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September, 2012

Sep 30, 2012

Syria and the Dogs of War, by Conn Hallinan | Foreign Policy in Focus
  “Blood and destruction,” “dreadful objects,” and “pity choked” was the Bard’s searing characterization of what war visits upon the living. It is a description that increasingly parallels the ongoing war in Syria, which is likely to worsen unless the protagonists step back and search for a diplomatic solution to the 17-month old civil war. From an initial clash over a monopoly of power by Syria’s Baathist Party, the war has spread to Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, ignited regional sectarianism, drawn in nations around the globe, and damaged the reputation of regional and international organizations. Once loosed, the dogs of war range where they will...

Imminent Iran nuclear threat?: A timeline of warnings since 1979 | Christian Science Monitor
  For more than quarter of a century Western officials have claimed repeatedly that Iran is close to joining the nuclear club. Such a result is always declared "unacceptable" and a possible reason for military action, with "all options on the table" to prevent upsetting the Mideast strategic balance dominated by the US and Israel. And yet, those predictions have time and again come and gone...

Lavrov at the UNGA: Rebel support ‘pushes Syria deeper into the abyss of bloody sectarianism’ | RT
  Those who insist on a ceasefire only by the Syrian government encourage the opposition to intensify its hostilities, and “take upon themselves an enormous responsibility,” Russian FM Sergey Lavrov said in a speech to the UN General Assembly. ­The shortest way to stop the loss of life in Syria, Lavrov said, is to adhere to the commitments in the Geneva communique, which were agreed upon by the Action Group as follow-up of the Kofi Annan Plan.. Lavrov noted that the deepening of internal conflict in Syria is of particular concern because the militarization of the conflict is combined with open calls for foreign intervention...

Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu on the Iranian Nuclear Issue at the UN General Assembly | The Race for Iran
...The real existential threat to Israel comes from what Israelis see going on around them right now, and which Ahmadinejad so aptly pointed out—the mobilization of Arab and other Muslim populations to demand more participatory political orders. For as Ahmadinejad, .. Ali Khamenei, and other Iranian leaders understand very well, the governments that grow out of this demand will not succumb to American pressure cum blandishments to “make peace” with Israel, even as it continues to occupy Arab land, suppress Arab populations, and flout international law in its grossly disproportionate applications of military force around the region...

Apartheid leader lectures the UN, by Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance
  The Prime Minister of Apartheid Israel just lectured the United Nations General Assembly! He spent most of his time nagging those present as if they were school children about Iran. He even insulted their intelligence by showing them a diagram of a "bomb" and drawing a red line on it (yes literally with an actual red marker). He also went about insulting 1.6 billion Muslims and even had the "chutzpa" to claim Israel is helping people around the world!..

Why Veterans Kill Themselves, by Marti and Luke Hiken | Dissident Voice
...our Pentagon and “misleaders,” have learned nothing from Vietnam, the Russian and French failures in Afghanistan, or our deceitful and shameful attack on Iraq. These “misleaders” are unaffected by the cruelty and viciousness of their overseas forays, while many engaged in these wars will spend their days contemplating killing themselves...

Fleeing or Flying? by Ruth Tenne | Palestine News Network
...The Jewish Virtual Library has documented two of the most prominent 1951 operations which were instigated and organised by the Jewish Agency with the full cooperation of the involved Arab governments. Thus, perhaps the so-called "Jewish Nakba" was no more than a well-planned Aliyah operation of ascendance/immigration to Israel - as the documents below proudly acknowledge...

Virtual 911 | YouTube
  From the What Really Happened website, written by Mike Rivero: "Will Israel Hack The US Banking System Computers and Falsely Blame It On Iran?"..

The Jewish Cartel, Not QE3 | YouTube
  [Not PC, but where there's smoke there's likely to be fire.]

Not Even the White House Knows the Drones' Body Count, by Noah Shachtman | Wired
...Neither the American government nor the independent agencies have the consistent presence on the ground needed to put together true assessments of the damage drone strikes do. Most of the evidence is third-hand, whispered from a local soldier to a far-off reporter. The death toll claims, which vary wildly, are all educated guesswork. It’s one of many conclusions in a new report on the covert, robotic air war that doesn’t fit neatly into the dominant narratives about the drone campaign, pro or con...

AIPAC: Israel’s Agent Feeling Squeezed? by Franklin Lamb | Al Manar
  The American Israel public affairs committee (AIPAC) has seen headier days according to US congressional staffers forced to work regularly with the pro-Zionist agent of Israel. The grip of fear and the lock on Congress that the Israel first organization has long touted in its service to Israel may be weakening against a backdrop of American Jews rejecting the increasing rants of Prime Minister Netanyahu that are driving many Jews to distance themselves from him, from AIPAC, from other Arabphobic US Zionist organizations, and from Israel...

'Israel land grab left Palestinians with no state hopes' | YouTube
  RT talks to rebel politician Jeremy Corbyn from Britain's Labour party, about the stalled search for Middle East Peace...



Sep 29, 2012

Ilan Pappe:
Israel is an Apartheid State | Middle East Reality Check
...Apartheid is a generic term for a legal, economic, social and political regime based on dispossession, discrimination and segregation on the basis of race, religion or nationality. The early Zionists, who were prolific diarists, described the Palestinians as dangerous aliens and usurpers. Their resistance to Zionist colonisation led the colonisers to develop apartheid policies of self-segregation and gated communities, which they forced on the native population once they'd become a ruling majority in 1948...

Israel Snubbed: The Power of the Jewish Lobby in the U.S | Russia Today/Intifada Palestine
  Crosstalk’s Peter Lavelle hosts Ruthie Blum, Grant F. Smith and Stephen Zunes to debate the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. politics...
[What's interesting is that Ruthie is just regurgitating Zionist propaganda verbatim, a stew of lies, myths, half-truths and distortions, and she appears to swallow all of it, as do millions of others. And they have the full power of the Western world - the money, the politicians, the media, the education establishment - behind them. This is what we're up against. We are indeed living in interesting times.]

