May 29, 2009 Valley Navy Veteran Receives Silver Star | Fresno News/ ABC30  U.S. Navy veteran Terry Halbardier is presented the Silver Star during a ceremony Wednesday with U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes ...The Navy vet was only 23-years old when his ship ... the USS Liberty was attacked by Israeli fighter jets. 34 crewmembers were killed, 170 others injured. During the two-hour attack Halbardier fixed an antenna that was shot down and sent out a signal for help. The June 8th 1967 attack is widely controversial because Israel was the U.S.'s ally during the war. President Lyndon Johnson declared it an "accident" but those aboard are certain the attack was deliberate. "There's a lot of theories but let's just say they didn't want us listening in to what they wanted to do," said Halbardier. "The government has kept this quiet I think for too long and I felt as my constituent he needed to get recognized for the services he made to this country," said Nunes... Read more... MI5 agents hound Muslim students in Britain | DAWN "Have you met Bin Laden? Do you know where he is?" Believe it or not, these questions were actually asked by MI5 agents to Pakistani students enrolled at one `prominent university in Scotland'..."To date, we have had an innocent man fatally shot in the head, one shot in the arm, many sent on rendition flights to be tortured and countless innocent international students who, if they haven't already been unfairly booted out, are currently facing deportation. Innocent people's lives have been destroyed, their livelihood and aspirations shattered, their faith in the system smashed and a whole community alienated. The current strategy is not working.".. Read more... Do Americans Have a Moral Conscience?, by Paul Craig Roberts | ICH Torture is a violation of US and international law. Yet, president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, on the basis of legally incompetent memos prepared by Justice Department officials, gave the OK to interrogators to violate US and international law. The new Obama administration shows no inclination to uphold the rule of law by prosecuting those who abused their offices and broke the law. Cheney claims, absurdly, that torture was necessary in order to save American cities from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Many Americans have bought the argument that torture is morally justified in order to make terrorists reveal where ticking nuclear bombs are before they explode. However, there were no hidden ticking nuclear bombs. Hypothetical scenarios were used to justify torture for other purposes. We now know that the reason the Bush regime tortured its captives was to coerce false testimony that linked Iraq and Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and September 11. Without this “evidence,” the US invasion of Iraq remains a war crime under the Nuremberg standard. Torture, then, was a second Bush regime crime used to produce an alibi for the illegal and unprovoked US invasion of Iraq... Read more... Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory | PCHR  A leaflet distributed by Israeli Occupation Forces warning Gazans to stay out of areas 300 meters from the border fence Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Continue Systematic Attacks against Palestinian Civilians and Property in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and Continue to Impose a Total Siege on the Gaza Strip... Read more... An Enduring Symbol of Holocaust Evil or Holocaust Falsehood?: Christopher Browning and the Testimony of Adolf Eichmann, by Paul Grubach | CODOH Christopher R. Browning is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. The author of numerous books and papers on Nazism and the Jewish experience during World War II, he is widely considered to be a foremost expert on the Final Solution, the alleged Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Browning was the Canadian government’s most important expert witness at the 1988 Holocaust trial in Toronto, where Revisionist Ernst Zündel was prosecuted for allegedly publishing false news about the Jewish experience during WWII. He was also one of the historical experts that testified at the David Irving--Penguin Books/Deborah Lipstadt libel trial in London in 2000, the most famous Holocaust court case since the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961. Considering Professor Browning’s current stature among academic historians, one should consider very carefully whatever he writes about evidence in regard to the Holocaust... Read more... Who Will Stand Up to America and Israel? by Paul Craig Roberts | Antiwar "Obama Calls on World to ‘Stand Up to’ North Korea" read the headline. The United States, Obama said, was determined to protect "the peace and security of the world." Shades of doublespeak, doublethink, 1984. North Korea is a small place. China alone could snuff it out in a few minutes. Yet the president of the U.S. thinks that nothing less than the entire world is a match for North Korea. We are witnessing the Washington gangsters construct yet another threat like Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, John Walker Lindh, Yaser Hamdi, José Padilla, Sami al-Arian, Hamas, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the hapless detainees demonized by former secretary of defense Rumsfeld as "the 700 most dangerous terrorists on the face of the earth," who were tortured for six years at Gitmo only to be quietly released. Just another mistake, sorry... Read more... An undemocratic stance on Palestine | SocialistWorker EAMONN MCCANN is right that "the birth of Israel on May 14 in 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians". He is also right in describing the "two-state" solution as undemocratic. However, he is mistaken in calling Israeli writer Uri Avnery a supporter of "a single secular state in historical Palestine in which all the present inhabitants of the territory and the Palestinian diaspora can live as equals," and "an indefatigable activist for justice for the Palestinians, a symbol of hope for the future, if there is one."..Israeli activist Jeff Halper points out that, "many Israelis, Diaspora Jews, and others - including such searching and otherwise radical figures as Noam Chomsky and Uri Avnery, together with the Peace Now, Brit Tzedek, Rabbis Michael Lerner and Arthur Waskow and members of Rabbis for Human Rights - cling tenaciously to the two-state solution." As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has written, this left-wing cover for two-state apartheid is - to put it kindly - outmoded:.. [It is not only outmoded -it is the main obstacle to turning things around. Without the backing of the Left, the only sane and workable solution will remain in the background, unseen and unknown by most of the world.] Read more... Gaza Disowned: The Pope, Israel and ‘Reconciliation’, by Ramzy Baroud | Dissident Voice “Gaza is not on the Pope’s itinerary, nor will it be. There will be no change in these plans. But I’ll say it very clearly, the Pope is absolutely not going to Gaza.” Such were the astounding comments made by the Pope’s spokesman in Israel, Wadie Abunasser, prior to Pope Benedict XVI visiting Palestine and Israel. As if there was no massacre in Gaza, no families entirely slaughtered, no human rights violated to match the record of the most grisly of crimes in modern history. As if Gaza were a mere irritant in the annals of human suffering. More, as if there were no Catholic flock in Gaza. To clarify, there are actually nearly 2,000 Catholics in Gaza, apparently not important enough for the ‘cut’... Read more... Dutch liberal leader: Holocaust denial should not be a crime - Haaretz A proposal to decriminalize Holocaust denial in the Netherlands by the leader of the Dutch liberal party touched off controversy in the party on Wednesday and drew criticism from prominent Jewish figures and from the political establishment. Mark Rutte, head of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), said Dutch law should only prosecute those inciting to violence, not hatred. Claiming the Holocaust did not occur "should be possible," Rutte added. Sources close to Hans van Baalen, frontrunner for VVD in the European Elections next month, told Haaretz he opposed Rutte's proposal and was considering voicing his reservations. Van Baalen - known for his favorable attitude toward Israel - was unavailable for comment... Read more... Ex-Taliban claims abuse at Gitmo, Bagram: 'They were beating me' - CNN  Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan, says U.S. war efforts are "failing." As one of the right-hand men to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was one of the first Taliban leaders arrested when the United States began military operations in Afghanistan. As a detainee, he was held both at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba -- spending more than three years in Guantanamo before he was released in 2006. Now free, Zaeef -- who claims he is no longer a Taliban member -- alleges the military engaged in abusive treatment both at Bagram and Guantanamo. He says he is still bitter about his time there. Closing Guantanamo Bay, he told CNN, is only part of the justice those detained there deserve... Read more... Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) calls upon freedom-loving students all over the world to stand in solidarity with us by boycotting Israeli academic institutions for their complicity in perpetuating Israel's illegal military occupation and apartheid system... Read more... A Tool for Reaching Obama voters on Palestine! | Annie's letters As you know, many Obama voters know very little about Palestine. Because of this lack of awareness, progressive opposition to American policies supporting Israeli crimes remains far smaller than would be expected given the ruthlessness and racism of Israeli oppression...we have created a half-page flyer for people to print out and place on the windshields of cars bearing Obama bumper stickers, on the front steps of homes with Obama signs, and to pass out at peace vigils and anti-war events and rallies. We should blanket progressive communities around the country with these! Download our Obama Flyer - The majority of Americans voted for change -- let's help them make it... Read more... Is Larry Summers Taking Kickbacks From the Banks He's Bailing Out? | AlterNet Why did Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley steer millions to a company Larry Summers directed while he administered "stress tests" on them? Last month, a little-known company where Summers served on the board of directors received a $42 million investment from a group of investors, including three banks that Summers, Obama’s effective “economy czar,” has been doling out billions in bailout money to: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. The banks invested into the small startup company, Revolution Money, right at the time when Summers was administering the “stress test” to these same banks... Read more... Prussia on the Mediterranean?, by Roane Carey | The Nation It is an assumption almost universally acknowledged among the liberal American intelligentsia that while the Israeli occupation is repressive and abhorrent, Israel itself is an open, fully democratic state with a lively, argumentative and very free press. Perish the thought. After spending three months in Israel on a fellowship, I can say that nearly every member of the liberal Israeli intelligentsia I've talked to says something quite different: that their country's media are seriously diseased, failing to provide the minimal level of fair reporting and serious critical inquiry that are crucial pillars of an open society... Read more... British Academics Take Firm Stand: UCU Votes for BDS! | Global BDS Movement British academic union deals one more blow to business-as-usual with the Israeli academy Once again, the membership of the University and College Union (UCU) has not let Palestinians down. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) salutes our British colleagues for their steadfast and principled support for the cause of justice and peace in Palestine and for adopting, at the UCU’s annual congress on 27 May 2009, significant steps in the direction of applying effective pressure on Israel and holding it accountable for its colonial and apartheid policies which violate international law and fundamental human rights. Coming four months after the end of Israel’s brutal war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, the UCU motions on Palestine could not be more appropriate or relevant, emphasizing the need to end Israel’s criminal impunity through pressure on it and on institutions complicit in its violation of international law and fundamental human rights... Jail for Jewish Israel Deniers The Israeli Knesset passed on Wednesday, May 27, a preliminary reading of a bill criminalizing citizens who refuse the Jewish nature of Israel, drawing immediate rebuke from opposition lawmakers. The bill, initiated by Knesset's Education Committee Chairman Zevulun Orlev, was supported by 47 lawmakers and rejected by 34 with one abstention. It slaps a one-year jail term against any person who challenges the Jewish nature of Israel... Read more... Israel’s anti- defamation league attempting to block US humanitarian aid to the starving people of Gaza | Global Arab Network Appended below, is a letter sent by ADL (Anti-Defamation League) to the Attorney General of the United States, the Honorable Eric H. Holder Jr. The letter contains false statements urging the Attorney General to investigate reports of fund raising for Hamas by Viva Palestina USA Convoy. It is obivious the ADL is trying to stop the American Humanitarian Aid Convoy because it would draw the world’s attention to Israel’s on-going crimes against the Civilian population of Gaza. The ADL has been working full steam lately trying to silence any Criticism of Israel. Academics like Prof. William Robinson, Norman Finkelstein and others have been attacked by ADL, and other pro-Israeli groups for the simple fact that they spoke out of good conscience against Israel's apartheid treatment of Palestinian people. Anyone who expresses his free right to criticize Israel’s militaristic policies is labeled as Anti-Semitic... Read more... The Old Testament and the Genocide in Gaza, by Gilad Atzmon | Palestine Think Tank  There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwager has found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible. As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted momentarily in Gaza by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF is using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to ‘destroy’ the Gazans while showing ‘no mercy’ whatsoever... Read more... CAIR Questions FBI Tactics in NY Synagogue 'Plot' A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today questioned the FBI's tactics leading up to the arrest of four New York men for allegedly plotting to attack Jewish institutions in that state. Based on early reports of a foiled plot to bomb a synagogue and a Jewish community center and to shoot down military planes, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) initially applauded the FBI and the other law enforcement agencies that took part in the investigation. In a statement issued today, CAIR cited newly-revealed details of the case that indicate the alleged "plot" may have been based more on the financial inducements of a government informant than on the predisposition to terrorism of three petty criminals and a mentally ill Haitian immigrant. The Associated Press described the alleged plotters as "down-and-out ex-convicts living on the margins in a faded industrial city.".. Read more... Afghan was taken to Guantanamo aged 12/ Reuters | freedetainees.org An Afghan who has spent over six years at the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay prison was only around 12-years-old when he was detained, not 16 or 17 as his official record says, an Afghan rights group said on Tuesday. Interviews with the family of Mohammed Jawad, who like many poor Afghans does not know his exact age or birthday, showed he was probably not even a teenager when he was arrested in 2002, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said. He was picked up by Afghan police in connection with a grenade attack in Kabul in which two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were wounded. He was transferred to U.S. custody the same day and flown to Guantanamo in early 2003. Commissioner Nader Nadery said in addition to being a minor at the time of his detention, Jawad was tortured and abused by the Afghan police and while at the Guantanamo detention centre, located at a U.S. naval base in Cuba... Read more... Huge Crowd Turns Up For "Seven Jewish Children"- Melbourne, Australia  End The Use of Depleted Uranium In Iraq Petition For information on the use of DU, click here Sign petition... The Religion of the Shoah, by Robert Faurisson Already in the late 1970s, at the first heavy blow I struck against them, the historians of “the Holocaust” (which today is often called “Shoah”) had shown their disarray. Whereas I had placed myself on scientific ground to demonstrate, in a way that admitted of no rebuttal, that their alleged homicidal gas chambers were technically inconceivable, they were reduced, abandoning reason for faith, to replying pitifully: “It must not be asked how, technically, such a mass murder was possible; it was technically possible, since it happened”... Read more... Aipac's hidden persuaders, by Richard Silverstein | The Guardian  A map contained in a brochure distributed at an Aipac meeting ...Israel is in the midst of a massive diplomatic, political and intelligence campaign, both public and covert, that could lead – if those officials behind it have their way – towards a military strike on Iran. It is a war for the hearts and minds of Americans. Or you might call it the war before the war. In intelligence circles, this Israeli project is known as perception management and defined by the department of defence as:.. Read more... Obama Steers Toward Endless War With Islam, by Michael Scheuer | ICH In just over 100 days, President Obama is on the verge of ensuring that militant Islam’s war on America will be waged for decades to come and its forces will never suffer manpower or money shortages. How did he accomplish so much in some little time? He simply behaved as all U.S. political leaders behave; that is, as an ignorant and arrogant interventionist. Let us take the ignorant part first. Since Jan. 20, Obama and his band of Israel-Firsters have shown the Muslim world – moderate, conservative, radical, and fanatic – that George W. Bush was no one-off fluke, that Democrats intend to wage war on Islam just like the Republicans. How so? Well, look at Obama’s decisions and actions. They can only be explained by accepting that the new president is ignorant of our Islamist foes, either by choice or because the ability to read is not required to graduate at Harvard... Read more... The Silence of MoveOn, by Tom Hayden | The Nation The most powerful grassroots organization of the peace movement, MoveOn, remains silent as the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan simmer or escalate...MoveOn is supposed to be an Internet version of participatory democracy, but the organization's decision-making structure apparently assures that the membership is voiceless on the question of these long wars... Read more... "There's No Way I'm Going to Deploy to Afghanistan" | IPS  U.S. Army Specialist Victor Agosto, a veteran of the U.S. occupation ..."I never had any traumatic experiences, never fired my weapon," Agosto told IPS in a phone interview. "I mostly worked in information technology, working on computers and keeping the network functioning well. But it was in Iraq that I turned against the occupations. Through my reading, and watching what was going on, I started to feel very guilty." Agosto added, "What I did there, I know I contributed to death and human suffering. It’s hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it."..of Iraq who is refusing deployment to Afghanistan [nice to know there are still some real heroes in the U.S. Military] Read more... The paradox of Israel's pursuit of might, by Max Hastings | The Guardian ...One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young Israeli talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. "In the next war," he said, "we've got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good." To me, in my naivete, Israel's struggle had hitherto seemed that of a brilliant little people, who had suffered the most ghastly experience of the 20th century, struggling for survival amid a hostile Middle East still bent upon their destruction. Now, suddenly, I found myself meeting Israelis committed to the creation of a greater Israel embracing the West Bank, who were utterly heedless of the fate of its inhabitants. The Palestinians were perceived as losers, a mere incidental impediment to the fulfilment of Israel's historic territorial destiny. By a curious quirk, that young Israeli whom I heard enthuse about emptying the West Bank of Arabs was Binyamin Netanyahu, today his country's prime minister... Read more... Elie Wiesel and the Catholics, by David O'Connell | Culture Wars Elie Wiesel is widely admired by many of the Catholics who wield power in the diocesan chanceries and the administrations of the nation’s Catholic schools and universities. He has received honorary degrees from a number of Catholic institutions, including Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham and Marquette. He is also fawned over by assorted Catholic intellectuals. He is accorded this treatment despite the fact that he plays a prominent role in exploiting the abusive relationship that exists between the representatives of the major Jewish Organizations and those Catholics who “dialogue” with them. In the 40 years since Vatican II, this alleged “dialogue,” well intentioned at the beginning, has actually turned out to be a monologue in which the Jewish side ritually denounces Catholics and Catholicism while the Catholic representatives nod in approval. No serious criticism is ever made of Jews or Zionism. The dialogue, for instance, is strangely “silent” about the unrelenting Israeli war against the Christians of Palestine. In 1948, 18-20 percent of Palestinians were Christian. That figure is down to about 2 percent today. The Christian population of Bethlehem, once 95 percent, has dwindled to about 15 percent. Even worse, the “separation fence” now under construction cuts through many places that are holy to all Christians... [I am coming to the conclusion that Wiesel will probably go down in history as the greatest con artist of all time.] Read more... A friend of Israel, by Gideon Levy - Haaretz It's already clear: the U.S. president is a great friend of Israel. If Barack Obama continues what he started this week, he might prove to be the friendliest president to Israel ever. Richard Nixon saved Israel from the Arab states in 1973, and Obama is about to save Israel from itself. Nixon sent us arms and ammunition at a critical time, and Obama is sending us, at a time no less critical, the substance of a complete peace plan, a plan that would save Israel. All that remains is whether Obama stays determined and decisive, as he was earlier this week. In one move he changed Washington's madness and the attitude toward the Israeli occupation. Now we will see if he succeeds in altering the same madness in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It's a long road, and Obama began well... [Well, faced with a crazed baboon like Netanyahu, he took one step, but it was sideways. Anyway, Israel as a Jewish state can only be saved at the expense of all of humanity, the Israelis included.] Read more... Rival Livni is Vital to Netanyahu, Say Analysts, by Jonathan Cook | MIFTAH Pressure is mounting on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to bring the opposition leader Tzipi Livni into the government after last week’s difficult meeting with the US president, according to senior analysts. Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said Mr Netanyahu now understood that he faced a stark choice between clashing with the White House and ditching the far-right parties in his coalition... Read more... How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe, by Avi Shlaim | The Guardian  A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions...Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City Read more... Does Obama understand Israel's war goal in Iran?, by Helena Cobban | JWN If Israel launches a military attack (= act of war) against Iran, what would the main goal of this attack be? There is good reason to believe that the goal would be not the direct physical destruction/incapacitation of Iran's nuclear programs but rather, to trigger an all-out US-Iran war in the course of which, Israel's planners hope, the US would do the dirty work in Iran that it is unable to do itself... Read more... Britain: the depth of corruption, by John Pilger In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the current scandal of MPs' tax evasion and phantom mortgages conceals a deeper corruption that is traced back to the political monoculture of the United States... Read more... Ending Today's Economic Crisis Simply and Easily, in America and Globally, by Stephen Lendman Some of the best ideas are often the simplest. When applied to the global economic crisis, the solution is easier than imagined. What's hard, in fact a Gordian Knot, is the political will to embrace it. But even matters that great can be solved by a bold stoke, and according to legend, Alexander the Great's "Alexandrian solution" was achieved with one stroke of his sword, cutting the Knot in half. Applied to the global economic crisis, it means addressing it with effective policies, not ones wrecking America and other troubled nations worldwide. Economist Michael Hudson explains that "debt leveraging is what caused our economic collapse," so piling on more ("The Recovery Plan from Hell" he calls it) makes things worse, especially the way it's done: - in America, by a private banking cartel Federal Reserve bailing out its members to enrich them - the key giant ones referred to as Wall Street; and - the US Treasury doing the same thing; it let the federal debt skyrocket to stratospheric levels and affirmed Adam Smith's dictum in The Wealth of Nations that no country ever repaid its debts, surely not huge ones in a private banking cartel run state, and therein lies the problem - easily solved with a bold stroke, thus far not taken nor will it without mass public action demanding it... Read more... May 27, 2009 War is Unsuitable for Children: Another YouTube outrage, by Cindy Sheehan  Last week, after being bombarded with pseudo-patriotic images of graveyards, gravestones and flags, I decided to begin posting images of maimed and killed Iraqis, but especially children and transform the mega-pseudo-patriotic Memorial Day to Remembrance of Victims of US Empire Day... Read more... "Benny Morris's War on History", by Ran Greenstein | Monthly Review Review of 'One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict' This book is a disgrace. It is difficult to understand why a reputable publisher like Yale University Press would wish to have its name on a book that is so dishonest, ill-informed, and pursues an obvious political agenda. Perhaps the clue can be found on the back cover: Morris's previous book, 1948, sold more than 12,000 copies in hardcover, we are told. Yale Press must have been anxious to repeat such a success, especially in these harsh times when people think hard before spending money on luxury items such as books, but commercial considerations cannot make up for a decision to publish a work devoid of scholarly merit... Read more... The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Prospects For A Multipolar World | Global Research On June 15th and 16th the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will hold its ninth annual heads of state summit in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. It will be attended by the presidents of its six full members - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - and by representatives of various ranks from its four observer states - India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan - and from several aspiring partner nations yet to be announced. The SCO as an institution and as a concept represents the world's greatest potential and in ways is its major paradox as its capacities and their realization to date are so far apart. Its six full members account for 60% of the land mass of Eurasia and its population is a third of the world's. With observer states included, its affiliates account for half of the human race... From Albania, freed Guantanamo prisoner watches detainee debate unfold | freedetainees.org  Abu Bakker Qassim, a Chinese Uighur who was freed from Guantánamo in 2005, ...Abu Bakker Qassim is one of five Chinese Uighurs released to Albania in 2005, after US authorities feared that repatriating them to China would expose them to persecution and human rights violations. Seventeen of Mr. Qassim’s Uighur compatriots remain in Guantánamo, even though they have been found innocent of wrongdoing and have been cleared for release. Although an increasingly heated debate in the US focuses on how to handle dozens of remaining suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo, the Obama administration faces an equally sticky dilemma over releasing the innocent Uighurs. The president has gotten resistance from Congress, with some arguing that the Uighurs – guilty or not – could pose a security threat. Other countries are skittish of taking the men, worried of angering China, which wants them returned for trial...has tried to rebuild a new life as a chef in Tirana, Albania Read more... Human Rights In Israel And Occupied Palestine, by Stephen Lendman | Countercurrents The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) publishes annual reports on "The State of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories." This article reviews its December 2008 one as human rights activists commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on December 10. ACRI is Israel's leading human and civil rights organization and the only one addressing all liberty and rights issues. It was founded in 1972, is independent and nonpartisan, believes human and civil rights are universal, and leads the struggle for these issues in Israel and Occupied Palestine (OPT) through litigation, legal advocacy, education, and public outreach. Ten years ago on UDHR's 50th anniversary, ACRI assessed the status of human rights in Israel and discovered some troubling phenomena and trends:.. Read more... Israeli legislation raises issue of loyalty | Los Angeles Times  Avigdor Lieberman's ultranationalist party, Israel Is Our Home, announced Monday that it The ultranationalist party led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has unveiled two bills targeting Israel's Arab minority, one that would outlaw the Arabs' traditional day of mourning over the birth of Israel and another that would require an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state...had prepared a bill requiring an oath of allegiance from anyone applying for a national identity card Read more... The Day of the Dead, by Cindy Sheehan | truthout I was on an airplane flying to Orange County from Sacramento to attend the al-Awda Conference, which is a Palestinian Right's Conference (al-Awda translates to "The Returning"), when the pilot's voice filled the cabin to make an announcement that I think went unnoticed by most of my fellow passengers, but I heard it... Read more... Israel's Next Move: Armageddon Now?, by Nadia Hijab | Counterpunch Of all the analysis generated by the Obama-Netanyahu meeting Robert Satloff's is the most significant. Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which serves as AIPAC's think tank. His piece, circulated Thursday, provides insights into what the lobby -- and Israel -- might do next. And it should ring alarm bells. Satloff starts quietly enough. Unlike other analysts, he is relatively sanguine about the divergences between the United States president and the Israeli prime minister over the peace process... Read more... Another Establishment News Site Confirms Obama Officials Attended Bilderberg 2009, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars  Richard Holbrooke, investment banker, CFR member, Trilateral Commission member and a Politico has reported on a “handful” of Obama administration officials who were in attendance at this year’s Bilderberg meeting at the Astir Palace hotel in Vouliagmeni on the Aegean Sea in Greece. James Steinberg and Richard Holbrooke gave presentations on foreign policy while Paul Volcker addressed economic issues at the elitist confab, according to the news website. It is illegal under the Logan Act for U.S. government officials to meet behind closed doors with leaders of foreign countries...virtual fixture at Bilderberg meetings, is Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Read more... Breaking News: Prof. William Robinson Speaks out in Defense of Academic Freeedom! | Voice of Palestine (Video) This is part one of a Speech by Prof. William Robinson speaking in defense of Academic Freedom at the Al-Awda Seventh Annual Convention at Anaheim, California on May 23, 2009 Read more... Faculty Members Protest Investigation of Sociology Professor | Voice of Palestine  We the undersigned: • Demand that academic freedom as defined by the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the American Association of University Professors be protected on this campus at all cost to ensure open and critical dialogue. Read more...• Demand that the attack on Professor Robinson’s academic freedom, one that ominously recalls similar campaigns against other critical academics across the nation, be publicly condemned. • Demand the immediate dismissal of all of the charges against Professor Robinson as frivolous, unfounded, and malicious. Any further consideration of these baseless attacks is unacceptable. • Join other students and faculty in pledging that we will not accept any resolution of this matter that is unfavorable to Professor Robinson and academic freedom. • Join other students and faculty in demanding that academic critique of states, governments, and political structures, including the state of Israel be protected as political speech... Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney for Torture Speech | AlterNet Silicon Valley Proclaims May 15th Palestinian Cultural Day | IndybayA former top interrogator is responding forcefully to the case Dick Cheney made on Thursday in favor of torture (what the former VP and his allies refer to as "enhanced interrogation methods.") Brave New Films released a short video Tuesday of Matthew Alexander taking apart Cheney's argument piece by piece. Alexander, who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, was a 14-year military interrogator who oversaw more than a thousand interrogations and conducted more than 300 in Iraq himself. He led the interrogation team that scored one of the United States' most high-profile captures, that of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and he did it using traditional methods... Read more, Watch video... Time for transparency at Der Spiegel?, by Franklin Lamb | GAN  “We don’t know where the Der Spiegel magazine did get their information from and we don’t know where they brought this story from. No one in the prosecutor’s office has spoken to the German magazine about anything. We have a clear policy of not leaking any information about the tribunal through media outlets, and we have been stressing this since the beginning. When Der Spiegel spoke about Bellemar’s spokesperson, they meant me. They emailed me and asked a few questions. My answer was that the tribunal does not deal with investigation files through the media and adopts the policy of direct announcement by the part of Mr. Bellemar.If we had something to say, we would have said it directly, not through media outlets.” Read more... - Radiya Ashouri, Spokeswoman for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) ... "Hezbollah Did It!": Der Spiegel Tries Again, by Franklin Lamb | Counterpunch ...Fast forward to the tense run-up right now, before the June elections. This weekend, a new exclusive, secret, investigative report showing the real, real assassins was published by the same weekly, Der Spiegel. Same author. Same editor. New target. This time Der Spiegel’s Erich Follath claims that the international committee investigating the assassination of former Prime Minister martyr Rafik Hariri has reached “surprising new secret conclusions”, this time pointing to Hezbollah... Read more... Israel's Terrorists: The Man Who Murdered Count Foulke Bernadotte | Counterpunch ...On May 21 the Daily Telegraph published the obituary of a man – no, not a man : a repulsive gobbet of contaminated carrion – called Yehoshua Zettler. It was well-written, of course; but it was the subject matter that caused nausea. The obit recounted that “Yehoshua Zettler, who died on May 20 aged 91, was the former commander in Jerusalem of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, or Lehi (known to the British as the Stern Gang); it was he who planned and supervised the assassination of the United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte on September 17, 1948. Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish royal family, was sent to the Middle East by the UN to mediate between Israelis and Arabs over the future of Palestine.” The UN’s representative was a fine person (like almost all UN envoys) who wanted to do his best for all mankind. So the Zionists killed him...Read more...  Palestinian Cultural Day was officially proclaimed by the cities of San José, Sunnyvale, and Milpitas, and by Santa Clara County in a ceremony on May 15, 2009. The day celebrates Palestinian heritage and remembers the Palestinian Catastrophe in the hope that it will never be repeated... Read more... Hamas claiming IDF troops were 'cowards' during Gaza war, by Amira Hass | Haaretz A Givati Brigade officer assembles his soldiers before the next attack on the Gaza Strip. "Who wants to go into the Izbat Abed Rabbo neighborhood?" he asks. Two soldiers raise their hands. "Who wants to get sent to El Atatra?" Five. "And who wants Tel al-Hawwa?" A sea of hands is raised. Everyone wants to serve in Tel al-Hawwa. This joke was recited two weeks ago by 17-year-old boys in Tel al-Hawwa. For anyone who doesn't understand, they explained: In Tel al-Hawwa the Israeli soldiers were not greeted by any Palestinian resistance. Therefore the Israeli soldiers prefer to invade it. According to the boys, this joke came out of the Iz al-Din al-Qassam brigade, and it reflects the reality... Read more... May 25, 2009 Letter from Mazin Qumsiyeh: Just another day in Palestine Breakfast with my mother then reading the news over the internet (Netanyahu aid says a focus on two states is silly, accusations against Hizballah to try and influence Lebanon elections, another child dies in besieged Gaza for lack of medical care, head of the Israeli Intelligence services tells Knesset the wall is not necessary to protect against Palestinian resistance etc)... Read more... Ministerial committee: Ban Nakba Day | Israel News The Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs on Sunday approved a motion barring the marking of Nakba Day. "Nakba", or "catastrophe", is the term used to refer to the refugee flight of Palestinian Arabs that followed Israel's inception in 1948...Balad Chairman Jamal Zahalka called the motion "crazy": "This is a crazy law by a crazy government. Passing a law that bans grief and mourning is an international precedent and an Israeli invention which indicates (moral) bankruptcy. We will find way to mark Nakba Day in spite of Netanyahu and Lieberman's insane government.".. Read more... When Will They Ever Learn?: Pakistan's Aerial Bombing Will Kill Civilians and Make More Terrorists | truthout Continued aerial bombing will result in more civilian casualties, leading to more anger, resulting in more terrorists [that's their caption - I call it Madonna and Child - Ed.] During the last thirty years of wars in Afghanistan, Afghan civilians have had one safe place to escape to: Pakistan. They fled the Soviet invasion. They fled civil wars. They fled US bombing. Pakistan took care of millions of these Afghan refugees. Now that safe haven with its lush green valleys is burning with bombs... Read more... Did Bibi Box Obama in?, by Patrick J. Buchanan | LewRockwell On Sept. 20, 2002, as the War Party was beating the drum for preventive war on Iraq, lest we wake up to "a mushroom cloud over an American city," The WSJ introduced an eminent voice to confirm that, yes, Saddam was driving straight for an atomic bomb. "This is a dictator who is ... feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons," wrote Bibi Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel. "Saddam's nuclear program has changed. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country – and Iraq is a very big country. Even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of mass death. ... Read more... LET THEM EAT CAKE, SAID MARIE ANTOINETTE: TRUE BELIEVERS & MASS MOVEMENTS | Mohawk Nation News As African songwriter, Bob Marley, told us in effect: “If you don’t know where you are coming from, how can you know where you are going to?” The early l950s and l960s writers explored mass consciousness, mass movements and fanaticism. Marshall McLuhan worried that the media and advertising would take advantage of mass consciousness. He thought the “global village” would bring humanity’s tribal memory under the electronic control of a single consciousness. He thought that individuals could be manipulated, exploited and controlled in a group. How right he was... Read more... We fell in love with a word: peace | YouTube The March for Peace and Non-Violence | Oct 2, 2009 - Jan 2, 2009 Watch video...Fixing America, Erasing Bush, by William Rivers Pitt | truthout Obama's shadow on US Constitution President Obama gave a speech on Thursday praising the excellence of the American experiment, and claimed his own life was made possible by the promise of the documents and the ideals that founded this nation. As usual, his delivery and diction was perfect. Unfortunately, his behavior of late has fallen far short of the ideals he has given such eloquent lip service to. Two thousand pictures of Americans performing acts of savage torture on prisoners will not be released to the general public if Mr. Obama gets his way. Military commissions will continue to try prisoners outside the scope of American law, and will be free to use brazen hearsay as "hard" evidence against defendants. Mr. Obama continues to cleave to the most abhorrent aspects of Bush-era secrecy policies, and has moved to block a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on behalf of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was outed by Bush administration officials in order to silence her Iraq whistleblower husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson... Read more... May 24, 2009 VIVA PALESTINA – LIFELINE TO GAZA We bring you the heart-warming story of Viva Palestina - Lifeline to Gaza - the British convoy of some 300 volunteers (our own Kamahl Mashni from Australia included) that left England on Valentine’s Day, 14 February to make the 5000 mile journey across Europe and North Africa to the Gaza Strip to bring vital aid to the Palestinians desperate for food and medicines due to Israel’s punitive sanctions... Read more... Picking on AIPAC?, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar Republicans and Democrats seek to outdo each other when it comes to praising and defending Israel, particularly during election years. The mainstream media likewise marches in lockstep, burying stories critical of Israel within a day or two after they first appear. Even in the blogosphere, Israel has many friends, at least some of whom are Israel Defense Forces soldiers fluent in English tasked with presenting a rebuttal whenever a critic surfaces. Israel has no shortage of allies, but most would agree that its principal supporter in the United States is the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC... Read more... As Israel rages, US plans for Iran war re-emerge | PressTV US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says the Pentagon As Washington gets updates on Israeli plans to strike Iran, US President Barack Obama orders the Pentagon to rejuvenate contingency plans for the use of military in Iran. Despite the prospects of diplomatic engagement with Tehran over its nuclear program, Defense Secretary and Pentagon chief Robert Gates said Friday that the White House has not ruled out the possibility of a military strike if diplomacy was to fail... has updated its plans for using military force Read more... Who is an anti-Semite?, by Tom Sunic | Occidental Observer Someday the word “anti-Semite” will be studied as an example of distorted political discourse — as a signifier attached to somebody who advocates the reign of demonology. How does one dare critically talk about the extraordinary influence of the Jews in the West without running the risk of social opprobrium? We certainly cannot expect that Jewish intellectuals will think critically about Jewish influence. As a French author Hervé Ryssen writes, “internationally-known Jewish authors, haunted by the either real or surreal specter of anti-Semitism, consider it a sickness, which enables them to avoid any form of introspection.”... Read more... Israel moves to link nuclear-armed Pakistan to Iran | PressTV A security expert in Israel talks of Pakistani hands helping Iran with its missile advances after a modified version of an Iranian ballistic missile was tested by Tehran. Iran successfully test-fired a new deterrent medium-range surface-to-surface missile, dubbed Sejjil-2, on Wednesday. The plus-2000-km-range surface-to-surface missile works with solid-fuel and therefore has greater deterrence power as it lowers the time needed to prepare for launch. Sejjil-2's range is comparable to the liquid-fueled Shahab III... Read more... Order 81 and the plunder of farming, by Latha Jishnu | Business Standard [as the destruction of Iraq continues, in every conceivable way, in order to make the world Safe for Amerika and Israel, i.e., kosher, profitable and under control - Ed.] ...There is an intolerable air of patronage — and duplicity — about the latest statement emanating from the military command of the occupying forces. It reflects a gross ignorance of the history of agriculture in the country which is now paying the price for Saddam Hussein’s adventurism and the Rambo-like invasion by US. Iraq, it must be remembered, has the oldest history of farming and one of the longest traditions of cultivation in the civilised world. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat more than 8,000 years ago, and is home to several thousand varieties of local wheat... Read more... Torture and 9/11, by John Hatch | OpEdNews It could be argued that of the panoply of evil of which human beings find themselves uniquely capable, nothing is as abominable as the deliberate infliction of mental or physical pain on a helpless captive person. That a nation grandiosely referring to itself as the world's lone 'superpower' would, on the basis of very thin evidence, stoop to such behavior as using sodomy (even against innocent children), cramming people into coffin-like boxes, chaining them in stress positions, karate-kicking them (even to death), suffocating them, slamming their heads into walls, taking away their clothing, freezing them, using sensory deprivation and drowning, plus a hundred other cruel measures, gives the lie to that assertion. An evil power perhaps. Hardly a super one... Read more... Support for Israel Feeds Terrorism : Cheney Breaks the Taboo, by Ray McGovern | Counterpunch If we hear in the coming days that former Vice President Dick Cheney has fired one of his speechwriters — or perhaps grounded Lynne or Liz — it will be clear why. Oozing out of the sleazy speech he gave Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute was an inadvertent truth regarding the Israeli albatross hanging around the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East... Read more... Michigan Media Watch - Cartoons of the Week [a keeper] Patrick Corrigan of the Toronto Star Go to website...American Death Squad, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar Obama inherits Cheney's army of assassins – and promotes their commander As the story of Bush administration’s war crimes comes out in fits and starts, it appears that torture is only one aspect – and not the worst, by any means – of this horrific history. In an interview in mid-March, Seymour Hersh let slip the following: "After 9/11 – I haven’t written about this yet – but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen."..But, as Hersh reveals, it gets worse. Much worse:.. Read more... May 23, 2009 Biden: US links Lebanon aid to election result | Global Arab Network Washington is to reassess its aid to Lebanon based on the outcome of upcoming elections, Joe Biden, Biden insisted his trip to Beirut to meet political leaders was not aimed at influencing the outcome of the elections... [ ;-) ]the US vice president has said after his meeting with Michel Suleiman, the president of Lebanon, on Friday. [This is a new site, still in Beta. Downloads slowly. Looks like it's going to be a good one.] Read more... Biden Does Beirut, by Franklin Lamb | Countercurrents It appears that the Biden visit is part of a US bid to supervise the electoral campaign of a Lebanese party, which feels threatened politically, in light of the expected outcome of the legislative vote. We call on all Lebanese, regardless of their political views, to rise up against such meddling that represents a flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty. Biden’s visit is part of U.S. efforts to impose its views on the government that will be set up after the elections. They are tracing red lines for the future government but we will rise up to this. – Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah, Friday morning 22 May 2009 as Joe Biden arrived in Beirut. Read more... US links Lebanon aid to poll result | Al Jazeera English Washington is to reassess its aid to Lebanon based on the outcome of upcoming elections, Joe Biden, the US vice president, has said. "The US will evaluate the shape of its assistance programme based on the composition of the new government and the policies it is advocating," Biden said after his meeting with Michel Suleiman, the president of Lebanon, on Friday. Hezbollah, which fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006, stands a chance of winning the majority of seats in parliament in the polls on June 7 and such a scenario would likely force the US to rethink its strategy towards Lebanon... Read more... Orchestrated New York Terror Plot Exploited to Increase Funding, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars The FBI admits James Cromitie was a wannabe terrorist with "limited means." As it turns out the so-called Muslim terrorists busted in New York, who supposedly wanted to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military airplanes flying out of the New York Air National Guard base, were petty criminals set-up by the FBI...Read more... Israel Destroys Enemy Chemical Plant (Video) Apparently under the impression that sugar-crazed Palestinian fellaheen would become so addled that they’d sprint straight through the Israeli security cordon, terrorizing Sderot and Ashkelon with bestial yells and perhaps upchucked sugary milk-products, Israel decided to take out a vital enemy supply depot, cannily called The Ice Cream Factory. Mustn’t let the children have their sweets!... Watch... Read more... El Plan de Aztlan and El Plan de Santa Barbara [Pollos coming home to roost?] Read more... Rafael Seduces India (Video) | Jewbonics or, "This shit is absolutely completely fucking insane" 'A member of my Israel-Palestine committee in Brooklyn for Peace sent me this video. I forwarded it on to one of Jewbonics’s most articulate correspondents - serious - who described the video posted above with the phrase quoted in the title. She was totally correct. One could be forgiven for thinking it a dead-pan satire of the first rank. It’s not though, it was produced by Israeli arms manufacturer Rafael, which in another one of those ironies that inhabit Israeli society, means “God is healing.” The arms company claims, according to Ha’aretz, that “the video had been received with much acclaim in India.” Right. And with that absurdity, I’ll let it stand in its sublime ridiculousness. Dinga dinga dee! ' [I don't want to spoil it for you, but the video can be summed up as follows: Israel wants to fuck India. India is willing if certain conditions are met. My guess is that the deal will go through. After all, Israel has screwed just about everyone else.] Read more... Academic freedom controversy brewing at University of California, by Max Ajl | Electronic Intifada A controversy is quickening at the University of California centered around William Robinson, professor of sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and a critic of globalization, capitalism and United States imperialism in Latin America. On 19 January, Robinson sent an e-mail message to the students in his Sociology of Globalization class containing some sharply critical commentary on Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip...[Abe] Foxman has historically not been very demure when confronted with what he calls "anti-Semitism." [Herbert] Marcuse explained that "when the meeting started, Foxman made clear that the only agenda point was his demand that I be investigated," adding that such scare-mongering is standard ADL policy, but that Foxman's intercession at UCSB is a serious scale-up of external pressure... Read more... IAF holds massive exercise simulating all-out war | Jerusalem Post IAF Stealth fighter jet F35s Israel Air Force squadrons took part in a large scale drill simulating war on all fronts over the past four days, Channel 10 reported Thursday. Fighter jets, cargo planes and missile defense systems of the corps took part in the drill where defense from a simultaneous attack against Israel from the south and the north was simulated... Read more... Holocaust Denial Widespread Among Israel's Arabs | AP More than 40 percent of Israel's Arab citizens say the Holocaust never happened, and barely one half think Israel has a right to exist, according to a survey published Monday. But the academic who directed it said the results were likely more statements of protest than belief. Sammy Smooha believes the numbers, which have shown a significant shift in the past few years, signal a rising frustration among minority Arabs in the Jewish state. He said the growing Holocaust denial is fueled by a belief that recognizing the World War II genocide, in which German Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews, gives justification to Israeli policies... [Translation: Apparently a majority of Israeli Palestians still believe the Grimm's fairy tale version of what happened. That's bound to change as time goes on.] Read more... YouTube - Why are we sending BILLIONS to Israel while states go broke? "They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them." - Joe Klein MUST SEE Videos about Israel and 9/11 are here: Read more... Israel to US: We reserve 'right' to bomb Iran | PressTV Israeli National Security Advisor Uzi Arad said that even in the past Israel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the Obama administration that Tel Aviv “reserves itself operational freedom” on Iran, according to an aide. The premier during his recent visit to Washington "clarified that Israel reserves itself operational freedom, and several of the most senior figures in the Obama administration said 'of course'," Netanyahu's national security advisor Uzi Arad told Israel Army Radio... did not update the United States regarding military operations. Read more... Foreigners Lead Global Land Rush. by Stephen Leahy | IPS More than 20 million hectares of farmland in Africa and Latin America are now in the hands of foreign governments and companies, a sign of a global "land grab" that got a boost from last year's food crisis. Rich countries that are short on land or water at home are looking to secure food-producing lands elsewhere as a way to ensure food security for their populations, said Joachim von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). "There is a major lack of transparency in these land deals," von Braun said in a telephone press conference from Washington. The IFPRI study, "'Land Grabbing' by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries," by von Braun and Ruth Meinzen-Dick, which was presented last week, estimates that 15 to 20 million hectares have been acquired or are in the process of being sold. Von Braun pointed out that this is equivalent to about 25 percent of all the farmland in Europe... Read more... Netanyahu: Jerusalem will never be divided or partitioned | Maan News Agency ..."Only under Israeli sovereignty will united Jerusalem ensure the freedom of religion and freedom of access for the three religions to the holy places," Netanyahu said in the ceremony at Ammunition Hill, which is located at an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem... Read more... Have You Killed a Palestinian Today?, by Mantiq al-Tayr Embracing the universalist elitism of the “Olympic Movement” and keeping in step with the mores of globalism, the tuyuur here at Mantiq al-Tayr very much hope that the Olympics will soon be hosted by Israel or by its satellite country, The United States of America. If the games are hosted in the US, then we recommend that waterboarding be introduced as a demonstration sport. In fact, recent events have provided excellent victims to be publically waterboarded by Israeli-trained CIA contractors and the winner would be the one who gets the most outrageous confession from these four morons who were set up by the FBI... Read more... US Must Rein in Israel's Nuclear Arms! | intifada-palestine Rose Gottemoeller The surprise announcement by Rose Gottemoeller, a US assistant secretary of state, that America would like every nation – including Israel – to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) has sent shockwaves through Tel Aviv, confirming the fears (or hopes, depending on who you ask) that the Obama administration is initiating a major overhaul of its policy on nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. The Israeli government will certainly challenge the Obama administration on this issue, as Israel is not likely to co-operate, to put it mildly, with the state department’s new logical, fair-minded approach to non-proliferation...Read more... WMA is the World Medical Association, the organization of the Medical Associations of participating nations. The AMA is a member organization of the WMA. The new President of WMA, from Israel, as head of the Israel Medical Association has defended practices considered by Amnesty and others to be torture and he defends the participation of Israeli physicians operating within the structures of Israel’s well esconced torture apparatus--see below... Read more... May 22, 2009 New York Terror Plot Another Government Provocateured Set-Up, by Paul Joseph Watson | Propaganda Matrix The corporate media and the authorities are having a field day lavishing saturation coverage on the so-called New York "terror plot" in which four men, three of them U.S. citizens, supposedly planned to blow up a Jewish temple and shoot down military planes, feverishly citing it as another example of why we should accept police state measures in major cities and the targeting of American citizens as "domestic terrorists". The only problem with this premise, mirroring just about every other major terror plot and terror bust that we have ever studied, is that the men were radicalized and provocateured by an FBI informant, who provided the group with the fake weapons that led to their arrest. Just as in every other case, the men will likely turn out to be semi-retarded dropouts who eagerly followed the fed's lead in the pursuit of a promise of massive cash gifts and a way out of their miserable poverty-stricken lives. However, this won't be reported with one iota of the gusto that the corporate media are pushing this story today... [yup, same old story - every time there just happens to be "an FBI informant" in the middle of it. It's like an old card trick - the rubes always fall for it. Great to know that our "intelligence" agencies are on the job.] Read more...Obama Expands the American Warfare State, by Sherwood Ross | OpEdNews Although the U.S. is not in imminent danger of attack from any country, President Obama’s first budget further expands the Pentagon’s already dominant global operations. Not even the prospect of a $3.1 trillion combined budget deficit for this year and next deters him. Let them chop the budget for black colleges and police officer death benefits, the Pentagon and its contractors continue to feast at the champagne-and-caviar table... Read more... No hope or change from Obama-Netanyahu meeting, by Ali Abunimah | Electronic Intifada President Barack Obama talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Seldom has an encounter between an American and Israeli leader been as hyped as this week's meeting between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As expected, Obama committed himself to diplomacy with Iran and pledged an enormous effort to achieve a two-state solution. Netanyahu continued to incite confrontation with Iran and refused to commit himself to a Palestinian state. On the surface it may seem there are real differences and that the forces arrayed on each side -- including the formidable Israel lobby -- are gearing up for an epic battle to determine the fate of US-Israeli relations...and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office, 18 May 2009 Read more... ''Over the Rainbow'', by Stephen Lendman | Baltimore Chronicle This writer just completed a six-part series on Ellen Brown's remarkable 2007 book titled “Web of Debt.” This article follows from it by picking up on the theme she struck, using L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" as a combination parable, monetary allegory, and political manifesto for change at a time it's most needed... Read more... The March of Folly, Continued, Norman Solomon | Truthout An Afghan family stands in the snow outside their home in Bamiyan Province To understand what's up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. "The March of Folly," by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things - how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession - and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names...Read more... Internet Threatened by Censorship, Secret Surveillance, and Cybersecurity Laws, by Stephen Lendman | Global Research At a time of corporate dominated media, a free and open Internet is democracy's last chance to preserve our First Amendment rights without which all others are threatened. Activists call it Net Neutrality. Media scholar Robert McChesney says without it "the Internet would start to look like cable TV (with a) handful of massive companies (controlling) content" enough to have veto power over what's allowed and what it costs. Progressive web sites and writers would be marginalized or suppressed, and content systematically filtered or banned. Media reform activists have drawn a line in the sand. Net Neutrality must be defended at all costs. Preserving a viable, independent, free and open Internet (and the media overall) is essential to a functioning democracy, but the forces aligned against it are formidable, daunting, relentless, and reprehensible. Some past challenges suggest future ones ahead... Read more... Netanyahu Adviser Moves Out of the Shadows, by Jonathan Cook | Antiwar Arad was recently appointed the head of Israel’s revamped National Security Council As might be expected of a former senior official with Israel’s spy agency Mossad, Uzi Arad – the most trusted political adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister – has got used to being in the shadows as he exerts influence...Arad, recently appointed the head of Israel’s revamped National Security Council, will oversee an organization that Netanyahu regards as the linchpin of the new government’s security and foreign policy. One military analyst, Amir Oren, has noted that, given Netanyahu’s unstable coalition, Arad "is likely to emerge as a strong adviser to a weak government."