how extraordinarily loopy and dire both the attacks on the White House, and the proclamations for pending apocalyptic doom were becoming -- I was getting nervous that one of Fox News' more unhinged hosts might finally just snap and pull a Rev. Jim Jones, beseeching viewers to make the ultimate sacrifice...
Read more...

Why Are We In Iraq? Please Remind Me, by Ira Chernus | Alternet
  ...That should be the main point of any discussion of Iraq. It is the first major war the U.S. has fought where no one can say whom we are fighting, much less why we are fighting. Engelhardt points out clearly that the stated goal — to “bring democracy” to Iraq — is as unbelievable and senseless as it is hypocritical and arrogant...
Read more...

Targeting Palestinian Mothers, by Reham Alhelsi | Palestine Think Tank


  Targeting the weakest and the most vulnerable is neither new nor surprising when it comes from an entity that stands on the ruins of Palestinian villages and is swimming in the blood of its Palestinian victims. It is the mentality of Zionists who in cold-blood aim to kill Palestinian children, who write on their helmets: Born to Kill and who wear T-Shirts with images of dead Palestinian babies and guns aimed at Palestinian babies. It is an entity that is proud of slogans showing images such as that of a pregnant Palestinian woman with a target sign on her belly and the inscription: 1 shot, 2 kills...
Read more...

Full Circle: NATO Completes Takeover Of Former Yugoslavia, by Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO
  In 1991 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a nominally defensive military bloc with sixteen members that, as the cliche ran, had never fired a shot. In 1991 the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the only simultaneously multiethnic and multiconfessional nation (entirely) in Europe, consisting of six federated republics with diverse constituencies. By 2009 NATO had grown to 28 full members...By 2008 the former Yugoslavia has been fragmented into six recognized nations (the former federal republics of Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia) and a semi-recognized province of Serbia, Kosovo...
Read more...

NATO's Kosovo War, 11 Years Later, by Ambassador James Bissett | Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies
  Eleven years ago NATO opened its bombing campaign against Serbia, illegally and without provocation. It started on March 24, 1999, and continued for 78 days and nights. It was the most intensive air offensive suffered by any country since the end of the Second World War.  Over a thousand people were killed and the civilian infrastructure of Serbia was destroyed, but it proved unable to degrade the Serbian military. It caused far more suffering than it prevented...
Read more...


March 26, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts says Good-Bye | Counterpunch

  There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest. Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it...
[Another masterpiece from Roberts, but he's telling us that he's throwing in the towel. A great loss to all of us if he sticks to it.]
Read more...
 
Israel's latest provocation at al-Aqsa, by Jonathan Cook | Electronic Intifada
  The Israeli government has indicated that it will press ahead with a plan to enlarge the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City, despite warnings that the move risks triggering a third intifada. Israeli officials rejected this week a Jerusalem court's proposal to shelve the plan after the judge accepted that the plaza's expansion would violate the "status quo" arrangement covering the Old City's holy places...
Read more...

UN rights body condemns Israel | Press TV

  The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed three resolutions in condemnation of Israel's "grave human rights violations" in the occupied Palestinian territories. The United States, however, voted against the resolutions, which condemned Israel over its policies related to Palestinian and Syrian territories, Haaretz reported...
Read more...

Blair Strikes Oil in Iraq, by Jayne Lyn Stahl | Counterpunch
  ...In the three years since he stepped down as prime minister, Blair pocketed more than $30 million in oil revenues from his secret dealings with a South Korean oil consortium, UI Energy Corporation. Despite all his best efforts to keep his connection to UI secret, word is spreading like wildfire throughout the U.K...
Read more...

Covering up American War Crimes, From Baghdad to New York, by Charles Glass | Takimag


  BBC correspondent John Simpson reported on March 4 that the number of defects in newborn babies in the Iraqi town of Fallujah had risen dramatically since the American assault there at the end of 2004. Some people in the town blame the abnormalities in their children on whatever chemicals the US Marines may have used in their conquest of the Sunni Muslim redoubt. Dr. Samira al-Ani, a paediatrician at Fallujah’s General Hospital, told Simpson that two or three children were born each day with serious cardiac problems...
Read more...

G.I. Drugged, by Kelley Vlahos | The American Conservative
  When The Washington Post revealed in 2007 the disgusting conditions endured by injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, the right wing blogosphere raced to blame the messenger and throw water on the outrage. Then, silence. There have been similar right wing blackouts on veteran/soldier suicides, health impacts from the burn pits overseas, and the overwhelming 1.1 million backlogged veterans’ claims at the VA, a system which one senior official recently admitted, “cannot be fixed.”...
Read more...

Israel braces for more expulsions in Mossad row | Middle East Online

Israeli Ambassador to Britain Ron Prosor

  Israel, which had hoped a row over the use of forged passports in the assassination of a top Hamas officer in Dubai was over, now fears other countries will follow Britain's lead in expelling diplomats...
Read more...

The Crisis That Wasn't, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar
  It might have seemed a no-brainer that the vital security interests of the United States would eventually trump the demands of a small client state that lately has not been much given to rational behavior.  But in the latest showdown between the friends of Israel and the Obama Administration the President of the United States blinked first, demonstrating once and for all that no one in the US has the power to say no to Israel...
Read more... 
 
Judea declares War on Obama | Gilad Atzmon
  Last week we read about AIPAC’s assault against President Obama. It was reported that the Jewish Lobby in America  took its gloves off. In the open, AIPAC decided to mount pressure on the American leadership and President Obama in particular...
Read more...

Apartheid on Two Continents, by Mats Svensson | Counterpunch
  We all have a common history that crosses borders in terms of both country and time. Together with black and white in South Africa we acted forcefully, taking a stand against apartheid and defining the evil and the good. We became part of a historic decision. A decision that was made by an earlier generation and led to that many today can feel pride over our common history. Today we can unfortunately read analytical reports showing that the evil remains in other parts of the world...
Read more...

War, Racism and the Empire of Poverty, by Andrew Gavin Marshall | Global Research


  At a time of such great international turmoil economically and politically, it is increasingly important to identify and understand the social dynamics of crisis. A global social crisis has long preceded the economic crisis, and has only been exacerbated by it. The great shame of human civilization is the fact that over half of it lives in abysmal poverty...
Read more...

Social Inequality in America:
Widening Income Disparities, by Vi Ransel | Global Research



  The "aristocracy of our moneyed incorporations" has never conceded a thing, not even to suppress a revolt.  This "opulent minority" does not "give" what it does not intend to begin to claw back with its cold, non-living corporate "hand" before the ink is dry on the signatures on treaties, the Fourteenth Amendment, even the New Deal, perhaps the greatest bowl of gruel ever cooked up by an oligarchy. Reforms, regulatory agencies and elections themselves are America's Circus Maximus, mere flourishes on the veneer of democracy painted over the naked concentration of power accrued to the few who hold the reins of the corporate mechanism, the most stunningly efficient means ever invented for accumulating and concentrating wealth, which is then translated into political power...
Read more...
 
Dershowitz Peddling More Middle East Myths | Information Clearing House
  Leaving aside his tiresome, and by now self-discrediting, reductio ad Chamberlinum argument, Alan Dershowitz's op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal is a useful reminder that his tendency toward dishonesty isn't limited to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He's dishonest about Iran, too...
Read more...

Are Americans Too Broken by Corporate Power to Resist? | AlterNet


  We need to take a look at what forces in American society are preventing people from being able to resist tyranny and dehumanization...
[It's interesting that this article arrives at the same time as Paul Craig Roberts' swan song - a very sad development]
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March 25, 2010


Truth and Consequences in the Middle East, by Tony Karon | Rootless Cosmopolitan
Obama's peace plan is doomed because failure costs Israel nothing


  Uncomfortable at the spectacle of the Obama administration in an open confrontation with the Israeli government, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman - who represents the interests of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party on Capitol Hill as faithfully as he does those of the health insurance industry - called for a halt...
Read more...

Scary new GOP poll | Yahoo! News
  On the heels of health care, a new Harris poll reveals Republican attitudes about Obama: Two-thirds think he's a socialist,  57 percent a Muslim-and 24 percent say "he may be the Antichrist."..
  [Here's a good survey question: Are Americans the craziest people on the planet, or just the most confused?]
Read more...

Arundhati Roy on Obama's Wars, India and Why Democracy Is "The Biggest Scam in the World" | Democracy Now
  We speak with acclaimed Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy on President Obama, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, India and Kashmir and much more...
Read more, watch...

Bibi Netanyahu's babe: kneepad diplomacy lives!, by Alan Sabrosky | Redress Information & Analysis


  Alan Sabrosky argues that US politicians' loyalty to Israel - "there isn't any longer even a facade of 'dual loyalty', only loyalty to Israel alone - has reached a point where, despite its enormous power, the US is totally paralyzed in the face of Israel..
Read more...

Stop Funding the Israelis, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
  It's the only way to rein them in
  If Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the AIPAC conference isn't a reason for the US to declare - finally - that they've had quite enough of the "special relationship," then nothing is. After ambushing the Vice President of the United States with an announcement that new "settlements" are in the works, the Prime Minister then took his anti-American jihad to the enemy's very gates, in Washington, D.C., where he invoked what Cato policy analyst Justin Logan trenchantly described as "the fallacy of '39":..
Read more...

Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis | Juan Cole
  ...Netanyahu mixed together Romantic-nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group. So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is
profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him...
Read more...

Anti-Western militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr holds balance of power | Times Online

Members of Hojatoleslam al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army fought British soldiers

  Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric whose militants fought British troops in Basra before being driven out by Iraqi forces, has emerged as a potential kingmaker in the next government. The Sadrist Movement, the political arm of al-Mahdi Army, is believed to have won between 30 and 40 seats in the 325-member Parliament in this month's elections - giving it the balance of power while the two main contenders for prime minister jockey for position...
[Sounds a bit like Israeli politics, doesn't it]
Read more...

Omar Released after beating and Fatenah Animation, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  Yesterday, after 6 days of kidnapping and beating our friend Omar Mousa Ala'eddin from the village of Al-Ma'sara, the Israeli occupation authorities released him broken and battered. We spend much of the day with him.  Omar is an English student at Hebron University and was returning with other students and two of his professors from a field trip to Ramallah where they
watched a play...
Read more...

Israel Gives The Finger To The USA | Pravda
  It is a case of the dog biting the hand that feeds it. After years of protection by Big Brother USA, covering up for its having nuclear warheads when Iran cannot even have a nuclear program, looking the other way when shocking war crimes and massacres of civilians are committed, when pregnant Palestinian mothers are left to die in the streets, Israel sticks up the
middle finger in a classic display of pig-headed arrogance by Netanyahu at AIPAC...
Read more...

The US choreographed "outrage" at Israel, by Stephen Maher | Electronic Intifada

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the AIPAC conference in Washington, DC

  ...The US hopes that this pretended outrage will lend its role as "honest broker" enough credibility to keep the "peace process" moving, itself merely a PR facade that shields Israeli crimes from public scrutiny. If it does not, the US will undoubtedly pay little mind to the harsh words spoken this week and do as it has done before: blame the Palestinians for its failure
and support Israeli repression...
Read more...

Criminal State Documentary
  Jeff Gates along with Anthony Lawson produce this startling new video that is an absolute necessity for every American who genuinely loves his country and knows something has gone very very wrong...
Read more, watch...

Award Winning Journalist Mohammed Omer Barred From Entry To Us | Desert Peace

  Demanding Omer Be Heard, Chicagoans Protest-and Proceed with Event


  ...In recent years, numerous foreign scholars and experts have been subject to visa delays and denials that have prohibited them from speaking and teaching in the U.S.-a process the American Civil Liberties Union describes as "Ideological Exclusion,"which they say violates Americans' First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying
foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States.  Foreign nationals who have recently been denied visas...
Read more...

The Jerusalem "compromise": Obama still has no stomach to take on Israel, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis
  Jonathan Cook argues that, despite recent tension between the US White House and Israel, "it remains doubtful that the US actually has the stomach to extract from Israel the concessions needed to create that elusive entity referred to as a viable Palestinian state"...
Read more...

Tell Me Again, Who Made The Desert Bloom? | Lawrence of Cyberia



  In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here. One of the subjects investigated in the Survey of Palestine is land use; specifically, which crops were Palestine's leading agricultural products at the end of the British Mandate, and whose farms were producing them...
Read more...

Is the Two-State Solution Dead?, by Mya Guarnieri | Huffington Post
  A drive east of the Green Line suggests the two-state solution is moot
  Jewish-only roads slice through the hills. The separation barrier winds through the West Bank, choking Palestinian villages. Settlements are lodged in the land's throat...
[The death of the two state solution has been announced frequently in the past few years, but the corpse is still noisily mouthing off]
Read more...

Corporate Media Hypes "Homegrown" Threat of Patsies, Dupes, and Mental Deficients, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars
  ..."The next step will be a staged 'terrorist attack,' a 'false flag' operation as per Operation Northwoods, for which Iran will be blamed," Roberts continues. "As Iran and its leadership have already been demonized, the 'false flag' attack will suffice to obtain US and European public support for bombing Iran. The bombing will include more than the nuclear facilities and will continue until the Iranians agree to regime change and the installation of a puppet government." The incessant drumbeat of blonde terrorists lurking in the heartland of America and dedicated to holy war against the infidels is obviously part of a preparatory phase of this coming false flag event...
Read more...

Israeli Schoolchildren Learn to Count with Tanks, by Sergeiy Sandler | The Only Democracy?
From kindergarten homework

  In January 2010, an official UN body determined for the first time that the militarization of Israel's government-run school system was in violation of the International Convention of the Rights of the Child and, in particular, of Israel's implementation of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC), to which it is a signatory. Unprecedented in an international legal document, this was one of the conclusions of a report submitted by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reviewing Israel's adherence to and breaches of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol...
Read more...

Venezuela in Washington's Crosshairs, by Stephen Lendman | OpEdNews
  Washington fears Hugo Chavez for good reason. His "good example" threat raises concerns that other regional leaders may follow. As a result, throughout his tenure, he's been targeted and vilified - to discredit, weaken and undermine his government to destroy Bolivarian benefits millions of Venezuelans now enjoy, won't easily give up, nor should they...
Read more...

Israel is stealing Palestinian and Arab water, by Sawsan Ramahi | Middle East Monitor
  World Water Day is upon us. Initiated by the United Nations in 1992 during its Conference on Environment and Development, 22 March 1993 was chosen as the first international day for water aiming to draw attention to the importance of fresh water and its availability. The commemoration of the day has since focused every year on a different aspect of the difficulties faced by people in obtaining fresh water...
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Does U.S. Policy on Israel and Palestine Uphold Our Values? | American Friends Service Committee
  The Chicago Hearing is modeled after a Congressional hearing and will be webcast live from a link on this page. The Chicago Hearing [Sunday, April 18th] will bring together witnesses to tell seldom-heard stories from Israel-Palestine that raise critical questions about the effects of U.S. policies in the region. Does Israel's explanation of security legitimize its violations of international law? Does the U.S. government condone Israeli policies and practices that would not be tolerated if replicated in America by the U.S. government?...
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Mideast peace effort is a charade, by Ali Abunimah | CNN


Ali Abunimah

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Monday speech to America's leading pro-Israel lobby took on added significance in light of the spat between the U.S. and Israel over the expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. It indicated the Obama administration blinked in the face of continued Israeli defiance, but that Israel likely faces more trouble down the road...
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Palestinians in Israel's 'democracy':
The Judaization of the Galilee, by Ben White | Middle East Monitor

  Israel's regime of systematic discrimination against its Palestinian citizens, who make up 20 percent of the population, remains a marginalised issue. This is for a number of reasons, but one of them is the way in which many 'liberal' critiques of Israel focus almost exclusively on the military occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip. Thus in a similar way to the international community's official 'peace process', the question of Palestine is dramatically diminished, to the exclusion of two groups of Palestinians - the refugees and Israeli citizens...
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Water Day Doesn't Quench Growing Thirst of Gazans, by Dr. Mona El-Farra | Palestine Chronicle

Here in Gaza, we are still thirsty

  Toni Morrison wrote, "All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was." I feel it is the same for Palestinian refugees, who have struggled for decades for their right to return home. I thought of this connection between water and refugees during a recent meeting about the Middle East Children's Alliance's (MECA) Maia Project with Mr. Aidan O'Leary, Deputy Director of UNRWA Operations in Gaza...
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CODEPINK activists disrupt Netanyahu (and use the AIPAC director's table to do it), by Rae Abileah | Mondoweiss
  This week almost 8,000 people from all 50 states are in DC lobby for violence and to incite suffering and warfare. No, it's not the NRA. It's the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy conference, which this year focusses on asking Congress for tightening sanctions on Iran and continued military aid to Israel...Lo and behold, I
found myself in the audience listening to the hate speech (including references to people the US targets to kill "in faraway places with strange names") spewing from the lavish stage...
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"Militarizing Latin America", by Noam Chomsky | MRzine
  The United States was founded as an "infant empire," in George Washington's words. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. From the earliest days, control over the Western Hemisphere was a critical goal.  Ambitions expanded during World War II, as the US displaced Britain
and lesser imperial powers. High-level planners concluded that the US should "hold unquestioned power" in a world system including not only the Western Hemisphere, but also the former British Empire and the Far East, and later, as much of Eurasia as possible...
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Walking With The Comrades, by Arundhati Roy | Outlook India



  The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India's Gravest Internal Security Threat. I'd been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: "Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas...
[The Na'vi live in many places on this planet]
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Israel & Aid | The Nader Page
  On July 10, 1996, at a Joint Session of the United States Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a standing ovation for these words: "With America's help, Israel has grown to be a powerful, modern state. .But I believe there can be no greater tribute to America's long-standing economic aid to Israel than for us to be able to say: we are going to achieve economic independence. We are going to do it. In the next four years, we will begin the long-term process of gradually reducing the level of your generous economic assistance to Israel."...
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Of course, we remember Rachel Corrie | Yemen Times
  For all the ugliness that the current White House administration and the Neo-con/Zionist Establishment represent, there are indeed shining beacons that remind us and the rest of the world that there is still really a lot of latent and apparent good left in America. If not for anything else worth citing, Rachel Corrie is the embodiment of all that good and more and still
remains to many people who love freedom, hate oppression and despise tyranny, a shining beacon of human rights advocacy that will always be looked upon for strength and determination to challenge all the rotten evil that has come to eat away at anything that may be called half way decent and human in this world...
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Who is the British Dog? | Gilad Atzmon


  Israeli officials and politicians sharply criticized the intention of the UK government to expel an 'unnamed' Israeli 'diplomat' in response to its passports being used in the Dubai assassination of Hamas Freedom Fighter Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. MK Aryeh Eldad (Israel National Union) doesn't show much respect to the Brits whom he compares to dogs...
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I am Israel
  I came to a land without a people for a people without a land. Those people who happened to be here had no right to be here, and my people showed them they had to leave or die, razing 480 Palestinian villages to the ground, erasing their history. Some of my people committed massacres and later became Prime Ministers to represent me. In 1948, Menachem Begin was in charge of the unit that slaughtered the inhabitants of Deir Yassin, including 100 men, women, and children. In 1953, Ariel Sharon led the slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, and in 1982 arranged for our allies to butcher around 2,000 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila...
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America's "Islamists" Go Where Oilmen Fear to Tread, by Peter Chamberlin | There Are No Sunglasses
  ...To students of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and throughout the world, it is common knowledge that the United States military and Central Intelligence often act in a manner that is contradictory to the words of American leaders.  To those who care to look behind the curtain of American duplicity, which casts a veneer of benevolence over our actions, it becomes readily apparent that "Islamic militants" tend to show-up wherever American oil companies have expressed an interest...
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March 24, 2010

Israel Threatens World Catastrophe | Voz de Aztlan

  Ambassador Bernard: "All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel."..
  [Out of the mouths of babes - and Daniel Bernard]
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The ties that bind America to Israel are beginning to fray and break, by Chris McGreal | The Observer
          Now President Obama must show he has the courage to take Israel on
  ...It was always striking to watch the smugness with which Israeli politicians sold Americans the idea that the only issue in considering the conflict with the Palestinians was what Ariel Sharon called, with deeply rolling Rs, the "tehrroar". The ever-expanding Jewish settlements, the annexing of land, expulsion of Palestinians, the killings of Arab children, the crimes of occupation, were discarded as an irrelevance...
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Pounding Gaza: Who is Killing Whom?, by Sonja Karkar | Counterpunch
  One man dead in Israel and the whole world knows.  He actually was not Israeli, but an unfortunate immigrant worker from Thailand.  We have been told who killed him too: not by name, but by some shadowy nom de guerre, used by jihadist groups some claim to be loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere...In Nablus two sixteen-year-old cousins were shot in the heart and the head for throwing stones.  One is dead, the other critically injured.  Similar incidents occur without any international outcries throughout the West Bank where protests by Palestinians against Israeli oppression, discrimination and expansionism continue with a courageous steadfastness...
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Dr. Michael Parenti: "Terrorism, Globalism and Conspiracy" (video) | Information Clearing House
Capitalism Creates Poverty?
  Globalization is an attempt to extend corporate monopoly control over the whole globe. Over every national economy. Over every local economy Over every life...
Watch...
 