Medievalist poses as champion of “modernity”: Bibi’s Crazy UN Speech, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
  It’s no wonder the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially held back from releasing a transcript of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN General Assembly: Bibi’s wackiness doesn’t bear close scrutiny. Perhaps “wacky” isn’t quite the right word for his 40-minute peroration, during which he pulled out a bomb “diagram” and a red marker to illustrate where he would draw a “red line” defining the outer limits of Iran’s nuclear program. Cartoonish is more like it...

No Child is Born a Terrorist | YouTube
  Explore met with Zacharia Zubeidi, former head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Juliano Mer-Khamis, the owner and director of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin. Both men were dedicated to positive change for Palestinians, and made a great impact on us...

‘Our (New) Terrorists’ the MEK: Have We Seen This Movie Before? by Coleen Rowley | Antiwar
  Yes, and what kind of mind-boggling corruption — of the worst kind — influence peddling by a “foreign power” (as defined by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to include foreign terrorist groups) — lies hidden behind the curtain? Could some members of the MEK “foreign terrorist organization,” their murderous history magically erased, be sent to a nice suburb somewhere to live as your next door neighbor as happens with the organized crime “witness protection program?”..

Veterans For Peace Meets With Ahmadinejad | Veterans for Peace
  As veterans, we understand the true damage that is caused by war, and as Veterans For Peace, we feel it is our obligation to use our unique voice to point out ways in which war may be averted. We know that it is much more difficult to end wars once begun, than to prevent them from the beginning; therefore we are doing our utmost to stop this one before it starts...

Bibi’s ACME bomb at UNGA inspires Israeli meme artists | +972 Magazine
  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (or should I say Bib E. Coyote?) had a lot of people worldwide holding their stomachs with laughter as he held his Looney Tune ACME bomb above the UNGA podium. The Israeli meme artists, as usual, were quick to respond. Here are a few...

It's Psychological Warfare, Stupid: Why Netanyahu Really wants to Destroy Iran, by Juan Cole | Informed Comment
...Iran isn’t, contrary to what Netanyahu alleged, a year away from having a nuclear weapon. Iran can’t construct a nuclear weapon at all as long as it is being actively inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which it is (and yes, including the Fordo facility). There is no facility with uranium or enrichment facilities that is off limits to the IAEA inspectors. No country under active inspection by the UN has ever developed a nuclear weapon. Israel, which always refused such inspections, has some 400 nuclear warheads...

Dr. Ahmadinejad in a meeting with the leaders of the International Jewish Anti-Zionism Network | Presidency of The Islamic Republic of Iran
...Elaborating on the crimes committed by the Zionist regime, he said that the occupation of Palestine is only the small portion of the crimes committed by the Zionist regime and their biggest crime is that they attribute themselves to the Jewish community. Spokesman for the International Jewish Anti-Zionism Network, David Weiss, for his part said that there are a large number of Jews in the world who are against the notion of Zionism and establishing a Zionist state...

Israel Deletes $360 million Debt from Oligarch | Roi Tov
...A second class citizen will go to jail for missing his mortgage payment. No Western government will care what his excuses are. Banks are the holy temples of Western Democracies; no citizen is allowed to taint their holiness. In sharp contrast, a first class citizen can quietly threaten back. Do you really want my money? No problem, but I will make sure the newly found gas fields are rendered useless! Any number of possible variations exists to this. This is why inflexible, brutal states become tender while dealing with the ultra-rich...

Israeli leaders set to repeat historical blunders | Redress Information & Analysis
  Uri Avnery argues that Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak, and their sycophantic parrots in the media and the political establishment, are leading Israel to disaster, just as Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan did in 1973, except this time it could be much worse...

The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Iran And The Bomb, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Facts, by Christian Stork | Antiwar
...Given how easily the American public and media were manipulated into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, this moment should give us some pause. The disastrous effects of that $3 Trillion Dollar War are still being felt across the world. For those not interested in seeing a much-bloodier, costlier sequel, I offer this introductory course in intellectual self-defense. The only way to rebuff and dismantle propaganda is to be aware of the truth on which it claims to comment...



Sep 28, 2012

Defining Moment: Anti-Muslim Films, Cartoons and My Gaza Neighbor, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
...During military curfews, Israeli soldiers often got bored. When all refugees were locked in, and no stone-throwing kids taunted them in the camp’s small alleys, the soldiers would break down a few rickety doors and entertain themselves by humiliating hapless refugees. The practice was widespread and recurring. Men and boys would often comply with all sorts of requests, but many remained steadfast when the soldiers’ demands reached God and the Prophet. Many bones were broken that way, too many to count. Spiritual, religious figures and symbols often represent the last hope to which poor, humiliated and disenfranchised people cling onto with absolute ferocity, for that hope is their last line of defense. Without it, all is lost...
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Israeli leaders meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in NYC | YouTube
[One can safely ignore the garbled and misleading title and text attached to the video – just pay attention to the video itself, which reflects the views of the Neturai Karta (True Torah). Being Jewish, I can say that this is the only rabbinical establishment within world Jewry that I am aware of that embodies the wisdom of the Torah and of Jewish culture in general. The rest have fallen in with the Jewish fascists. I think that Rabbi Hillel would have agreed.]

Security Council reform gains traction, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online
  At this week's parade of world leaders at the UN General Assembly, old and hitherto fruitless talk of reforming the Security Council received a timely revival. In contrast to past decades of inaction on the issue, the chance of reform appears better now than ever due to several interrelated factors. These include the dissatisfaction of emerging powers with the status quo, the council's occasional paralysis and the growing influence of developing nations via outlets such as the Non-Aligned Movement...
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Reuters and Ahmadinejad: Anatomy of a Dangerous Misquote | Newsvandal
  Headlines are designed to grab the reader’s attention and pull ‘em in. Today, Reuters rolled out a serious eye-grabber: In New York, defiant Ahmadinejad says Israel will be “eliminated”. Just sounds like par for the course when it comes to Iran’s dangerous doom-dealer, right? Well, there is a bit of a problem.. This is not a small matter, particularly when it comes to Iran, Ahmadinejad, Israel and the hurly-burly of Middle East diplomacy—and the role news plays in shaping public opinion as nations dance on the precipice of war...
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The Tender Tyranny of American Liberalism Redux, by Prof. James F. Tracy | Global Research
..Journalist Eric Norden’s perceptive critique, “The Tender Tyranny of American Liberalism,” appeared in the early years of the Vietnam era, accurately identifying how a predominantly liberal worldview projected by the ruling technocracy and its intellectual adherents acted to subordinate genuinely Left-progressive ideas and social movements at home while ensuring the furtherance of US imperial designs abroad. Today Norden’s insights are worthy of reconsideration in light of how the Left remains largely devoid of its own voice or vision and more than ever liberalism provides ideological cover for aggressive Anglo-American militarism, the prerogatives of transnational corporations, and an ever-expanding police state...
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Israeli humor: Hope kindergarten | YouTube
  A brilliant skit from the Israeli comedy show "Eretz Nehederet" (lit: "Wonderful Country) on Channel 2. This skit depicts a joint education program devised by the right-wing (yet mainstream) organization Im Tirtzu with the Ministry of Education that helps kindergarten children be prepared for the complicated life in Israel...