...Read more... US Colonel Advocates US 'Military Attacks' on 'Partisan Media' in Essay for Neocon, Pro-Israel Group JINSA, by Jeremy Scahill | RebelReports A new report for a leading neoconservative group which pushes a belligerent “Israel first” agenda of conquest in the Middle East suggests that in future wars the US should make censorship of media official policy and advocates “military attacks on the partisan media.” (H/T MuzzleWatch) The report for JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, was authored by retired US Army Colonel Ralph Peters. It appears in JINSA’s “flagship publication,” The Journal of International Security Affairs. “Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight,” Peters writes, calling the media, “The killers without guns:”... Read more... Recognizing The Jewish State's Right to Exist, by Jerry Levin | ODSG ...To continue to accept the self serving semantic fabrication that the Jewish State is a democracy in the Jeffersonian egalitarian inclusive inalienable rights sense means continuing to concur with a diminished concept of “democracy.” Nevertheless public recognition of the human and civil rights short comings of the Jewish State have been an elephant in the room that have been avoided or perhaps obfuscated in the United States for generations, from the time of the Lyndon Johnson presidency forward. Supporters of this legalized discriminatory status quo have found it amazingly easy to float the disingenuous notion that it is in our national interest to support the mythical Jewish Camelot even though they know very well that Israel’s pretend or at best limited confiscatory democracy is at the heart of Islamic discontent and an uneasiness in nations in the west and elsewhere in the world... Read more... Elie Wiesel - Holocaust High Priest - Blood On His Hands, by Prof. David O'Connell | Rense "The Weasel" Read more... Interview: Ilan Pappe talks to London Progressive Journal ...The Israeli government has laid the blame for the Gaza conflict at Hamas’ door, citing the group’s alleged refusal to agree to the renewal of a 6 month ceasefire, which expired a week before the recent fighting began, and also arguing that a military solution is needed to stop Hamas firing rockets into Israeli territory. Is there any truth behind these accusations? On 4th November 2008 the Israelis violated the ceasefire with the Hamas; it was their purpose of bringing an end to the relative peace in the south. The Israeli army initiated the war due to their defeat in Lebanon in 2006, for the sake of restoring 'deterrence' and with the hope of destroying Hamas before the Israeli elections and the inauguration of Obama. The reason was that Hamas is the only remaining Palestinian faction opposing the imposition of Israeli rule over all historical Palestine... Read more... Tomgram: The Pressure of an Expanding War, by Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch Going for Broke: Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy.".. Read more... Corporate Media Exploits Teen Idol to Push Cyberbullying Bill, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars Teen idol Miley Cyrus, who plays schoolgirl rock star Hannah Montana, had her feelings hurt, According to Reuters, Cyrus recently posted an angry tirade on her Twitter web page in response to criticism about her weight. “Those remarks that you hateful people use are fighting words, the ones that scar people and cause them to do damage to themselves or others,” the teenager wrote. “Kids hurt themselves. This is not something to be taken lightly.” The First Amendment of the Constitution shouldn’t be taken lightly, either...now the corporate media is using her as a poster child for a bill that would effectively criminalize free speech. Read more... Why Goldman Sachs Is the Greediest and Most Dastardly of the Wall Street Pigs, by Jim Hightower | AlterNet Goldman holds billions in taxpayer cash, plans for billions in exec bonuses this year, and has powerful friends in Obama's govt. up the wazoo... Read more... Israeli politics and the West: the more it changes, the more it stays the same, by Haim Bresheeth ...For over four decades, ever since 1967 and the devastating war started by Israel, ending with full Israeli control over the whole of Palestine, western nations have been playing an odd and damaging game, one which in reality has made a just political solution in the Middle East all but impossible. Under the guise of different statements, policies and ideologies, one factor has remained constant – the unwavering, and unprincipled support of the Israeli political system by all Western governments, with scant (or totally absent) regard to the Palestinian people and its rights, not to mention its plight. During this whole period, and in the face of numerous UN and Security Council resolutions calling for Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories of Palestine, and to vacate its illegal settlements, Israel was able to continue settling the said territories, with wanton disregard of the UN, the Security Council, the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, and too many international convention to list here, notably those on torture, nuclear proliferation, Chemical and Biological weapons and war crimes, to mention the main ones. One can hardly think of any other regime on earth which has broken, negated or ignored international law more systematically than Israel: it has invaded and conquered four of its neighbouring countries (it is still occupying territories which belong, or belonged to all four), it has attacked installations in a number of other countries, such as Tunisia, Iraq, Syria or Sudan, and had developed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction with total impunity, not to mention the active support from France, UK and USA... Read more... And the LORD spake unto Moses saying, “Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them the following–When ye are passed over the Jordan river into the land of Canaan, ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their... Read more...No Other Option, by Sam Bahour | ODSG I watch in shock, like the rest of the world, at the appalling death and destruction being wrought on Gaza by Israel; and still it does not stop. Meanwhile, we see a seemingly never-ending army of well-prepared Israeli war propagandists, some Israeli government officials, and many other people self-enlisted for the purpose, explaining to the world the justifications for pulverizing the Gaza Strip, with its 1.5 million inhabitants. Curious about how Israel, or any society for that matter, could justify a crime of such magnitude against humanity, I turned to my Jewish Israeli friends today to hear their take on things. One after another, the theme was the same. The vast majority of Jewish Israelis has apparently bought into the state-sponsored line that Israel was under attack and had no other option available to stop Hamas' rockets. More frightening is the revelation that many Israelis—including one person who self-identifies as a former "peace activist"—are speaking of accepting the killing of 100,000 or more Palestinians, if need be... Read more... May 21, 2009 Sadly, Israel is no longer democratic [as if it ever was], by Shulamit Aloni | Haaretz Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin and philosopher Asa Kasher, two respected men around here, published an article entitled: "A just war of a democratic state." A remark about the first part: There are wars that are necessary for self-defense or to fight injustice and evil. But the expression "just" is problematic when speaking of war itself - which involves killing and destruction and leaves women, children and old people homeless, and sometimes even kills them. Our sages have said: "Don't be overly righteous." And there is absolutely no question that dropping cluster bombs in an area populated by civilians, as we did in the Second Lebanon War, does not testify to great righteousness. The same thing can be said of using phosphorus bombs against a civilian population... Shulamit Aloni is an Israeli politician from the Meretz Party who has held the positions of Minister without Portfolio, Minister of Education and Culture, Minister of Communications, Minister of Science and Technology, and Minister of Science and the Arts in various Israeli governments. Aloni is a recipient of the Israel Prize. In 1998 she was awarded the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Read more... Support U.N. Economic Crisis World Conference | IAC General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockman will convene a critical, high level United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development, to be held at UN headquarters, on 1-3 June 2009. This international gathering, sometimes called the G-192 because every member nation of the UN will participate, is virtually tenfold the participation of nations in the G-20. The Conference's goal is to identify emergency and long-term responses to arrest and reverse the worst world global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and assure that such a self-inflicted human tragedy never happens again.. This summit of world leaders will for the first time give an equal opportunity to those who represent the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, those who are suffering the most but who have been left out in the decisions which have caused this systemic failure, to express their people's needs to the world and make known their suffering caused by arbitrary acts and excesses of rich nations. The powerful financial institutions that have long been entrusted to manage national and global financial and economic systems have failed. It is time to give all the others a voice and a choice... Read more... The Life of an American Jew in Racist, Marxist Israel This honest and courageous Jew was assassinated some years ago, by the Mossad The late Jack Bernstein was a rarity—an American Zionist who actually "returned" to Israel, not for a vacation or to summer on a kibbutz, but to live and die in Israel building a Jewish nation. What makes him almost one of a kind, though, was his ability to see through the sham and hype to the oppressive, racist, parasitic character of Zionism as practiced in modern Israel, and his courage to denounce it with the force and fervor of an Old Testament prophet. Bernstein tells how it was, how it is, and how it will be—as long as American taxpayers tolerate their leaders' bowing to every wish and whim of the Ashkenazic (Eastern European) elite which rules Israel. He takes the reader on a guided tour through Israel's history, institutions and values, demonstrating how the best traditions of Biblical Judaism have been obscured, corrupted, or cast out to make way for the totalitarian, militaristic, chauvinist monster that is the Israel of today... Read more... Yusuf Islam [Cat Stevens] Unites Muslims, West - IslamOnline "I think I've been given a position and place in this world which is quite unique" Renowned British Muslim singer Yusuf Islam sees his music and songs can be a bridge between the Muslims world and the West. "The fact that I'm a Westerner by birth and I'm a Muslim at the same time -- and living in this time where there seems to be such a gravitational split in polarities -- there need to be bridges. "I think music is one of the best ways to bridge all those gaps." Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, performed his first concert in Los Angeles last week, his first in the United States in 33 years...Read more... Israeli spies flee Lebanon amid crackdown | PressTV Lebanon's Interior Security Forces Director General Ashraf Rifi Amid an intensified crackdown on counter espionage activities in Lebanon, two Israeli spies have crossed the border into Israel, Lebanese security sources say. Citing security officials, Lebanon's Al-Manar reported on Monday that Lebanese citizen Elie al-Hayek has crossed a concrete wall between the villages of Rmeish and Yaroun, in southern Lebanon, fleeing into Israel early in the Morning. Hayek, 49, was a resident of the border town of Qleiaa. Israeli daily Haaretz however put the number of the escaped suspects at two. Over the last two months, Lebanese security forces have launched a crackdown on espionage activities and foiled several spy rings in the southern country. Interior Security Forces Director General Ashraf Rifi told the Lebanese daily As-Safir on Monday that the Israeli networks are 'strategically' being dismantled one after the other... Read more... Torture at Abu Ghraib: "The Man Behind the Hood", by Prof. Ali Shalal | Global Research Full Transcript of Ali Shalal's Testimony... Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures: Diplomacy, Militarism and Imagery, by James Petras President Obama’s greatest foreign policy successes are found in the reports of the mass media. His greatest failures go unreported, but are of great consequence. A survey of the major foreign policy priorities of the White House reveals a continuous series of major setbacks, which call into question the principal objectives and methods pursued by the Obama regime... Read more... Mullen Cites Nukes as a Pretext to Kill More Pakistanis, by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars Adm. Mullen made his comment about the threat of Pakistan’s nukes while the man largely responsible Last week Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Pakistan is building up its nuclear arsenal. “Inside the Obama administration, some officials say, Pakistan’s drive to spend heavily on new nuclear arms has been a source of growing concern, because the country is producing more nuclear material at a time when Washington is increasingly focused on trying to assure the security of an arsenal of 80 to 100 weapons so that they will never fall into the hands of Islamic insurgents,”...for the creation of al-Qaeda looked on — current Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates Read more... American Amnesia: We Forget Our Atrocities Almost As Soon as We Commit Them, by Noam Chomsky | AlterNet Historical amnesia is a dangerous social phenomenon because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead... Read more... Patch Adams "My next trip: can I count on you?" As a "doctor/clown," I have traveled the world over to bring the healing power of laughter to children and adults in virtually every corner of the world -- from Afghanistan, to Bosnia, to Haiti. Right now, there is a group of children who are really in need of healing -- the children of the Gaza Strip. .The 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip (more than half of them children) have had their homes destroyed, their playgrounds crushed and their schools gutted in the recent Israeli attack on this small, crowded corner of the world. Their borders -- both on the Israeli and Egyptian sides --are closed, making it impossible to rebuild... Read more... New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting | Huffington Post The New York Times assigned to the story a campaign-trail reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whose political perceptions are bland and whose knowledge of Israeli-American relations is an antiseptic zero. At the newspaper of record, a thing like that does not happen by accident. They took the most anxiously awaited meeting with a foreign leader of President Obama's term thus far, and buried it on page 12... [This happens all day, every day, throughout the mainstreammedia. It's how the Zionist theocracy maintains control of the Americanworld view.] Read more... Torturegate, by Eric Walberg | Global Arab Network The question now swirling around political corridors is whether Obama will fight the monsters or let them off the hook ...Obama originally said no prosecutions would be undertaken. He now says that he would support a congressional investigation over the issue if it were conducted in a bipartisan manner. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers will be sure to take him up on this... Read more... Elena Kagan: Jewish Ethnic Networking Eases the Path of a Liberal/Leftist to the Supreme Court, by Kevin MacDonald | Occidental Observer ...Kagan’s candidacy raises a number of issues. If nominated and confirmed, there would be three Jewish justices on the Supreme Court — all on the left. Jews are of course always overrepresented among elites — especially on the left, but 33% is high by any standard given that Jews constitute less than 3% of the US population. This is much higher than Jewish representation in the US Senate (13%) and the House of Representatives (~7%). The last time I checked, if there were three Jews on the Supreme Court, the percentage would be about the same as the percentage of Jews among the wealthiest Americans... Read more... May 20, 2009 A Set from Mike Odetalla Olive Oil Palestine! Palestinians, and Olive trees. Much has been written and will continue to be written about the ancient and symbolic olive trees, their importance, and significance in the very lives of the Palestinian people. This connection runs thousands of years and continues to this day. Olive trees and their fruit not only provide a livelihood and income to most Palestinians farmers, but they are also embedded in the very fabric of their every day lives just as they have been for many centuries... Read more... Sabr (cactus) Plants Next time you are driving through the country side or on any major highway in Israel, I want you to look for something. If you look close on some of the hillsides and other areas, you will see Sabra (cactus) plants. You may wonder why they are in certain places and not others. Why here and not there? These Sabr plants have a sad tale to tell. For you see they are what's left of the hundreds of small Palestinian villages that were destroyed and depopulated. All Palestinian villages had these plants and some used them as fences and barriers as well as a source of delicious fruit...Read more... Al-Nakba and Memories (1967 War) | Window Into Palestine The 61st anniversary of Nakba: the disaster of the people of Palestine. On this date, May 15th 1948, we, the people of Palestine began our long and painful journey into exile. Dispossessed from home and homeland, this was the start of the refugee ‘problem’ that still exists today. More than 3 million Palestinians live as refugees in squalid conditions in camps in Palestine and throughout the Arab world. I sat this week watching old black and white films of my people as they fled their homes, clutching children and what few possessions that they could carry, I could not help but realize that there, but for the grace of God, could easily have been my family as well. But I, it seems, have a different fate, a different responsibility: to tell our story, to document, so that it may never be forgotten... Read more... Unity Comes First, by Joharah Baker | Palestine Chronicle 'What is the use of a government that does not govern the entire people?' Saying we are back to square one hardly does our situation justice. If we are to be more accurate, we should say we are below zero, pushed back to a place we tried to avoid in the first place. But here we are – no national unity government, no factional conciliation and not even unity within Fateh itself. The Palestinian squabbling has splintered the leadership even more, leaving us empty handed once again...Read more... Pornography, feminisation of the enemy? Confused over what Obama’s view on Guantanamo and the backlog of torture images from Abu Ghraib? Join the club. The centrepiece of United States President Barack Obama’s PR campaign to show the world the US is the nice cop was to end the military tribunals, which he called “an enormous failure” during last year’s presidential campaign, and close the infamous Guantanamo prison. This was Obama’s first major “achievement” upon assuming office. Rumblings about the impossibility of closing Guantanamo were being heard even as Obama took office. It appears there’s no place to send the prisoners, most of whom are innocent of anything other than fighting invaders, if that... Read more... Mishal’s Luck (book review by Adam Shatz) | LRB In early September 1997, Danny Yatom, the head of Mossad, arranged a special screening for Binyamin Netanyahu, who was then prime minister. The film, shot on the streets of Tel Aviv, presented the plan for the assassination of Khalid Mishal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau in Amman. Twenty-one Israelis had died in Hamas suicide attacks in the previous two months, and Netanyahu was eager for revenge. The peace process might be undermined, but that would be just as well: Netanyahu shared Hamas’s hostility to Oslo, and had compared trading land for peace to appeasement with Hitler. Mishal..was selected from a list of targets by Netanyahu not only because he was suspected of orchestrating the suicide bomb campaign, but because he made an articulate case for Hamas’s position, in a suit rather than clerical robes: ‘he was too credible as an emerging leader of Hamas, persuasive even. He had to be taken out.’... Read more... Israel, Ahmadinejad and Peace: Interview with Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle I am not sure if one can still earnestly discuss a two-state 'solution' ...Baroud, whose writings have been praised by Noam Chomsky as “sensitive, thoughtful and searching”, is the chief editor of the Palestine Chronicle...In this exclusive interview with Foreign Policy Journal, we talked about the latest remarks of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Durban II anti-racism conference and the subsequent outrages stirred up in the U.S. and Europe, the Holocaust Denial tradition and its impact on Palestine’s cause, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...Read more... The West vs. the Rest, by Frank Scott | Online Journal The UN conference against racism was boycotted by the USA, inventor of the most deadly and long lasting form of racism, and Israel, founded on racist dominance of one people over another. They, along with their surrogates attending under strict orders to protect Israel from any revelation about its nature, offered evidence of the fading status of Western supremacy. A disgraceful performance by the West was only successful as reported to a minority of the world’s population. While Western media parroted the party line in claiming that alleged anti-Semitism in the Iranian president’s rhetoric provoked the prearranged rush for the exit by political puppets, President Ahmadinejad’s words actually echoed the sentiments of a global majority. He spoke bluntly, though only briefly, of the last racist regime on earth, but mostly he addressed the hope for global peace and challenged a political economic order that threatens humanity’s future... Read more... May 19, 2009 Reclaiming Einstein: New Book Reveals Famed Scientist as an Opponent of Israel | The Indypendent Einstein on Zionism and Israel: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East Countless books and articles have been written about the life of the great physicist and thinker Albert Einstein, and since his death in 1955, a near consensus has existed that Einstein was a staunch supporter of the state of Israel.Veteran journalist Fred Jerome uses hundreds of pages of Einstein's own letters, articles and interviews - many published for the first time - to refute this thesis... Read more... How Israel orchestrated the real Geneva ‘hate fest’ against Black and Brown people ...for nearly two years, hundreds of militant pro-Israeli activists and the Israeli Foreign Ministry had been coordinating their plans to sabotage the DRC. The fiercely pro-Israel NGO-Monitor named at least 17 Zionist organizations that had been “monitoring and protesting” the Durban Review Conference since May 2007 - only a few months after the U.N. General Assembly itself had passed a resolution to convene the Durban Review Conference... Read more... Pro-Israel Mouthpiece Says Freedom of Speech Dangerous | American Free Press ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL voices of the pro-Israel lobby has published a shocking essay suggesting that, in the future, there should be “military attacks” on journalists and media outlets that oppose American military ventures on behalf of Israel. In the spring 2008 issue of its Journal of International Security Affairs, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a particularly vocal force of the Jewish lobby, published a series of articles devoted to the subject: “The U.S. Military Faces the Future.”... Read more... Gaza Solidarity Day on the 42nd Anniversary of Israel's seizure of Gaza Read more... Bar-Ilan prof. defiant on blood libel book 'even if crucified' - Haaretz The author of a book on the use of blood by Jews in Ashkenazi communities in the Middle Ages said Sunday, in the face of the furor its publication aroused, "I will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me." In an interview with Haaretz from Rome, Professor Ariel Toaff said he stood behind the contention of his book, "Pasque di Sangue," just published in Italy, that there is a factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews. However, he said he was sorry his arguments had been twisted... [Articles by Israel Shamir on Prof. Toaff's work are here] Read more... Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State | AlterNet What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament? And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?... Read more... U.S Defence Secretary used quotes from Bible to brief Bush on 'mission from God' war | Mail Online One example had a U.S. Abrams tank in the desert and below it the biblical quote Former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used 'biblical images' to deliver reports on the war in Iraq to President Bush. With the former president known for his devout evangelical beliefs, bible passages were printed on the top secret briefs detailing the progress of the war in 2003, it has emerged. The hand-delivered messages, which were leaked to GQ magazine by a source at the Pentagon, were said to portray the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein as being more like a ' crusade' than a modern day war... from Ephesians: 'Therefore put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.' Read more... Can Obama meet Netanyahu's challenge?, by Mustafa Barghouthi | Los Angeles Times I cannot recall a more important meeting between an American president and an Israeli prime minister than today's meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Will the Obama administration have the courage to challenge Netanyahu, or will all the talk of change dissolve in the face of a concerted one-two punch from Netanyahu and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee?... Read more... Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law Letter from Mazin 5/19/09The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released findings that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories... [The eminent Virginia Tilley participated in this project.] Read more... The Disease of Permanent War, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent... Read more... US: Ask Israel to cooperate with Goldstone inquiry | Window Into Palestine President Barack Obama should endorse the comprehensive UN investigation, headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, into violations of international law during the recent Gaza conflict, and should urge Israel, when he meets today with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, to cooperate with the investigation, Human Rights Watch said. The Obama administration has so far not made any public comment on the Goldstone investigation, but US officials continue to insist privately that it will be biased against Israel... [Translation from Ziospeak: Goldstone will attempt to get at the truth.] Read more... The Right of Return: the heart and soul of the Palestinian cause, by Khalid Amayreh Sixty-one years ago, one of the greatest crimes in the annals of human history occurred when European Ashkenazi Jews, aided by western powers, took over Palestine and expelled and dispersed its native inhabitants to the four corners of the world. The barbarians committed widespread massacres, replaying and reenacting in Palestine some of the genocidal episodes that had been done in Europe a few years earlier. The criminal thieves created Israel, a manifestly racist and bellicose entity based on murderous ethnic cleansing, usurpation, dispossession and lies. The creation of the evil entity in Palestine was a brash act of rape; it will always be an act of rape no matter how many people continue to sing the hymns of Zionism and glorify the big lie Does a theft become lawful after the passage of 61 years, or even 500 years?... Read more... In the surreal but still beautiful world we live in, the Prime Minister of Apartheid Israel refuses to even abide by the minimal requirements of a road map that Israel technically agreed to (freeze settlements, evacuate posts to pave the stage for a two state solution). Instead he is mobilizing the Israel-first lobby to push for a US confrontation with Iran hoping to repeat the "success" of neutralizing Iraq as potential regional power. And while in some European countries the only free speech not allowed is any questioning of any kind to the dominant narrative about the atrocities done to Jews during WWII, the second largest party in the Israeli government wants to ban any commemoration or even mention of the Palestinian Nakba (for Palestinians that is our holocaust that began with the destruction and ethnic cleansing of 530 villages and towns and continues apace today as homes are demolished regularly and Jewish only colonial settlements are built on our land)... Read more... The U.S. to Raise Military Aid to Israel | AIC Despite expectations that the Obama administration will pressure Israel to accept a two-state solution and implement practical measures, the U.S. administration has sent signals that aid to Israel will, in fact, be raised. At the same time, the budget also imposes harsh conditions on the Palestinian Authority in order to receive aid. According to the Israeli daily, Haaretz, the budget proposed to Congress for 2010 includes $2.775 billion in aid to Israel, compared to $2.5 billon budgeted for 2009. This is more than a 10% increase in total U.S. aid to Israel. The budget also includes an increase in the assistance to the production of weapons systems, such as the missile Hetz-3... [Why don't we just hand them the keys to Washington, DC? I wouldn't object - after all, it's the armpit of the universe.] Read more... A Special Treat for Readers of this Website | YouTube The War Prayer, by Mark Twain Outraged by American military intervention in the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote this and sent it to Harper’s Bazaar. This women’s magazine rejected it for being too radical, and it wasn’t published until after Mark Twain’s death, when World War I made it even more timely. It appeared in Harper’s Monthly, November 1916... Read more... Another Zionist Victory: Afghan Villagers Describe Chaos of U.S. Strikes - NYT A 12-year-old recovered at a hospital in Herat, Afghanistan, from burns The number of civilians killed by the American airstrikes in Farah Province last week may never be fully known. But villagers, including two girls recovering from burn wounds, described devastation that officials and human rights workers are calling the worst episode of civilian casualties in eight years of war in Afghanistan...The bombs were so powerful that people were ripped to shreds. Survivors said they collected only pieces of bodies. Several villagers said that they could not distinguish all of the dead and that they never found some of their relatives...suffered during an American airstrike on her village Obama says Iran war not off the table | PressTV Ahead of the Israeli premier's trip to Washington President Barack Obama says the US has not taken military action against Iran over its nuclear program off the table... Read more... Lawyers, Rights Groups Outraged by Gitmo Decision | IPS Human rights advocates are furious at President Barack Obama’s decision to prosecute some Guantanamo detainees through the same military commissions he criticised during his campaign as a "flawed" system that "has failed to convict anyone of a terrorist act since the 9/11 attacks"... Read more... Quarrel on the Titanic, by Uri Avnery - Gush Shalom ...in this matter, too, Barack Obama must play a leading role. He must put an end to the stupid and disastrous policy of boycotting Hamas and employ his full power to bring about the creation of a Palestinian unity government... [I wonder how long it's going to take Avnery to realize that Obama is just another pawn in their game] Read more... Israel war on Iran compromises US security | PressTV An Israeli military move on Iran will make the United States a proxy target for Arab and Iranian anger, says a Washington think tank. The Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington in its latest assessment of possible options for dealing with the "Iranian challenge" said the United States has good reasons to oppose an Israeli strike on Iran... Read more... Congressional leaders inadvertently expose Israeli lobbyists behind letter to Obama | Raw Story GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) circulated a letter to colleagues this week urging President Obama to support Israel when moving forward with any Israeli peace process. Trouble is, they forgot to delete the name of the lobbying group involved in the letter from the document... Read more... Netanyahu Visits the White House: Change We Can Believe in for U.S.-Israeli Relations?, by Phyllis Bennis | Institute for Policy Studies Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is coming to Washington on May 18, for his first official visit with President Obama. If President Obama is serious about achieving a two-state solution in his first term, and therefore serious about bringing real pressure to bear on Israel, there will be no better time to do so... Read more... Open Letter to Leonard Cohen | PACBI ...Today, after exhausting all attempts to convince you to apply your avowed humanistic principles in a morally consistent way by refusing to entertain Israeli apartheid and whitewash its still-fresh crimes, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) calls on all supporters of a just peace in our region to shun your concerts and CDs and to protest your appearances everywhere. We consider your performance in Israel a form of complicity in its grave violations of international law and trampling on human rights principles... Read more... Israeli Organizations Call on Norway to Divest from the Israeli Occupation | FreeGaza Twenty different Israeli organizations send an appeal to the Norwegian people to withdraw Norwegian national pension fund’s investments in all Israeli and international corporations which are involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories... Israel lobby commits major blunder in France: tries to silence a comedian | Vineyard of the Saker Israeli spies don't work just for Mossad, by Yossi Melman | Haaretz Amazing stuff is happening in France. It all began with a relatively well-known French-Cameroonian comedian, Dieudonné M'bala M'bala was invited to participate on a TV show on the channel France 3...Dieudonne decided to impersonate an extremist Israeli settled infuriated by the presence of an Arab on a French show...(the French version of AIPAC) immediately attacked Dieudonne, suing him for racist comments and for "anti-Semitism" (a criminal offense in France).This was hardly the first time that the French Zionist mob had decided to crush an outspoken critic of its role in French politics or its unconditional support for the last racist state on the planet: Israel. But this time, the Ziomob miscalculated, badly... Read more... Edinburgh International Film Festival joins boycott of Israeli State institutions | Global BDS Movement The 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival organisers announced on Friday they were returning money donated by the Israeli Embassy. The return of the money was accompanied by an admission that it had been “a mistake to accept the £300 from the Israeli Embassy” and followed a torrent of angry letters expressing incomprehension, fury or sadness at the EIFF being associated with the Israeli State. Many pledged to support SPSC pickets of screenings throughout the 2009 Festival, and an initial public protest planned for the following day... Hassan Nasrallah addressing a Beirut rally last February to commemorate Imad Mugniyah's assassination ...The Arab media like to describe everyone suspected of spying for Israel as working for the Mossad. However, the work of gathering information about targets is in fact a joint effort, in which the three branches of the Israeli intelligence community cooperate with each other: the Mossad, the Shin Bet security service and the two major Military Intelligence units - electronic surveillance Unit 8200 and Unit 504, which runs agents... Read more... The Faux Defense of Western Liberties from the Anti-Muslim Right, by Glenn Greenwald | ICH ...concerns about the erosion of free speech rights in the Western world -- as part of a misguided attempt to suppress "hate speech" and other forms of religious and racial bigotry and as a way of accommodating the growing Muslim populations of Europe -- are both legitimate and warranted. I vehemently condemned Canada's investigations of Steyn and Levant despite finding them and their "ideas" noxious in the extreme, and I oppose with equal fervor use of "hate speech" laws in Europe and Canada to punish those who express bigoted views. No matter the motive, attempts by the state to circumscribe certain ideas as off-limits, prohibited, and sanctionable are always wrong and dangerous -- period... Read more... French-U.S. imperialist interests behind Chad-Sudan conflicts | Workers A flare-up in tensions between Chad and Sudan during the week of May 4 has exposed the continuing efforts of French and U.S. imperialism to dominate the political and economic future of North and Central Africa... Read more... May 17, 2009 Obama's Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice, by James Petras | Axis of Logic General Stanley McChrystal “The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan... Read more... Who Rules America? by Paul Craig Roberts What do you suppose it is like to be elected president of the United States only to find that your power is restricted to the service of powerful interest groups? A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees and a lucrative book contract. If he is young when he assumes office, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure... Read more.... Americans Divided by Hate Crimes Bill, by Karin Friedemann | Khaleej Times Despite lingering concerns about threats to Constitutional protections such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech, the Federal Hate Crimes bill, HR 1913, passed recently in the House of Representatives. If passed by the Senate, the legislation will expand the federal definition of such crimes to include those motivated by gender identity and permit increased federal power to investigate and prosecute crimes as “hate crimes.” The meat of the hate crimes bill is a $10 million grant for the establishment of a federally funded surveillance centre...The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) originally wrote this bill...The ADL, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is already heavily involved in Homeland Security’s locally based “fusion centres,” which collect personal data for intelligence databases that synchronise national intelligence collection with local police. ADL and SPLC have a record of illegally spying on American citizens and providing false information to law enforcement officials... Read more... The Hate Crimes Prevention Bill: Why Do Jewish Organizations Support It?, by Kevin MacDonald The “Hate Crimes Prevention Bill” will be in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. It recently passed the House, causing the Anti-Defamation League to rejoice. The ADL called the law "an essential and necessary step forward in the national effort to counter hate crimes" and urged passage by the Senate. It also congratulated itself on taking a leadership role in promoting this legislation for the last 10 years. Other Jewish organizations have also been at the forefront of promoting “hate crime” legislation in the US and throughout the West. Needless to say, there are very sound reasons to oppose this legislation... Read more... Dr. Haidar Eid addresses the 4th Bil'in International Conference on Grassroots Popular Resistance Dr. Haidar Eid's speech, delivered via video link between Gaza and the West Bank, at a panel on "Promoting a Culture of Resistance"... Part I, Part II, Part III UN torture watchdog demands access to secret jail, by Jonathan Cook | The National The UN is demanding that Facility 1391, a secret prison camp in northern Israel The United Nation’s watchdog on torture has criticised Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay”, and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating...where it is believed prisoners are routinely tortured, be opened to inspectors Read more... 61 years after the Nakba: the Israeli army is still enacting the Catastrophe | DCI/PS The anniversary of the Nakba comes to remind the world of the ongoing violations Israel has been committing against the Palestinian people, generation after generation, for more than sixty years, including the killing of thousands of Palestinians, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of others. Unlawful killings and forcible transfer of population continue amidst Israeli refusal to accept historical and legal responsibility for the Nakba, and recognise the principle of the right to return that was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in its Resolution No. 194 in 1948. Such refusal prevents Palestinian refugees from exercising their right to return to their abandoned homes... Read more... Problems Before Arrival of Dr. Finkelstein to Vienna On May 27, 2009, Dr. Norman G. Finkelstein, a well known American professor, will give a speech at the University of Vienna, in the old hospital campus, about Gaza. The invitation of Dr. Finkelstein to Vienna is the result of coordination between several Austrian organizations, among them the International Commission of UNESCO Project “Culture of Peace”, the Vienna Institute for International Dialog, and the Arab-Austrian Federation of Doctors and Pharmacists in Vienna. According to my latest information,the appearance of Prof. Finkelstein in Vienna has met some obstacles... [same old story, over and over again, the Inquisition never sleeps] Read more... West Bank Becomes Waste Land, by Mel Frykberg | IPS Israel has found a cheap and easy way to get rid of its waste, much of it hazardous: dump it into the West Bank. A few Palestinians can be bought, the rest are in no position to complain... Read more... U.S. Interrogators May Have Killed Dozens of Detainees | AlterNet United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations. In all, 98 detainees have died while in U.S. hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees -- and as many as 12 -- having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain... Read more... May 16, 2000 Prophetic words from Mahatma Gandhi in 1938 Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and in-human to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home... Read more... How the Jewish-Zionist Grip on American Film and Television Promotes Bias Against Arabs and Muslims Unquestionably the most powerful molder of opinion in the world today is the American global media, and especially the Hollywood motion picture industry. Ever since Zionist Jews forcibly established the State of Israel on the land of Arab Palestine in 1948 (with a great deal of American help), and as Arabs and Israelis have struggled for control of this land in the years since, Hollywood and the rest of American mass media have carried out a campaign to disparage Arabs and tarnish their image... Read more... Wastewater basin collapses east of Jabalia due to Israeli siege and attacks | IMEMC Sewage flood destroys Bedouin village Exactly two years after a massive sewage flood killed 5 Palestinians and destroyed an entire Bedouin village, another flood has overwhelmed the same village, located east of Jabalia, due to the collapse of an overloaded wastewater basin...Read more... Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson: The Nazi Roots Of The EU | YouTube Nazism and the EU have some very disturbing parallels. Indeed, the two are fundamentally intertwined and the origins of the EU can be traced directly back to the Nazis... Read more... The Nakba and Envisioning a better future, by Mazin Qumsiyeh Life is returning back to the "normal" beat of occupation/colonization after the Pope's visit. The reporters filed stories and the ones allowed to print went through while others were self-censored. Thus few stories appeared about the strangulation of Bethlehem and the colonial theft of our land and natural resources that has been going on for 61 years. But I believe the Internet and personal communications have accelerated a process of change that will inevitably lead to freedom and reversal of colonialism (the main risk now is the Palestinian leadership divisions and pettiness). The best evidence of this shift is that even mainstream media can no longer ignore reality and perhaps more importantly the evidence of desperation among the ruling regimes... Read more... Songsters Call On Leonard Cohen and Fans to Honor Nakba, Boycott Israel | PACBI Leonard Cohen, 1969 New York activists armed with acoustic guitars and drawings of guitars turning into barbed-wire fences will sing and pass out flyers outside singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen's Radio City Music Hall concert Sunday night. The activists are asking Cohen to cancel his September concert in Israel, supporting earlier calls by Jews, Palestinians and Israeli citizens, and by residents of the UK...Read more... We Will Survive This Latest Nakbah Too!, by May Altoukhi | INTIFADA I, like most people, have been feeling miserable these past three weeks because of the genocide against my people in Gaza. I can neither sleep, nor eat…Some days, I cannot even breathe. I thought that if I shared my thoughts and feelings with others, I might be able to cope better. But, then I discovered that I couldn’t find the words to describe the pain and agony I am going through. I look at my nieces, so young and happy, and my heart breaks because I know that one day they will too realize that the world doesn’t believe that they have the right to live, let alone to live freely, simply because they are Palestinians. Someday, they will be just as heart-broken as I am today, because they will watch their people suffer and die…Worst of all, they will watch the world participate in the annihilation of their land and their people, and they too will realize that no one gives a damn… Read more... Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part IV, by Stephen Lendman | OpEdNews This is the fourth in a series of articles on Ellen Brown's superb 2007 book titled "Web of Debt," now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free." This article focuses on America's "web of debt" entrapment... Read more... Young boy killed by Israelis in Gaza The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates the news media in the United States when it comes to coverage of foreign affairs. But does the mostly Jewish-owned corporate media reflect the truth of the situation? Or are we being given biased coverage that is failing to reflect the stark and extremely harsh reality of the tremendous human suffering created by the ongoing situation? The veracity of the matter is that Israel has created an extremely brutal and violent military occupation in the territories, bringing about a situation that makes any semblance of a decent life virtually impossible for the Palestinian people. The occupied territories have almost no economy with a 65% unemployment rate and 75% of the population living below the poverty line...Read more... Repatriate 'child soldiers' at Gitmo, U.K. groups urge | Globe and Mail The continued imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay of former child soldiers - including Canadian Omar Khadr - flouts international law, fives British legal associations said yesterday in a joint letter urging the new U.S. administration to move quickly to deal with their cases... Read more... May 15, 2009 Dalai Lama Calls America 'Champion of Freedom' in Exclusive Interview His Holiness the Dalai Lama poses with his FOX News mug after interview "I think basically America is a champion of freedom, democracy, liberty," he said before a series of lectures at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "Occasionally the administration neglects these principles, but overall, I think these principles are very much alive in this country."..The possibility of a meeting comes amid continuing warnings from China...suggesting that the Obama administration should not meet with the exiled Tibetan leader, whom China has described as a separatist. "That's quite routine. Nothing special," laughed the Dalai Lama, who has not been back to his native Tibet since he fled in 1959, nine years after Chinese troops seized control of the region. Since then, the Tibetan people and culture, he says, have been living under a "death sentence" as the communist government tries to erase it altogether...[There are politicians, and then there are politicians. If the Palestinians had a Dalai Lama, things would be so different.] Read more... Jesse Ventura: You Give Me a Water Board, Dick Cheney and One Hour, and I'll Have Him Confess to the Sharon Tate Murders | Video Cafe On Larry King Live Jesse Ventura takes on the Bush administration chickenhawks and Rush Limbaugh, and defends Colin Powell. After being waterboarded himself in the SERE program, Ventura makes no bones about it. Waterboarding is torture. I'd like to see Hannity have Ventura on his show to debate the issue... Read more, watch... Lebanon's Path from Perdition to Redemption, by Franklin Lamb Franklin Lamb continues with Part II of his series on Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon and the upcoming election next month When I graduated from Medical School here in Beirut more than 20 years ago there were 80 students in my class. The top dozen or so were Palestinians. But they all had to emigrate in order to practice medicine. Why? Lebanon’s shame. We Lebanese have in our culture a saying that in order to get the best quality olive oil you must press the olives very hard. That is what we have done to Palestinians in Lebanon. – Dr. Nizar Rifai, Lebanese Physician, in his Hamra Office, 11 May 2009 Read more... Hunting Demjanjuk: Injustice, Double Standards, and Ulterior Agendas, by Paul Grubach | CODOH In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that John Demjanjuk was not guilty in regard to the allegations that he was the notorious guard of Treblinka known as “Ivan the Terrible.” His United States citizenship was restored shortly thereafter. The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) has recently revived the 24-year old case by bringing a new legal complaint against the Ukrainian born retiree. They claim Demjanjuk was a guard in other Nazi concentration camps and that he lied about his wartime activities in his application to enter the United States in 1951... [The Holocult claims another victim - Demjanjuk was deported again a couple of days ago] Read more... EU obligated to prosecute war crime suspects EU Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering talks with Palestinians during his visit to the Gaza Strip one month after the end of the Israeli assault Over the past year, the European Union and Israel have deepened their relationship. The enhanced partnership that provides for closer political and mutually beneficial trade and investment relations as well as economic, social, financial, civil scientific, technological and cultural cooperation. The EU will pump 14 million euros ($18 million) of taxpayer money into the cooperation over the next seven years. However, talks to upgrade the current association agreement were suspended in January 2009 because of Israel's 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip... Read more... It's not up to Israelis to determine the status of Palestine, by Daoud Kuttab | Daily Star As the summit between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approaches, most of the discussion has focused on whether or not the newly elected Israeli leader will finally say that he backs a two-state solution. This is the wrong approach. Israelis should not determine the status of the Palestinian entity, nor should Palestinians have a say in what Israelis call their own state. The only question that Obama should ask Netanyahu is: When will Israel quit the occupied Palestinian territories?... Read more... Five Palestinian civilians, including two children and one woman, were wounded by IOF gunfire. [a quiet week]IOF conducted 15 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank. IOF arrested 12 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, and four in the Gaza Strip. IOF arrested the mother of an allegedly wanted Palestinian. IOF have continued to impose a total siege on the OPT and have isolated the Gaza Strip from the outside world. IOF troops positioned at military checkpoints in the West Bank arrested five Palestinian civilians, including a child and a girl. IOF have continued settlement activities in the West Bank and Israeli settlers have continued to attack Palestinian civilians and property. Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian civilians and their property. At least 110 donums were annexed to "Burkan" settlement in the northern West Bank. Read more... Covering up Israel's Gaza crimes with UN help | Electronic Intifada UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon meets with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the UN in New York, 6 May 2009 In my last article, I considered how UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon might handle the inquiry into Israeli attacks on UN facilities in the occupied Gaza Strip last winter. I hoped for the best but feared the worst given press reports that Ban had been told by the United States not to publish the report in full lest that harm the "peace process." Unfortunately, the worst fears were fully justified...Moreover, Ban rejected a key recommendation that there be a full independent investigation into numerous killings and injuries caused to UN personnel and Palestinian civilians during the Israeli assault... Read more... Survivors angered by pope's 'lukewarm' Yad Vashem speech | Haaretz The speech by Pope Benedict XVI Monday at Yad Vashem drew criticism from staff members of the Holocaust memorial, who described it as disappointing and lukewarm... [It is more likely that they were angry that he didn't kneel down and genuflect before their shrine] Read more... Families Down to a Meal a Day | IPS GAZA CITY - Um Abdullah cannot remember the last time she was able to feed meat to her eight children. She does know that for the past week the single meal she cooked for them each day consisted only of lentils. And that on one day, she had received aid coupons from the United Nations, which she subsequently sold to buy tomatoes and eggplant at the local market. Um Abdullah is a 42-year-old dressmaker and hails from Jabaliya, a cramped refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City. Stories like hers are commonplace across the Gaza Strip, where years of sanctions, siege and now war have battered the territory's economy and put many essentials out of reach for the majority of the population. "We live day to day, nothing more," says Um Abdullah, who made less than three dollars in profit over the last three days. "If we can eat once a day, that is good enough for us.".. Read more... May 14, 200 The hidden hand of Dick Cheney, Juan Cole | Salon Read more... Global Crisis: How Much Time do We Have?, by Adrian Salbuchi | Global Research An Argentine Prophecy ...Below, we address some key issues that we feel reflect the fact that a cycle is coming to an increasingly abrupt end in the whole world, even though the global media may be looking the other way (i.e., hiding the truth and generating smoke screens), most politicians hardly understand what is going on (on account of their ignorance), the bulk of the population in all countries see and feel this but cannot rationalize what's happening (disbelief), and some intelectuals may actually understand what's going on and where we're being dragged, but find it too hard to accept (i.e., denial)... [who really knows? I don't, but it sounds plausible in light of recent history..] Read more... Burmese Democracy Advocate Faces Military Trial - NYT Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was charged Thursday with violating the terms of her house arrest in a move that could tighten the grip of the military junta over its chief opponent in advance of an election next year... Read more... Obama warns Netanyahu: Don't surprise me with Iran strike - Haaretz U.S. President Barack Obama has sent a message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding that Israel not surprise the U.S. with an Israeli military operation against Iran. The message was conveyed by a senior American official who met in Israel with Netanyahu, ministers and other senior officials. Earlier, Netanyahu's envoy visited Washington and met with National Security Adviser James Jones and with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and discussed the dialogue Obama has initiated with Tehran... [little rays of hope in dark times] Read more... Silent As Death: Catholic Church Muzzled on Israeli Butchery of Palestinians with Bp. Williamson Controversy, by Mark Glenn "Israeli officials are hoping that the visit of Pope Benedict XVI will boost tourism, improve Israel's image and bolster relations between the Jewish state and the Vatican... ...he made sure to elucidate the fact that the Church stands firmly in Israel’s camp and will not use an ounce of her formidable voice in speak out against the injustices that have and continue to fall upon the real Semites in the region, meaning the innocent men, women and children in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq or elsewhere. In the meantime, he assiduously avoided visiting Gaza or talking about the recent purposeful carnage taking place there by Israel. No mention of the women and children deliberately incinerated with Phosphorus bombs or the gunning down of hands-held-high families as they exited their homes upon orders of the IDF. Instead, the man who commands the attention and respect of over a billion Catholics worldwide spoke about “peace” in the holy land in the same way some single-digit IQ beauty contest candidate talks about how she will wipe out world hunger if she wins...Read more... Spiritual journey cannot help but have political overtones, by Jonathan Cook ...