The Afghan ant hole, by Eric Walberg | Vineyard of the Saker
  A joint operation involving several thousand troops was launched in Kandahar last week, the second one this year after Operation Mushtarak in Helmand province. Kandahar has been the bailiwick of 2,500 contingent of Canadian troops who have suffered heavy losses in this mountainous home of the Taliban. It is ruled by a Canadian national, Governor Tooryalai Wesa , a close friend of President Hamid Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, chairman of the Kandahar provincial council, infamous for his involvement in the drug trade...
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Going it alone: a Third Intifada?, by Tariq Shadid  | Palestine Think Tank

In Nablus

  It may well be that the citizens of the world, tired of hearing newscasts about Israel and the Palestinians, are not in the mood to hear it. Still, pressure in Palestine is building up quickly due to Israel's continuing defiance of calls from around the world to halt settlement building in East Jerusalem and the other occupied territories. Simultaneously, we are hearing a clear increase in Palestinian calls for a Third Intifada, and it may well be that it is already underway...
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The Case of the Holy Land Five, by Noor Elashi | Counterpunch
  A decade before my father received a 65-year prison sentence, he handed me an unusual book, one that ultimately shifted the way I perceive the world. It was titled Magic Eye, and it contained pages of what seemed like simple multicolored patterns. But each page had a hidden gift, a sensational truth. By diverging your eyes, my father told me, you’ll see an unexpected image. It seemed to challenge everything I’d ever known...
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The Third Temple's Holy of Holies: Israel's Nuclear Weapons | Rense
Zionist Israel's Thermonuclear Blackmail Of America
  ...This paper is a history of the Israeli nuclear weapons program drawn from a review of unclassified sources. Israel began its search for nuclear weapons at the inception of the state in 1948. As payment for Israeli participation in the Suez Crisis of 1956, France provided nuclear expertise and constructed a reactor complex for Israel at Dimona capable of large-scale plutonium production and reprocessing. The United States discovered the facility by 1958 and it was a subject of continual discussions between American presidents and Israeli prime ministers. Israel used delay and deception to at first keep the United States at bay, and later used the nuclear option as a bargaining chip for a consistent American conventional arms supply...
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The Ultimate Revolution, by Case Wagenvoord | Information Clearing House
  George Orwell was a wonderful writer, deeply in love with the English language, and always quick to call our attention to its abuse.  Yet it has always puzzled me why dystopian views of the future always cite his 1984 as a benchmark by which we measure this future dystopia, when our dystopia bears a closer resemblance to Huxley’s Brave New World...
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Soldiers on Sale: Who's In Charge of These Hired Killers?, by Eric Margolis | Khaleej Times

  A fascinating scandal has erupted in Washington over the use of mercenaries (‘private contractors’ in US terminology) that is exposing the dark underbelly of America’s foreign wars. It has been that the Pentagon and other US intelligence agencies secretly fielded mercenaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan (aka “Af-Pak”), and Iraq to assassinate tribal militants. US law forbids murder or using mercenaries.  But, as the Roman jurist Cicero said, “laws are silent in times of war.”..
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When Facts And Propaganda Collide: The BBC Bends Over Backwards To Accommodate Israeli Claims | MediaLens

  When a Thai kibbutz worker was killed in Israel by a rocket launched from Gaza last week, BBC News online gave the incident headline coverage flagged up on its home page. ('Rocket fire from Gaza kills man in southern Israel'). By contrast, the killing of two Palestinian teenagers, Mohammad Qadus and Osaid Qadus, by Israeli soldiers on Saturday was buried at the end of a short news report on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon's Middle East visit. Even worse, the BBC's footnote simply echoed Israeli propaganda that "no live bullets were fired, only tear gas and rubber bullets", despite ample evidence to the contrary...
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March 23, 2010


Bilin Laughs Off Military Threats | Palestine Monitor
Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi leads the demonstration toward the apartheid barrier

  Bi’lin, home of the popular resistance movement, has endured many challenges to the weekly demonstrations for which it is famed. During more than five years of protest against the apartheid wall, injury, imprisonment and death have become regular hazards for the residents and activists who support the campaign...
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Big Oil Behind Haiti Quake?, by Victor Thorn | American Free Press
  Did American petroleum companies murder hundreds of thousands of Haitians while extracting oil from their shores? In an exclusive Jan. 28 interview, social commentator and human rights attorney Ezili Danto believes “hydraulic fracturing” caused by drillers searching for oil may have caused the Jan. 12 earthquake. Yes, oil is Haiti’s smoking gun...
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Cut off the cash and Israel might behave, by Avi Shlaim | The Independent
  Israelis are not renowned for their good manners, but their treatment of Vice-President Joe Biden during his recent visit to their country went beyond chutzpah. Biden is one of Israel's staunchest supporters in Washington, and the purpose of his visit was to prepare the ground for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority...It was a colossal blunder that is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the special relationship between the two countries...
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Zionism's dark forces don't want the lights on, by Alan Hart | Intifada Palestine


  At the opening of AIPAC’s annual foreign policy conference its new president, Lee Rosenberg, was not a happy man. As he put it, “In recent days we have witnessed something (the Obama administration’s initial public anger with Netanyahu and his government) very unfortunate.”..
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D.C. antiwar march draws thousands on seventh anniversary of Iraq invasion  | Washington Post
  Thousands of demonstrators protested the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on Saturday in a march through downtown Washington. Many expressed concern that health care and the dismal economy have begun to overshadow the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...
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Interfaith Peace-Builders - May 2010 Delegation in Palestine
Voices of the Peacemakers: From Roots to Reconciliation
May 23- June 5, 2010: Co-Sponsored with the National Peace Foundation
Delegation Leaders: Anna Baltzer and Cathy Sultan
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AIPAC punked by false press release saying it pressures Israel on settlements, by Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss


  ... Brilliant fake AIPAC press release showed up on Al Jazeera and all over CSPAN during Hillary’s speech to the policy conference. We bought it! This just drives the wedge between AIPAC and J Street and gives AIPAC a stinko headline when it’s trying to affirm the special relationship and attack Iran...
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Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts (Book Review) | OpEdNews
  A book that detailed all the military posts around the world would be encyclopaedic in size and nature, for in order to be comprehensive to cover all the bases and all the impacts and affects on human culture and demographics would require a vast array of information. Thankfully that information can be obtained from choosing prime examples of military exploitation as found in The Bases of Empire edited by Catherine Lutz. Lutz's intention is "to describe both the worldwide network of U.S military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the United States accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries' security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions."..
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Iraq PM Reiterates Call for Recount as Stalemate Looms, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar
  With just a few days of counting left in Iraq’s parliamentary election, the lead seems to be changing hourly, and after retaking and losing the lead earlier in the day, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc has once again seized a narrow lead over current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law bloc...Once the final count is certified and the number of seats is finally settled, the real battle begins, as Iraqiya and State of Law vie for the number of partners they would need to form a coalition government, with the bloc with the most seats going first. This is certain to be a long, messy process that will take months and could even end with a deadlock and a new election...
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Either one state for all, or open-ended conflict, by Khalid Amayreh | Uprooted Palestinians


  Some reluctant voices in Washington D.C. have finally admitted that the persistence of the Palestinian plight, namely the continued Israeli efforts to liquidate the Palestinian cause by way of building more Jewish settlements and narrowing the Palestinian horizons, is undermining American strategic interests in the Muslim world...
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Higher education under occupation, by Marcy Newman (Book review) | Electronic Intifada
  Gabi Baramki's Peaceful Resistance: Building a Palestinian University under Occupation is a memoir of Palestine's flagship university, Birzeit, by its former acting president. The memoir is an indispensable tool for teaching Westerners about the ways in which Palestinian education exists and flourishes under a constant state of siege and the barriers to academic freedom that Palestinians experience on a daily basis...
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The Doomsday Weapon, by Uri Avnery | Antiwar
  It is already a commonplace to say that people who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Some 1,942 years ago, the Jews in the province called Palaestina launched a revolt against the Roman Empire. In retrospect, this looks like an act of madness. Palestine was a small and insignificant part of the worldwide empire which had just won a crushing victory against the rival power – the Parthian Empire (Persia) – and put down a major rebellion in Britain. What chances could the Jewish revolt have?..
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The Gaza Music School, by Flora Nicoletta | Uruknet


On Tuesday 23 December 2008, in the theater of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Tal El-Hawa, in Gaza City, a concert was given to mark the first three months of teaching at the Gaza Music School...
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I will mourn on Nakba Day, by Nurit Peled-Elhanan | Creative-i

  The "Nakba Law" passed in a first reading last Tuesday. The law forbids mourning the Nakba on Israel’s Independence Day. Breaking the law will result in high fines and withdrawal of governmental financing from municipal authorities.
  I will mourn on Nakba Day. I will mourn for vanished Palestine most of which I never knew. I will mourn for the holy land that is losing its humanity, its landscape, its beauty and its children on the altar of racism and evil. I will mourn for the Jewish youngsters who invade and desecrate the homes of families in Chikh Jarakh, throw the inhabitants into the street, and then sing and dance in memory of Baruch Goldstein, the infamous murderer of Palestinian children, while the owners of the desecrated houses with their children and old people are sleeping in the rain, on the street, opposite their own homes...
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Iraq: Women Miss Saddam, by Abdu Rahman and Dahr Jamail | IPS
  Under Saddam Hussein, women in government got a year's maternity leave; that is now cut to six months. Under the Personal Status Law in force since Jul. 14, 1958, when Iraqis overthrew the British-installed monarchy, Iraqi women had most of the rights that Western women do. Now they have Article 2 of the Constitution: "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation." Sub-head A says "No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." Under this Article the interpretation of women's rights is left to religious leaders...
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Depleted Uranium: A War Crime Within a War Crime, by William Bowles | Creative-i


  As if destroying a country and its culture ain’t bad enough, how about destroying its future, its children? I want to scream it from the rooftops! We are complicit in crimes of such enormity that I find it difficult to find the words to describe how I feel about this crime committed in my name! In the name of the ‘civilized’ world?...
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Notes on Israel's Triumph to Disaster, by Bashir Abu-manneh | ZNet
  Who will stop Israel in its relentless expropriation of Palestine and from triumphing to disaster? Isaac Deutscher, from whom I borrow my title, believed that the occupation of 1967 would have catastrophic consequences for Israel. It wouldn't end well, he feared. Israel's expansion and colonial contempt would only produce more enemies, and its triumph would become its condition of defeat...
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By Order of Mr. God, by Manuel García Viñó | Palestine Think Tank
  My baker is a Palestinian. A while ago, every time I went to her bakery and there were no customers, we were never short of topics of conversation. That is how I learned many things about her country that the mass media never report, because quite often she used to communicate by phone with her family or with her neighbors from overseas when they came to Spain...
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47 Residents Wounded In Hebron | International Middle East Media Center

Soldiers firing at protestors in Hebron

  Palestinian medical sources in the southern West Bank city of Hebron reported Friday evening that 47 residents were wounded during clashes with Israeli soldiers in the city and the nearby Beit Ummar town...
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Israel wants to push Palestinians back into cycle of violence, by Amos Goldberg | Haaretz
  Israel has been waging a bitter battle in recent months against human rights activists and the non-violent struggle by Jews and Arabs against the occupation. To this end, the state has made use of the most questionable means available to it. ..
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Israel’s “No renting to Arabs” policy, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis
  Jonathan Cook reports on how the efforts of one rare Israeli Jewish couple to coexist with fellow Arab citizens have been thwarted by their elected racist Jewish community officials...
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Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops near Nablus, by Rory McCarthy | The Guardian

Palestinian mourners carry the bodies of Mohammad and Osaid Qadus, killed by Israeli troops

  Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank today amid a new descent into violence. The two, who Palestinians claimed were detained while ploughing a field of olive trees near Nablus, were shot several times. Palestinian officials said both were 17. The Israeli military said they had tried to stab a soldier...
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Israel and the lobby against the US: A Perfect Storm in Washington | P U L S E
  A perfect storm is brewing in Washington today. Gen. Petraeus has given many mainstream commentators cover with his comments about Israel’s actions endangering US lives around the world. It is no longer only our good friends at Mondoweiss.net: everyone from Joe Klein (Time), Roger Cohen (New York Times), Glenn Greenwald (Salon), Andrew Bacevich (Salon), Col. Pat Lang, John Mearsheimer (LRB), Jim Lobe (IPS), Stephen Walt (CNN), to Robert Dreyfuss (The Nation) is talking about it. Juan Cole has also abandoned his overly cautious approach take on the Israel lobby’s chief media doberman: Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg...
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Documents of Auschwitz Death Camp Doctors Found | NYT
  ...''The sensational value of this discovery is in the fact that these original documents, bearing the names of main murderers from Auschwitz, were found so many years after the war,'' Cyra said...
[The only "sensational" thing about this article is the last paragraph. It came from the AP and somehow slipped by the Zionist censors at the NYT. In a dozen European countries you can go to prison for writing or printing something that deviates from the Holycause dogma, and it's certainly not done at the Times, where the truth is not "fit to print.".]
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The mysterious case of the Grey Lady of Bagram, by Robert Fisk | The Independent
How does a neuroscientist and mother of three end up in jail as an al-Qa'ida agent?

Aafia Siddiqui's sister Fauzia, with their mother Ismat,
 and Aafia's son, Ahmed, at their home in Karachi


  Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. "I strongly doubt if the children are alive," he says. "Probably, they have expired." He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008 re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui – the "most wanted woman in the world", according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft – I guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight. But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children?...
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Cancer: The Deadly Legacy of the Invasion of Iraq | New America Media
  Forget about oil, occupation, terrorism or even Al Qaeda. The real hazard for Iraqis these days is cancer. Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment...
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Lights, Camera, Distraction!, by Keith Johnson | Revolt of the Plebs


  Days after our tough talking Vice President Joe Biden returned from his trip to Israel with a handful of broken glass, the Obama administration announced that it has blocked delivery of armaments slated for delivery to the state of Israel.  This announcement brought cheers and jeers from opposite ends of the political spectrum while leaving those in the middle, well…perplexed...
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Israelis are behaving like spoiled rich brats, by Udi Aloni  | Haaretz
  The terrifying specter of non-violent resistance to the occupation and the apartheid regime is hovering over the State of Israel, and all the state's dignitaries have been recruited to battle it...
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Norman Finkelstein's Best Revenge | The Angry Arab News Service

Iraqis react to Bush's "liberation" of their country

  Norman Finkelstein's enemies will suffer series of heart attacks when they read his latest book, which is not published yet. "This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion" (which will be out soon..) is a powerful and devastating dissection of the Israeli war crime festival in Gaza. Norman is at his best, and he marshals all the facts and use them in a most effective way. It is a succinct summary of the Israeli methods of war and propaganda...
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Olei ha-gardom | Kibush
  On 9 March 2010 the Knesset held a special session in memory of 12 Jewish terrorists, members of the Etzel and Lehi underground organizations, who were hanged by the authorities of the British Empire. They have received the description `olei ha-gardom` and are also sometimes called “harugei malchut”. Terrorists? God forbid! Only in the eyes of the British Empire. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who gave a speech at the session, they were freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives for their people’s liberty and therefore, he said, `today we salute the heroism of the 12 members of the underground...
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Attack of the Cheneys, by Matthew Duss | The Nation

  I'm sure not many fathers think about whether their children will defend them one day from accusations that they ordered torture. Dick Cheney would probably be one of the few who has--and how nice that he got that lucky. Since her father left office, Liz Cheney has been his most visible and effective advocate...
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Islamism: why the west gets it wrong, by Roger Hardy | The Guardian
  Islamism is widely misunderstood in the west. It has its roots in a reaction to the global politics of the 20th century...Our mistake is to see Islam as monolithic. We think of the Saudi brand as the norm – as if cutting off hands, outlawing the building of churches and denying women the right to drive were the norm across the vast sweep of the Muslim world...
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'Current Knesset is the most racist in Israeli history', by Jack Khoury and Dana Weiler-Polak | Haaretz

The current Israeli Knesset in session

  The Israeli government passed at least 21 bills aimed at discriminating against the country's Arab citizens making the current Knesset the most racist Israeli parliament since the country's founding, according to a report released Sunday by civil rights groups. The Coalition Against Racism and the Mossawa Center, which works to promote equality, claimed that the proposed legislation seeks to de-legitimize Israel's Arab citizens by decreasing their civil rights...
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"Times" Piece on Falk Expulsion Ignores Human Rights Abuses, Pipes Israeli Foreign Ministry Line, by Philip Weiss
  ...this level of shilling for the Israeli Foreign Ministry is over the top even for the Times...
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End the Wars, by David R. Henderson | Antiwar

  Last Saturday, the Peace Coalition of Monterey County held an antiwar rally on the seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Lawrence Samuels, co-chair of Libertarians for Peace, one of the member organizations, organized the rally with help from Phillip Butler of Veterans for Peace, another member organization...
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Israeli education ministry censors Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Ben White | Mondoweiss
  ...the office of the minister of education forbade distributing a booklet for kids about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it didn’t like two articles in the declaration, as well as some of the illustration in the booklet...
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Hillary tells AIPAC, the occupation is hurting the US around the world | Mondoweiss

  ...Most significant, it seemed to me, was her statement that in the ’90s she traveled the world and no one talked about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Now everywhere she goes it’s all that other countries want to talk about, first or second or third on the list of issues. "We cannot escape the impact of mass communications." The internet. You and me…
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March 22, 2010


Gaza's tragically peculiar economy, by Rex Brynen | The Middle East Channel
How 1,000 days of blockade has stifled Gaza's economy


  Last week Palestinians marked the 1,000th day of the "siege" of the Gaza Strip. The continuing economic embargo, with its attendant social and economic effects on the more than 1.5 million Gazans, makes for a depressing story. Equally depressing is the extent to which this situation has somehow become accepted as normal and acceptable by much of the international community...
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Mothers' day in Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  ...On the way we heard that Israeli forces shot dead two young Palestinians who were working in their own lands because as they claim they were carrying deadly tools with intend to harm (one was carrying a shovel and digging in his land).  The two 19 year old farmers Muhammad Faysal Qawariq and Salah Muhammad Qawariq) were shot in their village of Awarta near Nablus.  We also heard that the other 16 year old kid shot in the head yesterday died; the two 16 year olds are Mohammed and Useid Qadus from Iraq Burin village.  This brings the casualty figure in 30 hours to 4 Palestinians murdered and over 100 injured...
  [As usual the Israelis are casually slaughtering Palestinians as traitors like Biden talk about the unbreakable alliance - the Editor]
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McCain and Lieberman: A Threat to Americans Everywhere | Alternet
  When John Adams became President of the United States, he brought with him his anger at not having a Constitution that allowed him to govern unchecked like a monarch.  In order to create such a government, he had introduced and passed bills that charged anyone who wrote against his policies with sedition.  Thomas Jefferson called the bills an infringement on the rights of the citizens and had them immediately repealed once he was in office.  Adams was a one term president for a reason – Americans did not like being dictated to then...
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GOP congressmen: Everyone agrees Iraq war a "horrible mistake", by Daniel Tencer | Raw Story
  Two GOP congressmen say most Republicans on the Hill now believe the Iraq war was a mistake, and "more than half the Republican caucus" believes the way in which the US entered the Afghanistan war was also a mistake...
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An American Hero: McFadden's Attempts to Abolish the Federal Reserve System, by Richard Cook | Market Oracle

Say cheat

  Louis T. McFadden (1876-1936) - Dr. Ron Paul, the Republican candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, is not the first U.S. politician to point to the abuses of the Federal Reserve System and call for its abolishment. Similar pleas to get rid of the Fed were made by Reps. Wright Patman (1893-1976) and Henry Gonzales (1916-2000), both Democratic congressmen from Texas and chairmen of the House Banking Committee. Few recall, however, how controversial the Fed was when it was first proposed and then maneuvered through a recessing Congress just before Christmas 1913. Rep. Charles Lindbergh, Sr., R-MN and father of the future aviator, called the Federal Reserve Act “the worst legislative crime of the ages.”..
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Gaza: The Killing Zone | YouTube
  Life in Gaza is a constant gauntlet of Israeli sniper fire, military rockets and army bulldozers. No one is safe. In light of the escalating tensions, we're bringing back one our most moving documentaries, a hard-hitting expose of life in the Occupied territories. We speak to the children caught in the crossfire and find out the true cost of Israel's targeted assassinations policy...
Watch...