Spineless bookkeeping: The use of Mizrahi Jews as pawns against Palestinian refugees, by Yehouda Shenhav | +972 Magazine
  Calls to define Jews from Arab countries as refugees were silenced in the past by Israeli governments. The change of policy has to do with the relatively new recognition that Israel will not be able to escape its responsibility for the Nakba. But leaders of the new campaign should first learn the history of their unfounded idea...
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UN role in stillbirth of “two-state solution” to Palestine-Israel conflict | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Hart argues that contrary to UN chief Ban Ki-Moon’s recent warning that the prospect of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be disappearing permanently, the door on a two-state solution was in fact closed 45 years ago thanks to UN Security Council complicity, under pressure from US President Johnson and the Zionists, in Israeli’s expansionist designs...
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Israel’s red lines and US presidential politics | Redress Information & Analysis
  Lawrence Davidson explains how political lobbies corrupt US politicians, and argues that without political reform to make politicians less vulnerable to lobby power, groups such as the pro-Israel lobby will continue to rule the roost...
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Salam Fayyad, the World Bank and the Oslo Game, by Neve Gordon | Palestine Chronicle
  Triggered by gas-price increases, tens of thousands of Palestinian taxi, truck and bus drivers in the West Bank observed a one-day strike, effectively shutting down cities. This, as Al Jazeera reported, was the culmination of several days of protests where thousands of Palestinians, frustrated by the economic crisis in the West Bank, took to the streets...
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Lavrov on Syria: “Inactivity incites terror” | Voice of Russia
.."To a great extent the ongoing violence in Syria should be blamed on the countries that incite anti-Assad forces to deny a ceasefire and seek a change of regime. Actually, this approach hardly differs from the principles of terrorism applied by the armed opposition groups."..
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Proposed al-Awda withdrawal of endorsement from BDS, by Paul Larudee | deLiberation
...this is not a proposal to stop boycott, divestment and sanctions. However, BDS actions and practices do not require endorsement of a particular movement. Everything that undermines the racist Zionist state deserves our support. Nevertheless, under no circumstances can we support any statement or action that legitimates such a state, which is the problem with the BNC-led BDS Campaign...
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Obama's UN Speech: On Rhetoric and Actions, by Jim Miles | Palestine Chronicle
After beginning his speech with a nice homespun heartfelt story about U.S. diplomat Chris Stevens, President Obama turned the rest of his UN speech into a series of lies that are all too common in U.S. rhetoric, lies that are concealed by fine sounding platitudes and homilies. Some of the lies are direct, but there are also lies of concealment, avoidance, willful ignorance, and perhaps, genuine ignorance...
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Sep 27, 2012

Israel lobbyist hints that ‘Pearl Harbor’ may be needed to get US into war with Iran, by Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment
  Last Friday, during question time at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy policy forum luncheon on “How to Build US-Israeli Coordination on Preventing an Iranian Nuclear Breakout,” the director of research at the pro-Israel think tank hinted that a Pearl Harbor-type attack might be necessary to get the United States to go to war against the Islamic Republic...
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U.S. must resist Israel's 'detonator' strategy, by Patrick Tyler | LA Times
  Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed general who led Israel to military victories in the 1956 Suez war and the Six-Day War of 1967, believed in what he called a "detonator" strategy for the Jewish state. "When someone wishes to force on us things which are detrimental to our existence, there will be an explosion which will shake up wide areas, and realizing this, such elements in the international system will do their utmost to prevent damage to us.".
[This would be Plan B, with the Samson Option as Plan C. It's an example of Israel's Masada complex and utter disdain for the rest of humanity.]
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Heading for a Hollow Victory, by Deepak Tripathi | Counterpunch
...The November 2012 elections in the United States are upon us. In the age of ceaseless electioneering, America’s domestic politics determine its behavior abroad, and leave little scope for reflection on anything other than votes and power. This major fault line in the American political system gives extremist individuals and fringe groups a voice far louder than their size would suggest. Their capacity to radicalize the population is significant. They push some moderate figures seeking power to take more extreme positions. Other voices are muted for fear of damaging their political careers...
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“The Easy Road to War with Iran,” by Dr. Christopher Bolan | Sic Semper Tyrannis
...If American and Israeli leaders believe that Iran is engaged on relentless quest for nuclear weapons (despite the lack of concrete evidence and official US intelligence assessments to the contrary).. if Iranian leaders believe that Washington will never accept the legitimacy of their self-proclaimed Islamic government and will forever seek to curtail their rise as a regional power.. then conflict indeed acquires the air of ‘inevitability’ that will lead both sides to conclude that armed conflict is required to forestall these ‘inevitable’ and ‘unacceptable’ outcomes...
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Gareth Porter: Israel bluffing with anti-Iran threats | PressTV
  As Israel continues to issue anti-Iran threats, an American investigative journalist says this is a strategy used by Benjamin Netanyahu to mount pressure on the US and other Western states and steer them toward confronting the Islamic Republic. Iranian authorities and military officials have dismissed the Israeli war rhetoric as a psychological warfare campaign against the Islamic Republic...