“The very act of coming here is a political act that works to the benefit of Israel,” observed Mazin Qumsiyeh, who teaches at the West Bank’s only Catholic university, in Bethlehem. “This Pope’s visit, unlike his predecessor’s, offers no novelty – apart from his decision to stand next to [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and legitimise an extreme right-wing government.” Israeli officials too are unpersuaded by the Pope’s claim that he can avoid being dragged into local politics. Or as one government adviser told the Haaretz newspaper: “We have become pariahs in so many places around the globe. Promoting the Pope’s visit to the state is part of changing that.”Israel has established the largest press centre in the country’s history for this visit, while police have broken up attempts by Palestinian organisations in Jerusalem to present a rival picture to journalists... Read more... Recognizing The Jewish State's Right to Exist, by Jerry Levin | Palestine Chronicle 'Jewish majority rule has mandated second class citizenship on Arabs.' Recently Prime Minister Netanyahu became the first Israeli Prime Minister to voice a demand that Palestinians must recognize “The Jewish State’s right to exist” before it will enter talks. Right up until he changed the tune, the lyrics were that Palestinians much recognize “Israel’s right to exist,” despite the fact that the PLO and the Palestine Authority have been doing specifically that since the late 1980s. Whether or not he might retreat from the demand now that it has been made, it is essential for the sake of clarity to examine exactly what the right of the Jewish State to exist means...Read more... Money Talks, by Tom Sunic Never has money been so important in human relations. Never has it so much affected the destiny of so many Americans and Europeans. Today money has become a civil religion that makes it the centerpiece of discourse in all cultures and subcultures... Read more... Abbas Standing Takes a Fall, by Mel Frykberg | IPS Ripped posters of PA President Mahmoud Abbas Yet another sign of the growing unpopularity of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) was evident on the streets of Ramallah last weekend. Demonstrators ripped apart hundreds of posters of PA President Mahmoud Abbas that were plastered on walls and buildings along the street leading to the heavily fortified compound known as the Muqata, the PA government headquarters. All this was done within spitting distance of the heavily armed soldiers who patrol the sidewalks and roads leading to the Muqata. The popularity of Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, has plunged to an all-time low in the wake of allegations of corruption, and of collusion with Israel during its bloody January offensive in Gaza which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians. ..Read more... Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel, by Robert Sandels | Counterpunch ...Where the Port of Spain summiteers tinker with things as they are, the ALBA declaration offers a structural appraisal of the global economic crisis. Its language echoes statements made by Fidel Castro and recently by Morales about the unsustainablity of the current corporate, consumerist economic model. It asserts, "Capitalism is putting an end to humanity and the planet. What we are experiencing is a systematic and structural crisis, not just another cyclical crisis. Those who think the crisis will be resolved with an injection of tax money and some regulatory measures are very mistaken.. This is not a 'failure to regulate the system' but rather a constituent part of the capitalist system that speculates with all goods and stocks in hopes of obtaining the highest possible profit.".. Read more... 14 June 2009 – 16 August 2009 Come and celebrate Palestine! The Palestinian Summer Celebration is a unique annual program that gives people from all over the world the chance to encounter the life, culture, and politics of Palestine. Learn Arabic and study Palestinian history at Bethlehem University, spend time with local families and volunteer with a community organization...June 14th – July 12th 2009 (first month) July 13th – August 16th 2009 (second month) Read more... US-Latin American Relations in a Time of Rising Militarism, Protectionism and Pillage, by James Petras | Global Research One of the most striking aspect of contemporary US-Latin American relations is the profound divergence between the hopes, expectations and positive image of the Obama regime and the policies, strategies and practices which are being pursued. Many so-called progressive North American commentators and not a few Latin American writers have ignored the most elementary features of US foreign policy, and focused exclusively on the highly deceptive rhetoric of "change" and "new beginnings." A serious understanding of US foreign policy toward Latin America requires a discussion of the main objectives of the Obama regime, the global priorities of imperial policy in times of multiple wars and world depression... Read more... Action Alert: Tell Congress—No Arms for Israel Great opportunity for significant protest: The Israel Conference in Los Angeles to Spark Deal Flow Between Israel and California The Israel Conference™ spotlights clean tech, medical tech, high tech, entertainment media tech, and consumer products companies that are industry innovators and market-makers to an audience of investors, senior executives, and entrepreneurs to increase business and investment between Israel and California on Thursday, June 4, 2009 at the Luxe Hotel in Los Angeles beginning at 8am www.TheIsraelConference.org... Read more... May 13, 2009 Letter to Obama from a Palestinian Doctor in the Galilee Dear President Obama: In approaching the task of addressing you directly about a personal issue, I feel daunted by the abyss that separates the two of us in status and power. I am a retired public health physician, attempting to maintain a hold on his sanity and physical health by puttering around his garden in a Palestinian village in Galilee. You are the president of the nation most of humanity envies and desires to join, burdened with the task of saving the world from economic and political chaos and now from nuclear war. Yet I find enough shared experiences between us to embolden me to speak to you as an equal in humanity if in no other regard... [good luck, sir - the best thought I can offer is that it is always darkest before the dawn] Obama Chooses a Reliable Dictatorship | Counterpunch By choosing Cairo, Egypt as the platform for his long awaited address to the global Muslim community, President Barack Obama predictably leans on a reliable dictatorship suffocating a country that is teetering toward religious and political irrelevance. Indeed, modern Egypt resembles its ubiquitous tourist attraction, the Sphinx, the symbolic temple guardian adorned with a human head on a prostrate lion... Read more... Catholic Worker Peace Team to Continue Praying for Entry into Gaza at border | The Christian Radical The six members of a Catholic Worker Peace Team from California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Vermont spent 16 hours today in an unsuccessful effort to convince Egyptian authorities to allow them to enter Gaza, where physicians at the Al Shifa Hospital and children at the Rachel Corrie Center are waiting for them to deliver medical supplies and toys. Starting at about 4 PM, the group knelt in front of the border crossing and prayed the Rosary to persuade the officials to allow them to pass... Read more... Haaretz reporter Amira Hass arrested upon leaving Gaza | Haaretz Israel Police on Tuesday detained Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass upon her exit from the Gaza Strip, where she had been living and reporting over the last few months. Hass was arrested and taken in for questioning immediately after crossing the border, for violating a law which forbids residence in an enemy state. She was released on bail after promising not to enter the Gaza Strip over the next 30 days... Read more... An Existential Question for the Power Elite?: The Bomb Iran Faction, by Gary Leupp | Counterpunch There is clearly a faction of the power elite that is, and has for some years been pressing, for a U.S. military attack on Iran. It is not advocating a war, at least openly, or an occupation of that vast nation; rather, it is advocating an operation similar in concept to the Israeli attack on Iraq's French-built Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981. In a word, it is both advocating an Israeli-like action and justifying it explicitly as one on behalf of Israel...Others probably think this has to be the time for a show-down with the nuts. One faction in the power elite must be thinking: They cannot be allowed to get their Iran attack on the basis of fantasy. Whatever one thinks about the mullahs, or Ahmadinejad, or Islam---they can't be allowed another war-based-on-lies...How do Zionism and, for some, biblical mythology about a Chosen People and a Promised Land intersect with and even outweigh other considerations such as "national security" in a conventional sense and most fundamentally, U.S. corporate profit?... Read more... Peace or war?: Commentary by Arnaud de Borchgrave - UPI ...Even with territorial adjustments to the 1967 border in Israel's favor, which the Arab peace plan allows for, Israelis would begin to feel that the purely Jewish state concept is condemned by history to a short shelf life. Underlying the current geopolitical equation is the growing belief among Palestinian intellectuals that a one-state solution is preferable to two states. This school now argues it would be wiser in the long run to become an underprivileged, downtrodden minority within the state of Israel and the occupied territories, whence they could campaign with Israel's 1.2 million-strong Arab minority for equal rights. The overwhelming majority of these Israeli Arabs say they want to remain part of Israel. Demography, many believe, will eventually deliver a Lebanon-style hybrid state... Read more... Actual Bailout May Exceed $10 Trillion | truthout Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, preparing to testify before the Congressional Ask most people on the street how much money taxpayers are using to save banks and you will probably hear the number $700 billion...But the actual number is much bigger. The current block of taxpayer money that has been pledged by the US government and the Federal Reserve to prevent the system from collapsing, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News, is roughly $12.8 trillion as of March 31. This money has been lent, spent or guaranteed to prevent a systemic collapse. The Bloomberg report and a chart showing broad categories of where the money has come from and the programs it funds can be found here...Oversight Panel for TARP, is surrounded by protesters from Code Pink Read more... The Hate Crimes Prevention Bill: Why Do Jewish Organizations Support It?, by Kevin MacDonald | VDARE The "Hate Crimes Prevention Bill" will be in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. It recently passed the House, causing the Anti-Defamation League to rejoice. The ADL called the law "an essential and necessary step forward in the national effort to counter hate crimes" and urged passage by the Senate... Read more... What Palestinian Refugees Need From Lebanon's Elections, by Franklin Lamb | Counterpunch "My work here is very difficult. To be honest with you there isn't a single day when I don't leave work completely depressed, sometimes in tears. The amount of abuse of Palestinians in Lebanon is at a level that you cannot even imagine unless you live here. At the end of the day I go home and sit. And think. How is this possible? I think of these Palestinians and feel they are so pale and patient and 'moderate' compared to what I feel. I tend to keep quiet but what I feel inside is shocking and I am not comfortable describing it. This place is close to exploding." --European NGO social worker who assists children of NON-ID Palestinians in Ein el Helwe Refugee Camp Read more...The Palestinian Paradox, by Helena Cobban | The Nation Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and his supporters in Gaza, May 1 ...In the interview, Fayyad focused on the Israeli authorities' failure to let him do his job, in two key respects. First, Israel's continued building of settlements in the West Bank was limiting the possibility that a viable Palestinian state could be salvaged from the land that remained. And second, frequent Israeli military incursions were hampering the PA's ability to govern in areas that are supposed to be under Palestinian control...Fayyad is far from alone in thinking the clock might be running out for the two-state solution. The prospect of building an independent Palestinian state in all or nearly all of the territories occupied by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in June 1967--the goal that most Palestinian secular nationalists have adhered to since 1974--looks very remote absent a major change of behavior by Israel. As this prospect has dimmed, many Palestinians and a small group of stalwarts in the ruins of Israel's peace movement have returned to an older idea that was once more popular in both cultures: that of a single, binational state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea...Read more... The Single-Payer Taboo, by Ralph Nader | Counterpunch Among the giant taboos afflicting Congress these days is the proposal to create a single payer health insurance system (often called full Medicare for everyone). How can this be? Don't the elected politicians represent the people? Don't they always have their finger to the wind? Well, single payer is only supported by a majority of the American people, physicians and nurses. They like the idea of public funding and private delivery. They like the free choice of doctors and hospitals that many are now denied by the HMOs...Yet, on Capitol Hill and at the White House there are no meetings, briefings, hearings, and consultations about kinds of health care reforms that reform the basic price inflation, indifference to prevention, and discrimination by health insurers... Read more... US Envoy Writes of Israeli Threats | The Nation In the wake of the accusation by Chas Freeman that his nomination to lead the National Intelligence Council was derailed by an "Israeli lobby," a forthcoming memoir by another distinguished ambassador adds stunning new charges to the debate. The ambassador, John Gunther Dean, writes that over the years he not only came under pressure from pro-Israeli groups and officials in Washington but also was the target of an Israeli-inspired assassination attempt in 1980 in Lebanon, where he had opened links to the Palestine Liberation Organization... Read more... Democrats Give Wall Street a Big, Wet Kiss, by Jim Hightower | AlterNet Yet more evidence that the banks own Washington Sam Rayburn, a longtime speaker of the U.S. House, once said, "Every now and then, a politician ought to do something just because it's right." Recently, 45 U.S. senators dodged an excellent chance to do just what Mr. Sam advised. At issue was a straightforward, common-sense amendment proposed by Dick Durbin, D-Ill. It would have allowed bankruptcy judges to help hundreds of thousands of financially strapped homeowners who now find themselves trapped by exploding, exorbitant interest rates that bankers had attached to their loans... Read more... NATO "Fun and Games", by Eric Walberg | Global Research Bringing the threat of war to Russia's borders As Russian troops marched to celebrate the victory over Nazi Germany 8 May, NATO troops - 1,300 of them from 10 member countries and six "partners" - were beginning their month-long Cooperative Longbow/Lancer war "games" on Russia's southern border. In deference to Moscow, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Serbia decided not to participate in the NATO exercises, preferring to send their diplomats to Red Square in homage to the untold Russian sacrifice in pursuit of world peace. According to Russian MP Sergei Abeltsev, the NATO decision to hold the drills in Georgia during the WWII Victory Day celebrations was a "total revision of the history of theGreat Patriotic War". The games were greeted by Georgian troops with a coup attempt against their beleaguered President Mikheil Saakashvili, though there is speculation that this was something dreamed up by the Georgian president himself (he has done stranger things... Read more... May 12, 2009 Becoming What We Seek to Destroy, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, left, takes part in a re-enlistment ceremony for eight The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat... U.S. troops during his visit to Forward Operating Base Airborne in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, last week Read more... US General Builds A Palestinian Army | The Dreyfuss Report Last Thursday, in what was billed as his very first on-the-record address, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, U.S. security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, spoke to the 2009 Soref Symposium organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. WINEP, of course, is the chief thinktank for the Washington-based Israel lobby. And in his talk, Gen. Dayton delivered an important warning... Read more... War without Context: Fatah, Hamas & Flawed Language | Scoop From a distance, the struggle between Hamas and Fatah appears commonplace, a typical third world country’s political scuffle over interpretation of democracy that went out of control, or simply a ‘power struggle’ between two political rivals vying for international aid and recognition. In fact, the conflict may appear as if it popped out of nowhere and will continue as long as the seemingly power-hungry Palestinians carry on with their self-defeating fight... Read more... Does Iran Resemble Nazi Germany?, by Uri Avnery 'A comparison for the sake of fleeting propaganda advantage is trivializing the Holocaust.' First of all, I want to apologize to all the good women who are engaged in the world's oldest profession. I recently described Shimon Peres as a political prostitute. One of my female readers has protested vigorously. Prostitutes, she pointed out, earn their money honestly. They deliver what they promise... [No, Iran doesn't, but Israel certainly does. As for the Holycause, the Israelis sold it to the Disney Corporation decades ago] Read more... Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt, by Stephen Lendman | OpEdNews This is the first of several articles on Ellen Brown's superb 2007 book titled "Web of Debt," now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free." Given today's global economic crisis, it's an appropriate time to review it and urge readers to digest the entire work... Her book is a remarkable achievement - in its scope, depth, and importance... Read more... Ghada Karmi exposes Israeli racism | Redress Information & Analysis Henry Lowi views the inherent racism of Israel and and its apologists. He argues that "Palestine will be free when all of its people (including the refugees!) enjoy the protection of a regime in which one’s ethnicity is irrelevant to determining one’s rights, liberties, access to resources, privileges and duties"... Read more... Israel's psychological siege, by David Cronin | Electronic Intifada Few in the Gaza Strip were left unscarred by Israel's recent onslaught Palestinians in Gaza have a colloquial term to describe the buzzing of Israeli warplanes that is an ever-present feature of their lives: zanana. The gallows humor of likening instruments of death to honey bees might suggest that the people of this crowded sliver of land on the Mediterranean have found a way of coping with the occupation that has lasted more than four decades. Yet the planes also remind Palestinians of what they fear most: that they could come under fresh attack at any time...Read more... 88% of prisoners in Palestinian jails being held without trial - Haaretz About 18 months ago, a European Union delegation arrived in the Palestinian Authority to evaluate the condition of prisoners in Palestinian prisons. The delegation, which was attached to the European Union Police Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (Eupol Copps) - a group of European security experts who are involved in the restructuring of the Palestinian police force - was given a clear order: to bring about reforms in the Palestinian judiciary. One of the astounding conclusions of the legal experts from Europe was that 88 percent of all those in jail were being held without trial, a hearing or any sentencing... [not too surprising - after all, they're working for the Israelis, so it's monkey see monkey do] Read more... Amira Hass / Israel knows that peace just doesn't pay - Haaretz Successive Israeli governments since 1993 certainly must have known what they were doing, being in no hurry to make peace with the Palestinians. As representatives of Israeli society, these governments understood that peace would involve serious damage to national interests... Read more... Arundhati Roy in Karachi | Dawn Is there a threat of Talibanisation engulfing the entire region? I think it has already engulfed our region. I think there’s a need for a very clear thinking (on this issue of Talibanisation). In India, there are two kinds of terrorism: one is Islamic terrorism and the other Maoist terrorism. But this term terrorism, we must ask, what do they mean by it. In Pakistan, I’m here to understand what they mean by this term. When we say we must fight the Taliban or must defeat them, what does it mean? I’m here to understand what you mean when you say Taliban. Do you mean a militant? Do you mean an ideology? Exactly what is it that is being fought? That needs to be clarified... Read more... My Encounter with Iran, by Karla Hansen | OpEdNews Mainstream media in the United States portrays Iran as the raised clenched fist and misguidedly, the masses buy this distorted picture as gospel. For the past six weeks I have met, dined, danced, cried and laughed with Iranians...I will carry home to Des Moines, Iowa, a portrait of Iran quite different from the narrative depicted by the mainstream propaganda machine powered by the U.S./Zionist/military alliance that has a stranglehold on America. I am no longer polite about bluntly naming bullies... Read more... Israel shuts down Palestinian press center ahead of pope's Jerusalem visit | Atheo News Israeli police and intelligence forces raided the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem early on Monday morning, shutting down in advance a Palestinian Media Center planned in advance of the pope’s visit to Jerusalem. The Israelis handed the management of the hotel an order signed by the Israeli internal security minister closing off a conference room that had been planned to be used media center, offering visiting journalists resources to cover the pope’s visit... Read more... Caught on film: India ‘not shining’, Arundhati Roy | Dawn ...The [Congress] party claims that instead of India Shining it has presided over India 'Achieving'. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India's greatest contribution, certainly our political parties’ greatest contribution is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar-winning film to be shot in. So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it's beyond farce... Read more... Rebranding of U.N. conference undid years of human-rights work - Inside Bay Area DURING THE dark years of the Bush administration, an entire generation of Americans grew up expecting to see a globe-trotting U.S. president greeted with anti-American protesters wherever he went. But when Barack Obama was elected, even my young son understood what it might mean to have a leader who would be embraced by people all over the world. And yet, the man whose candidacy catalyzed a national conversation about race sent an unwelcome message to the rest of the world when he chose to boycott Durban II, the review conference of the U.N.'s World Conference Against Racism held recently in Geneva... Read more... May 11, 2009 AN OPEN LETTER TO LEONARD COHEN | AUPHR As many of you might be aware, Leonard Cohen's world tour that started 3 May, 2009 is scheduled to end 24 September in Tel Aviv. BRICUP have written him an open letter urging him to cancel the concert inTel Aviv.. Read more... A Public/Private Letter to Leonard Cohen - From the Editor Dear Leonard - I feel I can call you that. After all, we are brothers in more ways than one. You might even recall meeting me...So, brother to brother I implore you, don't violate your bodhisattva vow, don't lend the Israeli fascists your good name. Remember what you wrote so long ago, or was it yesterday... Read more... THE HYPOCRISY OF THE PAPAL VISIT TO ISRAEL | Desert Peace New Israeli Postage Stamp issued in honour of the Papal visit Read more... Gaza 2009: The Moment of Truth, by Haidar Eid | ODSG Gaza has returned to its pre-massacre state of siege, confronted with the usual, conspiratorial, "international" indifference after 22 long days and dark nights, during which its brave people were left alone to face one of the strongest armies in the world -- an army that has hundreds of nuclear warheads, thousands of trigger-happy soldiers armed with Merkava tanks, F-16s, Apache helicopters, naval gunships and phosphorous bombs. Gaza now does not make news. It's people die slowly, its children malnourished, its water contaminated, its nights dark, and yet it is deprived even of a word of sympathy from the likes of Ban Ki Moon and the president of "Change; Yes We Can."... Read more... Ask your sons, by Gideon Levy - Haaretz It is behavior well known to every police investigator: First the suspect denies everything, then attacks his interrogators, then admits to a small portion of the accusations (saying he merely did what everyone does), and finally breaks down and confesses. The Israel Defense Forces returned from Operation Cast Lead and, of course, denied everything. The people applauded it for its bogus victory and no one paid much attention to the awful price paid by the Palestinians. But after the smoke (in this case, white phosphorus) cleared a bit, the blood began crying out from the ground... Read more... Letter from Mazin 5/11/09: The Pope in Palestine I am a Christian and I teach at a Catholic University in the occupied West Bank but I doubt the Pope will hear views of people like me. His trip is scripted by the Israeli foreign ministry, itself under a direction of a Russian racist who lives in an illegal colonial settlement on the land of the Bethlehem District, the birthplace of Jesus. We do not know if he will ask Israel privately to end the occupation but it is likely his visit is dominated by the usual politics of history (and Jewish-Catholic issues). We do know that the Pope’s visit is looked at as a big PR success for Israel as it legitimizes the state of apartheid and the mistaken notion that Zionists represent “the Jewish people”... Read more... BDS: Thinking Outside the PLO Box, by Samah Sabawi | ODSG Read more... Christian Arabs and ‘peace and justice’| Jordan Times The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Jordan and Palestine is a perfect opportunity to review and declare the role of Christian Arabs in the peace process.To begin with, it is important for all to know that Arabs have been in Palestine and Jordan before Islam and Christianity. References to the word “Arab” and its derivatives are mentioned hundreds of times in the Old and New Testaments... Read more... Video: Mother's Day 2009 Demo at Leviev NY | Adalah-NY Here is the link to Adalah-NY's Mother's Day demo yesterday calling for a boycott of Leviev, the Israel diamond magnate at his store in NYC. The demo was also a tribute to Basem Abu Rahmeh from Bili'n who was brutally killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces during a demo against the Apartheid Wall in Bil'in on April 17th, 2009. Watch the video of Basem's killing (note that the video is graphic). Basem Abu Rahmeh, 29 years of age, was shot in the stomach with a high-velocity tear gas projectile. The tear-gas projectile, labeled "40 mm bullet, special/long range" in Hebrew was the same weapon which was used to critically injur American national, Tristan Anderson at a demonstration in Ni´lin on 13 March 2009 when he was shot in the head from 60 meters. Basem Abu Rahmeh is the 18th individual to be killed by Israeli forces during a demonstration against the Wall. - email from Riham Watch video of the demo...Karbala and the Imam Husayn in Persian and Indo-Muslim literature, by Annemarie Schimmel | Harvard University I still remember the deep impression which the first Persian poem I ever read in connection with the tragic events of Karbala' left on me. It was Qaani's elegy which begins with the words: What is raining? Blood. Read more...Who? The eyes. How? Day and night. Why? From grief. Grief for whom? Grief for the king of Karbala'... Video: Warning of Pitfalls of Consumption Is a Hit in Schools - NYT Annie Leonard “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation. The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste...Read more... (video link embedded) THE TWO-STATE DELUSION, by Alan Sabrosky | mepeace The world is once again being treated to yet another round in the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" charade. The "usual suspects" are posturing, pronouncements are being made, speeches are being given, and hints and rumors about a supposed "toughening" in the US Government's approach to Israel are filtering out from the press. We are supposed to think that something different is about to happen, and that, as the old American folk song had it, "The times, they are a-changing."..It is all nonsense... Read more... The Pope must have a message for the Middle East, by Tariq Ramadan | The Guardian In order to avoid controversies, official voices from the Vatican have been trying to explain that the pope's visit to the Middle East is not political. It should be understood as "a pilgrimage", aiming to spread a "religious message" of peace. All these terminological contortions will change nothing in the reality of the matter: the leader of the Catholic church, the head of the Vatican state, is visiting a region torn apart by the more critical political conflicts of our time. The world would be right to expect from him a plain religious discourse as well as a clear political positioning on the Israel-Palestine conflict... Read more... Concerns white phosphorus used in Afghan battle | Yahoo News Doctors voiced concern over "unusual" burns on Afghan villagers wounded in an already controversial U.S.