My Congressman, Bart Stupak, Has Neither a Uterus Nor a Brain | Michael Moore
  I live in Michigan, in one of the 31 counties represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by none other than Mr. Bart Stupak, a Democrat. You've probably never heard of him. He's a pretty quiet guy, a former Michigan State Police trooper who boldly decided to run some 18 years ago as a Democrat in a rural part of Michigan that votes almost exclusively for Republicans (yes, I know -- what am I doing here? I'll save that story for a future letter)...
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Oren's historical fiction about Lebanon war has long tradition in MSM hasbara | Mondoweiss
  Michael Oren has an op-ed in Thursday’s NY Times about the Bibi-Biden flap. While a comprehensive dissection would consume many times the length of the original, my attention was drawn to a very narrow issue that appears in the following sentence: "Previous withdrawals, from Lebanon and Gaza, brought not peace but rather thousands of rockets raining down on our neighborhoods."..
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Protest the US' silencing of Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer | Electronic Intifada


  Effectively canceling a planned speaking tour, the US consulate in the Netherlands has put an extended hold on the visa application of award-winning Palestinian journalist and photographer Mohammed Omer, scheduled to speak on conditions in Palestine, on 5 April in Chicago...
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In Gaza, UN chief calls Israel siege 'unsustainable and wrong' | Haaretz
  United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday urged Israel to end a three-year blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip and called on Palestinians to heal their political rifts. Ban's visit to the blockaded territory follows a trip made by the European Union's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, who entered the coastal enclave last week...
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Imperialism Re-Booted in Latin America: Canada's Long Embrace of the Honduran Dictatorship, by Todd Gordon and Jeffery Webber | Counterpunch
  Peter Kent recently returned from a three day trip to Honduras, proudly declaring the mission a success. As Canada’s Minister of State for the Americas, Kent is the Tory government’s point person for Canada’s growing political and economic interests in the region. Honduras has become an important focus of those interests, since the military coup last June against the moderately left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, swung the country sharply back to the right...
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Mocking democracy | Haaretz
  The Knesset yesterday put Israeli democracy to shame when it passed the "Nakba Law" at first reading with a majority of 15 against eight. If the law is passed at second and third readings it will be able to deprive bodies of state support and fine them if they mark Independence Day as a day of mourning, or if they hold memorial events for the Palestinians' "catastrophe" in 1948...
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Katrina to Birthright to Gaza–a young Jew’s progress, by Morgan Elzey | Mondoweiss


  Morgan Elzey is a young restaurateur and activist in LA. Weiss met him at JFK last December en route to Gaza and Elzey told him about his progress. Convinced that Palestinian solidarity offers young idealistic Jews a way to be engaged in world problems, in a great Jewish tradition, Weiss urged Elzey, at left in Cairo, to write up his story...
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Metals detected in Palestinian children's hair suggest environmental contamination | New Weapons Committee
  Many Palestinian children still living in precarious situations at ground level in Gaza after Israeli bombing during "Cast lead" have unusually high concentrations of metals in the hair, indicating environmental contamination, which can cause health and growth damages due to chronic exposure. This is the result of a pilot study conducted by the New Weapons Research Group (Nwrg), an independent committee of scientists and experts based in Italy, who is studying the use of unconventional weapons and their mid-term effects on the population of after-war areas...
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My Life With AIPAC: Plus Its Internal Strategy Document For This Week, by MJ Rosenberg | Huffington Post
  I understand what is going on at AIPAC right now. I know it because I volunteered there for a year back in the 1970's and then had a senior job there in the 1980's. I left for a better job. But I left on great terms. My then-boss, Tom Dine, the Executive Director is a good friend and took me with him when he left AIPAC for the Clinton Administration...
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Iran: The Next Crisis, by Ehsan Ahrari | Strategic Paradigms
  The United States has become well accustomed to imposing economic sanctions against any state that defies it. Such actions are taken without regard to how badly they affect the quality of life of the people in the sanctioned country. The cruel rationale in Washington is that, if people suffered the terrible consequences emanating from those sanctions, they would overthrow the existing government. When that did not happen, as in Iraq for instance, the administration of George W. Bush decided to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein through a military invasion...
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Israel's Troubling Tilt Toward Apartheid, by Robert Parry | Consortium News
  The United Nations General Assembly may well have been wrong in 1975 to equate Zionism with racism, since many early Israelis rejected extremist notions regarding separation of Jews from Arabs. But today a virulent form of Zionism is turning Israel in the direction of an intolerant apartheid state...
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Canadian government obstructs visit of Mustafa Barghouti | Aletho News


  The Harper government has obstructed the issuance of a visa to Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, resulting in the cancellation of Dr. Barghouti’s upcoming speaking tour in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Dr. Barghouti applied for a visa on March 5th, for entry into Canada on March 19th, yet despite the urgency of the issue being brought directly to high-level officials in Foreign Affairs and Citizenship and Immigration, the government delayed the issuance of a visa to the point where Barghouti missed two key flights, resulting in a cancellation of Barghouti’s visit...
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Response to Alan Dershowitz’s “Lets Have a Real Apartheid Education Week",by Ziyaad Lunat | Dissident Voice

  Alan Dershowitz recently wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post attacking Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). He argues that “radical Islamic students” are behind the event and their sole purpose is to “demonize Israel”. After painting the organizers as “extremists”, Dershowitz (a self-proclaimed “moderate” who supports torture and Israeli war crimes) suggests an alternative week entitled “Middle East Apartheid Education Week”...
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11 Years Later: NATO Powers Prepare Final Solution In Kosovo, by Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO
  March 17 marked the sixth anniversary of a concerted assault against Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo that resulted in 800 Serbian homes and thirty five Orthodox churches and monasteries being destroyed, 4,000 Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) forced to flee their homes, 900 hundred people injured and 19 killed...
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Brazil steps between Israel and Iran, by Pepe Escobar | Asian Times
  Talk about a Via Dolorosa. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is the first Brazilian president to visit Israel officially. Lauded for his charisma, swing and formidable negotiating powers - United States President Barack Obama refers to him as "the man" - little did Lula know that to engage his hosts this week he would have to give the Prophet Abraham a run for his money, no less...
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Iraq and Afghanistan: America's invisible wars | Christian Science Monitor
  "I would say that of our wars that have involved 100,000 servicemen or more, this has had the least engagement from the point of view of the public and society of any major conflict in our history," says Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and coauthor of the book "Toughing It Out in Afghanistan."..
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Haifa divides over restaurant's ban on Israeli soldier, by Jonathan Cook | The National

The Arab-owned restaurant Azad, in the city of Haifa,
has been the scene of protests by Israeli military supporters


  An Arab-owned restaurant in the Israeli city of Haifa has been caught in a whirlwind of legal action and threats of violence after staff refused to serve a soldier in military uniform, an incident that is rapidly tarnishing the city’s reputation as a model of good Jewish-Arabs relations...
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Extraordinary rendition and a missing speaker, by Christina Cowger and Robin Kirk | News Observer
  This is a time of year when many Americans celebrate their Irish roots. But the U.S. government doesn't want North Carolinians getting too close to at least one Irishman.In the past, this would have been someone like Gerry Adams, the politician with ties to the Irish Republican Army. But Edward Horgan is no rebel; he was an officer in the Irish Defence Forces for 22 years. He served as a United Nations peacekeeper in Cyprus and the Sinai. Currently, he monitors elections in places like Ghana, Armenia, Zimbabwe, East Timor and Ukraine...
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UC Berkeley student senate votes in favor of divestment, by Dina Omar | Electronic Intifada
  Early yesterday morning, the University of California Berkeley Student Senate (ASUC) passed a bill to divest from companies that provide military support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Debate began the night before at 9:00pm and ended and six hours later when the vote was held at 3:00am. The session was attended by more than 150 students, educators and concerned community supporters, forcing the meeting to be relocated to a larger room. Never before has the senate chambers been so overcrowded, signifying the importance and interest in the issue of Israel-Palestine on the Berkeley campus. Ultimately, the bill passed with 16 senators in favor and 4 against...
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The Biden vs. Netanyahu Flap | John Spritzler
  The recent flap between America's Vice President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu over Israel's building 1600 new Jews-only housing units in East Jerusalem is, at its root, a disagreement about whether or not Israel should take the "new path" advocated by Israel's previous Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. I discussed Olmert's "new path" in 2008 in my article, A New Path For Israel?...which noted that hours after resigning as prime minister of Israel on September 21, 2008, Olmert gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth...in which he said...
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The Forgotten War, by Laurence Vance | Lew Rockwell
  The civil war in Korea from 1950 to 1953 that the United States foolishly intervened in, and, for the first time for a major conflict, without a congressional declaration of war, is known as the Forgotten War. The number of American soldiers killed in this senseless war is over 36,000. Yet, Korea remains divided at the 38th parallel to this day just like it was before the war began. Talk about dying in vain. None of these soldiers died in defense of the United States; all of them died for the United Nations, for the foolish policies of Harry Truman, and for the failed diplomacy of World War II...
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March 21, 2010


Terrorism And The Fleecing Of The Faithful, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today
The Abomination Of “Faith Based ” Warfare
The "Reverend" John Hagee

  The “war on terror” has been like no other.  America has kidnapped and tortured dozens, hundreds, even thousands of innocent civilians, bombed poor villages off the map and turned on its own citizens.  We hold mock trials, hire mercenaries and have covered up so many crimes, from rape to murder to massive corruption and even treason that we have become unrecognizable as the country we were even in 2000.  America moved from “faith based initiatives” as a way of expanding public charities to “faith based” foreign policy which has become the greatest tragedy in our history since the Civil War...
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Feds Accused of Entrapment in Synagogue Bombing Plot: How independent is the "U.S. Government"? | NBC
  We have heard of the "historic break" with Israel over its continued expansion of illegal settlements.  But stories like this make me wonder if the Zionists aren't calling the shots all the way down the line - Tom Mysiewicz
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Palestinian rallies jolt West Bank, Gaza | Press TV
Israeli forces detain Palestinian protesters in East al-Quds

  Fresh clashes are reported between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli security forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (al-Quds) as Gaza brims with anti-Israeli rallies...
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ZOG's committment to genocide in Palestine: "unwavering, unbreakable, unshakable" | Vineyard of the Saker
  Yesterday I posted a recent AIPAC statement in which the Israel Lobby in essence demanded that the Obama administration desist from its complaints about the recent humiliation of VP Biden in Israel. Sure enough, the entire US ruling class immediately jumped to attention. Take, for example, the statements of US Congress members which immediately issued statements of loyalty to the Israel Lobby. As for the Executive Branch - we all heard their obsequious reply about the (legally non-existing) "alliance" with Israel: unwavering, unbreakable, and unshakable. It really looked like they were all reading from the same talking points. There simply can be no doubt about the fact that the United States have been taken over by what some call a "Zionist Occupation Government"...
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Lawmakers assail Ahmadinejad, propose debate | Press TV

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president

  Three lawmakers on Saturday slammed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for launching an attack on the elected representatives of the people, saying he is legally obliged to execute the economic reform plan approved by the Parliament (Majlis)..."The president does not have the right to disobey a law which has been approved by the Parliament," read the statement...
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America's "Houdini Recovery" under IMF-Type Austerity | Steve Lendman
  ...A recent issue of the Economist magazine asked "Why Is the recovery jobless? Maybe because it isn't a recovery," with no lack of supportive evidence. "In February, for the twenty-fifth time in 26 months, the American economy shed jobs," and beneath the surface it's much worse...
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Israeli aircraft violate Hungary airspace | Press TV

  Two Israeli military aircraft have been sighted flying at a low altitude over the Hungarian capital unbeknown to the country's defense ministry and the civilian and military secret services. Hungarian Defense Minister Imre Szekeres on Friday urged follow-up action on the Wednesday flight over Budapest's international airport...
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The Death of American Populism | Steve Lendman
  Ideogically it believes governments must provide for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It opposes concentrated wealth, demagogy, and despotism, and supports democracy, human and civil rights, and social justice - an ideology the 19th century People's Party and 20th century Progressive Party endorsed without majorities. Unil recently, faint echoes remained, sadly silenced after Senator Bernie Sanders and sole House populist capitulated...
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The complicated faces of anti-Semitism, by Alan Sabrosky | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Sabrosky considers the different forms of anti-Semtitism – the irrational, the criminal and that whose roots lie within Jewish culture and religion, in the form of the bloodthirsty “anti-Gentilism” that takes shape when “Jews collectively behave in an organized polity”...
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Gazan Fisherman Struggle to Stay Afloat, by Rada Daniell and Bianca Zammit | Palestine Chronicle

Israelis only talk with Palestinian fisherman over the barrel of the gun

  Gaza's 45 kilometers long, beautiful Mediterranean coast is fished by 3,500 professional fisherman. Many more people earn their daily bread doing jobs related to this trade, such as producing and repairing nets, transporting fish and selling it at the markets, running restaurateurs etc...Walking along the coast one will always see many small fishing boats which Gazans call hassaka. At night the sea is dotted with lights which shine into the water to attract fish. Gaza does not have a navy and its fishing fleet consist of less than 300 boats. The largest are the fishing trawlers, they are about 20 meters long and there are 18 of them. There are 55 so called shanshula boats which are 10- 14 meters long and about 200, 4-7 meters long hassakas. To say that the life of Gazan fishermen is not easy would be putting it very mildly. And they are not facing just the usual hazards which are part and parcel of working at sea...
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Why Israel Always Prevails, by Jeffrey Blankfort | Counterpunch
  ...even a day after having been blind-sided by the announcement that Israel would build 1600 new and exclusively Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem, Biden was still trying. In a prepared speech, he once again bragged, this time to a Tel Aviv university audience, that he was a Zionist and that, “Throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States,” a statement that should raise questions about dual loyalties and which, curiously, was omitted from all reports on his speech in the US press...
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Time to bury dead ideas about Palestine, by Martha Reese | Electronic Intifada

Only a just solution can end the current reality of religious and ethnic discrimination

  There is a growing recognition that the Israeli settlement enterprise in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is, in practical terms, irreversible. The two-state solution, which for decades has been characterized as the preferred solution of an amorphous "international consensus" has generally been understood to involve a return to the pre-1967 occupation boundaries (referred to as the green line) with minor territorial adjustments by the parties. By now, even optimists refer to this solution as "unlikely" and "virtually impossible," while realists recognize that the concept has outlived its usefulness as a political aspiration...
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Musings: On Being A Righteous American Jew, by Gordon Duff | Veterans Today
Time For Those Who Know Better To Air Some Reality
  Jews in America are being played, some at least.  Frankly, I don’t know one Jew that buys in on any of the extremist idiocy that has driven Israel to acting so terribly.  Maybe only half my friends and co-workers are Jews.  I am in that kind of world.  Jews, people with Jewish families, make up, not only friends but half my own family.  Fights go on continually about holidays and mostly food.  There simply aren’t any discussions about Israel.  What has happened there and what has happened here, in the US, were never meant to happen.  None of us, for years, had an accurate history.  Now we can believe almost nothing at all...
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Activism is Change, Not Academic Squabbles and Bickering, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle

Effective boycott and divestment campaign is a must for reining in belligerent Israel

  Activism, as I understood it, was largely a unifying, pro-active force that kept the struggle and resistance alive. It was the ingredient that allowed the Palestinian people to maintain their relevance to the conflict, despite the brutality of their enemy and the self-serving nature of their elites. The elitism in Palestinian society led to a breakdown in unity, culminating in the bloody consequences of the Fatah-Hamas clash. Still, despite all the attempts to undermine it, Gaza remains standing. This cannot be attributed to any factional decision or political diktat, but only to the spirit of its people, a spirit predicated on internal cohesion and a clearly defined purpose...
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International Campaign Around Venezuela's Elections Has Begun: An Ugly and Dangerous Game, by Mark Weisbrot | Counterpunch
  Venezuela has an election for its National Assembly in September, and the campaign has begun in earnest. I am referring to the international campaign. This is carried out largely through the international media; although some will spill over into the Venezuelan media. It involves many public officials, especially in the U.S. The goal will be to generate as much bad press as possible about Venezuela, to discredit the government, and to de-legitimize the September elections – in case the opposition should choose to boycott, as they did in the last legislative elections, or refuse to recognize the results if they lose...
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March 20, 2010


Madoff in Jerusalem | Gilad Atzmon

  Zionism, at least in its early days was premised on the belief that once back in their ‘homeland’, Jews would mature into ethical beings. For early Zionists it was the Diaspora conditions that corrupted the Jews...It is transparently evident that Zionism failed to erect a modern ethical collective. Considering the Zionist agenda to celebrate a Jewish national aspiration at the expense of the indigenous people of Palestine, it shouldn’t take us by surprise that Zionism evolved into an unethical morbid entity...
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Selected Popular Resistance News, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  Big victory for human rights: the largest public university system in the US supports divestments from Israel for its war crimes.  Here is the well-documented resolution that passed 16:4 and is worth emulating at other universities...
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The Growing Movement for Publicly Owned Banks, by Ellen Brown | YES! Magazine

  We the people have given away our sovereign money-creating power to private, for-profit lending institutions, which have used it to siphon wealth from the productive economy. Some states are moving to take that power back...
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The Military KNOWS Israel did 911 | YouTube

  Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former director of studies at the US Army War College says that the military brass now know that Israel and those traitors within our nation committed the 911 attack...
Watch...

Please help little Amal from Gaza | Avigail Abarbanel
  A couple of nights ago I watched the documentary ‘Children of Gaza’ on Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’. The film was made by the award winning documentary maker Jezza Neumann. Since then I can’t get the face of Amal, one of the four children featured in the film, out of my head. Amal was wounded during Israel’s attack on Gaza just over a year ago. She was found under rubble and I understand that for a while she lay near the dead and mutilated bodies of her uncles, one of whom had his head split in two...
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Amnesty slams EU firms over banned 'torture trade' | Press TV

Thumb-cuffs and stun guns were among the exported equipment listed in the report

  The European Parliament's Sub-Committee on Human Rights has been briefed on claims that EU companies are still manufacturing and exporting torture equipment despite a 2006 ban on the trade. The study, prepared for human rights organization Amnesty International, details how some countries have forged ways to side step the ban on the sale of equipment used in the torture of humans, including thumb-cuffs and devices that give electric shocks...
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The Irish Famine Was Genocide, by Francis Boyle | Information Clearing House

  Some controversy has surrounded the use of the word "genocide" with regard to the Great Irish Famine of 150 years ago.  But this controversy has its source in an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of genocide.  No, the British government did not inflict on the Irish the abject horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.  But the definition of "genocide" reaches beyond such ghastly behavior to encompass other reprehensible acts designed to destroy a people...
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Zero Point of Systemic Collapse, by Chris Hedges | Adbusters

We stand on the cusp of one of humanity’s most dangerous moments
  Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort...
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Show some courage! Jesse Ventura challenges Bill O'Reilly to an interview | Russia Today 
  RT is sitting down with author, former governor of the state of Minnesota, former actor, radio and TV host, a man of many titles and a wild biography, and a controversial public figure in the U.S., Jesse Ventura...
Watch...
 
McCain and Lieberman's "Enemy Belligerent" Act Could Set U.S. on Path to Military Dictatorship, by Liliana Segura | AlterNet
  Glenn Greenwald calls the bill "probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades."..
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UC Berkeley Student Senate's vote for Israel divestment a "watershed" | Ali Abunimah
  I received the following message and attached documents from Omar Barghouti, one of the key figures in the Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel:..
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The Map: The Story of Palestinian Nationhood Thwarted After the League of Nations Recognized It | Juan Cole


  The tiff between the US and Israel is less important than the worrisome growth of tension between Palestinians and Israelis as the Israelis have claimed more and more sites sacred to the Palestinians as well. There is talk of a third Intifada or Palestinian uprising...I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century...
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Two Right-Wing Billionaire Brothers Are Remaking America for Their Own Benefit, by Jim Hightower | AlterNet
  How billionaires' money took over Washington - and created the mobs who rant against reform...
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Obama won't restrain Israel - he can't, by Rupert Cornwell | The Independent
  His error has been not to think through the clout of America's pro-Israel lobby..All you can say is, we've been here before. "Who the **** does he think he is? Who's the ******* superpower here?" Bill Clinton spluttered in fury to his aides back in 1996. The "he" in question was Benjamin Netanyahu, then as now the Prime Minister of Israel...
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UnPACking AIPAC's White House Slam - Israeli style, by Marsha Cohen | LobeLog
  The home page of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, offers no hint that anything is amiss between “America’s pro-Israel lobby” and the Obama administration.  On the contrary.  “Today’s Briefing” features Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke at Tel Aviv on Thursday, affirming that “The U.S. has no better friend than Israel” and and even  provides a link to the full text of the Vice President’s speech. The highlighted plenary speaker at AIPAC’s upcoming Policy Conference (March 21-23) is none other that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. However, the home page is not where the AIPAC’s heart is...
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U.S. tough love is the kind Israel needs, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz
  Israel - addicted to the occupation, and showing symptoms of overdose and accumulated damage - has finally found a savior to rescue it from its plight. Israel's redeemer hasn't just stood idly by for 40 years, but has even facilitated the habit. However, it seems that change may at last be in the air...
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Taking Sides, by John Mearsheimer | London Review of Books

  In the wake of Vice President Joe Biden’s ill-fated trip to Israel last week, many people would agree with the Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s remark that ‘Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975… a crisis of historic proportions.’ Like all crises, this one will eventually go away. However, this bitter fight has disturbing implications for Israelis and their American supporters...
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March 19, 2010


A People’s History of the Great Irish Famine and What it Means for Us Today, by Grant Lawrence | Alternet


  Between 1845 and 1852 the population of Ireland dropped by nearly 25%. One million people died and one million people left Ireland. This is referred to as the Great Famine. Like many Americans, I have descendants that made their way to the United States from Ireland because of the starvation and the desperation that arose during this period...Hopefully in one hundred and fifty years people will have learned the lesson of disaster capitalism and unfair trade policies...
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A St. Patrick's Day lament: The Green They Steal, The Greed They Wear | Michael Moore
  It was amazing. Every story on the front page of Monday's New York Times told the story of the Age of Greed during which a system known as capitalism is slowly, but surely, killing us...There's now a daily parade of news like this -- well, not really "news," more like the media division of large corporations shoving your face into the dirt that is your life...
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30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War, by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon | FAIR
  ...the front page of the New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and 'certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin." But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam — no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War. A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties...
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Imran Khan: Why I believe America created the Pakistan Taliban | Evening Standard

Imran Khan is treated as a rock star

  I don't have to do this,” Imran Khan tells me earnestly. “I could have a very easy existence. I could go on TV and make so much money, live like a king.” Instead the retired international cricketer, and former husband of Jemima Khan, has dedicated his life to politics back home in Pakistan. Jemima, the daughter of the late financier, Sir James Goldsmith, may just have bought a £15 million stately pile in Oxfordshire, but Imran lives hand-to-mouth on a farm outside Islamabad. He grows his own vegetables and tends cows on his land in the foothills of the Himalayas...
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Today in Palestine!
  Every day Shadi Fadda posts numerous links chronicling what is going on in Palestine as we speak...It is not just a litany of Israel's unceasing acts of aggression and dispossession against Palestinians, but also includes items covering events in the surrounding region.
Go to site...

Wolf Blitzer is a Zionist [In case you hadn't noticed] | YouTube
  Brother Finkelstein bitch slaps Wolf Blitzer. From: The Intifada within the American, Israeli, Islamic Triangle University of Pennsylvania. Classification: Comedy
Watch...