Outrage at CIA's deadly 'double tap' drone attacks, by Jerome Taylor | The Independent
  Report claims just one in fifty victims of 'surgical' US strikes in Pakistan are known militants.. The product of nine months' research and more than 130 interviews, it is one of the most exhaustive attempts by academics to understand – and evaluate – Washington's drone wars. And their verdict is damning. Throughout the 146-page report, which is released today, the authors condemn drone strikes for their ineffectiveness...
[See also dedicated website Living Under Drones]
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Battle For Syria: View from the Frontline! | Russia 24
  War has been raging in Syria for a year and a half. An endless series of special operations, victories and retreats, a struggle between government forces and an armed opposition that takes place both with weapons on the ground and on the TV screen. Even seemingly unimportant local battles are being discussed far abroad because the result of this war will impact not only the future of Syria. The situation here is splitting the world in half...

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Israeli threats, nuclear program and Syria, by David Ignatius | The Washington Post
  Iran may be on the firing line, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was as calmly combative as ever Sunday, dismissing Israel’s military threats and predicting that nothing will happen in the nuclear talks until after the U.S. presidential elections.. “We, generally speaking, do not take very seriously the issue of the Zionists and the possible dangers emanating from them,” he said early in the interview. “Of course, they would love to find a way for their own salvation by making a lot of noise and to raise stakes in order to save themselves. But I do not believe they will succeed.”..
[See also Lessons from an Iranian war game. Even the rabidly Zionist WAPO seems to be taking a closer look, rather than just spewing fear and hatred.]
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Jews from Arab lands skeptical over refugee status | Jerusalem Post
...Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat Gan say it is wrong to expect Jewish losses in Iraq to "offset" Palestinian losses.. About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and came in huge numbers until 1952; the community had dwindled to the double-digits by the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. There is a great, unsolved debate over the subject of whether some of the anti-Jewish violence that spurred the exodus may have been perpetrated by fellow Jews dedicated to the ultimate Zionist cause of encouraging aliya to Israel...
[“may have been”? See THE JEWS OF IRAQ, by Naeim Giladi ]
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Ahmadinejad shows soft side in New York, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online
  He may be scorned and vilified constantly in the US media, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his latest trip to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly opted for a less combative and more conciliatory approach than in past US trips. On Monday, at a private meeting with some US media heavies as well as members of US think tanks, Ahmadinejad addressed a broad range of issues, including the future of US-Iran relations, Syria, Afghanistan, the nuclear issue and, of course, Israel's threat of military action against Iran...
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How the Israel Lobby Gets What It Wants, by Lawrence Davidson | Counterpunch
  Much is being made of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s involvement in the on-going American presidential campaign. His public stance has been characterized as an Israeli effort to “openly…topple [President] Obama.” The truth is that the only thing unusual about this meddling is its open and advertised nature. In a more discreet fashion, Zionist pressure bordering on blackmail and bribery goes on every day...
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Even Dumb Ideas Have Consequences, by Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt | Tom Dispatch
...With the launching of the Global War on Terrorism, Islamism succeeded Communism as the body of beliefs that, if left unchecked, threatened to sweep across the globe with dire consequences for freedom. Those who Washington had armed as “freedom fighters” now became America’s most dangerous enemies. So at least members of the national security establishment believed or purported to believe, thereby curtailing any further discussion of whether militarized globalism actually represented the best approach to promoting liberal values globally or even served U.S. interests...
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Mujahideen-e Khalq goes from "terrorist" to "freedom fighter" in preparation for war on Iran | The Vineyard of the Saker
  Just as it had done with the KLA before the US/NATO war on Serbia, the USA is about to take the local terrorist group, in this case the Mujahideen-e Khalq, off its official terror list. That makes sense politically and it is legally necessary to make it easier to fund, train and otherwise assist it: US assistance to various terrorist groups worldwide is usually provided only covertly which, of course, complicates its delivery. Besides, the overnight re-branding of the local terrorist groups into "freedom fighters" is the normal procedure before any overt military aggression against another country...
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Sep 26, 2012


Demise of the Racist Two-State Solution in Palestine, by Haidar Eid | Palestine Chronicle
...A secular, democratic state is one inhabited by its citizens and governed on the basis of equality and parity both between the individuals as citizens and between groups which have cultural identities. Inherent in such an arrangement is the condition that the groups living there are enabled to coexist and to develop on an equal basis. This is summed up in Nelson Mandela’s last words at the end of his four-hour statement to the court at the Rivonia Trial: "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."..

A Story of Betrayal, by Stuart Littlewood | Intifada Palestine
...She accused me and all Americans of knowing about these daily abuses against Palestinians but not caring. I tried to tell her that most Americans do not know about these tragedies, and that we would never support those who perpetrate them. But her belief that the average American is savvy about international politics was as strong as it was naive. “Of course Americans know we’re suffering over here,” she retorted.“ You’re the most powerful nation on earth. And everyone has a television. I know you know.”..

More Posturing on Iran, by Paul Pillar | The National Interest
...No good will come out of this subversion of the terrorist-group list with regard to conditions in Iran, the behavior or standing of the Iranian regime, the values with which the United States is associated or anything else. The regime in Tehran will tacitly welcome this move (while publicly denouncing it) because it helps to discredit the political opposition in Iran—a fact not lost on members of the Green Movement, who want nothing to do with the MEK. The MEK certainly is not a credible vehicle for regime change in Iran because it has almost no public support there...

Address by the IHR director, Mark Weber, in Tehran: The Zionist Lobby in America
...Nearly all of the 800 people in the "Friendship Salon" hall are Iranian university students, about half of them women. As he speaks, Weber's remarks are translated into Farsi. His address, which lasted about two hours, includes a Q and A session. In this talk.. Weber emphasizes the crucially important Jewish-Zionist role in the relentless campaign of smears against Iran, and the many threats by Israel to attack the country. He also speaks about widespread misconceptions in the US about Iran, and the Jewish grip on Hollywood and American cultural and political life...