-Taliban battle, and the country's top human rights groups said Sunday it is investigating the possibility white phosphorus was used... [The Americans, the Israelis, is there any difference? It's like musical chairs.] Read more... Fears of sectarian violence in Nazareth, by Jonathan Cook | The National Anti-Christian banners and billboards have sprung up along the main route to Nazareth’s Roman Catholic church days before Pope Benedict XVI is due to arrive in Israel’s largest Arab city to conduct an open-air mass. The signs, including one denouncing those who “harm God or his messenger”, have been posted by a radical Islamic group in the city as part of a campaign to stop the Pope’s visit. Nazareth officials are publicly downplaying the significance of the signs, though privately they fear they will be highly visible as the Pope passes through the main street of Nazareth accompanied by tens of thousands of pilgrims. But the municipality is reported to be wary of removing the posters for fear of triggering protests from radical Muslims that could turn violent. Meanwhile, Israeli police are gearing up for possible trouble and will deploy thousands of officers in Nazareth for the Pope’s arrival on Thursday and seal off sections of the city for 24 hours beforehand... Read more... May 10, 2009 Aung San Suu Kyi: The Voice Of Hope - Conversations with Alan Clements | Foreign Policy Journal ...Author Alan Clements travelled to Rangoon in December 1995 to meet secretly with Daw Suu Kyi and recorded a series of dialogues with the leader of the NLD. Clements’ involvement with Burma goes back 30 years. He is the first American to be ordained a Buddhist monk, and like every foreign journalist entering Burma, he has also encountered the wrath of the military junta by being deported. Between his extensive knowledge of the domestic situation, and Daw Suu Kyi’s wisdom and elegance in answering every question put before her, readers will understand just how Buddhism is closely connected with politics in Burma, and why the concepts of faith and metta (loving kindness) are among the building blocks of any genuine democracy... Read more... How the US Empire Contributed to the Economic Crisis, by Ivan Eland | Antiwar A few — and only a few — prescient commentators have questioned whether the U.S. can sustain its informal global empire in the wake of the most severe economic crisis since World War II. And the simultaneous quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan are leading more and more opinion leaders and taxpayers to this question. But the U.S. Empire helped cause the meltdown in the first place... Read more... UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report | The Independent The UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon bowed to pressure from Israel yesterday by trying to limit the impact of a comprehensive critique accusing its military of “recklessness or negligence” in this year’s Gaza offensive... Read more... Ban Ki Moon comes to the defence of Israel | WSWS This latest inquiry was forced upon Ban as international concern over Israel’s disproportionate and massive use of force against an essentially unarmed population mounted. Israel’s 22-day offensive against a largely defenceless population killed 1,400 people, the majority of them civilians, including 400 women and children, injured at least 5,000 people, and destroyed 21,000 homes. Israel suffered only 13 deaths, and several of these were by “friendly fire.” Even then, Ban did everything he could to limit its remit and impact... Read more... Introducing "We Are Change" | BrasscheckTV Some very interesting words from a nice sounding young American man as seen on Russian television.. Watch... On the Lite Side: 18 Arab Leaders You Would Want with You in a Bar Fight | KABOBfest This post is not a political statement. It is simply a list of the Arab political figures you would want on your side if a bar fight were to break out. Because there are not that many, most of them are wimps once you take away their mukhabaraat, I had to throw in a few non-Arab ones for good measure... Read more... Time to Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid, by Mairead Maguire | Counterpunch An Open Letter to Barack Obama from a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate I found your book ‘Dreams from my Father’ a moving and inspiring story of your own struggle to find your identity and purpose in life. You found it for sure, and today carry the hopes and dreams of so many people in our world. We pray for you and your family. We wish you all good health and happiness. You carry so much responsibility. We hope you will change the policies of USA (both domestic and Foreign) to people centred policies, based on the values and ethics which you try to live out in your life... Read more... Seeds of Truth: Sheila Stuff I have learned over the past decade if I want to know what's really going on in the United States, I have to cruise through the foreign media to see what's creating a furor or causing a stink. So, while searching for the status of Spain's on-again, off-again criminal proceedings against six Bush Administration war criminals, this headline in Der Spiegel caught my eye -- "Frankenfood Ban is Neither Populism nor Panic-Mongering.".. Read more... She's Israeli, he's an Arab. War has made them like mother and son | The Observer Ali Abu Awwad and Robi Damelin met through the Parents Circle after his brother and her son were killed It is a friendship as remarkable as it is unlikely: Robi Damelin is a 65-year-old Jewish grandmother whose son, David, served in the Israeli army; Ali Abu Awwad, 37, is a former Palestinian revolutionary who joined the first intifada as a teenager and was later sentenced to 10 years in an Israeli prison – he served four. David Damelin was killed by a Palestinian sniper seven years ago; two years before that, Awwad's brother, Youssef, 32, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier...Read more... The Big Dog Wins Another One, by Kevin MacDonald The acquittal of former AIPAC operatives Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman on espionage is yet another victory for the Israel Lobby. As happens so often these days, stories that are much discussed in some sectors of the Internet are pretty much ignored in the MSM. The New York Times buried it and the LA Times ignored it entirely. It was missing from network news and from cable TV talk shows of all political leanings. Lobbies, it is said, live in the dark and die in the light of day. And here the media cooperates with a bit of self-censorship... Read more... Hillary and Latin America, by Mark Weisbrot | Counterpunch ...Washington’s stated strategy was to isolate Venezuela from its neighbors. This was before the election of additional left governments in Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Paraguay, and El Salvador. I argued that this strategy was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what was happening in the region, and that it would only succeed in isolating the United States from its southern neighbors. All this has come to pass, but more interestingly, for the first time we have an acknowledgement of this failure from the United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton... Read more... May 9, 2009 Israel's war on dissent | Electronic Intifada (5/8/09) An Israeli settler clashes with an Israeli left-wing activist during a demonstration against settlements in the West Bank town of Hebron Israeli left-wing activists and Palestinian land owners demonstrated against the settlers of Kharsina settlement in Hebron after they built wooden structures on Palestinian land. Photo link... Two excellent articles on Zionism: its definition, etiology, modus operandi, prevention and cure Zionism for Compleat Dummies, by Les Visible | Smoking Mirrors ...Zionist behavior causes reactions because it is an ugly thing that no human being could countenance as far as its behavior and rhetoric goes. However, when you rightfully criticize Zionism you are tagged as criticizing Jews. As a result, Zionism has been able to become a world problem because they use the Jewish people as a human shield. You launch a comment and it is made to appear to hit collateral bystanders. That’s the intent... Read more... Straight Talk About Zionism: What Jewish Nationalism Means, by Mark Weber | IHR ...Our political leaders tell us that American Jews should be encouraged to think of themselves as a distinct national group with an identity and community interests separate from those of other Americans. At the same time American politicians insist that Zionist Jews be given all rights as full and equal US citizens. On the basis of this double standard, Jews are given a privileged status in American political and cultural life. Americans are led to believe that Zionism is a benign outlook of altruistic and righteous support for a so-called Jewish homeland. In fact, Zionism is an ideology and movement of ethnically-based Jewish nationalism that reinforces the identity and self-image of Jews as a distinct and separate community with interests different from those of non-Jews, and which strengthens the already powerful world Jewish community... Read more... Do Jews Have a Jesus Problem? | Jewish Forward The joke, if that’s what it is, goes like this: “You’ll have to forgive us Jews for being a little nervous. Two thousand years of Christian love have worn down our nerves.”... Read more... America: a superpower no more, by Walter Rodgers | CSM Two American icons, General Electric and Berkshire Hathaway, lost their triple-A credit ratings. Then China, America's largest creditor, called for a new global currency to replace the dollar just weeks after it demanded Washington guarantee the safety of Beijing's nearly $1 trillion debt holdings. And that was just in March. These events are the latest warnings that our world is changing far more rapidly and profoundly than we – or our politicians – will admit. America's own triple-A rating, its superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy. President Obama's recent acknowledgement that the US is not winning in Afghanistan is but the most obvious recognition of this jarring new reality. What was the president telling Americans? As Milton Bearden, a former top CIA analyst on Afghanistan, recently put it, "If you aren't winning, you're losing." .. Read more... Peres to Obama: No choice but to compare Iran to Nazis - Haaretz The world has no choice but to compare the threat posed by Iran now to that of Nazi Germany before the Second World War, President Shimon Peres told U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday. "Iran is a threat not just to Israel, but to the whole world. As Jews, after being subjected to the Holocaust, we cannot close our eyes in light of the grave danger emerging from Iran," Peres said... Read more... The 29 fakes behind a rewriting of history | The Guardian A letter to Adolf Hitler from the Duke of Windsor, supposedly written in 1939, turned out to be a fake They were the secret intelligence files that turned second world war history on its head with "revelations" of British collaboration with the Nazis. British agents used the royal family to deceive the Nazis into expecting a pro-German putsch. The Duke of Windsor leaked secrets to help Hitler. And, most sensationally of all, SS chief Heinrich Himmler was murdered by secret agents on Winston Churchill's orders. The elaborate claims, contained in three separate books by the historian Martin Allen and based on previously unseen documents, read like the stuff of spy fiction. As it turned out, they were...Read more... Poll: Jews to blame for US recession | PressTV Results from a recent opinion poll show at least one third of Americans more or less blame the Jewish community for the current economic recession. A survey by the Boston Review in its May/June issue indicates some 38 percent of the non-Jews in the United States blame the Jews in some way for the financial crisis, while an estimated 25 percent blame the Jews a moderate amount or more for the global economic slump...The Jewish respondents surprisingly displayed almost the same results when questioned on the same issue... Read more... Analysis of Second FY 2009 Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental War Funding Request | Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation ...On February 26, 2009, the Obama administration released the initial details of its proposed FY 2010 budget for the federal government. At that time, the administration indicated that it would also be seeking an additional $75.5 billion in supplemental funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the latter part of the current fiscal year (FY 2009)... Read more... Israel 'demands' Pope Benedict XVI condemn Holocaust deniers - Telegraph Pope Benedict XVI waves to the crowds upon his arrival to hold a mass at the Regina Pacis Center in Amman The Israeli government demanded that Pope Benedict XVI explicitly condemn Catholics who deny the Holocaust, as he arrived in Jordan on the first leg of his tour of the Holy Land billed as an act of 'reconciliation'... Read more... Mousawa: An Alternative to a Two-State Solution | Huffington Post ...Palestinians residing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that their dream of a state of their own has all but disappeared. More Palestinians have been vocal about a binational state that provides full democratic rights for citizens of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. A movement that began amongst Palestinians with Israeli citizenship is now making its way to East Jerusalem and to the West Bank. It is called "Mousawa" which means equality...perhaps this is what Abbas should be talking about with Obama... Read more... Al Nakba and Israeli Apartheid: A Continuum Please join the Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid-Southern California and the American Friends Service Committee for a special event commemorating the 1948 expulsion of over 750,000 indigenous Palestinians that accompanied the founding of the Zionist state - at UCLA... Read more... Who Will Stop the AIPAC Jews Before it is Too Late?, by Medea Benjamin | CommonDreams While I was being tackled by security guards at Washington's Convention Center during the AIPAC conference for unfurling a banner that asked "What about Gaza?," my heart was aching. I wasn't bothered so much by the burly guards who were yanking my arms behind by back and dragging me-along with 5 other CODEPINK members-out of the hall. They were doing their job. What made my heart ache was the hatred I felt from the AIPAC staff who tore up the banner and slammed their hands across my mouth as I tried to yell out: "What about Gaza? What about the children?"... Read more... Not an Analogy: Israel and the Crime of Apartheid | CommonDreams ...In recent years, increasing numbers of people around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. (1) This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week.(2) Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians, something that has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference... Read more... See original article by Karine Mac Allister Tomgram: Everyday is Doomsday in Washington, by Tom Engelhardt A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: "In Pakistan, U.S. Courts Leader of Opposition." And nobody thought it was strange at all. In fact, it's the sort of thing you can read just about any time when it comes to American policy in Pakistan or, for that matter, Afghanistan. It's just the norm on a planet on which it's assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called "foreign aid," now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince... Read more... Of Thieves and Liars in the service of Zionism, by Mike Odetalla | Window Into Palestine Today I received a frantic message from my father to call him right away once I got his message. Distraught, I quickly dialed his number. Thank God everything was alright with him health wise, but never the less, he was quite upset of the news he had just received from my brother who lives back home in Beit Hanina, Palestine. It seems that a couple of days ago, an Israeli vehicle with 2 “religious type” Jews and their armed bodyguard had pulled up in my mother’s driveway and dropped off a paper on the top of the staircase leading to our front door. My mother had seen them drop off the paper, but because she can barely walk, she could not confront them and called my brother to come home and see what this is was all about... Read more... The "Hope" convoy led by senator Rossi is to arrive soon | Palestine Telegraph The European campaign to end the siege said that the "Hope" convoy, which left the Italian port of Genoa for the besieged Gaza Strip last Sunday, is led by Fernando Rossi, a member of the Italian senate, and is expected to arrive during the next few days. In a statement received by the PIC on Saturday, Dr. Arafat Abu Madi, the head of the European campaign, stated that senator Rossi, who already visited Gaza and sensed closely the suffering of its people, is accompanied by 11 other European lawmakers in addition to politicians and volunteers... Read more... 69 of the 359 candidates in the fray in Gujarat have criminal records | The Hindu Of the 359 candidates in the fray in 26 Lok Sabha constituencies in Gujarat, 69 have criminal records. According to data compiled by the Gujarat Election Watch, a part of the National Election Watch organisation monitoring the candidates in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, all the parties have candidates with criminal records; topping the list was the BJP with 11 of its 26 candidates having criminal records, followed by the Congress with a close 10. The Bahujan Samaj Party, which fielded 24 candidates, has four. Three come from the newly-formed Mahagujarat Janata Party, which has put up candidates in 16 constituencies. The 69 candidates together have 136 criminal cases registered against them, of which 48 cases were of a serious nature, including charges of murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping, extortion and such others. Though Gujarat had a reasonablly good record in law and order compared to many other States, 19.22 per cent of its candidates have criminal records... [laissez lez bontemps roller] Read more... Government Could Destroy Records in Hundreds of Guantanamo Cases | freedetainees.org A stockpile of documents about hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees, some written by the prisoners themselves, could be destroyed under a little-known provision of a federal court order the Bush administration obtained in 2004. For four years, records in the prisoners’ habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the legality of their detentions have been piling up in a secure federal facility in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Va. Because much of the information is classified, the 750 or so attorneys representing the prisoners are required to do and store all their work on-site... Read more... May 7, 2009 Non Violence and the Right to Resistance, by Mohamed El Mokhtar | Palestine Chronicle 'Every form of oppression generates its own rebellion Engaging in non-violent acts as a means of resistance to tyranny and injustice is certainly a noble and dignifying attitude. It is historically best epitomized by the Christ’s attitude of offering the second cheek in response to an act of violence or provocation. The concept of non violence is, therefore, laudable in many aspects. Though seldom an efficient arm against the wrath of injustice or the cruelty of oppression, it, nevertheless, remains, and for good reasons, a gracious act of revolt and a noble expression of dissent...Read more... Jon Stewart: Wimp, Wuss, Moral Coward by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar Can a Democrat commit war crimes? Of course not! ...It was clearly the execs who reined in the freethinking Stewart and laid down the law, and the first law of "controversial," "provocative," and indubitably "edgy" television commentary is to never – ever, ever! – allow a deviation from the conventional wisdom that falls outside the contemporary Left/Right paradigm...In any case, Stewart’s apology was embarrassing: for him, for the studio audience (which giggled nervously, and inappropriately, at awkward intervals), and for me. As he looked into the camera and babbled about how wrong he was – without giving a single reason, never mind a good one – you could almost see his strings being pulled by his corporate masters... Read more... Palestine Think Tank: celebrating our first year!, by Gilad Atzmon Read more... Letter from Mazin 5/8/09 What the pope won’t see while visiting Palestine. He will not meet with local Christians. He will be prevented from standing next to the Apartheid wall and much more, and he won't see these Children (Jesus would certainly have insisted to on seeing and helping them)... Read more... A Palestinian Critique: Durban Review Conference, by Haidar Eid | Palestine Chronicle 'Palestinians in Israel are considered foreigners in their own homeland' The Durban Review Conference, held in Geneva on April 20-24, was supposed to review the implementation of the Programme of Action of the World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Some western countries boycotted the conference altogether, and some walked out in protest against Ahmedinejad's speech in which he dared to reiterate the obvious; namely, the racism inherent in Zionist ideology. These countries are, historically, either racist, or settler-colonialist. The conference itself was actually hijacked by the West. Palestinian voices were almost nonexistent. The major problem for those countries was, then, the equation of Zionism with racism. So, what we have here is a complex issue: one seems to be dealing with a colonist who denies his colonialism and argues to the contrary, and with a victim whose victimisation has been denied for decades. This ought to be scrutinized...Read more... The End of Free Speech?: Criminalizing Criticism of Israel, by Paul Craig Roberts | Counterpunch On October 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. This legislation requires the US Department of State to monitor anti-semitism world wide. To monitor anti-semitism, it has to be defined. What is the definition? Basically, as defined by the Israel Lobby and Abe Foxman, it boils down to any criticism of Israel or Jews... Read more... Israeli Activist to Be Jailed for Caring, by Neve Gordon | Palestine Chronicle 'Israeli activist Ezra Nawi will most likely be sent to jail' Ezra Nawi was ridiculed and arrested for trying to protect people's homes. Only international attention can help him now. Without international intervention, Israeli human rights activist Ezra Nawi will most likely be sent to jail. Nawi is not a typical rights activist. A member of Ta'ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership he is a Jewish Israeli of Iraqi descent who speaks fluent Arabic. He is a gay man in his fifties and a plumber by trade. Perhaps because he himself comes from the margins, he empathizes with others who have been marginalized – often violently...Read more... AIPAC ED fears the growing movement to sanction Israel could fundamentally change US policy towards Israel. He's right. | Mondoweiss One of the most interesting speeches given at the AIPAC Policy Conference was one that received the least media attention. AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr addressed the capacity crowd Sunday night before Newt Gingrich, and he came with a stern and clear warning - there is a growing movement to de-legitimize Israel in the eyes of its allies. He warned it's growing, it's successful and it's coming to the US. In a conference full of fire and brimstone bluster about Iran and the omnipresent threat of annihilation, when it came to this speech Kohr was exactly on the mark... Read more... Some thoughts about torture. And Mr. Obama., by William Blum | AxisofLogic President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the Okay, at least some things are settled. When George W. Bush said "The United States does not torture", everyone now knows it was crapaganda. And when Barack Obama, a month into his presidency, said "The United States does not torture", it likewise had all the credibility of a 19th century treaty between the US government and the American Indians...U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Read more... Ending Tyranny Without Violence, by Murray N. Rothbard ...This, then, becomes for La Boétie the central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? La Boétie cuts to the heart of what is, or rather should be, the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society? To La Boétie the spectacle of general consent to despotism is puzzling and appalling:..Why do people continue to give their consent to despotism? Why do they permit tyranny to continue? This is especially puzzling if tyranny (defined at least as all personal power) must rest on mass consent, and if the way to overthrow tyranny is therefore for the people to withdraw that consent... Read more... Stephen Hawkings, Another genius stating the simple truth about Israel and Gaza | YouTube Riz is joined by Daniel Barenboim and Stephen Hawking, two geniuses of their respective fields who are calling for a solution on Gaza - from outside the political system. Watch... British MP Galloway: I am not a supporter of Hamas and Never Have Been | Interview with Dr. Hesham Tillawi Indeed, it appears that–at least in certain sectors–persons of power and influence have had their fill of Israel’s murderous, genocidal behavior in the Middle East and are now speaking out against it, and loudly. One such VIP is George Galloway, member of Great Britain’s Parliament and outspoken opponent of the incalculably-high number of outrages committed by the Jewish state since its inception in 1948... Read more... Defaming America's past: Henry Ford and the Eugenics Movement, by Kevin MacDonald | Occidental Observer One result of the triumph of the culture of critique is that Americans must endure constant defamations against the pre-1965 culture of America. A good example is the defamation of Henry Ford — an icon when I was growing up but now known mainly as an anti-Semite from America’s dark past... Read more... May 6, 2009 Mourning William Moffitt, by Sami Al-Arian | Counterpunch For over three years during my ordeal with the US government between 2003 and 2006, I was placed in solitary confinement, having no contact visits with anyone except my attornies, Bill Moffitt and Linda Moreno. At the end of my first meeting with Bill in the spring of 2003, after my arrest, he hugged me and said: "this is how we greet each other, brother." He was indeed not only my attorney, but also my trusted friend and brother...Bill often referred to our case as the civil rights case of the 21st century... Seventh Annual International Al-Awda Convention: May 22-24 in Los Angeles ...Featured speakers include The Right Honorable George Galloway, British Member of Parliament, William Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General, Ghassan Ben Jeddo, Al-Jazeera Beirut Bureau Chief and Talk Show Host, Sr Yvonne Ridley, Viva Palestina UK, Press TV and the Free Gaza Movement, Khaled Dawoud, New York-based Al-Jazeerah Arabic correspondent, Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July" and joint leader of Viva Palestina US, Cindy Sheehan, anti-war activist, Fernando Suarez del Solar, anti-war activist, Dr. Jamal Nassar, specialist in Middle East Politics and Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at CSUSB, and Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh, Galilee Society and Ittijah founder and author of 'A Doctor in Galilee', among others... Read more... The Lessons of Gaza 2009 | Upping the Anti ...It's clear that Zionism is a different project than South African settler-colonialism, and that America's strategic interests in the region are such that Israel is protected much more from international pressure than South Africa ever was. The problem is not the absence of a Palestinian Mandela, but Israel's colonial project itself and the obstructions and impediments it puts in front of peace with the Palestinians. Cutting a deal with U.S. imperialism gave Palestinians no state, no sovereignty, and no independence. It also forced the PA elite to go against the popular wishes of the majority of Palestinians and to abort or crush popular political mobilisation... Read more... Ban Ki-moon's moral failure | Electronic Intifada UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a press conference in Gaza City outside the UN headquarters, Late last week, according to the BBC Arabic news website, a report was submitted to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon about the scale of destruction Israel inflicted on UN installations in Gaza. This was also mentioned on a BBC news bulletin on 1 May, but I could find little trace of this story anywhere else. The brief news item stated that the UN report contained secret information supplied by Israel about an incident in which more than 40 Palestinian civilians were massacred when Israeli shells fell "outside" a UN school where many Palestinians were taking shelter. The secretary-general is reportedly considering how much of the information he can release without revealing the information supplied by Israel, the news item said, adding that the UN report concluded that Hamas fighters were not inside UN buildings but close to them...still smoldering from the Israeli bombardment of the facility, 20 January 2009 Read more... Hostage to Israel’s far right | Le Monde Diplomatique Following the Israeli elections the far-right leader Avigdor Lieberman has become foreign minister and deputy prime minister. His views on the Arab-Israeli conflict have provoked a clash with President Obama. And he is calling the Israeli Palestinians’ citizenship into question, even talking of eventual ‘transfer’... Read more... Professor's comparison of Israelis to Nazis stirs furor | Los Angeles Times The UC Santa Barbara sociologist, who is Jewish, sent images from the Holocaust and from Israel's Gaza offensive to students in his class. He has drawn denunciation and support... Read more... Trying to give 'peace' a bad name Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Monday for a "fresh" triple-track approach to peace with the Palestinians that includes an immediate resumption of talks without conditions...Read more... BDS reaches the northernmost university in the world! | PACBI Twenty-one staff members of the University of Tromsø have signed a call for boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. The initiative calls for the University to "establish an academic boycott of Israel", of Israel‘s "institutions of education, research and culture, and the institutions‘ representatives, regardless of religion and nationality." The University of Tromsø has 9000 students and is known in Norway as the "peace university." Mordechai Vanunu and Desmond Tutu were both granted honorary doctorates by the university. The University was a leading force in Norway during the massive boycott of the Apartheid regime in former South Africa... Read more... UN committee charges Israel with maintaining secret jail | Al Jazeerah The UN committee against torture has denounced the Israeli general security apparatus for using a secret detention center for interrogation that could not be visited by the Red Cross, lawyers or relatives of those detainees. The ten independent experts, members of the committee, said that the installation "1391" was located in an unspecified area in Israel. They added that the committee received complaints on torture, maltreatment and inappropriate detention conditions in this installation. The committee said that some of the Israeli security officers were exercising practices against Palestinian detainees that violate the convention against torture whether during the interrogation or after it. Such practices include severe beating, forcing detainees to sit in awkward positions for long period, tightening the handcuffs, violently shaking the detainee and turning his head suddenly and violently, the committee elaborated. It criticized Israel for issuing military detention orders against 12-year-old children for eight days whether they were indicted or not and without appearing before a military judge... Read more... Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations release joint fact sheet calling for an end to international donor complicity in Israeli violations of international law On 2 March 2009, major international donors convened in Sharm al-Sheikh to collectively respond to the destruction caused by Israel's 23 day military offensive on the Gaza Strip. During the conference, a total of $4.5 billion was pledged in reconstruction funds for Gaza. In light of the extensive destruction across the Gaza Strip, especially the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure, reconstruction is urgent. However, as Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations, we must note that by agreeing to reconstruction without specific, binding assurances from the State of Israel, international donors are effectively underwriting Israel's illegal actions in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT)... Read more... Buying Brand Obama, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest... Read more... For those of you who would like to check out Al Jazeera English, from Debbie Menon Yes, Americans can get Al Jazeera free if they know what to do. I'm not sure that all that many people do know. The would need to go to www.livestation.com and download the application. Al Jazeera is the default program once they open the program. Keep up the good work. Probably, if the U.S. Government was really aware that LiveStation was providing Al Jazeera they would figure out some way to shut it down, as they have with other Al Jazeera websites in the past. Just a cautionary note. [thanks, Debbie - indeed, the one thing that the powers that be are hopelessly allergic to is truth] Sanctions, by Tom Gjelten Children die because hospitals cannot get the medicines required to treat them. Factories close and unemployment soars because manufacturers cannot import the supplies and materials they need or export their finished products. Basic foodstuffs are so expensive that the average family can no longer afford to eat well. Can the imposition of sanctions against a nation under some circumstances be a war crime?.. Read more... AIPAC conference: lets celebrate treason | American Goy I have lost all hope. We have lost comprehensively. And by "we", I mean America. Tomorrow, May 3rd, 2009, the AIPAC conference begins. Here is an organization which as its goal does not have the well being of American citizens, nor the betterment of our nation (which, may I remind everyone, is called the United States of America), nor is it concerned with the betterment of the Jewish Americans...instead it is all about America's support for Israel, a foreign power... Read more... May 5, 2009 Israeli policemen beat and arrest women at a demonstration held by the feminist movement New Profile About six months after Israel's attorney general publicly announced an effort to criminalize dissent, state authorities have upped the ante in their "war" -- as the Israeli daily Haaretz called it last September -- against Israel's youth; against the broad, grassroots movement slandered by officials as "draft shirkers." On 26 April, a day before Israel's Memorial Day, Israeli police produced a hyperbolic piece of political theater. As if facing down a dangerous organized crime "family," they "raided" -- to quote their press release -- the homes of six activists in different parts of Israel, who were detained for interrogation. Exploiting the ritual emotions of a day of mourning for military dead, the police action singled out and branded anti-militarist activists as non-members of the legitimate community, implying that they (we) are fair game...in support of six activists from the group who were arrested from their homes by the police, 30 April 2009 Read more... From Victimhood to Aggression: Jewish Identity in the light of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, by Gilad Atzmon| Palestine Think Tank Identity is a very tricky concept. It can very mean many opposing things and at the same time it can mean nothing. One may start to wonder about one’s identity only when one feels he is under the threat of losing it. The case of Jewish identity is a very good example. Judging by the literature and history textbooks, Jews started to explore the notion of their identity following the emancipation, assimilation and the collapse of the rabbinical authority. In short, Jews started to wonder who they were once their collective self-notion was already melting down. Seemingly, the notion of ‘Jewish identity’ was there to replace the tribal, rabbinical and racially orientated notion of the ‘Jew’ with a tolerant acceptable ‘liberal’ discourse that aims at a universal awareness. Read more... Time to Say No to Israeli Fascism, by Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem | Al Jazeerah Israel and her supporters are making rabid efforts to enhance the ugly image of the new Israeli government. That government, as we all know, is composed of manifestly fascist parties based on Jewish supremacy and racist disregard for the Palestinian people which has been on the receiving end of Zionist savagery and brutality for over sixty one years. This month, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and his thuggish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are going to try to convince the leaders of western countries that Palestinians don’t really need freedom and liberty and human rights and that, like all animals, all they need is bread and some other food supplements... Read more... America’s Shame, by Paul Craig Roberts Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine doesn’t? This is the question of our time. For sixty years Israelis have been stealing Palestine from Palestinians. There are maps available on the Internet and in Israeli publications showing the shrinkage over time of what was once Palestine into what Palestine is today--a small number of unconnected ghettos or bantustans. Palestine became “the occupied territory” from which Palestinians were ejected and Israeli settlements built for “settlers.” Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are full of refugee camps in which Palestinians driven off their lands by Israeli force have been living for decades. Driving people off their land is strictly illegal under international law, but Israel has been getting away with it for decades... Read more... Europe's 'Special Interrogations': New Evidence of Torture Prison in Poland - Der Spiegel Poland's alleged secret prison The current debate in the US on the "special interrogation methods" sanctioned by the Bush administration could soon reach Europe. It has long been clear that the CIA used the Szymany military airbase in Poland for extraordinary renditions. Now there is evidence of a secret prison nearby...Read more... SWINE FLU HOGWASH: Dr. Ron Paul Says ‘Flu Hype’ Designed To Scare Americans An international businessman who performs major work for the Department of Health and Human Services told AFP that fear mongering by Washington and the World Health Organization about swine flu is an attempt to scare people into allowing global control of the healthcare system. From 300,000 to 500,000 cases of flu are reported in the United States each year and 30,000 to 40,000 die, he pointed out. At the moment of this interview, 100 cases of the flu variant called “swine” had been reported. Yet, all of the major newspapers and news broadcasts breathlessly report on the “swine flu pandemic” to the virtual exclusion of other developments throughout the world... Read more... Iran far from what US media say | PressTV Sid Ganis at Persepolis, Shiraz, Iran President of the Academy of American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Sid Ganis says Iran is very different from what the US mainstream portrays. Ganis visited Iran along with American actresses Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Frank Pierson, producer William Horberg and Phil Alden Robinson in early March. “Our entire group was somewhat surprised to see how different Iranian life is, the way people live it on a daily basis, from the usual depictions we see in the media, especially the news media,” said Ganis in an interview with Foreign Policy Journal... Read more... See also Tulip Festival Near Tehran Tomgram: The Afghan Reconstruction Boondoggle, by Ann Jones With Afghanistan, it always seems to be more and worse. More American (and NATO) troops "surging" in, more Taliban control in the countryside, more insurgent attacks, more sophisticated roadside bombs, more deadly suicide bombings, more dead American and NATO troops, more problems with U.S. supply lines into Afghanistan, more civilian deaths from American and NATO military operations, more U.S. bases being built, more billions of U.S. dollars needed for military operations -- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently indicated that the build-up of U.S. forces alone in that country in the next fiscal year could cost an extra $5.5 billion -- and, of course, yet more reports and studies indicating that everything yet tried to "stabilize" Afghanistan has gone desperately wrong... Read more... Is it the "Mexican Flu", the "Swine Flu" or the "Human Flu"?, by Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research The WHO announced on May 1st that it will be dropping the designation of "swine flu". The flu will henceforth be designated A H1N1, to be known more broadly as "the Mexican Flu", intimating that the disease originated in Mexico through human to human transmission. Swine influenza refers to "strains of influenza virus, that usually infect pigs". The terminology, therefore, is important, because if the pandemic is labelled "Mexican flu", the presumption is that Mexicans, namely humans, are the source of the disease. The term "Swine Flu', on the contrary, suggests that the pigs, at least initially, transmit the virus to humans, and, therefore, the issue of animal health must also be addressed. The news reports have largely focussed on the transmission from humans to humans. They have failed to address the abysmal environmental and health conditions affecting the hog population in factory farms, which are central to an understanding of two fundamental processes: a) the proliferation of the disease within the hog factory farms. b) the process of transmission of the virus from pigs to humans... Read more... The Israel Boycott is Biting, by Nadia Hijab | Counterpunch "When Companies Begin to Lose Money, They Start to Listen" On May 4, protesters will greet Motorola shareholders, already disgruntled by the company's losses, as they arrive for their annual meeting at the Rosemont Theater in Chicago, Illinois. The protest, organized by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, is part of a drive to "Hang Up On Motorola" until it ends sales of communications and other products that support Israel's military occupation of Palestinian land... Read more... History of Neo Cons Rise to power in America | Polidics The Rise of Neoconservatism to power in America is documented in the BBC’s series “The Power of Nightmares”. All the NeoCon myths exposed and the obvious exploitation of American values in to twisted patriotism. Great information on the Fathers and minions of Neoconservatism, Strauss, Wolfowitz and Kristol. Basing their entire theory on failing liberalism and personal independence being the cause for the people’s negative reaction to Government policies. Deducing that the only way to give America it’s “True” course was to “Invent” good and evil so the country would unite in a common cause - a fabricated War against Evil... Read more... Israel is on a dangerous path | bitterlemons an interview with Eyad Sarraj bitterlemons: What do you make of the Israeli demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state? Sarraj: I agree that Jews have rights in the Holy Land. But I don't think this religious condition for the Jewishness of the state is conducive to any hope for peace and reconciliation. On the contrary, it will further strengthen the antagonism and enmity between Jews and non-Jews in the area. We have seen an extremist Islamist reaction, not only in Palestine but elsewhere, to the establishment of Israel and the occupation. Israel's insistence on having a Jewish state, denying non-Jews their equal citizenship and rights, is a form of racism that can only lead to a future of violence and more discrimination... Read more... The Silent Population | MIFTAH 'The Jewish community is hardly a monolithic group that unquestioningly supports Israel If it weren't for two little boys hitching a ride with us, this article would never have been written. Thanks to the mysterious way the universe operates, I will admit I am glad for the bizarre events of yesterday so that I could be reminded of a sector of Palestinian society all too often disregarded. I am talking about the Bedouins, those silent nomads of whom I was reminded because of two tiny first graders who needed a ride home...Read more... 9/11: Say It Ain’t So, Howard Zinn!, by Richard C. Cook Howard Zinn, 86-year old folk hero, activist, professor, historian, and author of one of the great books of American popular literature, A People’s History of the United States, is telling people that searching for the truth about what really happened on 9/11 "is a diversion." Say it ain’t so, Howard Zinn! He used the word "diversion" several times during an interview...Here are some excerpts: "There are some issues that are interesting but are diversions from what we really have to do. This is one of them." "Maybe there was a conspiracy. Who knows?" "It’ll go on and on and on and people will write books and talk about it; it’ll be an enormous waste of good energy… I just don’t think that it leads anywhere.".. Read more... Gaza under Israeli fire during the 22-day "war" In pursuit of the case of Israeli war crimes, the United Nations moves to report to the Security Council that UN facilities in Gaza had been targeted willfully. After the United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) compound became the target of GPS-guided Israeli mortars on January 15, the UN set up a commission to bring Israeli human rights violations in Gaza out into the open. The commission -- led by the former British secretary-general of human rights group Amnesty International, Ian Martin -- assembled a report on Israeli actions in Gaza for submission to the Security Council. "Israel deliberately fired at UN institutions even though it knew it was forbidden", read the report... Read more... Guerrilla Ad Campaign Replaces Study In Israel Billboards | Window Into Palestine Students and community members near the UC Berkeley campus were surprised one weekend to see a series of bus shelter billboards asking, “What country uses live ammunition against unarmed children?” Below a photo of identically dressed schoolboys in front of a barbed wire fence is the answer: Israel. The guerrilla ads replaced ads which also featured photos of groups of people, beneath the headline, “Study in Israel? You’d like it here.” The ad campaign was part of an intensive campaign to promote study in Israel at California universities... Read more... My Interview With Economist James K. Galbraith | truthout According to unapologetic Keynesian economist James K. Galbraith, Economists go to work every day at universities, financial institutions, think tanks and government offices prepared for battle. They fight using historical models, statistics, public statements and complex computer algorithms. Their war is the war; they fight to influence world leaders who command the course of history. This war remains somewhat hidden until catastrophe strikes, collapse is imminent and the economists are wheeled out to explain what happened. This occurred after the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression and is going on again today as the reality of the so-called Great Recession begins to sink in... his side has won, but not without massive collateral damage Read more... May 4, 2009 Let the world see Israel's true, ugly face, by Khalid Amayreh | Palestine Think Tank There is no doubt that the new Israeli government, led by Benyamin Netanyahu, honestly reflects the collective mindset of the Israeli Jewish Zionist society. True, there are Israelis who are averse to racism and fascism, but these are unfortunately very few in numbers and their influence is almost negligible. Indeed, a fleeting glance at the composition of the new Israeli cabinet reveals an extremist coalition of war criminals, pathological liars, racist thugs (both of the Hitlerian and Stalinist styles), and hateful religious maniacs who inhale and exhale hatred 24 hours per day... Read more... Tackling America's Toughest Questions: Alternative Media Interviews with Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle may be one of the few international lawyers to have been extensively interviewed by most of the world's major media, both in the United States and abroad--in testament to the stature of his clients, the significance of events in which he has played a role, and to his worldwide reputation for combining international legal expertise with keen political insight. Over a long professional career, his expertise has extended to a wide range of issues related to war and peace: conflicts in the Middle East, Bosnia and elsewhere, nuclear disarmament, biowarfare, and the self-determination rights of oppressed peoples...Here, Francis Boyle addresses hard-hitting questions on the many troubling aspects of US policy since September 11, 2001--the war in Afghanistan from the initial US military intervention to its 2008 escalation, the war on terrorism, Iraq, Iran, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, impeachment, torture, the antrax attacks, and domestic infringements of the constitution. His insight on domestic and international events, in the framework of both law and politics, provides a comprehensive orientation to understanding the most significant events of the past decade... Read more... See also wikipedia entry CODEPINK Interrupts Israeli President at AIPAC Conference | CommonDreams During Israeli Pres. Shimon Peres' speech today at the annual AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) policy conference at the Washington Convention Center, CODEPINK members raised banners saying "Want Peace? End the Occupation," "What About Gaza?," and "No Money for War Crimes." As the six activists were forcibly dragged away from the stage, they shouted similar phrases including "Tikun olam (Heal the world) for Gaza, too!", all meant to draw attention to widespread opposition to AIPAC's policies lobbied to Congress that include unconditional support and financing for Israel's militaristic policies including the recent devastating invasion of Gaza, building of illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the separation wall, refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians' democratically elected representatives, and threats to attack Iran... Read more... The FBI, the Islamic Center of Irvine and Craig Monteilh: Who Was Conning Whom? | Orange County News Craig Monteilh in Muslim-convert drag If there’s a precise moment when the FBI first began to have a sinking feeling about Craig Monteilh, it likely occurred sometime in the spring of 2007, when his handlers read a small detail buried in one of his surveillance reports...Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to hire a convicted felon and con artist to spy on Orange County’s Muslim community after all...[well, that's what our "intelligence" agencies do] Read more... AIPAC conference 'no arena for debate' on Israel | YouTube The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel US lobby, has earned a reputation for professionalism. Al Jazeera's Clayton Swisher looked behind the scenes of the lobby's annual conference, finding a staged press conference, rather than an arena for learning and debate. Watch... Banksters on The War Path, by Danny Schechter | Global Research How Wall Street Is Fighting Back and Winning Their Fight For The Status Quo ...despite the journalists like Bill Moyers and Arianna Huffinton who have been blowing the whistle on the role of the “banksters” in our political life, criticizing the Republicans and Democrats who deregulated the financial system, this issue seems to float above the heads of most of the public, much of the press, and even the activist community more drawn to punishing the torture inflicted on a few by a former Administration than the economic duress being imposed on the majority of Americans by a minority of the superrich. Demonstrators are still drawn more to the White House than the banks that have proliferated on every corner of the country... Read more... On Ahmadinejad and Progressive Myopia | OpEdNews Whenever Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes a public appearance, the airwaves, papers, and Internet become flooded with outraged and self-righteous opinion pieces. He is called everything from “evil,” “racist,” a “blowhard” and a “hatemonger” to “ridiculous,” “ignorant,” “silly,” and a “clown.” His speeches are described as “diatribes,” “rants,” “screeds,” and “tirades.” Whereas this reaction is obvious and expected from those both in the mainstream media and on the Freedom Fries end of the political spectrum, these same epithets and denouncements are often found coming from a most surprising and disappointing source: so-called “liberals” who proudly identify themselves as anti-imperialist progressives... Read more... Osama bin Laden Hype Misled Public, by Karin Friedemann | Khaleej Times A National Public Radio rehashing of the 1999 Egypt Air crash made me uneasy. It seemed like an effort to indoctrinate listeners to believe that Muslims would commit suicide by deliberately crashing passenger jets. I wondered what was coming. The sky was blue and deceptively cheerful in New Jersey a few weeks later on September 11, 2001, when I heard about the attack on the World Trade Center. My husband called and told me to turn on the television. As soon as I saw the flames and explosions, I recognised a professional made-for-TV event... Read more... Gary Leupp: Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case | Counterpunch On August 4, 2005 American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) operatives Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman were arrested on charges relating to espionage on behalf of Israel. This had a lot to do with Iran. It followed the arrest in May 2004 of Larry Franklin, the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst by the FBI after he had been caught turning over secret documents (including ones pertaining to Iran) to Israeli Embassy staffers including Mossad Station Chief Naor Gilon... Read more... One Voice: manufacturing consent for Israeli apartheid | Electronic Intifada US Middle East envoy George Mitchell meets with Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. The American effort, started by the Bush Administration and continued by President Barack Obama to impose an Israeli-friendly Palestinian leadership has failed, according to new surveys of Palestinians How do Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege see their world, especially after Israel's massacre of more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in the occupied Gaza Strip three months ago? Two recent surveys shed light on this question, although one -- published on 22 April by the pro-Israel organization One Voice -- appears intended to influence international opinion in a direction more amenable to Israel, rather than to record faithfully the views of Palestinians or Israelis... Read more... Humboldt State University, where a rabbi responds to our question of "One Person, with Proof" | Bradley Smith Blog I published an ad in The Lumberjack where I used 17 words to ask if there is one professor at Humboldt State University who can …. provide, with proof, the name of one person who was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. You have written more than 1,000 words to demonstrate that you cannot answer the question and that you will not try to answer it....I understand, being a rabbi, you are primarily interested in the suffering of Jews, but my sense of things is that it is really rather too shallow to not feel the need to express any empathy whatever for the tens of millions of others who suffered unjustly in that war, particularly when we, our own families, participated in carrying out the slaughters... Read more... Revisionist Editorial: The Truth Deserves to be Known, by Friedrich Berg The Holocaust story is a hoax because no one was killed by the Nazis in gas chambers--and because the total number of Jews who could have possibly died in German-occupied territory is minuscule compared to what is alleged. Just a few years ago, Steven Spielberg proudly announced to the world in an Academy Award acceptance speech that “there are 350,000 survivors of the Holocaust alive today.” Other sources, including Israeli sources, have in recent years given even higher numbers. All such numbers more than fifty years after the war would be impossible if there had been any kind of physical extermination of the Jewish people under German control. It never happened!..When the Russians were about to overrun the Auschwitz camp in January 1945, both Elie and his father “chose” to go west with the retreating Nazis and SS rather than be “liberated” by America’s greatest ally. They could have told the whole world about Auschwitz within days—but, both Elie and his father as well as countless thousands of other Jews chose instead to trek west with the Nazis on foot at night in the middle of one of the coldest winters... Read more... At Annual Meeting, Pro-Israel Group Reasserts Clout - NYT President Shimon Peres of Israel speaking Monday at the annual ...More than half the members of the House and Senate attended Monday night’s dinner, which featured the group’s “roll call” in which the lawmakers all rise. It is a conscious — and effective — effort to demonstrate the group’s influence on Capitol Hill...conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Read more... 13 Pictures: The youngest casualties of the conflict in Gaza | The Guardian This is a slide show consisting of 13 photos which appeared in the Guardian yesterday. You can only wonder how anyone can look at these photos and be indifferent to them or be devoid of compassion. "Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law." (From Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948) The Palestinians are waiting. View... Spain okays Gaza war crimes probe against Israeli officials, by News Agencies | Haaretz Israel on Monday urged Spain to stop a Spanish judicial investigation into a 2002 bombing on the Gaza Strip, saying it "contravened the clear position of the Spanish government." Spanish National Court judge Fernando Andreu announced Monday that he will pursue his investigation into a 2002 Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip, despite contrary advice by prosecutors at the court. In response to the decision, Israel's Justice Ministry said it was "convinced the Spanish government and judicial system will do their utmost" against a "cynical" attempt by the Palestinian plaintiffs to "exploit the Spanish judicial system in order to advance a political agenda against Israel."...Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he would call on the Spanish government to prevent the investigation, reiterating Israel's stance that the Israel Defense Forces is the most "moral" army in the world. .. [Haaretz appears to have changed the title since the article was first published] Read more... Gaza patients questionings 'rise' | BBC NEWS The number of Palestinians forced to provide information before being let out of Gaza for medical treatment is rising, an Israeli group has reported. In the first three months of 2009 more than 400 patients were interrogated, Physicians for Human Rights says. They say Israeli security services are involved in a systematic attempt to recruit Palestinians as collaborators...Physicians for Human Rights says Israel also interrogated children, detained patients for undisclosed periods of time, and intimidated them during interrogations. Those who did not co-operate were refused permission to leave Gaza for treatment, the group says... Read more... THE BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE MOVEMENT INVITES YOU TO A PEOPLE’S ECONOMIC SUMMIT IN NEW YORK CITY - SUNDAY MAY 31 From June 1–3, The General Assembly of the UN will hold a summit on the world economic crisis in NYC. The UN is holding its own economic summit out of the concern that the 192 member nations of the UN are being marginalized by the G20 summit meetings. In conjunction with this meeting, on Sunday May 31, the Bail Out the People Movement will hold a people’s summit on the world economic crisis in NYC outside the UN under a large tent in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza... Read more... Zionist Quotes (Online site) Vladimir Jabotinsky on 100 Sheckel note Since the inception of Zionism, its leaders have been keen on creating a "Jewish State" based on a "Jewish majority" by mass immigration of Jews to Palestine, primarily European Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. When a "Jewish majority" was impossible to achieve, based on Jewish immigration and natural growth, Zionist leaders (such as Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizmann) concluded that "population transfer" was the only solution to what they referred to as the "Arab Problem."..Read more... Yes you can, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Human Rights Newsletter David Ben-Gurion had a conversation with another Zionist leader before he died. An interesting excerpt: "’I don't understand your optimism,’ Ben-Gurion declared. ‘Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. …There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out’. ‘But how can you sleep with that prospect in mind,’ I broke in, ‘and be Prime Minister of Israel too?’ Who says I sleep? he answered simply.’