Expect false flag terrorist attack to precede invasion of Iran, by Paul Craig Robert | Prison Planet
American Naifs Bringing Ruin to Other Lands

  According to news reports, the U.S. military is shipping “bunker-buster” bombs to the U.S. Air Force base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The Herald Scotland reports that experts say the bombs are being assembled for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The newspaper quotes Dan Piesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London: “They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran.” The next step will be a staged “terrorist attack,” a “false flag” operation as per Operation Northwoods, for which Iran will be blamed. As Iran and its leadership have already been demonized, the “false flag” attack will suffice to obtain US and European public support for bombing Iran. The bombing will include more than the nuclear facilities and will continue until the Iranians agree to regime change and the installation of a puppet government. The corrupt American media will present the new puppet as “freedom and democracy.”..
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Blowback On the Border: The Purpose of the Terror War System | Chris Floyd
  Let me say..up front that it is my personal view that the form of vigorous activism known as non-violence is the only way, or the best way, that we can hope to even begin to address the inherent and intractable conflicts of human existence in a genuinely effective profound, sustainable and humane manner..Of course, I also recognize that being what I am -- a white man of Christian heritage living safely and comfortably under the penumbra of empire -- it is easy for me to espouse this ideal. No drone fired in the distant black sky is going to kill my children tonight as they sleep warmly in their beds. No raiding party of assassins is going to tear down the door of my parents' house tonight and shoot them at the dinner table...
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NYC's Jihad Against Debbie Almontaser, by Amy Goodman | Truthdig
  Debbie Almontaser has won a victory in her battle against discrimination. She was the founding principal of the first Arabic-language public school in the United States, until a campaign of hate forced her out. She is well known for her success in bridging cultural divides, bringing together Muslims, Christians and Jews, yet as the new school neared its opening date in the summer of 2007, she became the target of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attacks. Last week, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that the New York City Department of Education (DOE) discriminated against her “on account of her race, religion and national origin.”..
[the good guys win one for a change]
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psst...voices calling loud | Eva Bartlett In Gaza


  Today, the latest in growing demonstrations in the Israeli-imposed “buffer zone”, demonstrators again protested this lethal Israeli ban (shoot to kill threat) which renders roughly 30% of Gaza’s best agricultural land off-limits and under which in August 2009 the UN’s OCHA reported 33 Palestinian civilians (among them 11 children) had been killed and another 61 civilians (among them 13 children) injured.  From January 18 2009 to September 15 2009 alone, ISM reported 7 civilians (among them 4 children) killed and 28 (among them 8 children and 2 women) injured by Israeli soldiers in the border regions...
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Settlers' call sends Palestinian shepherd to IDF beating, by Amira Hass | Haaretz
  The response from the Israel Defense Forces spokesman came surprisingly quickly; a mere two or three hours after the query had been sent by Haaretz, the spokesman replied orally, and then in writing, that "following the reporter's question and after receiving most of the facts, the chief [military] prosecutor, Col. Jana Modzagbrishvili has instructed the military police to look into the matter." The matter, according to most of the facts, was that soldiers had beaten a civilian, who was bound and blindfolded, for several hours on January 7...
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Medics report on the clashes in East Jerusalem | JNews
  ...According to medical teams in the city, on 16 March 2010, over 90 Palestinians received medical care as a result of injuries sustained in clashes in different neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Three of the injuries were defined as serious, caused by gunshot injuries, while the rest were moderate and light injuries, caused by beatings, tear gas, stun grenades, pepper, and plastic-coated metal bullets shot at long and short range. In at least one case live fire was used...
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PFLP: Meet occupation's settlement crimes in Jerusalem with popular revolt | Window Into Palestine


  The Popular Front for the Liberaion of Palestine called on March 16, 2009 to confront the occupation's campaign of settlement and Judaization of Jerusalem with a popular uprising that can pave the way for an alternative strategy and a unified national leadership. Only a mass popular mobilization can fully meet the challenges imposed by the occupation's aggressive expansionist offensive against the land, people and holy sites of Palestine!..
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The Break on Palestine, by David Bromwich | Huffington Post
  "To wipe the spit off his face, Biden had to say it was only rain." The Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar was tapping a vein of bitter Jewish wit when he wrote those words about the humiliation of the vice president on his recent state-visit to Israel. Trust a weakling, the saying goes: if you spit in his face he'll just pretend it was rain. Last week, an American leader finally chose not to pretend...
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Group files to have AIPAC declared agent of Israel in US
  The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has been formally asked to begin regulating the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as the foreign agent of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs...
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Where to next in the US-Israel feud?, by Rami Khouri  | Daily Star 
  I have been in Boston and New York City following the dust-up in American-Israeli relations after the Israeli government – during the official visit of US Vice President Joseph Biden – made two announcements approving the construction of 1,800 new housing units in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The controversy has been immense, as far as relations go between the United States and Israel. Rarely do senior American officials say in public or private, as they did in the past week, that Israel has “insulted” the US; accuse Israel of deliberately undermining US-mediated talks; “condemn” Israeli actions; or demand that Israel prove its commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations just getting under way with US mediation...
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Iraq Election 2010: Iraq 'condemned' to democracy, by Robert Grenier  | Al Jazeera

Around 19 million eligible voters will choose from over 6,000 candidates

  As Iraqis go to the polls to cast ballots in the second parliamentary election since the US invasion in 2003, there is great trepidation among both foreign and domestic observers: Not only over the outcome, and whether it will enhance or decrease political stability and good governance in the country, but over the future of the democratic experiment in Iraq itself...
[Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. From October 2002 until December 2004, he was the CIA Iraq Mission Manager. He was also the director of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre. He provides an informed version of the Imperial view.]
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Inside the Lawfare Project: Netanyahu’s attack on human rights NGO’s comes to the US, by Max Blumenthal
  As the anti-Goldstone, human rights-bashing Lawfare Project’s opening event on March 11 wrapped up, I asked its chairman, Columbia University Law School Dean David Schizer, for an interview. Schizer, who had just attacked the Goldstone Report from the podium, pointedly refused to speak to me and looked for the exit. As Schizer was leaving, he was politely confronted by Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke, who heads the school’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Law. "Why didn’t you invite any speakers with an alternative perspective?" Franke asked Schizer...
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Israel's apartheid: Making Palestinians pay for Hitler's crimes, by Suzanne Weiss | Uruknet
  A year after a murderous Israel’s assault, the war on the people of Gaza continues. Gaza is still under siege – still surrounded by walls and checkpoints. Its people are denied the necessities of life and the right to rebuild and shape their future. For me, as a survivor of the holocaust, the tragic situation in Gaza awakens memories of what I and my family experienced under Hitlerism – the ghetto walls, the killings, the systematic starvation and deprivation, the daily humiliations...
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Humor Dept?: "Fourth Reich Israel" Blogger: Deceptive "Geneviève", by Mary Rizzo | Palestine Think Tank


  ...What follows is indeed one of those things we hate to see. It is about a blogger of the blog "Fourth Reich Israel" and manager of the Ning site Peace for Palestine and the web of deception she has woven for whatever reasons she may have. Could be boredom, could be need to have sexual or romantic involvement, could be something sinister: a desire to disrupt the communities of people working for Palestine, to entrap young Muslim men in a "honey trap", a need to find "radical anti-Zionists" and get their private contact information to threaten them or worst of all, to damage the Palestinian cause by bringing it into disrepute...
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Why protest building a synagogue?, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  The Hurva synagogue was destroyed in the 1948 war by the Jordanian army. Before 1948, synagogues were used by Zionist underground forces for illicit activities including hording weapons.  But why is there a furor over building it again?...
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March 18, 2010


Anti-Semitism: "what is it?", by Jeff Gates | Redress Information & Analysis


  Jeff Gates considers how the definition of “anti-Semitism” has been broadened to an extent where any questioning of Israel’s relationship with or penetration of the United States political system, or of anything pertaining to 9/11 or the US’s war on Iraq, is deemed “anti-Semitic” and may pose a risk to the reputation or even the life of the questioner...
[I encourage everyone to disseminate this brilliant piece as widely as possible]
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Where are the Rulers of Arab and Muslim Countries?: Joe Biden's Empty Desert, by Bouthiana Shaaban | Counterpunch
  Vice President Biden’s speech in Israel on March 11 sounded like an official American statement, providing absolute support to all the crimes committed by Israel. Biden’s speech was full of anachronisms aimed at polishing the image of Zionism tarnished by the blood of civilians, particularly children.  Biden was not hypocritical like most Western politicians.  He was candid and transparent...
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BNC Welcomes Landmark EU Court Ruling | WAFA
  The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign National Committee (BNC) welcomes the long overdue ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union that Israeli products originating from Israel's colonial settlements built on Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) do not qualify for preferential customs treatment under the EC-Israel trade agreement . According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, all Israeli colonies are illegal and constitute war crimes...
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The Lehman Scam and Fuld's Mossad Connection | Christopher Bollyn


Richard S. Fuld

  ...the A.I.G. and Lehman meltdowns were not accidental - they were carefully designed crimes.  Richard S. Fuld and Maurice Greenberg of A.I.G. are criminals, as are the people at the Federal Reserve who allowed their criminal conduct and then bailed them out - with taxpayer funds.  Will Geithner and Bernanke face criminal charges?...
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How the western press distorts the Mideast, by James North | Mondoweiss
  Egyptians are justifiably proud that Cairo is one of the safest big cities in the world, but you are rarely going to read that in the mainstream U.S. press. In a democratic Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably be the largest single political party; the Brotherhood remains committed to nonviolence even though the American-supported Mubarak regime continues to arrest, torture and imprison its members. But you are not going to see long interviews with its leaders on U.S. television...
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March 20th Demonstrations | If Americans Knew
 On March 20th there will be demonstrations throughout the U.S. to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, in many cases the organizers and leaders have pro-Israel sympathies that seem to prevent them from seeing – or allowing others to learn – of Israeli militarism and oppression. Because of this, they frequently work to prevent Palestine from being discussed and Israeli injustice from being opposed...
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Solidarity from "Pro-Palestinian" Jews Revisited, by Ibrahim Alloush | Free Arab Voice
  No Palestinian Arab would ever argue whether international solidarity with our cause is welcome or not.  In fact, it's our obligation to garner such support wherever we may.  Moreover, we can never neglect our obligation to confront Zionist propaganda internationally and to debunk Zionist myths in any language, shape, or form.  So at least as far as this goes, ALL Palestinian activists would NOT disagree. The question remains, however, what actually constitutes support for the Palestinian cause: sympathy with the victimization of Palestinians, like one would sympathize with road kills for example, conscious political support for a platform for liberation, or something in between?...
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The Medicare Option - How the US Health Care Is Worse than Cuba's, by John Little | OpEdNews

a whole bunch of doctors in Cuba

  In 2000, The World Health Organization (WHO) published a shocking report which ranked the nations of the world according to their ability to care for their country's overall health. As expected, the major industrialized nations all ranked high on the list, while the poorer nations struggled towards the bottom. France was rated overall to have the best health care system with Italy ranked second. In fact, Europe held seven of the top ten spots, with Singapore, Oman and Japan rounding out the top ten. But even more stunning is the fact that European nations held 17 of the top 20 spots. Clearly, Europe has taken health care seriously and their efforts shine through...
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Iran hacks US spy sites, arrests 30 activists | ComputerworldUK
  Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps hacked into 29 websites affiliated with US espionage networks, Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency reported on Sunday...
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Join the Second Global BDS Day of Action 30 March 2010 | BNC
  The BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling on you to unite in your different capacities and struggles for a Global BDS Day of Action on 30 March 2010 in solidarity with the Palestinian people and for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel...
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Israel Humiliates Biden, Announces Further Colonization on Eve of US-Brokered Talks | Juan Cole
  The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel majorly sandbagged Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday, demonstrating once again that it has not the slightest interest in pursuing a just peace with the Palestinian people or in trading a cessation of its colonization of the Palestinian West Bank for a comprehensive peace with the Arab world...
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UK continues its betrayal of Palestine, by by Khalid Amayreh | Palestine Telegraph


   Last week, a few Palestinian journalists and I had the opportunity to meet with Martin Day, a spokesman of the British government. The meeting, which was hosted by the Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN), took place in Ramallah. In his introductory remarks, Day gave the impression that the imminent renewal of peace talks between the almost completely helpless Palestinian Authority (PA) and a brazenly insolent Israel, ruled by the most hawkish government in the Jewish state's history, will eventually achieve peace and lead to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state...
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Where are the Rulers of Arab and Muslim Countries?: Joe Biden's Empty Desert, by Bouthiana Shaaban | Counterpunch
  Vice President Biden’s speech in Israel on March 11 sounded like an official American statement, providing absolute support to all the crimes committed by Israel. Biden’s speech was full of anachronisms aimed at polishing the image of Zionism tarnished by the blood of civilians, particularly children.  Biden was not hypocritical like most Western politicians.  He was candid and transparent...
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Does anyone else find it odd that Israel is the most visited foreign country by US politicians? | Investment Watch
  I’m not talking about Biden going there as VP, which is clearly part of US foreign policy. I’m talking about trips that are not part of policy, more like meet-and-greet/networking affairs. And it’s not just congressmen. It’s also various lobbyists, and lawyers connected with federal and state government departments, etc...
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Murdoch's Kind of Arabs: Sleeping with the Enemy, by Jeremy Salt | The Palestine Chronicle

Of course Israel could flatten Gaza if it wanted, said Rupert

  Rupert Murdoch, perhaps the greatest defender of free speech and the free flow of communications in recorded human history, or so you would think to read his speeches, and the praise heaped on him by his flatterers, pleaded at the inaugural Abu Dhabi Media Summit last week for an end to media censorship in the Middle East so that the entire region could benefit from the 'powerful wind' of creative energy that was blowing through it. He warned his Arab media hosts not to bury inconvenient stories because 'in the long run this is very counterproductive'.  For someone who has spent his life burying inconvenient truths this is certainly amusing...
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Eye Witness Testifies: Israeli Military Investigator Tried to Influence My Statement | The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice
  Today, March 15, 2010, the Haifa District Court saw the third day of testimony in the civil lawsuit filed by Rachel Corrie’s family against the State of Israel for her unlawful killing in Rafah, Gaza. Rachel was crushed to death on March 16, 2003 by a Caterpillar D9R bulldozer. She had been nonviolently demonstrating against Palestinian home demolitions with fellow members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct action methods and principles. Today’s only testimony came from British citizen Alice Coy, a nurse, who was an eyewitness to the killing...
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'Government knew of Jewish terrorist's plan to open fire on Shfaram bus', by Jack Khoury | Haaretz
  Newly discovered footage of a terrorist attack perpetrated by an Israel Defense Forces soldier in the Arab town of Shfaram five years ago indicates that authorities were aware of plans to commit the attack, a lawyer representing Israeli Arabs suspected of taking part in the subsequent lynching of the gunman said Sunday...
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IOF injures 5 Palestinians in Ni'lin | Palestine Telegraph



   At least five people were injured Tuesday afternoon in the clashes between the Palestinians and Israeli soldiers in Ni'lin village, in the West Bank's Ramallah, following the demonstration which people staged in support of Jerusalem...
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Boycott or censorship?, by Sami Hermez | Electronic Intifada
  On 5 March 2010, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that producer Shuki Weiss, who has been involved in producing many of the Israeli concerts headlined by international stars in recent years, has attacked human rights activists for calling on the Pixies to cancel their 9 June concert at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds. Weiss is reported to have said that "There's no difference ... between a regime in China that silences a performance from fear of westernization, an Islamist regime that stops a performance because of revealing dress and a political group attempting to express itself at the expense of music lovers." Weiss is responding here to the growing movement to boycott, divest from and sanction (BDS) Israel, and in particular to advocates of a cultural boycott...
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US-Israel Showdown?, by Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation
  The Israel lobby is mobilizing for what might turn into the most significant confrontation between the United States and Israel since, well, the Suez War of 1956, when President Eisenhower told Israel -- and its covert allies, the UK and France -- to halt the unprovoked assault on Egypt. Since then, US-Israel conflicts have been relatively small and tied to side issues, such as the fight over President Reagan's sale of AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s or President Bush's showdown with Israel in the early 1990s, when the United States threatened to withhold loan guarantees to Israel after a right-wing Israeli government stone-walled the peace process...
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Violence flares in East Jerusalem | Al Jazeera

The reopening of the Hurva synagogue after 62 years sparked violence in East Jerusalem

  Palestinians have clashed with Israeli police in two areas of occupied East Jerusalem after Palestinian groups called for a "day of rage" over the reopening of a synagogue in the Old City...
[It would appear that the 3rd Intifada has begun]
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Capitalism Is Dying a Natural Death, by Siv O’Neall | Dandelion Salad
  The curtain is going down on the lone-superpower world we know and it is now a most urgent question if and when and how forces for true democracy, human rights, peace and civilization can come out and dissipate the cloud that has spread over what was once an almost decent way of life...
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We are ALL Americans!: Cindy Sheehan interviews Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales | Dandelion Salad
   ...As Cindy explains: “We are not anti-American, we are anti-Imperialism”.  She just plain got tired of all the misinformation spread here in the USA about President Chavez and the people’s Bolivarian Revolution.  For only one example, the National Endowment for Democracy (an Orwellian named agency receiving federal money to subvert real democracy) spends millions of dollars every year in Venezuela trying to destabilize Chavez’s democratically elected government.  Meanwhile, back at home in “the freest nation on earth,” we enjoy a President who keeps us safe by killing American citizens (anywhere in the world) who are only suspects – without trials!...
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The writing on the wall, by Toufic Haddad | The National


The calligraphy says 'We are returning' in this mural from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian refugee’s
 key of homecoming – a symbol of both defiance and yearning – hangs from the lettering


  Half a dozen teenagers rattling spray paint cans and adjusting ventilation masks stand before a large blank canvas at a cultural centre in Bethlehem. The youngsters are part of a posse of graffiti artists whose work can be found on the stone facades across the West Bank town...
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Goldman's Great Greek Swindle and the American Blowback, by Scott Thill | AlterNet
  Goldman's epic swindle may topple Greece and even the European Union. Wall Street's stranglehold on the U.S. is equally dangerous...
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Leave Israel alone to kill!: How can you say NO to Real Beauty? | Gilad Atzmon
[This video reveals a great deal about Jewish/Zionist psychopathology, a subject that Atzmon is very intrigued by, as am I.]
Watch...
 
Rahm: "Flaking away in 'Fucknutsville'" | Milfuegos
  President Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, as previously reported by WMR, has been engaged in a virtual "pogrom" against progressive Democrats in the White House, as well as in Congress. However, WMR has learned from multiple Capitol Hill sources that Emanuel's vendetta has taken on vicious racial overtones with the African-American leadership of House of Representatives committees being his top targets...
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Is the Man Who Controls Access to President Obama a Mossad Agent? -- Signs of the Times


  After 9/11, the U.S. followed Israel to become the second nation on earth that officially tortures people as a matter of public policy. As we saw earlier, it was such Israel-firsters as Alan Dershowitz who successfully pushed for the U.S.A. to join the Zionist torture brigade. Most other War on Terror abuses, including extrajudicial assassinations and disappearances, "pre-emptive" wars of aggression, ethnic profiling, omnipresent government surveillance, intrusive searches at security checkpoints, and so on were developed in Israel, then imposed on the U.S.A. by the Zionist neoconservatives who seized power in the wake of 9/11...
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Final destination Iran? | Herald Scotland
  Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures. Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities...
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Pentagon vs. Israel?, by Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation
  Nearly a year ago, I wrote about General Keith Dayton's address to the annual Soref Symposium of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the pro-Israeli thinktank. In that address, I noted, Dayton -- who'd been assigned the job of helping to train and equip Palestinian military units in the West Bank -- worried out loud that despite the fact that the individuals selected for those units were vetted by Israeli and Jordanian intelligence, and despite the US involvement, it wasn't impossible that these units could become stirred by a Palestinian nationalist (i.e., strongly anti-Israel) outlook...
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They Love it from Behind: Jewish Accessories | Gilad Atzmon


  Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the wonderful word of modern Jewish accessories...
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Nudge towards alternatives in Middle East, by Paul Gillespie  | The Irish Times
  As Oslo dilemmas are exposed, both sides look tentatively at one-state models...
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Abe Foxman’s League of Extraordinary Hypocrites, by Keith Johnson | Republic Broadcasting
   ...Have you ever heard such racism directed at the administration of our first black President? My God, he practically called him the N-word. Maybe he forgot to read the opening paragraph of his own report entitled “Rage Grows in America” which states “Since the election of Barack Obama as president, a current of anti-government hostility has swept across the United States, creating a climate of fervor and activism with manifestations ranging from incivility in public forums to acts of intimidation and violence.”...
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March 17, 2010

Review: Finkelstein's transformation to victim hero in "American Radical", by Max Blumenthal | Electronic Intifada

In a scene from American Radical, Norman Finkelstein and Alan
 Dershowitz debate in the studio of Democracy Now!