Zionism and Anti-Semitism: A Strange Alliance Through History, by Allan C. Brownfeld | IHR
...Anti-Semitism has been redefined to mean anything that opposes the policies and interests of Israel. The beginning of this redefinition may be said to date, in part, from the 1974 publication of the book The New Anti-Semitism by Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. The nature of the "new" anti-Semitism, according to Forster and Epstein, is not necessarily hostility toward Jews as Jews, or toward Judaism, but, instead a critical attitude toward Israel and its policies...

Ahmadinejad to RT: Israeli theft failed, occupation days numbered | YouTube

Diplomat: Iran Offered Deal to Halt 20 Percent Enrichment, by Gareth Porter | Counterpunch
...Soltanieh revealed that two senior IAEA officials had accepted a key Iranian demand in the most recent negotiating session last month on a “structured agreement” on Iranian cooperation on allegations of “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear programme – only to withdraw the concession at the end of the meeting. The issue was Iran’s insistence on being given all the documents on which the IAEA bases the allegations of Iranian research related to nuclear weapons which Iran is expected to explain to the IAEA’s satisfaction...
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Israeli kids in the army museum, with Itamar Rose | YouTube
[The kosher Hitler Youth are eager to fight...]

“War on Iran Will Trigger World War III,” by Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research
...Public opinion, swayed by media hype is tacitly supportive, indifferent or ignorant as to the likely impacts of what is upheld as an ad hoc “punitive” operation directed against Iran’s nuclear facilities rather than an all out war. The war on Iran is presented to public opinion as an issue among others. It is not viewed as a threat to humanity. Quite the opposite: it is viewed as a humanitarian endeavor...
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Systemic Destabilization as “A Strategy of Tension”: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing, by Peter Dale Scott | Asia-Pacific Journal
...The victory of truth over violence did not come easily: journalists, parliamentarians, and at least one judge were themselves killed. And it was clearly a victory against one part of the state, which was achieved through the countervailing forces of other parts. The Italian example proves that the forces behind a strategy of tension are not invincible. They also suggest that, if the dark forces of the deep state are to be defeated, this will take the combined resources, not just of the people, but of those elements in government that can, eventually, be aroused in search of the truth...

Has Palestine Been Abandoned by Its Own Leadership? by Paul Larudee | Dissident Voice
...It seems as if BDS has given up on the most essential and crucial Palestinian principles. While BDS was initially committed to the opposition of colonisation of all Arab lands, the current BDS’ goal statement merely opposes only the colonisation of Arab lands occupied in 1967. The BDS clearly changed its goal statement...
[Gilad Atzmon shared his suspicions with me about Barghouti and BDS some months ago. At the time I didn’t know what to make of it. Now it appears that, as usual, he was right on the mark.]

Mario Savio and the Palestinian People | Paul Eisen
...the real point for me is that the incident took place at the Sproul Plaza and, being an old sixties geezer, this really set the bells ringing. Because it was in that self-same Sproul Plaza, nearly 50 years ago on December 2nd 1964 that Mario Savio delivered his famous 'You've got to put your bodies upon the gears" speech. That was about free speech too - and you can watch it here ...
[This from another old sixties geezer, myself, who was across the Bay at the time, and riveted by what was going on at UC – please disseminate this video among all supporters of the Occupy movement - maybe it will help focus their minds and stiffen their spines. At the time, we had little idea about the nature and structure of the "Establishment," as we called it - there's a lot more information available now if one searches diligently and without bias.]

France's "Left" silences anti-war activist Jean Bricmont: The War on Freedom of Speech, by Gearóid Ó Colmáin | Dissident Voice
...For many years, Bricmont has been a critic of the politics of military interventions undertaken under the pretext of protecting “human rights.” Bricmont’s heresy on this issue and his anti-Zionism has made him a pariah in the fashionable salons of France’s “respectable” intelligentsia. The Belgian physicist’s unequivocal anti-imperialist stance has also made him the target of a vile defamation campaign on the internet and in the mainstream French media...


Sep 25, 2012

In the Name of Justice:
Key Issues Around a Single State, by Jeff Halper and Itay Epshtain | ICAHD