... Read more... 60,000 Palestinians at Risk in Jerusalem, UN Warns | IPS A report published Friday by a United Nations agency has warned that the problems facing the people of Silwan, who are facing eviction from their homes, are replicated throughout East Jerusalem. At least 60,000 out of the estimated 225,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem are at risk of having their homes obliterated because they have been deemed illegal by Israeli officialdom, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated. Some 90 Palestinian buildings were demolished in 2008 alone, uprooting about 400 people. All this destruction is being wrought as part of a systematic policy of ensuring that the entire city of Jerusalem falls into Israeli hands, even though a raft of UN resolutions have insisted there is no legal validity to building settlements in East Jerusalem. To date one-third of East Jerusalem has been expropriated by Israel and almost 200,000 settlers housed... Read more... Seamless Continuity From Bush Time: Obama and "Two States", by Ellen Cantarow | Counterpunch A false claim is wafting through the press: Obama is hanging tough with Benjamin Netanyahu, he’s going to “twist Israel’s arm” and at long last force the Jewish state into a two-state agreement, settling the Israel-Palestine question for good. There’s even talk that Obama backs the Arab League’s 2002 peace initiative, complete with its main demand: Israel’s withdrawal to its 1967 borders. There’s no proof for any of this. Obama has said nothing about when, where, and with what boundaries a Palestinian state might be established. Neither did George Bush. The slide from one regime to the next has been seamless on the score of Israel and Palestine as on much else... Read more... Resist or Become Serfs, by Chris Hedges | Truthdig Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is overseeing the use of billions of taxpayer America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty...dollars to protect Wall Street financiers from their bad investments. Read more... Pro-Palestinian Supporters Enter French Supermarket And Remove Israeli Goods From Shelves | YouTube On the 7th March a group of Pro-Palestinian supporters wearing 'Boycott Israel' T-Shirts entered a French supermarket and started to remove all goods supplied by Israel. Watch... Nakba - Not a Dirty Word, by Amaya Galil | Zochrot [Translated from Hebrew] “Where will you be for the holiday? Are you going to the celebrations in town? To a picnic in the Carmel Forest? It’s really beautiful there! Won’t you come? Everyone’s going.” A few years ago I would have joined them; a picnic out in the country – what could be wrong with that? But something changed. People around me are celebrating, but I’m not. Once, at one of the picnics, I came across the remains of an old building with a blue dome. I discovered that it had belonged to the village of Ein Ghazal. IDF soldiers expelled its Palestinian residents on 26.7.1948, Israel prevented them from returning, and planted the Carmel Coast Forest among the ruins of the buildings it demolished. It was difficult to see the remains, but once I did I could no longer ignore them - the ruins of villages where people lived until 1948...There are other alternatives. Palestinians and Jews can together build a society that is just and egalitarian. People will live sanely, not perpetually anxious and in fear of war. And then? Then we’ll really have a happy holiday... Read more... PACBI Statement on the McCarthyist Campaign against Omar Barghouti The impressive growth of the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, particularly after its criminal war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, is testimony to the morality and consistency of ordinary citizens and civil society organizations around the world concerned about restoring Palestinian rights and achieving justice for Palestinians. The most recent achievement of the Israel boycott movement was the adoption of BDS - nearly by consensus - by the Scottish Trade Union Congress, following the example set by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU, and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU... Read more... US to drop charges against pro-Israeli lobbyists | PressTV Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman US prosecutors are dropping espionage charges against two former pro-Israeli lobbyists accused of sharing US' defense secrets with Israel. Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, former employees of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had been charged with conspiracy to pass secret US defense information to unauthorized people between April 1999 and August 2004... Read more... YouTube: American kids are the most brainwashed kids on the planet | Vineyard of the Saker Check this out. Poor kids really. Filling their bodies (sodas) and minds with garbage. And then giving money to Ronald McDonald House. Clearly - Holocaust-worship has become a mainstream cult in the ZOG controlled USA. Scary, really. Watch video... Mortgaging the White House, by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship | truthout President Obama walks alone down the hall leading away from The East Room Finally, here we are at the end of this week of a hundred days. As everyone in the Western world probably knows by now, this benchmark for assessing presidencies goes back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who arrived at the White House in the depths of the Great Depression. In his first hundred days, FDR came out swinging. He shut down the banks, threw the money lenders from the temple, cranked out so much legislation so fast he would shout to his secretary, Grace Tully, "Grace, take a law!" Will Rogers said Congress didn't pass bills anymore; it just waved as they went by...after his press conference on his 100th day in the White House Read more... Cairo Conference Against Imperialism and Zionism On May 14th | IkhwanWeb After postponement and threat of cancellation, the International Campaign Against Universal Imperialism and Zionism has decided to hold its seventh conference at the headquarter of Medical Professions Association in Azbakeya from 14-17 May. The seventh Cairo Conference, which will be convened under the slogan "Pro-Resistance and Anti-Occupation with its crimes", will be discussing a number of issues such as supporting the resistance, developing the struggle against the occupation of Iraq, confronting the racist policies of imperialist governments and issues against dictatorship and globalization in Egypt and the Arab world... Read more... Ethnic Cleansing is Nothing to Celebrate: Protest at Israeli 'Independence Celebrations' (5 May, Dublin) ...We need to shame those attending this celebration of dispossession and mass killing. Last year's picket was highly successful and looked really well, we hope this year's will be even bigger... Read more... The Lobby Wants War (Against Iran), by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar The Israel lobby has been running into a few problems lately, but it’s nothing they don’t think they can handle: a charge of treason, a strong suspicion of obstructing justice, and a gathering storm of criticism from a few dissident intellectuals and policy types. Nothing to get too exercised about. Having felled Charles "Chas" Freeman, smitten Gen. Zinni, and sidelined those in the Obama administration who question the nature and utility of America’s "special relationship" with Israel, the Lobby’s flagship organization, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is primed to hold their national conference in Washington next week, with Jane "This Conversation Doesn’t Exist" Harman slated to address the gathering... Read more... The Emperor’s Old Clothes, by Uri Avnery | Gush Shalom Everybody is talking about the first 100 days of Barack Obama. And there’s a lot to talk about...An Israeli cannot, of course, resist comparing Obama to Binyamin Netanyahu, our old-new Prime Minister, who did not exactly storm into the arena. He crawled into it... Read more... Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms | Wired Science Read more... Severin suspended for comments about Mexican immigrants - The Boston Globe Pig from Boston - (my apologies to the four-footed variety) Comments about Mexicans and swine flu by WTKK radio host Jay Severin have prompted a flood of complaints to station management Jay Severin, the fiery right wing talk show host on Boston's WTKK-FM radio station, was suspended yesterday after calling Mexican immigrants "criminaliens," "primitives," "leeches," and exporters of "women with mustaches and VD," among other incendiary comments. Heidi Raphael, a spokeswoman for the station, said Severin had been suspended indefinitely from his afternoon drive-time show. She declined to say which of his comments - made since an outbreak of swine flu was linked to Mexico in recent days - sparked the suspension....Read more... Run to Help Gaza Kids | Palestine Chronicle A newly established British charity is seeking to help raise funds for the children of Gaza by sponsoring an event that seeks to break the Guinness Book world-record for the number of people running 100 meters in a 24-hour relay. "We are trying to get 4,000 runners to run 100 meters in a 24-hour relay,"...The Gaza 100, the charity's first project, aims to promote public participation in innovative, fun campaigns and fundraising projects and sweeping aside all "ifs" and "buts." "Each participant will have to raise a minimum sponsorship of £100, so we are hoping to raise at least £400,000 for the children of Gaza.".. Read more... May 2, 2009 From the ashes of Gaza, by Tariq Ali (December, 2008) In the face of Israel's latest onslaught, the only option for Palestinian nationalism is to embrace a one-state solution The assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely, as Neve Gordon has rightly observed, to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch... Read more... Mass singing of Israeli national anthem and more, by Mazin Qumsiyeh Visitors at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, We live in an Orwellian world just witnessing the news. Israel tried to shut down preparations for the Pope’s visit to Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem so that the issue of the refugees is not highlighted. We want him actually to go to Gaza. And Yad Vashem (main museum for the Jewish holocaust) fired an employee who simply pointed out that Deir Yassin (an ethnically cleansed village in which a large massacre was committed by Zionist forces in April 1948) remains unmarked and unmentioned even as the site is actually visible from Yad Vashem...where research is being done on lesser-known killing fields Read more... "Two State Solution" Equals Racism: Palestinians and Jews CAN Live Peacefully as Equals in One Democratic State, by John Spritzler In light of Stephen Walt's recent article, "Is Obama turning up the pressure on Israel?" (i.e. pressure for a "two state solution"), it may be good to read (or re-read) this earlier one by yours truly: A New Path For Israel? The "two state solution" means, in reality, a "Bantustan solution" in which the "Palestinian state" would be no more "independent" of Israel than Gaza today is "unoccupied" by Israel. Palestinians would continue to suffer from being the victims of ethnic cleansing. They would continue to be denied their right to return to the land where they were born, and to be compensated fully for the property that Zionists stole from them. Israel would still insist that is is anti-Semitic to oppose the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the part of Palestine now called Israel. Israel would very likely use "making the Jewish state secure against violent anti-Semites" as a pretext to invade the "Palestinian state" and slaughter its people, just as it invaded Gaza after "withdrawing" from it... Read more... Racism, boycott and a big dose of hypocrisy, by Isabelle Humphries | The Electronic Intifada "Geneva City of Refuge" -- except for Palestinians? Reading the papers in a Geneva cafe, a paragraph at the bottom corner of page four caught my eye. A small article reported on the latest World Bank publication emphasizing what we already know: Palestinians don't get their fair share of water. Israelis use four times the amount of water as the average Palestinian who doesn't even have enough for his or her basic needs. Unfortunately, this example of Israeli apartheid was hidden amongst pages of commentary on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech. Yet again the racist reality that is life for Palestinians was hidden beneath the political rhetoric...Read more... Who is purging the Russian military intelligence and why? | The Vineyard of the Saker For several months already, rumors have abounded about the reported conflict between the head of the Russian military intelligence service (GRU), Valentin Korabelnikov, and President Medvedev. Today, the Russian media announced that Korabelnikov had been replaced by one of his deputies, Alexander Shliakhturov...All this is taking place in the midst of a much-needed (and much delayed!) reform of the Russian armed forces. Thus, these rumors might reflect not so much the real plans of the Kremlin as the worst fears of the top brass of the Ministry of Defense... Read more... The ultimate reality show, by Mazin Qumsiyeh In this video tape, Bassem Aburahma (nicknamed El Feel, the elephant, for he was always thought of as a giant among his peers) is seen pleading with Israeli soldiers to wait (saying Raiga in Hebrew) as Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals protested the land confiscation and building of the apartheid fence on village land. The soldiers then shoot Bassem point blank with a high velocity gas grenade which kills him within five minutes. .. Read more... Swine Flu Scare: Stock Market Bonanza for "Politically Connected" BioTech Companies, by Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research The Swine Flu scare has boosted the stock market values of Big Pharma. Following initial reports from Mexico on the influenza outbreak, the demand for anti-flu drugs has skyrocketed. Supported by media disinformation, an atmosphere of fear and intimidation has unfolded. Health “emergencies” have been declared in various parts of the US. The most sought after influenza drugs are Tamiflu and Relenza. Treatment courses by the US government have been released from the national stockpile “to make sure health care providers are ready for any escalation in cases.”... Read more... Mexican Flu Outbreak 2009, by Dr Leonard Horowitz | YouTube This unprecedented H1N1-H5N1 flu outbreak implicates the Ango-American Vaccine Pipeline, says world leading consumer health protector, Dr. Leonard Horowitz. Consider the skyrocketing stock values of Novavax, Inc., precipitated by dozens of alleged flu deaths in Mexico. Then investigate the leading Anglo-American network of genetic engineers manipulating, mutating, and distributing these viruses. The evidence compels you, for the benefit of public health and safety to seriously consider, even decree, a conspiracy to commit genocide, according to this Harvard trained expert in emerging diseases... Read more, Watch... Treason Fest 2009 | kenny's sideshow The excitement is surely building. Only a week to go until the annual AIPAC Policy conference when several US elected officials and associated shills will remind the world who they really work for. Even Tel Aviv Jane Harman is scheduled to give opening remarks and to discuss "an insider's look at the Middle East," if she is not deemed too radioactive. Over 300 members of Congress reportedly attended in 2008 but the guest list for this year has been hidden at the organizer's request. I suppose that's to keep constituents from publicly questioning their representatives about where their loyalties lie and ruining a good time... Read more... Report about the Haifa Conference, by Yoav Bar The Haifa Conference for the Right of Return And the Secular Democratic State in Palestine Initial Report... Read more... PROSECUTING TORTURE OR GROWING GARDENS?, by Carolyn Baker As most readers of my writings know, I don't concern myself with what the two ambiguously separate wings of America's one political party are up to. I have more important things to do like preparing personally and with my community for the collapse of empire. This is not to say that I condone torture or feel numb when thinking about it. Yet, while some may question what could be more important than prosecuting torture, the current dither on this issue leaves me feeling bewildered, very much like a child growing up in an abusive family... Read more... Israeli Use of Palestinians As Human Shields, by Stephen Lendman | Palestine Chronicle 'Cases below are examples of customary Israeli practice in violation of international law.' In April, it [The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights] published a seven-case study update of its July 2008 report titled: "Hiding Behind Civilians - The Continued Use of Palestinian Civilians as Human Shields by the Israeli Occupation Forces." This article reviews both reports to highlight what international law unequivocally prohibits. Nonetheless, it's customary IDF practice even though Israel's Supreme Court banned it on October 6, 2005...Read more... Jane Harman, Haim Saban, and AIPAC: The Disloyalty Issue in Multicultural America, by Kevin MacDonald ...Jewish Congresswoman Jane Harman has allegedly been caught agreeing to "waddle in" to help get the charges against Rosen and Weissman reduced. As part of her defense in the media, Harman pointedly noted that "anyone I might have talked to was an American citizen, and these were conversations that took place in the United States." This is the multicultural defense par excellence. Harman was talking to an American about the business of AIPAC, an American organization that has not been required to register as an agent of a foreign government. What could possibly be wrong with that? One problem with that is that the American citizen that Harman may well have been talking to was Haim Saban who is not only an American citizen but also a citizen of Israel. Saban's commitment to Israel seems almost a caricature of a nut case Zionist — someone who makes Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz seem lukewarm by comparison... Read more... 'Racism in Israel is not like racism in other states.' Racism is common to most and probably all societies. Laws never seem entirely to eliminate it. It was the essential tool in the creation of modern settler states. The United States could not have come into existence without the obliteration of North American Indian cultures and of large numbers of the people themselves. They had to die so the US could be born. In Australia the indigenous people of Tasmania were wiped out to the last man, woman and child, while on the mainland the tribes were massacred, confined, stripped of their ancestral land and eventually turned into fringe dwellers. Until recently Australia had a prime minister who could deny that aboriginal children of mixed ‘blood’ were taken from their parents up to the 1930s and refused to issue any expression of remorse for their mistreatment...Read more... Social Psychology, Religious Belief, Censorship and the Holocaust | heretical.com In the American Humanist magazine Free Inquiry, its Editor, Professor Paul Kurtz, wrote 'We can take nothing for granted: some relatively unknown religious ideology may again sweep the world' (Kurtz, 1994). From a rationalist perspective the disadvantage of religion is that it is capable of facilitating radical social changes which may be undesired. If a religion were to be unrecognized as such it could avoid the modern policy of separating Church and State. The theme of this review is that a new religion has indeed become established. In what may, to future generations, be a remarkable exemplification of ambivalence, the new creed has been adopted and is being promoted by leading Humanists... Read more... Demolitions build Jerusalem tension | BBC NEWS Samia Ihdaidoon says she and her family were given five minutes to vacate their home Five young children cling to their mother. All of them are crying. This morning, without warning, Israeli bulldozers came to destroy their home in Jabal Mukabar area of East Jerusalem...Read more... Lincoln or Ford?, by Eric Walberg | Al-Ahram Weekly In response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), United States President Barack Obama authorised the release by the US Justice Department of four detailed memos describing and justifying torture techniques used by the CIA to gather information from prisoners. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) framed 14 techniques, such as waterboarding, forced nudity, and prolonged sleep deprivation, to appear legal despite the prohibition in international law against "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment. It's as if Hitler and his henchmen arranged for compliant lawyers to produce legal opinions arguing that what the Gestapo was doing was OK so German leaders would not fear prosecution later. The lawyers would be let off the hook because they were just issuing legal opinions, not committing the actual brutality and murder, and the lowly Gestapo functionaries were, of course, just following orders. The question then becomes: is America any different?.. Read more... No Independence for the Oppressed, by Joharah Baker | Palestine Chronicle This week marks the 61st anniversary of Israel’s independence I can’t believe it almost slipped my mind. Walking up to Jaffa Gate with my kids the other day, I noticed an unusual buzz of activity where east meets west, just outside the large gate that takes a person out of the walled city...Oh yes, how could I have forgotten? This week marks the 61st anniversary of Israel’s independence. For Israelis this is a time of pride, of achievement and of celebration. There will be barbeques, concerts and speeches on the occasion. The country will be strung out in blue and white, with Israelis proudly boasting of its brave soldiers who took back the Jew’s “Promised Land.”..Read more... I'm back and coming to you from Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico May 1, 2009 Antony Lerman: Israel-Palestine is already a de facto single state | The Guardian The control Israel exerts on Gaza and the West Bank suggests time is running out for proponents of a two-state solution... Read more... Lieberman: U.S. will accept any Israeli policy decision - Haaretz Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, right, standing with U.S. envoy George Mitchell after a meeting in Jerusalem last week The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office. "Believe me, America accepts all our decisions," Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets... Profile: American Israel Public Affairs Committee | Right Web The pro-Israel lobbying organization American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was founded in the early 1950s by Si Kenen, a Canadian-born former journalist. "Kenen was a tireless advocate for Israel in the 1950s and early 1960s, when it had to claw for dollars and votes against a powerful and determined lobby of oil interests, Arab-oriented diplomats, and lawmakers such as J. William Fulbright . who saw support for the fledgling Jewish state as a serious mistake that threatened regional stability,".... Read more... Ahmadinejad: “Read My Lips”, by Gilad Atzmon - plus Full Text of Speech Once again I find myself saluting Iranian President Ahmadinejad, in full support of his words. No one could do better bringing to light European racial discriminatory sentiments. What we saw yesterday at the UN Anti Racism Forum was crude collective institutional Islamophobic racism in its making, a coordinated show of rabid western chauvinism. A bunch of European diplomats behaving as a herd of sheep, exhibiting complete denial of the notion of freedom of speech and the culture of debate... Read more... Israel's righteous fury and its victims in Gaza, by Ilan Pappe | Electronic Intifada Palestinians in Israel protest Israel's massacres in the Gaza Strip, Jaffa, 29 December 2008 My visit back home to the Galilee coincided with the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza. The state, through its media and with the help of its academia, broadcasted one unanimous voice -- even louder than the one heard during the criminal attack against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israel is engulfed once more with righteous fury that translates into destructive policies in the Gaza Strip. This appalling self-justification for the inhumanity and impunity is not just annoying, it is a subject worth dwelling on, if one wants to understand the international immunity for the massacre that rages on in Gaza...Read more... INCREDIBLE GRILLING OF UK DIPLOMAT! | Palestine Think Tank (Video) BBC reporter for Newsnight, Paxman grills the UK Ambassador on the walk-out. This video wasn't available for anyone outside the UK, and after a few hours, even they couldn't watch it anymore! It is an incredibly important excerpt of a document on the nature of what the journalist clearly recognises as a "stunt" and the Ambassador insists upon calling a "protest", fallling all over his own rhetoric in the process... Watch... The Pulitzer-Winning Investigation That Dare Not Be Uttered on TV, by Glenn Greenwald The New York Times' David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Bartow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow's exposés: Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended... Read more...The Demographic Fear Factor in Israel… Keep Them Babies Coming! | Palestine Think Tank Settlers and their infant Most observers of the Israel-Palestine conflict have heard a phrase without even really reflecting upon what it might mean or any implications behind it. The phrase is that Israel risks the detonation of a demographic bomb. The Israelis have been convinced up until very recently that they are unbeatable in any military milieu. That belief has allowed them to continue with the Occupation of Palestine and the inhumane treatment of the Arabs. All Arabs, even those who have held political office in Israel, are treated as foreign bodies that need to be extirpated. But, with the curtain of “permanent victory” being slashed from the rod to the ground, the illusion of force is dying, and rather than entrust security to the young men and women aged 18 to 35 in combat fatigues, they are now pinning their hopes on Jewish lives still in the womb...Read more... Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa | Atheo News Last fall, shortly after I returned from Nigeria, I was accosted by a perky blond college student whose blue eyes seemed to match the "African" beads around her wrists. "Save Darfur!" she shouted from behind a table covered with pamphlets urging students to TAKE ACTION NOW! STOP GENOCIDE IN DARFUR! My aversion to college kids jumping onto fashionable social causes nearly caused me to walk on, but her next shout stopped me. "Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled. It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption. Idealistic college students, celebrities such as Bob Geldof and politicians such as Tony Blair have all made bringing light to the dark continent their mission. They fly in for internships and fact-finding missions or to pick out children to adopt in much the same way my friends and I in New York take the subway to the pound to adopt stray dogs... Read more... Heed voices calling for justice for Palestinians | Seattle Times WE Palestinians are often asked where the Palestinian Gandhi is and urged to adopt nonviolent methods in our struggle for freedom from Israeli military rule. On April 17, an Israeli soldier killed my good friend Bassem Abu Rahme at a nonviolent demonstration against Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land. Bassem was one of many Palestinian Gandhis. One month prior, at another demonstration against land confiscation, Israeli soldiers fired a tear-gas canister at the head of nonviolent American peace activist Tristan Anderson from California. Tristan underwent surgery to remove part of his frontal lobe and is still lying unconscious in an Israeli hospital. In 2003, the Israeli military plowed down American peace activist Rachel Corrie with a Caterpillar bulldozer as she tried to protect a civilian home from demolition in Gaza. Shortly thereafter, an Israeli sniper shot British peace activist Tom Hurndall as he rescued Palestinian children from Israeli gunfire. He lay in a coma for nine months before he died. Despite the killing of these unarmed civilians and documented evidence of systematic human-rights abuses, the U.S. continues to supply Israel with approximately $3 billion in military aid annually, allowing Israel to continue abusing Palestinians and preventing any meaningful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict... Read more... Chomsky: Iran is too independent and disobedient | Foreign Policy Journal ...Not only the non-aligned movement, but also the large majority of Americans believe that Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy. But almost no one in the U.S. is aware of this. That includes those who are polled, and probably think they are the only ones who hold these beliefs. Nothing is ever published about it. What appears in the media, constantly, is that the “international community” demands that Iran stop uranium enrichment. Almost nowhere is it brought out that the term “international community” is used conventionally to refer to Washington and whoever happens to go along with it, not just on this issue, but quite generally... Read Interview... Economist Devastates "War for Oil" Dogma | Atheo News Professor Cyrus Bina relates the facts that the colonial era ended decades ago and that the oil industry and markets have been globalized. The various theories that have been put forward from both the left and the right regarding war rationales that rely on demonisation of OPEC are essentially nothing more than outdated fear mongering. Cyrus Bina has been vindicated by more recent events which have shown that oil prices have been determined by Western financial markets rather than exporters... Read more... Durban and the West’s racist hypocrisy | Green Left ...The mainstream media has focused on the April 20 speech of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the outraged reaction of Western nations to its supposed anti-semitism. This included the pre-arranged response of nine Western nations (including the US, Israel and Australia) who boycotted the conference. However, whatever the crimes of Ahmadinejad, his statement that caused so much outrage was perfectly true. He described Israel as a “racist state”... Read more... Researchers Question Nature, Cause and Treatment of “Swine Flu” Outbreak | CheckTheEvidence.com An independent researcher has collated a set of important questions regarding the real nature and cause of the so-called “Swine Flu” outbreak in Mexico, which many mainstream media sources describe as a “Pandemic”. The questions relate to recent events before the outbreak and corporate interests involved with the supply of a so-called “vaccine”... Read more... |
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