  One night about two weeks ago, while I was walking down Bleecker Street in New York City's West Village, I crossed paths with Norman Finkelstein. He was wearing a light jacket and eating a banana, seemingly impervious to the bitter wind and heavy snowfall pouring from the sky. I told Finkelstein that a YouTube clip of him parrying attacks from Zionist student activists during a speech he gave at the University of Waterloo was gaining popularity online. "Well, that scene hasn't been very good for me," he remarked in a near whisper...
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A Dangerous Prelude?: The Dubai Debacle, by Conn Hallinan | Counterpunch
  At first glance, the recent assassination of a mid-level Hamas operative in Dubai by the Israeli intelligence organization, Mossad, was a comedy of errors, as if the Three Stooges has suddenly been put in charge of one of the fabled agency’s hit squads...But was it really just a case of ineptitude and arrogance run wild or, as the Financial Times...editorialized, “part of a much bigger operation, or quite likely…about Dubai itself, and about Iran, which Israel sees as its greatest threat?”...
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Clarity On Afghanistan Pipeline Story, by Bruce Gagnon | Organizing Notes

  I've had lots of responses to my post the other day about the Marines being used to clear out southwest Afghanistan. One friend here in Maine sent me the above map that was in a Canadian newspaper in 2008. This map lays out a similar pipeline route from Turkmenistan that would deliver natural gas through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and then into India...
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Stamping Out (Mostly) Non-Violent Protests at Ni’lin and Bil’in | The Magnes Zionist
  Haaretz is reporting that the IDF has declared the West Bank villages of Bil'in and Ni'lin closed military areas for the next six months – on Fridays from 8 am to 8 pm. The purpose – to stop once and for all the protests against the expropriation of village land for the construction of the Security Barrier (a.k.a. the Land Grab Wall). The closure applies to the area between the Security Barrier and the villages...
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Israel Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig

Israeli soldiers take position next to the highly controversial security barrier,
which has been used..to seize Palestinian land and manipulate the population


  The Israeli government, its brutal war crimes in Gaza exposed in detail in the U.N. report by Justice Richard Goldstone, has implemented a series of draconian measures to silence and discredit dissidents, leading intellectuals and human rights organizations inside and outside Israel that are accused—often falsely—of assisting Goldstone’s U.N. investigators...
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The Poodle Gets Kicked | Patrick J. Buchanan
  Actually, Joe set himself up. From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, our vice president was in full pander mode. First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel “a central bolt in our existence.” “For world Jewry,” Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans, “Israel is the heart. … Israel is the light. … Israel is the hope.” Meeting Shimon Peres the next day, Joe confessed that when he first visited at age 29, “Israel captured my heart.” In Peres’ guestbook, he wrote, “The bond between our two nations has been and remains unshakeable.” He then told Peres and the world, “There is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.”..
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Eva Bartlett follows in the footsteps of Rachel Corrie, by Pam Bailey | Palestine Telegraph


  Today is the seventh anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer who was run over by an Israeli army bulldozer while she was trying to stop the demolition of a home in the Gaza Strip. Her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, are still fighting to hold the government to account, and are in Israeli court this week with their civil suit...
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ADL'S Foxman under attack | Rebel News
  The prestige of Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has never been lower. A recent biting article by J. J. Goldberg in the Jewish Forward reveals that criticism of Foxman continues to expand, especially from leaders of the American Jewish community. Increasingly, American Jewish intellectuals fear that Foxman, while decrying the anti-Obama “paranoia” of the religious right, may be a victim of his own paranoid obsession with anti-Semitism where it doesn’t exist...
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Jail ordeal of hundreds of Palestinian children arrested for throwing stones, by Rory McCarthy | The Observer

Palestinian youths throw stones at Israeli soldiers during clashes in Hebron last month

  Rights groups express concern at the rising number of juveniles as young as 12 who are held behind bars and 'treated like terrorists'...
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Gaza's Guernica | Gilad Atzmon
  "Approximately 1500..." is a 30 meter long anti-war mural painted by 25 young artists in Gaza. The war against Gaza killed ca 1400 people, 431 children were among the victims. 5038 people were injured, 411 of them badly. The artists painted their own experiences from the war: "We hope the mural will encourage people to say "It's enough!"
Watch...

Hizma: A microcosm of a disappearing Palestine, by Nour Odeh | Al Jazeera



  Palestinian women clash with Israeli soldiers at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and occupied East Jerusalem. To the south, Israeli soldiers clash with youth in Beit Ummar, near Hebron. These are the latest manifestations of boiling tensions in the area, sparked by Israel's announcement of large-scale settlement expansion in Occupied East Jerusalem...
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Euro crisis: Latvia and the PIGS | Eric Walberg
  Two million people took to the streets of Athens last week in the country's second general strike this month, protesting the austerity measures proposed by their socialist government. All of Greece came to a 24-hour standstill and the airport was closed as a result of the action. The only public transport was the commuter train so that protesters could reach the demonstration. The crisis broke last autumn after Prime Minister George Papandreou took office and discovered the country was bankrupt. The conservative government had cheated to get into the European Union euro zone in 2001, cooking the books. What on paper -- creative accounting courtesy of Goldman Sachs -- was a budget deficit of 3 per cent and public debt 60 per cent of GDP, by 2009 had ballooned to 13 per cent and 125 per cent...
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Petraeus says lack of progress for Palestinians is "root cause" of Arab anger, by Paul Woodward | Mondoweiss
(Sometimes the news takes 9 years)

  As erupting violence in Jerusalem suggests a third intifada may soon take hold, the CENTCOM commander Gen David Petraeus, testifying before the US Senate Armed Services Committee today, gave a grave warning about the wider impact of a conflict that has been the epicenter of Middle East hostilities ever since the creation of Israel...
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Israeli Apartheid and The Nakba: a new brilliant work by Anthony Lawson | Gilad Atzmon
  There can be absolutely no doubt that Israel has created an inhuman, illegal and utterly disgraceful Apartheid state, and the international community will never be able to excuse itself if it takes no action against this blatant, ongoing and in-plain-sight crime against humanity...
Read more, watch...

Israeli forces open fire on Palestinian students | Press TV


  Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinian students demonstrating near a West Bank checkpoint, injuring seven people on Monday, medics say. According to a Palestinian security official, three of the seven were wounded by live rounds and the others were hit by rubber bullets, AFP reported...
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This Time It's Pregnant Women: Another U.S. Atrocity in Afghanistan, by Dave Lindorff | Counterpunch
  Another night-time raid on a housing compound in Afghanistan. Another bunch of innocent Afghans killed. Another round of lies by the US-led forces of the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Only this time, among the dead are two pregnant mothers and a teenage girl...
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Lula refuses to visit grave of founder of Zionism | Press TV

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Tel Aviv on March 15

  Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has refused to visit the grave of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. In response to the rebuff, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman decided to boycott the Brazilian president's visit. On Monday, Lieberman also criticized Lula's close ties with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his plan to visit Tehran in the near future. Lula described his Middle East tour, which includes scheduled visits to the occupied West Bank and Jordan, as "a mission of peace."...
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Biden and the Settlements: Wiping the Spit Off His Face, by Uri Avnery | Counterpunch
  ..It’s all a matter of timing. The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, one of the greatest “friends” of Israel (meaning: somebody totally subservient to AIPAC) and spat in the face of President Barack Obama. So what? It’s all a matter of timing...
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Report: US Sending Massive Amounts of Weaponry to Diego Garcia | Antiwar


  Reports emerged this weekend from Scotland’s Sunday Herald that the US government has contracted with a Florida company to ship a massive amount of weaponry, including hundreds of bunker buster bombs, to Diego Garcia...
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Supporting the War Instead of the Troops, by Rep. Ron Paul | Antiwar
  Last week, Congress debated a resolution directing the president to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan no later than the end of this year. The Constitution gives the power to declare war to the Congress, so it is clearly appropriate for Congress to assert its voice on matters of armed conflict. In recent decades, however, Congress has defaulted on this most critical duty, essentially granting successive presidents the unilateral (and clearly unconstitutional) power to begin and end wars at will. This resolution was not expected to pass; however, the ensuing debate and floor vote served some very important purposes...
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Is Israel an Apartheid State? | One Democratic State Group
  The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, in its efforts to eliminate and prevent the kind of suffering the South African and Namibian people suffered under apartheid, commissioned a legal study of the Israel-Palestine situation. “The aim of this project was to scrutinize the situation from the nonpartisan perspective of international law, rather than engage in political discourse and rhetoric.” This fifteen-month collaborative study set out to examine legally the question: Do Israel’s practices in occupied Palestinian territory, namely the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, amount to the crimes of colonialism and apartheid under international law?...
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Geithner and Bernanke's Possibly Criminal Roles: Lehman Brothers Scandal Rocks the Fed, by Mike Whitney | Counterpunch
  After a year-long investigation, court-appointed bank examiner Anton Valukas has produced a deadly 2,200 page report which details the activities that led to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The report is a keg of dynamite. The question now is whether anyone in government has the nerve to light the fuse. Valukas provides powerful evidence that Lehman executives were involved in “balance sheet manipulation” by implementing an arcane accounting procedure called “Repo 105” which masked the bank's true financial condition from investors and regulators...
Read more...


March 16, 2010


Jihad Jamie: Corporate Media Hypes Another Blond Terrorist, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez is described as a lonely and emotionally distraught woman by her mother

  Last week it was Jihad Jane. This week it is Jihad Jamie. “Colorado mother Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was released from custody in Ireland after being arrested in a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who angered many Muslims by portraying Mohammed with a dog’s body,” reports ABC News...
Read more...
 
The Second Haifa Conference For the Return of the Palestinian Refugees and for the Democratic Secular State in Historic Palestine | Abnaa elBalad
Call for participation in the preparations
  ...The only program for the relieving of the suffering of our people and for a solution of the conflict is the restoration of the patriotic and national rights of the Palestinian people, the adoption of the principles of democracy and human rights as the basis for a solution and rejection of and resistance to ethnic cleansing, oppression and racism. It means the return of all Palestinian refugees to all the areas from which they were expelled and the constitution of one democratic secular state on all of the Palestinian national soil...
Read more...

Israeli apartheid continued, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  The Israeli military finally constructed the watchtower in Ush Ghrab in the middle of our town of Beit Sahour today.  An ugly reminder to us of the apartheid military power and an eye-sore too.  News also indicates that the army decided to declare areas of Bilin and Nilin as closed military zones on Friday so that they try to prevent the weekly demonstrations...
Read more...

Chavez mocks US 'self-righteous' attitude

  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has dismissed a recent US report accusing Caracas of human rights violations and described the allegations as 'cynical.' Chavez mocked Washington for crediting itself as a role model while it is a country that has launched atomic bombs, killed millions and assassinated presidents...
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U.S. report offers damning picture of human rights abuses in Afghanistan | The Globe and Mail
  Afghan prison conditions are horrific, torture is common and police frequently rape female detainees, the U.S. State Department finds in its annual survey of human rights. The damning report paints a grim picture of scant respect for human rights by the embattled regime headed by President Hamid Karzai...
[What else would one expect from a U.S. backed puppet?]
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The Woman Who Just Might Save the Planet and Our Pocketbooks | AlterNet
  What if our economy was not built on competition? Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom talks about her work on cooperation in economics...
Read more...

The Petraeus briefing: Biden's embarrassment is not the whole story, by Mark Perry | The Middle East Channel


  On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen...
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Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception | Steve Lendman
  Journalist Henry Siegman titled his August 2007 London Review of Books article, "The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam," calling it likely "the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history."..
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On Kramer's Statements | The Harvard Crimson
  We write as gravely concerned students and student group leaders representing over 16 groups throughout Harvard University..We are disturbed by the racist and inhumane comments of Martin Kramer, Visiting Scholar at the National Security Studies Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. We have become even more alarmed that rather than taking a dissociating or even strictly neutral stance against such extremist and hateful statements, the Weatherhead Center issued a defensive response...
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Lessons of Vietnam Revisited, by Andrew Bacevich | World Affairs
  I'm just back from Vietnam and Cambodia, after two weeks in Thailand. I imagine you would not recognize much anymore...The famous hotels of Saigon that you may have known have all been redone, plus myriad new ones have sprung up. In a sense this "Communist" state is more capitalist than George W. Bush's fondest dreams...
Read more...

Statement by Iranian Women for International Women's Day | Iran Feminist School


  Official statement by a group of Iranian women's rights activists who participated in a Green gathering commemorating March 8th...
[So there's a feminist school in Ahmadinejad's Iran and women are allowed to organize?]
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Stop the Abuse of Afghan Women | The Petition Site
  When Gulsoom was 15, she was forced to marry a 40-year-old man. Her husband was a drug addict who regularly beat her. Feeling trapped in her abusive marriage, Gulsoom attempted suicide by setting herself on fire. More and more Afghan women are resorting to suicide to escape abuse within forced marriages. Last year, a law was passed in Afghanistan that legalized marital rape...
[So that's Afghanistan under the American puppet Karzai. Can you imagine a "feminist school" in that country?]
Read more...
 
The Second Battle of Gaza: Israel's Undermining of International Law, by Jeff Halper | Monthly Review
  The Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population, impoverished and the victim of occupation and besiegement these past 42 years.  It was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR people, and politicians, led by (no less) a philosopher of ethics.  It is an effort coordinated as well with other governments whose political and military leaders are looking for ways to pursue "asymmetrical warfare" against peoples resisting domination and the plundering of their resources and labor without the encumbrances of human rights and current international law.  It is a campaign that is making progress and had better be taken seriously by us all...
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It's time: Declare lies for war with Iran as treason against our soldiers and US Constitution | Examiner
  Five thousand dead American soldiers in wars all based in known lies. Thirty thousand admitted American soldiers wounded and injured with over 100,000 disability claims granted. Over one million dead Iraqi and Afghan citizens and God knows how many wounded and suffering. $3 to $5 trillion in long-term costs to American taxpayers. That’s $30,000 to $50,000 per US household of $50,000 annual income. If your household makes more than $50,000 per year, do the math to understand your personal obligation to pay for these long-term costs based on known lies...
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Gaza children struggle to survive | Palestine Telegraph


  Omsyatte adjusts her green school uniform and climbs gingerly on to a desk at the front of the classroom. The shy 12-year-old holds up a brightly colored picture and begins to explain to her classmates what she has drawn. It is a scene played out in schools all over the world, but for one striking difference: Omsyatte's picture does not illustrate a recent family holiday, or jolly school outing, but the day an Israeli military offensive killed her nine-year-old brother and destroyed her home...
Read more...
 
Israel could wipe out Europe with nuclear weapons and expel all Palestinians, says Israeli military historian Martin Karfeld | Al Jazeera
  Noted Israeli military historian Martin Karfeld stated that Israel could find itself one day forced to exterminate the European continent using all kinds of weapons including its nuclear arsenal if it felt its demise neared, stressing that Israel also considers Europe a hostile target...
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Israel's Arabs have been misbehaving lately, by Gideon Levy | Haaretz
  Our Arabs have been misbehaving lately. After all we did for Scandar Copti - funding and grooming him and sending him off to Hollywood - he dared say that his film "Ajami" - our film, the film of us all - doesn't represent us in the end. After we allowed MK Ahmed Tibi to study medicine at Hebrew University (!) and even let him be elected to the Knesset, he dared compare our saintly Zionist militants - the Olei Hagardom who were hanged by the British during the Mandate period - to their terrorists...
Read more...

Active Non-violence in Palestine and Israel, by David Hartsough | P U L S E
  When some people think of Palestine and Israel, they often picture Palestinians as suicide bombers and terrorists while the Israeli military are seen as bombing whole neighborhoods in Palestine. The violence and counter-violence and endless war has created a hopelessness about any peaceful future for the Holy Land. However, during a month-long stay in Palestine and Israel recently, I found something else...
Read more...

Umm Al-Kheir, Where Freedom Stands For Demolition | Palestine Monitor


  Umm al-Kheir means ‘Mother of Freedom’ in Arabic. But the eighty residents of this little Bedouin community in the South Hebron Hills aren’t free at all. With the settlers of Carmel as their neighbours, these shepherds have to deal with harassment, warrants of demolition, bulldozers and even gunshots. The inhabitants of Umm al-Kheir are mostly refugees from 1948. They were forced to leave their homes...and started to wander in the West Bank. In the 1970s, they arrived in Umm al-Kheir, which is located approximately 20 kilometres north of Tel Arad in the South Hebron Hills. It’s a region were Palestinians are imprisoned between the Jewish settlements..Israeli military training zones and outposts such as Havat Ma’on...
Read more...

Settlers Torch Olive Orchard In Hebron | International Middle East Media Center
  A group of fundamentalist Jewish settlers burnt on Thursday at night an olive orchard in Safa village, north west of Hebron, in the southern part of the West Bank..Dozens of settlers torched the grove while the Israeli army did not attempt to intervene or stop them...
Read more...

Systemic Wall Street fraud (Bill Moyer's Journal) | Brasscheck TV
Watch...

Who's stealing Afghan cultural treasures? | Russia Today
  Afghanistan’s unique location has made it home to the world's most complex civilizations that left a rich cultural heritage. But the war-torn country has now fallen victim to looters, stealing the nation’s artifacts...
Read more, watch...

Continuing campaign of arrests against civilians in the West Bank | Middle East Monitor



  The Middle East Monitor (MEMO) has obtained primary evidence of how Israeli forces and Palestinian security services have embarked on a campaign of arrests against Hamas supporters in the occupied West Bank..It can be seen how, increasingly, arbitrary political arrests are being conducted in Nablus and Hebron, where there is a high level of Hamas support, as well as other governorates across the West Bank. The detainees include university students, professionals, journalists and political activists...
Read more...
 
Jerusalem burns | Palestine Monitor
  Thermometers peaked yesterday around 31 degrees. But Jerusalem is burning not only from the hot Saharan wind, known as the Khamasin, coming in from the desert, but by the rage of its Arab residents over the injustices they face once more...
[Includes a link to the full report on the "Hebronization" of Jerusalem by Chatham House]
Read more...

High Court rejects petition to stop building in West Bank outpost, by Akiva Eldar | Haaretz
  The Supreme Court took an unusual step this weekend in rejecting a petition to stop illegal construction at a settlement outpost near Ramallah. Justice Neal Hendel denied the request despite the fact that, at the initial hearing on the matter, the state prosecutor told the High Court the building activity violates the terms of the settlement freeze order as promised to the U.S. government...
Read more...

Israel tortures Jerusalem minors | Palestine Telegraph

  Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights revealed Saturday that Israeli police tortured Jerusalemite children, who were arrested before by Israelis...
Read more...

Justice for Rachel Corrie? (YouTube) | Inside Story
  Israel has to defend itself in court for the death of a pro-Palestinian activist...
Watch...

Israel envoy: U.S. ties at their lowest ebb in 35 years, by Barak Ravid | Haaretz
  Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has told the country's diplomats there that U.S.-Israeli relations face their worst crisis in 35 years, despite attempts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office to project a sense of "business as usual."..
Read more...

Clinton Family Pockets Haiti Assets in Telephone Company Privatization, Says Pumphrey | Black Agenda Report


  Backed by the might of the United States military and their own official positions, the Clinton power couple plus brother-in-law have muscled themselves into the Haitian telephone monopoly. This cozy public-private partnership poses huge conflicts of interest, says Paul Pumphrey, of Brothers and Sisters International – and robs the Haitian people of hundreds of millions in revenues a year.   But then, that's what empires are for, isn't it?...
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Support to Israel is no favor to the Jewish People | Neturei Karta
Jewish Rabbis to protest Israeli government visit to Berlin  
  In regards to the upcoming visit of the government of Israel to the government of Germany tomorrow, January 18, 2010 to negotiate the acquisition of weapons and armament, Mr. Reuven Cabelman, an anti Zionist Orthodox Jewish activist, said last night in a meeting, that: "with all due respect to the German Government for their willingness to help Jews, still Jewish Orthodox Rabbis worldwide find it important to clarify that help or assistance for Israel is no favor for Jews, but a tragedy for the Jewish people and for the Jewish Religion”...
Read more...

The Video That Will Put Geithner Behind Bars, by Mike Whitney | AlterNet
  The NY Fed, and likely Geithner himself, undermined, perhaps even violated, laws designed to protect investors and markets...
Read more, watch...


March 15, 2010


Freedom in the Air, by Israel Shamir | Deir Yassin Remembered
Rowan Laxton

  "Britons never shall be slaves", claims the song. Never say "never". They were so free that they could rhyme 'the queen' with 'her fascist regime' and 'she ain't no human being', in the Sex Pistols song. But that was then, and anyway the queen had enough of a sense of humour to invite the Pistols to the Palace. Now, a British gentleman Mr Rowan Laxton watched the Jews pour napalm and brimstone on hapless children of Gaza on live TV. Oh bloody Jews, said he, and I am sure so would you. He was immediately arrested and charged with "inciting religious hatred". Mr Laxton can be sentenced to seven years of jail...
Read more...

A triptych on "anti-semitism" from Redress Information & Analysis

Zionist myth vs truth and reality
  Alan Hart views the myth and reality of anti-Semitism and argues that the myth, created and propagated by Israel and Zionism, is the single biggest potential threat to Jews the world over...
Read more...

Silencing the messenger of truth with Canada’s “hate provisions” 
  William A. Cook recounts how Canadian Zionists, in the form of B’nai B’rith of Canada, cast aspersions on his personal and professional character because he had dared to highlight the genocidal actions of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his successors...
Read more...

Zionism’s indispensable alibi

  Maidhc Ó Cathail considers the symbiotic relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism – real or imagined – and how Israel and other Zionists have at times faked instances of “anti-Semitism” in order to promote their cause..
Read more...


Come Home, America: Prospects for a Coalition Against Empire | Front Porch Republic


  I was privileged to be at the February 20 anti-empire, anti-war conference in DC...The session itself has been well described by participants from various perspectives: conservative, libertarian, and liberal. So, I’ll just briefly summarize my impressions of the meeting.  I’ll deal at length with the theoretical and historical context of the coalition-building effort...
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Women Miss Saddam, by Dahr Jamail | Antiwar
  Under Saddam Hussein, women in government got a year’s maternity leave; that is now cut to six months. Under the Personal Status Law in force since Jul. 14, 1958, when Iraqis overthrew the British-installed monarchy, Iraqi women had most of the rights that Western women do. Now they have Article 2 of the Constitution: "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation." Sub-head A says "No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam."..
Read more...