...with the two-state solution gone, apartheid unacceptable and a Middle Eastern economic confederation a distant vision, it seems time to seriously consider the only alternative available to us at this time: the creation of a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. To be sure, the idea has been raised before, but it remains ambiguous. There are fundamental variations and disagreements even among one-state proponents themselves. Political clarity is vital, especially if such a solution is – or is not – inclusive of Israelis..
[A commendable (I suppose) attempt by a Zionist Humanist (oxymoron?) to preserve a fascistic form of Jewish identity within the approaching and inevitable formation of one democratic state within historic Palestine. The worm in the apple is the argument that there are “two peoples,” which implicitly ignores the genuinely humanistic realization that we are all one people, the human race, which trumps the priorities of any constituent identity groups. ‘Rabbi’ Halper is a lovable and utterly sincere activist, someone who, like Noam Chomsky and Uri Avnery, deeply believes in the principles of justice and human rights and is willing to fight for them, but who at the same time can’t let go of the notion of the ‘specialness’ of the (nonexistent) Jewish People and their ‘right’ to a distinct political presence in Palestine. It is this fundamental flaw in their thinking (no doubt subconscious) that leads me to believe that we will see something more along the lines of the Algerian, rather than the So. African, solution.]
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A State of ALL its Citizens: The One-State Vision and Foundational Principles of a Republic in Historic Palestine | 1 not 2
  "We, the undersigned, Palestinians and Israelis, believe that the historic land of Palestine should be shared by all those who now live in it and its natives who have been expelled or exiled from it since 1948, and their descendants, regardless of religion, ethnicity, national origin or current citizenship status. Cognizant of the great changes in the Middle East including the recent Arab uprisings, we conceive of our movement as part of the drive towards democracy, accountability, transparency, equality and economic and social justice in the region. We intend to build a model state in the region, rooted in equal citizenship, popular democracy and institutional justice"..
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US taxpayers paid more to Israeli defense budget than Israelis, by Alison Weir | Veterans News
  The Israeli army’s chief of staff states that in the past three years, “US taxpayers have contributed more to the Israeli defense budget than Israeli taxpayers,” according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.. American taxpayers give Israel over $3 billion per year (over $8 million per day), more than to any other nation, despite the fact that Israel is smaller than New Jersey and is in the top 30 richest countries in the world.. Some of the other top recipients of US tax money, Egypt and Jordan, were provided this assistance in return for diplomatic recognition of the Israeli state...
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The Summer of Muslim Discontent: It’s Not “The Amateur Film” Stupid, by James Petras | Information Clearing House
...The legacy of imperial intervention in the Muslim world during the first decade of the 21st century, in terms of lives lost, in people displaced, in economies destroyed, in perpetual warfare, exceeds any previous decade, including 19th and 20th century colonial conquests. Much of the latest Western mayhem and violence has been compressed in the period dubbed the “Arab Spring” between 2011 – 2012. Moreover, the worst is to come...
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AIPAC-Drafted US Aid to Israel Illegal, by Grant Smith | Antiwar
..The Israel lobby’s biggest and longest-running Washington boondoggles are the massive annual weapons and economic packages to Israel. Tightly coordinated campaign contributors (both individuals and political action committees) and the Israeli government’s own quiet demands manifest themselves within AIPAC-drafted foreign aid legislation. The U.S.-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012 forces Americans to fork hard-earned tax dollars over to Israel’s coffers on the pretext that it is in imminent danger...
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Read it and Resist! by Dan McGowan | Paul Eisen
  In 2005 Germar Rudolf was tried in a German court for Incitement of the Masses (Holocaust denial to you and me). He was found guilty and sentenced to 30 months imprisonment which he duly served. But before he was sentenced, Germar addressed the court. Some years later Germar published the address under the title "Resistance is Obligatory." Dan McGowan wrote a foreword for the book. Here it is. Read it and resist...
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October Surprise? by Tom Engelhardt | Tom Dispatch
...in much of the world an older order, linked to the Cold War scheme of things, was finally coming unglued. A combination of the Bush invasions of the Eurasian mainland and the way the U.S. financial sector stormed the planet with a vast ponzi scheme of bogus financial derivatives did much to promote the process, especially in what neoconservatives liked to call “the arc of instability” (before they offered a striking demonstration of just what instability was really all about).. The question for the rest of us is: What the hell happens next? It’s one you better start thinking about because the Obama people, much as they want to rule the roost for four more years, don’t have a clue...
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The Counterproductivity of US Covert Action During The Cold War, by Nicholas Lawrence Adams | e-International Relations
...In 1947 Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) granting authority “to perform other such functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” Within six months the CIA airdropped guns to rebels inside the USSR, plotted assassinations, supplied and trained private armies, conducted foreign wars by proxy, sponsored and instigated coup d’états, wrecked economies and manipulated the political process of allies. The scope and scale of such operations have been enormous, with paramilitary operations resulting in thousands of deaths and immense destruction...
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UN General Assembly: Egypt hits Israel | Roi Tov
  Tomorrow, September 25, 2012, the General Debate of the 67th UN General Assembly will begin and last for a week. Two planned speeches are of immense importance for the future of the Middle East. The newly elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who is affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Palestine’s Mahmoud Abbas have already hinted at the controversial content of their speeches. The aftermath may change forever Israel’s position in the area...
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The Hypocrisy and Looming Danger of De-Listing MEK, by John Glaser | Antiwar
  The Obama administration’s decision to remove the Iranian cult Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the State Department’s list of officially designated terrorist groups was a long time coming. But no single act by the administration so crystalizes the hypocrisy and recklessness of US postures towards Iran...
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Jewish atonement, but not for Zionism’s crimes against Palestinians | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Hart argues that Days of Atonement which ignore the need for Jews to be honest with themselves about Zionism’s crimes against the Palestinians, starting with the creation in Arab Palestine of a state for Jews through terrorism and ethnic cleansing, are nothing but Jewish theatre...

David Rovics: International Terrorists | YouTube
  One of his best...

Divertissement: Cult Leader Thinks He's Jesus | YouTube
  Yessireebob, the Messiah is back! (I've lost track of how many versions of the story there have been, but at least this guy plays the role with classical verisimilitude. The production is slick and contemporary, but there are bound to be many more such latter-day gospels until human beings wake up, which is reliably predicted to occur in several gazillion years, give or take a few aeons)...
Watch video...



Sep 24, 2012


So, Really, Why Do They Hate Us? by Paul Atwood | Counterpunch
...Many do remember the overthrow of the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeqh in 1953. Exceeding its legal mandate to gather intelligence, the newly minted Central Intelligence Agency, initiated its first successful overthrow of a constitutional and elected government because that government decided that Iranian oil belonged to the Iranians and not to the British oil company that would eventually become British Petroleum. The American scheme was calculated to ensure that American companies would thereafter dominate Iranian oil production and get rid of most British competition in Iran as well...

The Summer of Muslim Discontent: It’s Not “The Amateur Film” Stupid! by James Petras | Intifada Palestine
  Death and destruction is rampant, poverty and misery has multiplied, law and order has broken down, retrograde thugs have seized political power, where previously they were a marginal force. Living standards have plunged, cities are devastated and commerce is paralyzed. And presiding over this “Arab Winter” are the Western powers, the US and EU, – with the aid of the despotic Gulf absolutist monarchies, their Turkish ally and a motley army of mercenary Islamic terrorists and their would-be exile spokespeople...

Scholars voice opposition to California Assembly resolution on "anti-Semitism," by Nora Barrows-Friedman | The Electronic Intifada
...the Simon Wiesenthal Center — the ultra-right-wing Zionist organization at the head of building a “museum of tolerance” on top of an ancient Muslim cemetery, which is being steadily destroyed, in Jerusalem — helped draft the language in HR 35. Zionist organizations and Israel lobby groups have been relentlessly attempting to repress free speech and Palestine solidarity activism on campuses across the US; trying to stifle debate and discussion about Israeli policies by claiming that such speech is “anti-Semitic.”..

The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime, by Mark Weber | Institute for Historical Review
...Although officially Jews have never made up more than five percent of the country's total population, they played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role in the infant Bolshevik regime, effectively dominating the Soviet government during its early years. Soviet historians, along with most of their colleagues in the West, for decades preferred to ignore this subject. The facts, though, cannot be denied.. With the notable exception of Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov), most of the leading Communists who took control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews...