Biden visit exposed Israeli settler truths, by Daniel Levy | The Guardian

US vice-president Joe Biden speaking at Tel Aviv University today,
 where he moderated his earlier criticism of Israel


  There was a moment of rare clarity this week for America's efforts to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace. The US vice-president Joe Biden was on a visit, ostensibly a charm offensive to an Israel that has been heretofore neglected by the Obama administration's most senior echelons, and an opportunity to discuss broad regional issues, notably Iran. By coincidence, Biden's trip coincided with special Middle East envoy George Mitchell's launching of indirect, or proximity, talks, between the Israelis and Palestinians. Perhaps less coincidental, Biden's presence was greeted by announcements of dramatic new plans for Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem...
[Even a brown noser like Biden can take only so much, but he quickly got back in line.]
Read more...

Drug War Without End, by T. P. Wilkinson | Counterpunch
  ...When Allen Dulles, Harry Anslinger, and J. Edgar Hoover died, the government agencies each had left behind were powerful, entrenched bureaucratic institutions. These men were masters of public relations. Their aggressive personalities, all shaped by what might be called the particularly American Puritan hypocrisy, helped to create and sell the enduring myths that sustain the American vision of “national security”...
Read more...
:
Will It Mutate Into Yet Another Disaster in the Middle East?: Obama's Toxic "Green" Policy, by Franklin Spinney | Counterpunch
  The contemptuous treatment of President Barack Obama and the United .by the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is setting the stage for a continuing string of disasters in Middle East. Netanyahu just stuffed it to Obama by continuing settlement expansion, despite Obama's humiliating pleas to freeze that expansion in the interest of restarting the pusillanimous "indirect" peace talks...
Read more...  

Spain predicts Israeli annexation of entire West Bank | Press TV

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos

  Madrid has warned that, if continued at the current rate, the Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian lands would bring about the annexation of the entire occupied territories...
[Annexation would greatly clarify the situation - there would be no more hypocritical, self-serving nonsense about "two states."]
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PA official: Israel orders demolition of Nablus mosque | Maan News Agency

Salman Al-Farisi Mosque in Nablus taken on 14 March 2010

   Israeli authorities ordered the demolition of a mosque under construction in the northern West Bank village of Burin on Sunday, head of the Palestinian Authority's settlement portfolio said...
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Critic fined over Sherbini remarks to appear in court | Press TV

Dr. Sabine Schiffer, Head of the Media Responsibility Institute

  A German court is set to review legal action against a media researcher for her remarks on the murder case of Egyptian doctor Marwa el-Sherbini...The hearing is over a fine she was handed last year for her remarks questioning the clearance of a police officer involved in the controversial case...
Read more...

Permanent Aggression: War on the horizon in Latin America | Postcards from the Revolution
  The Empire will stop at nothing to find mechanisms and techniques to achieve its final objective, and we cannot disregard the possibility of a military conflict in the near future. If the US places Venezuela on the “terrorist list” this year, we could be on the verge of a regional war...
Read more...

Sealing in the Palestinians: The Story of the Most Controversial Border Wall in the World | AlterNet


  Who invented the wall? Who came up with the idea for it? "Maybe it was me," Dany Tirza says half-jokingly as he weaves his car through Gilo morning traffic. Adjacent to the southern neighborhoods of Jerusalem, this truly "new" city of thirty-seven thousand people, which dominates the nearby Palestinian enclaves of Bethlehem and Beit Jala...
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Governmental Atrocities Have Exploded Since WWII, by J. Speer-Williams | PPJ Gazette
  Down through the annuals of history, central governments have been notorious in their consistent and repeated crimes against humanity; but perhaps, at no time were their crimes more heinous than during the years of the Second World War. Since WWII, however, the severity and magnitude of governmental crimes have exploded exponentially...
Read more...

Russia calls for report on US human rights record | Press TV

File photo shows the infamous Guantanamo prison. Russia pointed
 to the prison as an example of human rights violations in the US.


  The Russian foreign ministry has questioned the objectivity of US annual report on worldwide human rights practices, criticizing it for ignoring the United States' own record...
Read more... 

Who’s to blame for the Iraq war?, by Maidhc O’Cathail | Veterans Today
  Maidhc Ó Cathail presents a detailed 20 question quiz with answers at the end. This quiz clarifies many points about the Iraq War...
Read more...


March 14, 2010


Truth, History and Integrity | Gilad Atzmon

  ...The ADL’s behaviour is a glimpse into the notion of Jewish history and the Jewish understanding of the past.  For the nationalist and political Jew, history is a pragmatic tale, it is an elastic account. It is foreign to any scientific or academic method...
Read more...

A bountiful harvest of plants and actions, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  The olive young leaves and flower sprouts are denser than ever before. It promises a great season not only of bountiful agricultural harvest but of bountiful harvest on the activism front. It is true that, as the Palestinian poet stated, if the olive tree knew the suffering of its owner, its oil would turn into tears...
Read more...

U.S. gave Israel green light for East Jerusalem construction, by Akiva Eldar | Haaretz

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden

  The apology offered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Interior Minister Eli Yishai recalls the joke about the servant who pinched the king's bottom. En route to the gallows, the servant apologized: He thought it was the queen's bottom...
Read more...

Humor Dept: Bill Hillary and the Lockbox | Political Joke Archives
  When Bill and Hillary first got married, Bill said, "I am putting a box under the bed. You must promise never to look in it." In all their 25 years of marriage, Hillary never looked. However, on the afternoon of their 25th anniversary, curiosity got the best of her and she lifted the lid and peeked inside...
[an oldie but goodie]
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Deafening silence from corporate media (on silent IDF dinner protest) | Mondoweiss



  Last night’s moving, silent protest outside the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan as Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi gave the keynote speech at the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces gala was powerful and inspiring...
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Israel's Lobby Imposes Crippling Sanctions on America - Again, by Grant Smith | Antiwar
  The Israel lobby’s campaign against US and international corporations doing business with Iran is gearing up this week.  The tip of the spear is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee sponsored expansion of the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996.  If signed into law by president Obama, the legislation would institute onerous new monitoring to ensure exports never enter Iran, along with mandatory divestment from and penalties for any corporations discovered doing business in Iran...
Read more...

Taboo Thwarts Candor on Israel/Iran, by Ray McGovern | t r u t h o u t



  Participants at an otherwise informative discussion on "Iran at a Crossroads" at the Senate on Wednesday seemed at pains to barricade the doors against the proverbial elephant being admitted into the room - in this case, Israel...
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Welcome to America, Sucker, by Andy Kroll | TomDispatch
  "I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me," Charles Ponzi once told the New York Times.  An Italian, who emigrated to the New World in 1903, his glory, such as it was, involved leaving countless immigrants and other Americans with only $2.50 in their pockets and nothing to hope for...
Read more...
 
US troops kill Iraqi reporter, her husband
More than 140 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003

  American forces occupying Iraq have opened fire on a car in Baghdad, killing an Iraqi reporter and her husband, a police official announces...
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Deluded Obama Coffee Party Says Government is the Will of the People, by Kurt Nimmo | Infwars
  In a brazen effort to drum out rising Tea Party voices, Obama’s Coffee Party has scheduled a “National Coffee Party Day” to be held on March 13 around the country...
Read more...

On a Good Pope, a Bad Politician and an Evil General | Rebel News

Reuven Rivlin (right) | and Friends

  He is the Speaker of the Knesset, enjoying thus the best seat; nobody blocks his view up there. He is the first one to get the tea in the morning and always, always gets crispy cookies; the stale ones go to the opposition. He even gets personal updates from the chefs, those indefatigable conspirators...
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Is Norman Finkelstein a Zionist Stooge?, by Thomas Dalton | RePortersNoteBook
  For most of the past decade, Norm Finkelstein has been held up as a paragon of truth and justice.  He is a darling of the anti-war, anti-Zionist set, and friend to Arab and Muslim groups around the world.  What could be better?—a Jew critical of the Jewish state, and a champion of the Palestinians.  But I think it is high time to expose a few weaknesses in his armor, and to make the case that he is, perhaps unwittingly, an apologist for Israel and for Jewish supremacy...
[Sadly, I am in full agreement with the writer]
Read more...


March 13, 2010


The dark face of Jewish nationalism, by Dr Alan Sabrosky | Redress Information & Analysis

Carving the Golem

  Alan Sabrosky considers the characteristics that differentiate Jewish nationalism from other nationalisms, highlighting in particular its intrinsic extremism, its xenophobia, racism and militarism, its undermining of civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries and its propensity to hatred and racial exclusivity...
Read more...

Debunking Zionist myths, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Redress Information & Analysis
  Below we expose some of the most frequently mentioned myths that are used by Zionists and their apologists in defence of Israel and its crimes:..
Read more..
 
Palestinians and Israelis speak on controversial Israeli Apartheid Week | The Examiner


  ...Yifat Shaik, an Israeli pro-Palestinian activist...responded, “It was only the war in Gaza that truly made me change. Something about [it] all didn't make any sense. So I started researching - first [on] the internet, and then in reality (going to the West Bank etc.). And slowly, I started to change my mind...
Read more...

Dear Congress: What the Purim video reveals about the racism embedded in the Israeli state structure, by Scott McConnell | Mondoweiss
  If granted one simple wish to raise awareness in the US Congress about where America’s annual Israel subsidy goes, it would be this: before the next pro-Israel vote, members of Congress would  sit down and watch YNET’s ninety second video of Israeli settlers holding a  Purim Party in East Jerusalem  in the neighborhood where Israel is forcibly evicting Arabs who have lived there for generations so Israelis like these can move in...
Read more, watch video...  
 
Leaked Zionist strategy paper to counter BDS | Palestine Think Tank

Settler poster
(In English, because most of them are lunatics from Brooklyn)

  Here is a leaked copy of the Zionist plan to attack the Boycott and Divestment Campaign Against Israel's Occupation and its strategy to shut down the debate on the Palestinian issue and to shift it to a discussion of anti-Semitism and not Israel's illegal Occuption and illegal settlements and human rights violations...
Read more...
 
Back in Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  It was hard to say goodbye to my wife and friends in the US.  The last night was very meaningful as we were in New York seeing the performance of Najla Said, daughter of my friend and mentor, the late Professor Edward Said...I cried while she was speaking because her words expressed deep emotions that I often felt but could not adequately express...
Read more...
 
Conflict 'eats at Jewish soul', by Daniel Barenboim | BBC
The Old City is dominated by the golden roof of the Dome of the Rock

  There are photographs hanging on the walls of my dressing room in the Staatsoper Berlin, photographs that remind me of what I see when I look out the windows of my house in Jerusalem...
Read more...

AIPAC of Raving Lunatics, by Keith Johnson | Infowars
  Without regard for the severe economic devastation and loss of life that a war with Iran would create, Israel’s agents in the United States continue to aggressively stoke the fires of anti-Iranian rhetoric and mobilize their minions on the floor of the House...
Read more...

Chomsky: US, Israeli threats tempt Iran's nuclear options | Press TV

Top American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky at Harvard Memorial Church

  US scholar Noam Chomsky blames hostile US and Israeli actions as a major factor in a potential Iranian decision to develop a "nuclear deterrent."...“If they're not developing a nuclear deterrent, they are crazy,” he asserted...
Read more...
 
US/Israel: The Special Relationship: An Entangled Alliance | Interview With Jeff Gates | Press TV
 To restore national security requires a reappraisal of the U.S.-Israeli "special relationship." Jeff Gates is A widely acclaimed author, attorney, investment banker, educator and consultant to government, corporate and union leaders worldwide.
Watch...

The Rogue Nation, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar
  In spite of the fact that the United States faces no enemy anywhere in the world capable of opposing it on a battlefield, the Defense budget for 2011 will go up 7.1 percent from current levels.  A lot of the new spending will be on drones, America’s latest contribution to western civilization, capable of surveilling large areas on the ground and delivering death from the skies. It is a peculiarly American vision of warfare, with a "pilot" sitting at a desk half a world away and pressing a button that can kill a target far below.  Hygienic and mechanical, it is a bit like a video game with no messy cleanup afterwards...
Read more...

A Closer Look at Israel's Role in Terrorism, by Jeff Gates | Criminal State


  ...Game theory war-planners rely on mathematical models to anticipate and shape outcomes with staged provocations. For the agent provocateur, the reactions to a provocation—as well as the reactions to those reactions—thereby become predictable within an acceptable range of probabilities...
Read more...

Biden Steps Up In Jerusalem | Media Matters Action Network
  I can't help but think of the Buffalo Springfield lyrics: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear." That is how I feel about Vice President Joseph Biden's just-concluded visit to Israel.  I can't understand what the Israelis were thinking...
Read more... 
 
Liberating the Iraqi birth defects in Fallujah | Gilad Atzmon
Watch...

PLO paper reveals leadership bereft of strategy, legitimacy, by Ali Abunimah | Electronic Intifada


Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas listens to US VP Joe Biden

  ...Nowhere of course does the Erekat paper actually propose reviving and democratizing the PLO and really involving Palestinians whose voices have been so long shut out by the corrupt and oppressive Oslo clique. It does not recognize or mention the growing civil society-led campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (which scares Israel much more than Erekat's barking), and mentions the one-state solution only in passing without acknowledging the serious work that has already been done to develop and disseminate this idea...
Read more...

Why Chutzpah is a Hebrew Word, by Richard Hoste | Alternative Right
  ...If you want to win an argument in America, call your opponent racist.  I bet the best way to put out a pro-life message is to say that blacks tend to have more abortions.  If you’re pro-choice, go around saying abortion bans would disproportionately restrict the freedom of women from “communities of color.”  But the “r card” being used by the only racialist state in the world this side of North Korea to justify its expansion?  That’s chutzpah...
Read more...
 
Deconstructing Sunstein, by Keith Johnson | Revolt of the Plebs


Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulation and information “Czar”

  “It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries.”– Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society...
Read more...

The Hurt Locker, the Academy Awards and the rehabilitation of the Iraq war, by David Walsh  | WSWS
  This year’s Academy Awards ceremony was a spectacle of banality and cowardice. The three films the Academy rewarded most highly, The Hurt Locker, Precious and Inglourious Basterds, collectively embody something retrograde and foul in the film industry, and all fly under false flags...
Read more...

Three generations of exile | BBC
Marwan, 35, Muhammad, 77, and Ahmed, 12, share their experiences

  Sixty years ago, the Diab family swapped the simple life of Palestinian peasants in western Galilee for an existence of displacement, dispossession and exile...
Read more...
 
How Western anti-Muslim bigotry became respectable: An interview with Şener Aktürk & Mujeeb R. Khan | Real News
  As scholars who work on the centuries-old Islamic presence in Europe and the continent’s first post-Holocaust genocide against, not coincidently, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we were deeply disturbed but not surprised that an ostensibly tolerant and pluralistic Western democracy like Switzerland would vote by a margin of 57 percent to ban the religious symbol of 400,000 of its Muslim residents because they felt “threatened” by the grand total of four minarets that exist there...
Read more...
East Jerusalem housing plan | Al Jazeera   
  Israel's approval for building 1,600 new housing units for ultra-Orthodox Jews in East Jerusalem has infuriated the Palestinians. Nabil Abu Rudeina, a Palestinian Authority spokesman, told the AFP news agency: "This is a dangerous decision and will hinder the negotiations." The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now condemned the new project, saying it would "widen the gap with the Palestinians and the two-state solution, which risks becoming obsolete"...
Read more, watch video...


March 12, 2010


Calling All Rebels, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig
Student protests last week on the campus of UC Berkeley

  There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police...
Read more...

The Decline of Israel and the Prospects for Peace, by Jonathan Cook | New Left Project
  In a wide ranging interview journalist Jonathan Cook describes the increasingly repressive nature of Israeli society and the prospects for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict...
Read more...

An Oscar for America's Hubris, by Robert Scheer | Truthdig


  “The Hurt Locker” is...an endorsement of the politically chauvinistic view that the world is a stage upon which Americans get to deal with their demons no matter the consequence for others... 
  [It's like a version of Avatar in which the Navi are barely noticeable background for the self-absorbed colonists.]
Read more...
 
Brutalizing Palestinian Children | Stephen Lendman
  As an isolated incident, it would be appalling and criminal. As a regular occurrence, it's state-sponsored terrorism against defenseless children, subjected to barbarism by Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity to crush their will for wanting to live free on their own land - what Westerners take for granted; what Palestinians since 1948 haven't had, and since 1967, under military occupation denying their very humanity...
Read more...

Jewish lobby blocks EU support for UN Gaza report | Indymedia

Head of the UNFact-Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict Richard Goldstone

  Pressure from European Jewish lobbyists has forced the members of the European Parliament to change their plan to pass a resolution demanding implementation of the Goldstone report on Gaza war. ..
[The tail wagging the other dog]
Read more...
 
Time for a U.S. Revolution?": Fifteen Reasons, by Bill Quigley | Information Clearing House
  It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people. The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty, to engage in a revolution...
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Bolivia, our beacon of hope, by Matt Kennard | The Guardian

One of Latin America's most popular leaders:
Supporters of Bolivia's president Evo Morales gather in La Paz
.

  There's a game I've been playing recently. Any time I read the news and get depressed about the parlous state of our world, I type "Bolivia" into Google news and wait for the results. It's really all you need to brighten up your day...
Read more...

Ahmadinejad: Even war can not save Israel | Press TV
  ..."See what has become of Israel. They [the West] gathered the most criminal people in the world and stationed them in our region with lies and fabricated scenarios. They waged wars, committed massive aggression… and made millions of people homeless,"..
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Europe bars Wall Street banks from government bond sales | The Guardian

European policymakers have slammed Wall Street banks for putting profits before financial stability.

  European countries are blocking Wall Street banks from lucrative deals to sell government debt worth hundreds of billions of euros in retaliation for their role in the credit crunch. For the first time in five years, no big US investment bank appears among the top nine sovereign bond bookrunners in Europe...
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Why Availability of Freshwater Is a Huge Factor in the 'War on Terror' | AlterNet
  Water and national security may not seem at first to be interconnected. But they are-increasingly so as the global freshwater scarcity crisis deepens...
Read more...

Two humiliations: Can Obama live with a third?, by Alan Hart | Palestine Infifada

Israel firster Biden

   ...Netanyahu had won in a big way. “Not only did he survive, not only has he shown that he is no ‘sucker’ (a word he uses all the time), he has proven to his people – and to the public at large – that there is nothing to fear: Obama is nothing but a paper tiger...
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Blindly Support Government – Right Or Wrong, by J. Speer-Williams | PPJ Gazette
  ...A lack of empathy blinds human beings to justice, liberty, decency, and personal discernment, rendering them soulless – a major reason for all wars – as such soulless beings are easily enslaved...
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Welcome to the World's First Murdochracy, by John Pilger | t r u t h o u t

World Economic Forum

  ...his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 percent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper and Sky Television and much else. Welcome to the world's first murdochracy...
Read more...

New FBI Files Alleging AIPAC Theft of Government Property and Israeli Espionage Released | Earth Times
  Declassified files detailing an FBI investigation targeting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee are now available on the Internet.  AIPAC was investigated after it acquired and circulated classified government information provided in strict confidence by US industry and worker groups opposed to AIPAC sponsored economic legislation.
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As Simple as Tea and Bread, by Sgt. Paul Kendel | Shambhala Times

Sgt. Paul Kendel with Iraqi children

  Many of my fellow soldiers in Iraq often found my attitude and actions a bit inexplicable, particularly my interest in inviting myself into random Iraqi homes and asking the families to make tea and bread for me. This may sound peculiar, but I was never really scared when I was around the local people with whom we interacted on a daily basis...
Read more...
 
Netanyahu and Pastor Hagee’s Lovefest on Eve of Biden’s Arrival in Israel | Max Blumenthal
  ...The day after a series of talks between US Special Envoy for the Middle East George Mitchell and Netanyahu, and a day before Biden’s arrival, Netanyahu appeared onstage with Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem. The occasion was Hagee’s Night To Honor Israel, an event the far-right Texas-based preacher arranged to tout his ministry’s millions in donations to Israeli organizations and to level bellicose rhetoric against Israel’s perceived enemies...
Read more...

The New Christian Zionism and the Jews: A Love/Hate Relationship, by Rachel Tabachnick | Public Eye

The mayor of the West Bank settlement town of Ariel, Ron Nachman,
 gives a gift to Christian Zionist John Hagee and his wife


  ...Wiesel joins a long list of Jews and Israelis who show no discomfort at being in the center of someone else’s apocalyptic religious vision. Making common cause with Christian Zionists are the lobby group American Israel Political Action Committee, which hosted Hagee as a conference keynote speaker in 2007, and Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who attended a CUFI summit last July...
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Premature Withdrawal, by Tom Engelhardt | Antiwar
  We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years.  Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad.  And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded?  In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better.  In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week...   
Read more...

Official dogma:
Iraq War a success, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon



  The New York Times' Tom Friedman, who did as much as any single individual to persuade large numbers of Democrats and "moderates" to support the invasion of Iraq, today writes: Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right...
Read more...

Where Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word...Like "Bribery":
Congress of Corruption, by William Blum | Counterpunch

  I really did not know that I could still be so surprised, even shocked, by corruption in the Congress of the United States. I thought my coating of cynicism was already more than thick enough to be impervious to any new revelations. I was wrong. Consider the following...
Read more...


March 11, 2010


Hundreds set to turn out for anti-Israel demo in NY | Jerusalem Post

AshkeNazi

  Nearly a thousand people are expected to turn out for a large anti-Israel protest outside a fundraiser for the Israeli Defense Forces on Tuesday in New York City. Focusing on IDF actions during the Gaza war, protesters plan to march outside the Waldorf Astoria hotel, where the Friends of the IDF will host a $1,000-a-plate dinner. IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who is traveling to New York and Washington this week for talks with senior American officials, is scheduled to deliver the dinner’s keynote address...
[Ignored by the MSM, but the Jerusalem Post covers it. The joke is that the US Zionists have greater control over their country's media than their Israeli counterparts.]
Read more...

Welcome to Palisraelestine, by Jerry Mazza | Rebel News
  The year is sometime in the future. The Wall has come down. The tunnel is closed. The past has been buried with the dead. The old hates have been dissolved. The memories of mutual Holocausting have brought a mutual compassion to fuse two populations...
[Another upbeat imagining of a future not so bleak. It must be Spring.]
Read more...

Myanmar Bans Detained Opposition Leader Aung San Suu Kyi From Polls | AHN


  Myanmar has banned detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from elections expected later this year. A new elections law announced Wednesday bars individuals convicted of a crime from joining a political party, thus barring them from running for election...
[Even Burma has learned from the Western "democracies" how to make it look like the people have a voice, while at the same time ensuring that they don't.]
Read more...
 
China Snubs Israeli Calls for Iran Sanctions | American Free Press
  The prime minister of contract murder, Binyamin Netanyahu, was not long permitted to rejoice over the agreement to sanction Iran which he had wrested from the Russian leadership. A few days later, China made it clear that it would in no case help to carry out such sanctions. Consequently, Netanyahu believed it necessary to pay a visit to the Chinese leadership, in order to bring them on course through an Israeli word of command...
[What's wrong with the Chinese? It always works on the Americans.]
Read more...

Vice President Biden lashes out at Israel on East Jerusalem settlement boom | NY Daily News

One picture is worth a thousand words

  Israel blindsided Vice President Joe Biden's fence-mending mission Tuesday by announcing a settler building boom in East Jerusalem. The move to expand an Orthodox Jewish settlement by 1,600 units embarrassed Biden, who was trying to jump-start "indirect" talks with the Palestinians...
Read more...
 
Our Dirty Little Secret: Who's Really Poor in America?, by Leo Hindery Jr. | AlterNet
  ...At least 50 million people are ill-fed -- up from 37 million just a year ago -- including 17 million children. Hunger in America is now at an all-time high, and there are currently entire national geographic regions -- the very large 15-state 'South' being one of them -- where more than half of all public school students are poor and ill-fed...
Read more...

What James Lindsay and Ray Takeyh Get Wrong About Iran: How not to contain Iran | Stephen M. Walt


  In the run-up to the war in Iraq, a critical moment came when moderates and liberals joined forces with the neoconservatives who had been pushing for war since the late 1990s. The poster child for this process was Kenneth Pollack, whose pro-war book The Threatening Storm (written under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations) gave reluctant hawks a respectable fig-leaf for backing the invasion...
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The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste, by Russ Belville | NORML
  I work this issue every day and am well aware of the racist nature of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. But even I wasn’t aware of the outrageous statistics comparing the Drug War to Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander lays it all out in her new book...
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Women of Resistance | Irish4Palestine

  Never underestimate the strength of women in resistance and struggle. Given that I come from an oppressed country where once, like the Palestinians today, have also had to struggle for Freedom, Justice and Equality. And today being International Women’s Day, I have to write about the women of Palestine and Ireland. As the women in my life would remind me, they played an important role in our struggle, and just like in Ireland, the women of Palestine do this everyday...
Read more...

In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps': A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers | Institute for Historical Review
  ...Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance...
[A real holocaust, unrecognized by the Holycause, which deifies a phony one]
Read more...

Khalid Amayreh interviewed by Silvia Cattori | Palestine Think Tank


  Khalid Amayreh is a journalist who lives in Hebron, a city brutalized and bloodied daily by armed Jewish settlers who are driving the authentic inhabitants by force. He is what might be called a true Palestinian; a man of integrity who was never seduced by financial rewards and prestige; a man standing who has remained with his martyred people in order to witness every day the atrocities he suffers at the hands of the Israeli army, but also, and this is the most painful, at the hands of the authorities of Ramallah...
Read more...

Collapse of the American Empire: swift, silent, certain, by Paul B. Farrell | Market Watch
  ..."Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice." Yes, America is on the edge...
[The Thomas Cole paintings can be viewed here]
Read more...

Rachel Corrie family finally puts Israel in dock: Court hears how army bulldozer killed peace activist, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis



  After years of efforts by the Israeli government to deny justice to the family of  US peace campaigner Rachel Corrie, who was murdered by the Israeli army in 2003, the Corries have finally succeeded in bringing the case to court, Jonathan Cook reports...
Read more...


March 9-10, 2010


The Banality of Jewish Symbolism | Gilad Atzmon

  In a remarkable exposé of the Mossad operation in Dubai, The Times happens to refer to Meir Dagan’s (the Mossad chief) ‘philosophy’...
Read more...
 
Mazin Qumsiyeh's impending arrest | One Democratic State Group - Gaza
  Many people have been injured and killed in the past few weeks as both the local population and the occupation authorities realize we are in the birth pangs of a new uprising against the occupation focused on civil resistance in villages and towns impacted by the colonization policies.  A 14-year-old Ehab Afdal Barghouthi was critically injured after Israeli occupation soldiers shot him in the head earlier this week during one of these demonstrations. The concern that hundreds of you showed to my situation with a potential arrest upon return home moved me. Of course, I am more protected and privileged than most Palestinians who engage in civil resistance and we must not forget about them...
Read more... 

The Scar Of David, Book Review by William James Martin | Countercurrents
  The Scar of David, by Susan Abulhawa, is about a scar and a man named David who bears the scar, and another scar -- the scar worn by Amal, the protagonist of the story, whom we follow from childhood and who also incurred a scar on her lower abdomen as the result of the exit wound of a rifle bullet from an Israeli soldier who shot her in the back as she walked to her home in the Jenin refugee camp...
Read more...

Ashton to try to enter Gaza on Middle East trip | The Irish Times

  EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton will try to enter the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip when she visits the Middle East next week, escalating pressure on Israel in the run-up to US-brokered “proximity” talks with the Palestinians...
Read more...

America After the Quiet Coup | Black Agenda Report


  ...The U.S. government has spent more than one trillion dollars of taxpayer money to resuscitate the financial services economy and restore the status quo while unemployment has grown by millions since January 2009, and all without developing the real economy: production, sustainable development, infrastructure, and social networks...
Read more...

ABC Vs. Loose Change | American Buddhist Net
  Ultimately 9/11 comes down to this--do you want more information or not? Do you want the official institutions of our society - Congress, courts, media, scientists, police, and more - to openly and deeply investigate 9/11 or not?
[Watch how the producers of "Loose Change" are being "interviewed" by ABC. It is obvious that the ABC toadie was sent to do a "chop job" on these two kids. They saw right through it, and handed this guy his ass on a silver platter. Is it any wonder why the public hates and distrusts the controlled media. - Jim Kirwan]
Watch...

The Video The US Army Doesn't Want You To See (Watch At Your Own Risk) | YouTube
Watch...

Humor Dept: Proorfeading, sent by Dick Chardet
  Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter...
Read more...

Former FBI Chief Says 9/11 Was An Inside Job | YouTube
Watch...

Rabbinic Text or Call to Terror?, by Daniel Estrin | The Forward

The Pomeranz Bookseller in Jerusalem is among the bookstores that are selling copies of ‘The King’s Torah.’

  The marble-patterned, hardcover book embossed with gold Hebrew letters looks like any other religious commentary you’d find in an Orthodox Judaica bookstore — but reads like a rabbinic instruction manual outlining acceptable scenarios for killing non-Jewish babies, children and adults...
Read more...

Finance Superstars Talk About the Massive Fraud in Our Economic System | | AlterNet
  "Make Markets Be Markets" conference of financial reform all-stars offers an alternative to Washington's disastrous oversight of the economy...
Read more...

Illusions of Freedom, by Jim Kirwan | Rebel News
  "The Matrix is one of the greatest metaphors ever. 'Machines invented to make life easier end up enslaving humanity.' This is the most dystopian theory in science-fiction. Why is this fear so universal, so compelling? Is it because we really believe our toaster and our notebook will end up as our mechanical overlords? Of course not. This is not a future that we fear but a past that we are already living...
Read more...

Russia, Azerbaijan/Armenia: All Roads Lead to the Caucasus, by Eric Walberg | Dissident Voice

  The Russian Federation republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Ingushetia have experienced a sharp increase in assassinations and terrorist bombings in the past few years which have reached into the heart of Russia itself, most spectacularly with the bombing of the Moscow-Leningrad express train in January that killed 26...
Read more...
 
Iran speaker lashes out at 'thuggish' US general | Press TV

Ali Larijani, the Iranian Parliament speaker

  Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani on Tuesday criticized a top US military commander over what he called a barrage of angry rhetoric about Iran's presidential election in June. "The murderous government of the United States is a government of thugs which has killed thousands of Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians,"..
Read more...

Jason Bermas on Russia Today: New world order put on trial | Prison Planet
  There is a new film that seeks to put the structure of power on trial. The film looks at the history of political power, scandal and the vision of some of the most well known leaders in the world, and how they shaped it. Jason Bermas is a radio host and filmmaker who is behind this new movie, it’s called Invisible Empire: A new world order defined...
Watch...

Biden: East Jerusalem plan undermines peace talks | Haaretz
  Israel's decision to approve 1,600 new homes in an ultra-Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood is undermining Middle East peace talks, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said in Jerusalem on Tuesday...
[blah blah blah, wink wink wink]
Read more...

Israeli Apartheid Week in Gaza on Vimeo | One Democratic State Group

  Launch of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in Gaza for the first time March 1-10, 2010 along with more than 40 cities around the world. TV news report.
Watch...


March 8, 2010


A Literary View into the Future of Palestine, by  Anis Hamadeh | Palestine Think Tank

Anis Hamadeh

  The following eleven voices from different countries show views on Palestine after the breakdown of Zionism, written in 2030, three years after the State of Israel had collapsed...
[An elegant bit of futurology well worth pondering]
Read more...
 
Does Israel hope to spark a new wave of suicide bombing?, by Stuart Littlewood | Redress Information & Analysis
  Stuart Littlewood looks at how Israel’s incessant abuse of the Palestinian people’s rights and freedoms, and its trampling on their dreams, lie behind almost every act of suicide bombing...
Read more...
 
Don't Wait Until It Happens to You: Wake Up, by Missy Beattie | Counterpunch
  In a nationalistic frenzy to avenge the deaths of the 9/11 victims, we invaded Afghanistan and, then, Iraq, killing many more civilians than we lost on that September morning when two planes were used as weapons to take down symbols of prosperity in NYC, when one plane cratered a field in Pennsylvania, and yet another pierced the Pentagon. Questions have gone unanswered despite an investigation that was a travesty. And why wouldn’t we be suspicious given the information available about Operation Northwoods, a template for the events that shattered the security of our country and set in motion a neocon/fascist plan that is destroying democracy?..
Read more...
 
Dissenters To Be Detained As “Enemy Belligerents”?, by Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet
New bill allows U.S. citizens to be kidnapped and detained without trial indefinitely based on “suspected activity”


  The “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” introduced by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday with little fanfare, “sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning,”...
Read more...

 Is Europe planning seal of approval for Israeli settlers?: Israel set to join club of richest nations, by Jonathan Cook | Redress Information & Analysis
  Jonathan Cook reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is set to accept Israel as a member – thus conferring legitimacy on its illegal occupation of Arab lands – despite Israel’s failure to meet a number of OECD criteria, including on corruption, copyright and wealth disparity...
Read more...

Mordechai Vanunu's Nobel Stand, by Rannie Amiri | Counterpunch
  ...It was revealed last week that in a letter to the Committee, Mordechai Vanunu had asked for his candidacy to be rescinded. It was unusual enough for Geir Lundestad to acknowledge that a nomination had even been received, let alone publicly disclose Vanunu’s request. But for Vanunu—a man who should have been awarded the Peace Prize long ago—it was in full keeping with the dignity, integrity and uncompromising nature of one to whom the world owes a great debt...
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More Than Words: Liz Cheney says terrorists have no rights. Also, you're a terrorist, by Dahlia Lithwick | Slate

Liz Cheney

  ...After 9/11, once you're branded an enemy combatant, you can be held for years without any of your constitutionally protected rights, including the right to be told of the charges against you or to confront the witnesses against you. Thanks to people like Cheney, those alleged to be members of al-Qaida are stripped of their Sixth Amendment right to prove they are not...
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Freeing Dr. Aafia, a Matter of Honour, by Gordon Duff | Salem-News
  ..The Bush administration, when it saw its “War on Terror” wasn’t getting enough suspects, hired drug cartel members and criminal elements to kidnap innocent civilians to fill our secret prisons. Yes, we actually did this. In this case, we kidnapped a mother with 3 children, tortured her for years, murdered a small child and then charged her with attempting to murder her captors after years in a secret prison on Bagram Air Force Base...
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A Wrench in the Israeli Gears, by Alison Weir | Counterpunch
  ...An outside observer might be forgiven for being confused about which nation these candidates are seeking to serve. Rather than competing over who is the most loyal Californian and patriotic American, these would-be Senators seem often to be competing over who is the most supportive of a foreign regime...
Read more...

Netanyahu Re-igniting Religious War in the Holy Land, by Dr. Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine

A Palestinian boy scuffles with an Israeli soldier during a demonstration
 by Palestinians against the Israeli decision to include two West Bank shrines
 on a list of their national heritage sites in the West Bank village of Beit Omar, near Hebron


  Netanyahu’s late decision to include the Islamic Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil (Hebron) and Bilal Mosque in Bethlehem to the so-called “Israeli list of national heritage sites” seems to re-ignite the spark of religious war between Jewish Israelis on one side and the Moslem Palestinians and the Islamic World on the other side...
Read more...

David Ignatius/Neo-Con Media: Oh What a Lovely War, by Philip Giraldi | Campaign for Liberty
  The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote "Oh what a gift a gift to gie us, to see ourselves as others see us." Burns could not have possibly predicted a hubris ridden twenty-first century America not much given to introspection, but there were certainly enough examples of over mighty kings and princes in his own time for him to draw upon...
Read more...

American born Al Qaeda spokesman arrested in Pakistan, by Elias Farhud | Intifada Palestine


  This  arrest in Pakistan is a top story headline at Google news, but it fails to mention that Adam Gadahn had converted to radical Islam while living with his Jewish Zionist Grandfather who was an official of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
Read more...

Anthony Lawson -"It was the right decision" | Gilad Atzmon
  With Anthony Lawson around who needs the Chilcot Inquiry? The art of questioning performed here by Lawson is not  presented at the Iraq Inquiry. In Britain 2010, war criminals are yet to be challenged...
  [Lawson is a video artist of the highest order]
Watch video...
 
America's Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan, by James Lucas | Antiwar
  Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons, and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare...
Read more...  

The Harlot's Grave, by Uri Avnery | Palestine Chronicle

The Ibrahimi mosque in al-Khalil (Hebron)

  Some weeks ago, Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in Rome, was released after serving 28 years in prison. The motives for his act have never been clarified. But a Palestinian leader once told me his version: God appeared to Agca in a dream and told him: Go to the Holy City and kill that damn Pole. But the Turk misunderstood, so instead of going to Jerusalem and killing Menachem Begin, he went to Rome…”
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Two “Iraq war” movies compete for awards, by Mamoon Alabbasi | Redress Information & Analysis
  Mamoon Alabassi compares two "Iraq war" movies, "Avatar" and "Hurt locker", and argues that, for Iraqis who feel de-humanized by the media, the positive depiction of non-humans in "Avatar" is welcome: "If some humans can relate to the 'humanity' of non-humans in fiction, then surely they would find it easier to identify with the true humanity of de-humanized humans in real life."
[Following last night's Oscar extravaganza I thought I'd repeat this link]
Read more...

Avatar's Parable of Our Times: The Navi and the Palestinians, by Bouthaina Shaaban | Counterpunch
  ...This contrast between the values of  two cultures is at the essence of the creation of Israel.  For seventy years, it has killed the Palestinians on a daily basis, Judaized their holy places, settled their land, confiscated their water, uprooted their trees, mocked their beliefs, their commitment to their land and their way of life.  Those who created this settlement armed  it to the teeth with hatred, and provided it with weapons of mass destruction...
Read more...

Will the Afghan Surge Succeed?, by M. Shahid Alam | Palestine Chronicle

How did the Taliban stage this comeback?

  More than eight years after dismantling the Taliban, the United States is still mired in Afghanistan. Indeed, last October it launched a much-hyped ‘surge’ to prevent a second Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, not imminent yet, but eminently possible...
Read more...

U.S. Government Confirms Sanctions Don't Work, by Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF

  Even while employing sanctions against Iran, the U.S. government is confirming that sanctions do not work...
Read more...
 
The sounds of piano in Gaza, by Pam Rasmussen | Electronic Infifada
  ...Nour, Tasneem, Rana and Assala are like girls around the happier parts of the world in so many ways. They love to chat with friends online, play dodgeball and read adventure novels. Shopping is difficult in Gaza; there are no malls and there is little money. But they have all one dream that sets them apart: "peace and freedom," for their country, and their families. In Gaza little girls have a way of sounding old and wise...
Read more...


March 7, 2010

Ashkenazi's US visit draws protests | Press TV
The butcher of Gaza

  As the Israeli military chief Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi is heading to the US, dozens of organizations in America are planning protests against the head of the Israeli Defense Forces. More than 25 American, Jewish and Israeli organizations plan to stage a protest against Ashkenazi in New York's Manhattan on Tuesday...
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A superpower and “the world's sickest warrior state”, by Paul J. Balles | Redress Information & Analysis

  Paul J. Balles says the US “has not only become the world's major power, it has become the world's sickest warrior state”. He calls on humanitarians to reject the double standards set by warmongers, on the clergy to stop preaching sanctimonious sermons and on teachers to teach a zero tolerance policy for self-righteous warriors...
Read more...

Veritas in Harvard: No, Just Double Standards, Injustice, and Fear, by Mohamed Khodr | Palestine Think Tank

"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about
 the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed
 the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
–Prof. Arnold Toynbee

  I must strenuously and in the strongest terms possible protest the silence and inaction of Harvard University toward the outrageous, inhumane, offensive, even racist eugenic proposal that Dr. Martin Kramer, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard made during his speech at the Israeli Herzliya Conference on January 31, 2010...
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The truth about Israel as only Gideon Levy can tell it:
A damning indictment of Israel’s “peace camp”, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis

  Alan Hart views an article published in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, in which Gideon Levy castigates the Israeli “left” and “peace camp” for their “impossible adherence to Zionism”, for their complacency and for the unwillingness of their followers to take personal risk and show courage, which, he says, mean that Israel's left is “illusory” and its peace camp “an unborn baby”...
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Israel, Yemen, the Gold Watch and Everything!, by Keith Johnson | Palestine Think Tank


  The fingerprints of Israel’s meddling are all over the place in Yemen. And you better believe that we’ll be hearing a lot more about Yemeni connections to all manner of atrocities committed in the name of “Allah” against the United States. Israel will make darn sure of that. And what’s my evidence? Well, recent history would be a good place to start...
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Israel's Lies, by Henry Siegman | London Review of Books
  Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network...
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O'er the Bounding Waves
Which fleet would you prefer to be sailing with?

Flotilla Sailing from Turkey to Break the Siege of Gaza | Salem-News


  The many passenger boats accompanying the cargo ships will carry members of Parliament from countries around the world as well as high-profile journalists and human rights workers...
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Two Israeli Missile Ships Pass Through Suez Canal | Israel News


  Two [nuclear cruise] missile ships [gifts from the Zionazi state of Germany] belonging to the Israeli Navy passed through the Suez Canal sometime during the last few weeks, according to reports on several internet sites. In the past, the passage of Israeli warships southward through the canal, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, has been interpreted as preparation for a possible attack against Iran...
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'Peace or Apartheid' are not the only options for Israel | Alan Hart
  The developing debate about Israel’s future offers two scenarios but there is a third which, apparently, should not be discussed in the open, in public. So let’s do just that...
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Thousands march in Jerusalem rally | Al Jazeera

  At least 3,000 protesters, including Israelis and Palestinians, have rallied in an Arab quarter of east Jerusalem to protest the eviction of Palestinians from their homes there in favor of Jewish settlers...
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Universities across the globe mark Israeli Apartheid Week, by Danna Harman | Haaretz
  A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organizers have declared as "Israeli Apartheid Week" - and all three speakers are Israeli. University campuses in more than 40 cities around the world are marking the week with lectures, films, multimedia events, cultural performances and demonstrations...
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March 5-6, 2010


Ireland says Israeli siege on Gaza 'medieval' | Press TV

Irish Foreign Minister Michael Martin

  Ireland blasts the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip as "medieval," urging the European Union to pressure Tel Aviv into easing the restrictions...
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Israeli Apartheid Week: Targeting Israeli Apartheid, by Stephen Lendman | Dissident Voice
  ..“Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories). At the same time, elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law.” - former UN Special Human Rights Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, John Dugard...
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Meditation on a photo of Ernst Zundel after he emerged from prison, by Michael Hoffman | On the Contrary


  ...Ernst will not bow to adversity, he will not whine, he will not show pain, but rather, in his smiling countenance one sees the joy of life. This is a testimony to his spirit, after seven years' incarceration, including two in solitary confinement in Canada. Let us also not forget that as a child he survived the Allied firebombing holocaust against his hometown of Pforzheim; consequently, on top of it all, he is a holocaust survivor. I have seen a similar serenity and nobility in Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts...
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So when are you going to make war on Israel, Mr Brown?, by Alan Hart | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Hart highlights the double standard displayed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Iraq Inquiry on 5 March, where he sought to justify the aggression against Iraq on the grounds of Iraq’s non-compliance with international law – something Israel has been doing for 62 years...
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HRW slams Israel's detention of Palestinians | Press TV


  Human Rights Watch has called on Israel to immediately end its arbitrary detention of Palestinians protesting the separation barrier in the occupied West Bank...
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How do you aim BDS at the Israel lobby? | Mondoweiss
  Amy Goodman had a good debate of BDS today, between Omar Barghouti of Palestinian civil society and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the longtime peace activist, who admits he was all for BDS when it was South African apartheid, but not this time around. One distinction he makes is that maybe we should be boycotting the Israel lobby, not Israel?...
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Israeli forces raid Al-Aqsa Mosque compound

  Israeli forces have stormed the courtyards of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied East Jerusalem Al-Quds and cordoned off its premises where dozens of Palestinian protesters had gathered...
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 Israeli Apartheid Week: Beirut, by Daniel Drennan | Monthly Review
  Two months ago a few students got together at the American University of Beirut and started planning a week of conferences, workshops, and actions based on the model offered by Israeli Apartheid Week which started six years ago in Toronto.  A list of speakers was drawn up, and with nothing much to offer except the basic idea itself, invitations went out...
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Eleven Injured As Troops Attack Anti Wall Protest | International Middle East Media Center


Palestinian youth injured by the Israeli army fire

  Eleven people, amongst them two internationals, were injured, on Friday, by Israeli military fire when troops suppressed an anti wall protest at the al-Nabi Saleh village, northern West Bank...
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Protests: Troops fire tear gas at journalists, 'Ghandi' | Maan News Agency
  ..."The occupation forces fired tear gas towards the citizens of Bil'in, foreign peace activists and peace-loving Israelis," a statement from the popular committee said...
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Cleric issues anti-terror fatwa | Al Jazeera
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri said there was no place for violence or terrorism in Islam

  A leading Islamic scholar has issued a fatwa in Britain condemning "terrorists" as the enemies of Islam, in a bid to deter young Muslims from extremism...
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Israeli Pride | Gilad Atzmon
  The Zionist dream is over. The attempt to become people like other people has failed. We are dealing here with a bloodthirsty tribal society on the verge  of collective psychosis.
Watch video...