On Syria and way beyond: Lars Schall Interviews Guenter Meyer | Asia Times Online
...Until recently mainstream reporting in most Western media was clearly biased. It focused mainly on the distinction between the "bad" Syrian regime, which has to be toppled, and the "good" opposition, which has to be supported because it is fighting against a corrupt, authoritarian and brutal government. This perception has changed gradually during the past few months. More and more media are reporting about the conflicting interests of the highly fragmented oppositional groups as well as about the atrocities of the rebel groups and their crimes committed against the civilian population, especially against Alawites but also against Christians...

Terror delisting the MEK is a cynical sham, by Richard Silverstein | The Guardian
...The Obama administration isn't even claiming the MEK has renounced terrorism. If it did, it knows that it's likely such a statement would rebound should the MEK's activities become exposed. The chief argument offered in defense of the change of heart is that the group has agreed to relocate from Camp Ashraf, where it's been a thorn in the side of the Iraqi Shi'ite led government, to a US facility, from which the residents would be relocated to foreign countries.. The MEK is useful in the covert war the US and Israel are waging against Iran's nuclear program. It is our proxy, much as the Cuban rebels involved in the Bay of Pigs operation served our interests...

West Attempts to Trigger Clash of Civilizations, by Tony Cartalucci | Global Research
  In France where people are sent to jail for “Holocaust denial,” considered by law a religious hate crime, it seems strange then that well timed, raunchy cartoons designed solely to insult and inflame hate against and amongst Muslims worldwide would be defended vigorously by French politicians who claim, according to the Christian Science Monitor, that “freedom of the press should not be infringed.”..

A Rare Look at Why the Government Won't Fight Wall Street, by Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
...The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who've come at the issue from the inside...

An Impeachment Warning to Obama | Information Clearing House
  Congressman Walter B. Jones (R-NC) held a press conference, Sept. 21 to discuss House Concurrent Resolution 107. Rep. Jones was joined by a group of senior retired military officials, constitutional lawyers, and congressional co-sponsors, to discuss HCR 107 (the bill to send an impeachment warning to Obama), which currently has 11 cosponsors. This bi-partisan resolution, introduced in March of this year, reasserts the power of Congress to declare war, and states that any President who circumvents Congress, unless the United States is attacked, will face an article of impeachment...

Benghazi Attack: Libya’s Green Resistance Did It… And NATO Powers Are Covering Up, by Mark Robertson and Finian Cunningham | Global Research
  The NATO powers and the bureaucrats they installed in Libya want you to think that all 5.6 million Libyans are happy that NATO and its proxy terrorists destroyed Libya, a country which under Gaddafi had the highest standard of living in Africa. They want you to think that NATO brought “freedom and democracy” to Libya, not chaos and death. They want you to think that there is no Green Resistance to the NATO imperialists or NATO’s Islamist allies in Benghazi...


Sep 23, 2012

Mainstreaming the one state solution | Jews sans frontieres
  Here's another call for the one state solution from, to my mind anyway, an unexpected source. Simon Hughes of the UK's Liberal Democrats has described himself before now as "unequivocally a lover of Israel".Well now he's calling for the one state solution on the grounds that Israel has made the two state solution impossible. Here he is in The Jewish Chronicle:.. Simon Hughes has said that the opportunity for a two state solution to the Israel-Palestine dispute is now “near to the end” and the international community should consider a “one state solution”..
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Israeli War against Palestinian Children, by Dr. Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine
  The Israelis were not satisfied with the mere occupation of Palestine, the evictions of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their country, the annihilation of Gaza Palestinians through a choking economic siege and frequent aerial bombardments, and the continuous confiscations of Palestinian land and the demolitions of their homes in the West Bank, so they had developed a very oppressive anti-Palestinian children policies, that are aimed at intimidating, terrorizing and traumatizing Palestinian children, whose families dared to stay in the country...
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Iran-U.S. Hostilities Must Stop, by Seyed Hossein Mousavian | The National Interest
  President Obama’s policy of engagement with Iran has failed. Recent steps have led to unprecedented hostilities between the two countries with Washington conducting a full-scale economic, covert, cyber and political war with Iran. Yet these measures have not quenched the thirst of the electorate, as both presidential candidates continue the trend of past election campaigns by competing to see who can deliver a more hostile posture toward Iran. Despite this saber rattling, a good relationship is still possible—but only if the United States changes course and opens up to the idea of genuine engagement...
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That Was Now, This Is Then: Netanyahu Edition, by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America
...This week, Lobe reminded us of the testimony then-former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight on September 12, 2002 in which he marshaled nearly every hackneyed talking point about weapons of mass destruction, support for terrorists and the benefits of regime change in an effort to push the United States to illegally invade and occupy Iraq. Six months later, he got his wish...
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By Delisting the MEK, the Obama Administration is Taking the Moral and Strategic Bankruptcy of America’s Iran Policy to a New Low | The Race for Iran
...At a macro level, we are disdainful—even scornful—of the U.S. government’s lists of both FTOs and state sponsors of terrorism. We have seen too many times over the years just how cynically American administrations have manipulated these designations, adding and removing organizations and countries for reasons that have little or nothing to do with designees’ actual involvement in terrorist activity...
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Islam, Elections and Managed Lies, by Frank Scott | Legalienate
...Separating truth from lies is not the job of our mass media. It is joined at the hip to our government, which is locked in a passionate embrace with corporate capital in a perverse ménage-a-trois that threatens to bring forth ever more mentally disabled offspring. What this unholy alliance does to our social and natural outer environments is matched by its endless attack on our internal system, especially our capacity to think. When it comes to thinking about the more than a billion Muslims of the Abrahamic triad of Judeo-Christian-Islam, our media and government are united in creating an atmosphere of hateful and near raving insanity...
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The Meaning of Altruism, by Dr. Paul J Balles | deLiberation
...Over the next decade of subscribing to Rand’s “objectivism”, I realized that I had been infected with the worst kind of selfishness. Objectivism was the term that Rand used to describe selfishness. To Rand, altruism reflected the evil she opposed. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness, and involves doing for others without any expectation of reward. Rand declared, “From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality.” This is a near-perfect description of the present conflict between America’s two political parties...
[Ayn Rand appeals to Republicans and many obnoxious adolescents - it's raw selfish egotism.]
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Freedom of speech: insults, incitement and Islam | Redress Information & Analysis
  Graham Peebles argues that to reduce the issue of the anti-Islam film “Innocence of Muslims” to notions of freedom of speech versus censorship “is a convenient distraction fabricated in order to avoid discussing the filmmakers’ intention and the underlying causes of hurt and anger among Muslims which arise largely out of American foreign policy”..
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Libyans say no to Islamists and armed gangsters in Benghazi, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis
...Fed up with the chaos and arbitrariness brought about by the armed gangs, the people also stormed the headquarters of another militia, the “Rafallah Sahati Islamic Brigade”, which is affiliated to the “Ministry of Defence” – a virtual body that exists on paper only – as part of the “government’s” ill-conceived policy of achieving security through alliances with armed groups. This is people’s power at its best. After 42 years of neglect and arbitrariness under Gaddafi, Libyans are determined to guard their freedom, whatever the cost, and not to allow Islamist outlaws to replace Gaddafi’s armed gangsters, the so-called “Revolutionary Committees”..
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When Democrats Demand War, by Michael Tracey | The American Conservative
  I stumbled out of the Democratic National Convention on the final night in a disoriented daze. What seemed like every last delegate — the majority of them earnest and well-meaning, presumably — had eagerly joined the vice president’s exhortation to cry out, in unison, “Osama bin Laden is dead!”..