Bowing to Jewish Pressure by Gilad Atzmon


  Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced plans today to stop the issue of arrest warrants for foreign officials such as Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and other Israeli war criminals who were forced to cancel planned trips to London after arrest warrants were issued against them...
Read more...

Suppressing Evidence: David Miliband and UK complicity in torture | Sarah Gillespie
  ...as Miliband’s credibility crumbles in the light of his failed cover-up, so the plausibility of Binyam Mohammed’s testimony gains ground. The tide is changing...
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CONCLUSIONS OF THE RUSSELL TRIBUNAL ON PALESTINE
Read report...


March 4, 2010


How the Monsters at Goldman Sachs Caused a Greek Tragedy, by Jim Hightower | AlterNet


  Greece's crushing debt has exploded into a full-blown crisis, with the country on the precipice of the unthinkable: the default of a sovereign nation. Thanks Goldman Sachs...
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Muslim Disunity: A Religion Divided Against Itself, by Paul Craig Roberts | Counterpunch 
  Muslims are numerous but powerless. Divisions among Muslims, especially between Sunni and Shi’ites, have consigned the Muslim Middle East to almost a century of Western control...
Read more...
 
EU urged to see Gaza plight for itself | Press TV
Ashton has come under fire for failing to rush to Haiti after January's devastating tremor there

  Major European charity organizations urge EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton to visit Gaza during her West Bank tour and see the Palestinians' plight for herself...
Read more...
 
"I RESIST", Video by Shadi Nassar | Palestine Think Tank
Watch...
 
Moment of truth: time to boycott Israel's entire range of injustice, by Rifat Kassis | Electronic Intifada

A Palestinian woman stands by as Israeli army bulldozers uproot
olive trees belonging to families in Beit Jala, occupied West Bank


  ...The authors of the "Moment of Truth" Kairos document, which is the Christian Palestinians' statement to the world about the occupation of Palestine and a call for support in opposing it, have repeatedly been asked about the use of the word "boycott." What exactly does this mean? How far exactly does it go? And what exactly does it call for?...
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Goldman's Golden Fleece, by Mary Bottari | Center for Media and Democracy
  The steady stream of revelations regarding the role Goldman Sachs has played in the fleecing of Europe should reinvigorate efforts in Congress to rein in the reckless trading that could send the global economy into another tailspin...
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The Murderous Mossad and 9-11 | Christopher Bollyn

Israeli citizen and son of a Mossad agent, Michael Chertoff, from his perch at the
Department of Justice, oversaw the confiscation of 9-11 evidence and non-investigation by the F.B.I.


  To avoid more war in the region it is essential to understand the strategy of the Zionist extremists -- and the people behind it. The three key highest level Israeli agents involved in the treasonous cover-up of 9-11 truth:..
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Paul Craig Roberts Sticks It To The 9/11 Criminals | World Reports
  The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper's website for the past three days was the "Inside the Beltway" report, "Explosive News", about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members...
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Germany's Fear of Finkelstein, by Ali Fathollah-Nejad | Palestine Chronicle

Finkelstein was prevented by German Israel Lobby from speaking about Gaza

  Norman Finkelstein, an internationally renowned scholar of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, was due to talk about the state of the decades-old conflict and the situation in Gaza one year after the Israeli assault last week in Munich and Berlin...
[I guess the Germans are kind of predictable; they smoothly goose-stepped from Hitler's Nazism to ZioNazism. Didn't miss a beat.]
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Dubai seeks Netanyahu's arrest over killing of Hamas man (Reuters) | Haaretz
  Dubai's police chief plans to seek the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad over the killing of a Hamas leader in the emirate, Al Jazeera television reported on Wednesday...
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Call me, Lieberman!, by Roy Tov | Rebel News
Avigdor Lieberman | Political Persecution in Israel

  ..Few would accuse me of having any political sympathies with Avigdor Lieberman, the current Foreign Affairs Minister of Israel and the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, an extremist, right wing party, a Jewish supremacist, a settler in the West Bank and a proud racist, at least judging by his highly controversial statements regarding Arabs in general, Palestinian-Israeli citizens in particular and the outrageous solutions he proposes for the conflict...
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No Such Thing As Liberal Zionism, by Lawrence of Cyberia | Uruknet
  Just look at these numbers...
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"I can't live without this place", by Nora Barrows-Friedman | Electronic Intifada


Abed Rabbeh in his cave holding his father's ID and court documents proving the land belongs to his family

  "The Israeli police used a bullhorn and shouted 'death to Arabs!' toward me once," Abed Rabbeh remembers, his hands wrapped around a small ceramic cup of tea. "Another time, they tried to tell me that my grandfather was born in Dheisheh refugee camp and that I have no roots in this land." His face breaks into a wide smile. "However, I have documents that prove that my father, my grandfather and many generations before him, were born here, in al-Walaja village. Now, I'm the only one left here."...
[One of thousands of similar stories...]
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Israel Penalizing Nakba Commemoration: One More Step Down the Path of Apartheid | Badil
  The Israeli parliamentary Law Committee has recently approved a law proposal the (“Nakba bill”) that, if passed by the Knesset, would impose economic sanctions on the organizers of Nakba commemorations. Every year in May, Palestinians and supporters of their right of return commemorate the Nakba of 1948, which marks the single most traumatic and far-reaching event in the long and ongoing process of forced displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel...
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Humor Dept: How Megachurches Would Profit From Temple Prostitution, by Tim Worstall | Rebel News


  Much of international discourse, international politics, is all about how they should become more like us. Quite how they should become more like us depends upon the speaker: if it’s Hillary then more attention should be given to strong, hefty, and mature women who’ve never had an original idea in their lives and if it’s Bill then more attention will be paid to strong, hefty, and young women who have some very original ideas about cigars...
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Humanity vs Insanity, by Frank Scott | legalienate
  Whenever there is a crisis in the system’s stability ruling power often reacts in a disarray approaching panic but the numerous crises of the present moment bring with them an even more serious situation. It warrants aroused action from a unified and informed population but so far we are only aroused...
[Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. An excellent overview; please disseminate widely]
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118 UN members reaffirm support for Iran's N-program | Press TV
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) logo

  As the West pushes for new sanctions against Iran, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) moves to issue a new statement, voicing its support for Iran's peaceful nuclear program...
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Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction", by Stephen Lendman | OpEd News
  ..They control governments, the courts, war and peace, dominant information sources, and essential services, including health care, air and water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, and school curricula to the highest levels. They own genetic code patents, basic human life elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste, tomatoes or toilet paper...
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'Aafia's return, a question of honor for Pakistan' | Press TV

People rally to support Aafia Siddiqui who is in US custody

  ...During the demonstrations which were held on Wednesday, rights activist, students, and political party leaders urged the government to take all possible measures to secure the release of Aafia, who is in US custody for her alleged contacts with the Al-Qaeda...
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Russell Tribunal on Palestine concludes in Spain | Press TV
  ...At the closing of the session Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, enumerated Tel Aviv's international-law violations. "Among serious Israeli infringements are closure of Gaza Strip borders, restrictions on the freedom movement of its inhabitants, stripping Palestinian refugees of return right to their land of origin as well as preventing Palestinians from free use of natural resources such as water within their land,"..
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March 2-3, 2010


White Lie, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom
  This coming Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Israel will consider an application by a group of Israeli citizens to compel the Interior Ministry to register them as belonging to the “Israeli nation”. Odd? Indeed...
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Israeli army wants me, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter
  The Israeli army invaded our neighborhood at 1:30 AM Tuesday morning waking up my mother, wife and sister.  Heavily-armed soldiers blocked roads during "the operation". When my family opened the door, they demanded to see me.  They were told I have already left to the US.  After many more questions, they left a paper that states I am to appear at the military liaison office next Monday...I guess I am a wanted man now for engaging in nonviolent protest!..
Read more...
 
NY Times' Jerusalem property makes it protagonist in Palestine conflict | Electronic Intifada

A photo from an Israeli mapping website shows the Qatamon house
 where Ghada Karmi grew up. The two upper levels, bought by
The New York Times in 1984, were built around the late 1970s


  The New York Times' Jerusalem bureau chief lives on property Israel seized from Palestinian refugees forced to leave their homes during the Nakba in 1948. EI's Ali Abunimah reveals for the first time details of The Times' acquisition and use of this property and the story of the Palestinian family whose home it was. What are the implications for its reporting of a case that places the "newspaper of record" at the heart of the Palestine conflict?...
Read more...

Combating the Disinformation, Psyops, and Cover-ups of the US Military, by Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri | Dissident Voice
A Scrape in the Teflon US Military Propaganda: Interview with Captain Eric H. May
  Few people have heard of the Battle of Baghdad. They might remember Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, Iraq’s information minister, warning of a surprise awaiting U.S. troops if they attacked Saddam International Airport. Later, al-Sahhaf claimed that the Iraqi Republican Guard had slaughtered U.S. troops and was in control of the entire airport. His claims, according to one intelligence officer, were true, but were countered by a US military-media campaign of evasions and distortions which switched the subject from the airport to Private Jessica Lynch and ridiculed al-Sahhaf as “Baghdad Bob.”...
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Senator Kerry Tells Israel Not to "Jump the Gun" On Iran Attack, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars

U.S. Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during his meeting in Israel

  Senator John “Skull and Bones” Kerry has traveled to Israel in support of a plan to wreck Iran’s economy over the Islamic nation’s imagined nuclear weapons program...
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"War council" in Damascus, by Abdel Bari Atwan | Middle East Monitor
  The tripartite meeting held in Damascus last week included Syrian President Bashar al-Asad and his Iranian guest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon. The three came together as a "war council" to discuss plans, roles and functions in the event of an attack on any or all of the three parties. A similar meeting took place between Mr. Ahmadinejad and the leaders of the Palestinian factions in the same context...
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Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle, by Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash


  On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America's pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman's role in precipitating the global financial crisis...
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Mossad Comes to America: Death Squads by Invitation, by James Petras | Information Clearing House
  The principle propaganda mouthpiece of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO), the Daily Alert (DA), has come out in full support for Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassination. In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime...
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Violations of Iraqi Children Rights Under the American Occupation, by Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi | Uruknet


  For two decades, Iraqi children, along with all other elements of Iraqi society, have been subjected to grave human rights violations. These violations began with the destruction of all civil services and Iraqi civil infrastructure by the US/UK aggression on Iraq during the Gulf War of 1991, and were followed by the brutal economical sanctions which deprived the people of Iraq of food, clean water, health care, education and security...
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Georgia vs. Russia: Fanning the flames, by Eric Walberg | Media Monitors
  "Saakashvili is pursuing a propaganda campaign aiming to destabilise the region through direct and indirect provocation of Russia and support of terrorists with the tacit approval of Washington and Brussels. He has launched a Russian-language TV station First Caucasus beamed into South Ossetia, much like Reagan’s TV Marti set up in 1985 for Cubans. He has also reached out to Abkhazians and Ossetians to try to convince them to subvert their current governments and join Georgia."...
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Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig

Tiger Obama

  We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives...
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Muslims are their own worst enemy, by Paul Craig Roberts | Redress Information and Analysis
  Paul Craig Roberts describes how disunity and bickering among Muslims have made it possible for Israel to dispossess the Palestinians, for the US to invade Iraq and for the US to rule much of the region and beyond through puppets...
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What Israel fears, by Udi Aloni and Ofer Neiman  | Counterpunch

"Iranian Atom" 2008 by Sigalit Landau features humans stripped of their skin following a nuclear attack

  It seems that for the first time in many years the Israeli peace camp is now reaping the fruits of its labor. Petrified by the success of the struggle which exposes Israel as an apartheid state, the state’s power players have begun a smearing counter-campaign, wasteful and vile, which sweeps Israel’s severe human rights violation under the carpet. The campaign includes for example, the Reut Institure’s report, which portrays BDS activists as a kind of Elders of Zion cabal, acting according to methods taken from the famous (forged) protocols...
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America's Permanent War Agenda , by Stephen Lendman | Baltimore Chronicle
  Like George Bush, Obama plans permanent war and more military spending than all other nations combined at a time America has no enemies. He promised change and betrayed us. Grassroots activism must stop this madness...
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From Delusion to Vindictiveness:
Interpreting the Zionist Dream | Gilad Atzmon



  Early Zionism was indeed a cheerful dream, it was all about the transformation of the ‘Jew’ into a ‘civilised, respectful and authentic human being’. The founders of Zionism were inspired by the notions of ‘people like any other people’ and ‘nation amongst nations’.  Reading early Zionists such as Nordau, Borochov and Gordon provides us with some very contemptuous references to Jewish character and identity that would make Nazi ideology look mildly liberal...
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Splitting Egypt's political atom, by Khaled Diab | The Guardian

Can Mohamed ElBaradei's campaign for the Egyptian presidency save a country close to political meltdown?
  ...His return to Egypt has felt more like a state visit by a world leader than the coming home of a senior international diplomat. At the airport, he was treated to a hero's welcome, with jubilant supporters cheering him on, as if he had already been elected president. The crowd included ordinary Egyptians from across the country, as well as opposition figures, actors and novelists...
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Telling Her Story: An Interview With Cherien Dabis, Director of Amreeka


  In March, Hollywood will roll out the red carpet to honor the achievements of professionals in the film industry. One film that was overlooked by the Academy this year is Amreeka, the debut film directed by Cherien Dabis. Amreeka, which received rave reviews at film festivals throughout 2009, tells the story of a Palestinian woman, Muna, and her son, Fadi, who leave the West Bank to settle in the suburbs of Chicago at the beginning of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq...
Read more... 

A Budgetary SOS for 2011, by Jo Comerford | TomDispatch
  If there were a prize for worst headline of the week, even the month, it would surely go to a February 23rd piece in the New York Times headlined online:  “Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace.”  The bellicose “mood,” so undermining of global peace that our secretary of defense had to go after it, was..the “public and political opposition to the military” spreading across Europe.  Who wouldn’t react similarly in the face of such an unnerving phenomenon?  After all, should it grow stronger, peace on Earth will surely prove a chimera...
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Sheikh Jarrah and Israel's Emerging Human Rights Movement | AAPER


  The East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah has received a good deal of attention over the past year. The Palestinian residents of the neighborhood, located just outside of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, live in constant fear of having their homes demolished or being evicted from their homes, sometimes watching helplessly as Israeli settlers move in...
Read more...
 
The Global Pacification Industry | YouTube
  Interview with Jeff Halper, Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and author of Obstacles to Peace: A Re-framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and An Israeli In Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel...
Watch...
 
The Goldstone Report and the Israeli "Right of Self-Defense", by Jerome Slater | Huffington Post


  Richard Silverstein is one of the best bloggers on Israeli affairs. He was recently interviewed about the Goldstone report on the Seattle television program, Moral Politics. The interview, now posted Silverstein's blog, Tikun Olam, is rather long but well worth watching -- his defense of the Goldstone Report is courageous, articulate, and convincing. However, Silverstein does not discuss the Goldstone commission's most crucial error:..
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Calculating Life for a Dying Empire, by Francis Shor | Global Research
  $2000 per dead child! That's the amount of compensation offered by the Pentagon for the "collateral damage" which it has caused in Afghanistan. As the war escalates and more innocent victims of Washington's aggressive actions accumulate in number, the US military calculates what it will take to placate grieving Afghan parents...
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Opening First Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine: The Right to Self Determination | Australians for Palestine


  The morning of the first session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine opened with a focus on the Palestinian right to self determination as enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1956. The session was opened by Stephane Hessel, a co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Ambasador de France. He said,”We are acting in the name of every individual which has a responsibility to put pressure on international bodies to uphold international Law. We cannot allow for the impunity of those responsible for violations of international law to remain unchallenged.”..
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Inspiring talk by Palestinian Archbishop Elias Chacour (video) | Australians for Palestine

  Abuna Chacour has become an ambassador for non-violence and someone, who not only preaches, but lives the Sermon on the Mount.  He travels very often between the Middle East and other countries around the world. In addition, hundreds of groups of visitors, fact-finding missions, and pilgrims have visited and continue to visit with him in Ibillin. He has received many International peace awards and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on three occasions...
Watch...

Why it takes so many Mossad agents to kill a Palestinian with a Pillow? | Gilad Atzmon
  While in Britain, France, USA and Argentina the Mossad  enjoys the support of thousands of local Sayanim, Jews who are happy to betray their neighbours for their beloved Jewish state, when operating in Arab countries the Mossad has to schlep its very many assassins and their assistants using different fraudulent methods...
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March 1, 2010


New Israeli Law Forbids Palestinians From Mourning Or "Showing Signs Of Sadness"


  A new law in Israel makes it a crime to commemorate what Palestinians call the “Nakba”, the “catastrophe” of their dispossession by the creation of the Zionist state in 1948. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has passed “The Nakba Draft Law” after just one reading. Penalties will be imposed on anyone showing signs of sadness and mourning within the (undefined) borders of Israel on 15 May; Palestinians remember on that day the creation of the refugee crisis that remains after 62 years...
Read more...

Fake Al Qaeda | What Really Happened
  "Ana raicha Al Qaeda" is colloquial for "I'm going to the toilet". A very common and widespread use of the word "Al-Qaeda" in different Arab countries in the public language is for the toilet bowl. This name comes from the Arabic verb "Qa'ada" which means "to sit", pertinently, on the "Toilet Bowl". In most Arabs homes there are two kinds of toilets: "Al-Qaeda" also called the "Hamam Franji" or foreign toilet, and "Hamam Arabi" or "Arab toilet" which is a hole in the ground. Lest we forget it, the potty used by small children is called "Ma Qa'adia" or "Little Qaeda". So, if you were forming a terrorist group, would you call yourself, "The Toilet"?...
[The video is well worth watching]
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Hitting the wrong target, by Ross Burns | The Age

  In the course of a career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, much of it spent handling Middle East matters, I rarely heard language as portentous as the statements on relations with Israel from Australian political leaders in the past couple of days...
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Liberal Richard Cohen Wants Israel-First War Policy, by Stephen Sniegoski | Rense
  While we are explicitly told by anti-war commentators such as Juan Cole that the only type of American Jews pushing for war on Iran are right-wing ones, it is apparent that Jewish liberals such as Richard Cohen are also in the pro-war camp...
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Growth that Palestine can believe in, by Sam Bahour | The Guardian


  A serious misconception is being propagated by the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. Media, international organisations, foreign governments and Palestinians-at-large are being coaxed into believing that the flurry of economic activity in the West Bank is economic development towards statehood. The facts on the ground rip this argument to pieces, just as Israel continues to micromanage the economic pieces of the intended future state of Palestine towards systemic stagnation...
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Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word, by Glenn Greenwald | Salon
  Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto.  Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants).  All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:..
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On grabbing the third rail, by Stephen Walt | Foreign Policy
...while you're out there slaying your chosen dragon, make sure you have some fun too...


  Last week a colleague who has been facing repeated and unfair attacks in the media and the blogosphere (for making arguments that cut against the conventional wisdom) sent around an email asking a number of friends and associates (including me) for advice on how to deal with the attacks. Having been smeared in similar fashion myself, I circulated a list of the lessons I learned from my own experience with "grabbing the third rail." A few of the recipients thought the list was helpful, so I decided to revise it and post it here...
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Double Standard on 'Terror' Counterproductive, Offensive | CAIR
  The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), along with other national Muslim organizations, today held a news conference in Washington, D.C., to express concerns over a perceived double standard on the use of the label "terrorism" as it relates to acts of political violence committed by people who are not Muslims.  CAIR's news conference was prompted by coverage of last week's politically-motivated airborne suicide attack on an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office in Austin, Texas, which the Muslim civil rights and advocacy group called an act of “terror."..
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