Sep 22, 2012


Obama officials' spin on Benghazi attack mirrors Bin Laden raid untruths, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  Almost immediately after President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden, top government officials, including then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and top terrorism adviser John Brennan, made numerous false statements about what took place. That included the claim that Bin Laden was killed after he engaged in a "firefight", that he used his wife as a human shield to protect himself, and that he was living in luxury in a $1m mansion. None of those claims, central to the story the White House told the world, turned out to be true...

Israel’s shadow hovers over anti-Islam film | Redress Information & Analysis
  Jamal Kanj detects signs of involvement by US-based pro-Israel Jewish and Christian fundamentalist groups in the anti-Islam film “Innocence of Muslims”, and warns Muslims not to play “into the hands of those attempting to divide followers of religions who share the same reverence for Jesus and God”..

Israel's version of the two-state 'solution' is anything but dead, by Henry Norr | Mondoweiss
  Every week this year seems to bring some new obituary for the two-state solution. Both in Israel and in the U.S., more and more politicians on the right (the Netanyahu-appointed Levy Committee in Israel; settler spokesman Dani Dayan in the New York Times; the legislatures of Florida and South Carolina; even, apparently, the Republican National Committee) have been coming forward to acknowledge what many on the left have argued for years: there’s only one state between the river and the sea, and there’s no realistic prospect of that changing...

Spinning Benghazi, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
  Washington can’t seem to get their story straight: first we were told the attack on our Benghazi consulate and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens was the result of a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand – and today we’re told it was all a plot initiated by a heretofore little-known "al Qaeda affiliate." Before we get to the obvious question – which is it? – let’s linger awhile and wonder: why the sudden change in spin? This is important because in Washington, and the world of American politics, there is no reality: there’s just spin...

Palestinians need a one-state solution, by Ghada Karmi | The Guardian
  This situation demands a new Palestinian strategy, a Plan B that converts the Palestinian struggle for two states into one for equal rights within what is now a unitary state ruled by Israel. The first step in this plan requires a dismantlement of the PA as currently constituted, or at least a change of direction for the Palestinian leadership. The PA's role as a buffer between the occupier and the occupied should end, along with the illusion of a spurious Palestinian autonomy it has fostered. This has not only shielded Israel from facing its legal obligations as an occupying power, but it has created a false equivalence between occupier and occupied...

The Man Who Kissed the Pope’s Ring, by Michael Robeson | The Occidental Observer
...As the group filed out of the room to the nearby reception hall, one of the Franciscan priests came along and thanked me for asking the question. “How can he think that peace and justice can be separated” he said. “We can’t think that way. We are Catholics.” It was one of the rare moments that I believed that perhaps injustice would not always triumph...

Netanyahu erasing Palestinians with Iran war drama | PressTV
  “Netanyahu didn't talk about them. Thus the fate of several million people living under varying degrees of an occupation that continues to plunder land, maintain discriminatory laws and administrative procedures - such as rationing water to Arab villages while their neighbors in the Jewish settlements have unlimited supplies - remains in limbo.”..

Consequences of war with Iran, by Shahir Shahidsaless | American Iranian Council
...Tensions are mounting daily between Iran and the US, and between Iran and Israel, over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran shows no sign of compromise and most likely will not in the future. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, argues that the US strategy is “regime change” and strongly holds that under bullying and intimidation, the way to success is to not retreat from the enemy, “not even one step.” He was quoted as saying: “If the officials of a country get daunted by the bullying of the arrogant powers and, as a result, begin to retreat from their own principles and make concessions to those powers, these concessions will never come to an end!..”



Sep 21, 2012


The Waning of the Modern Ages, by Morris Berman | Counterpunch
  It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in...

More mess in the Middle East, by Dan Simpson | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
...In this season of U.S. presidential politics, the situation is worsening. Last week were the deaths in Libya. This week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waded into our elections on the side of Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Most U.S. observers have not yet grasped that Mr. Netanyahu did this to save his own skin in Israeli domestic politics. His coalition with the centrist Kadima Party broke down in July and his Likud Party has been left as a minority in parliament, dependent on the support of right-wing religious parties to stay in power...

Maureen Dowd accuses the neocons of fomenting war - and is promptly tarred as an anti-Semite, by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss
...The best line in Maureen Dowd’s piece is when she says that the Project for a New American Century’s manifestos prodded an uninformed Bush to invade Iraq. These manifestos must never be forgotten. They include statements like Israel's fight is our fight. So we must do to Iraq after 9/11 what Israel did to the West Bank after the second intifadah. The thinking was echoed by Tom Friedman in his famous statement that it was necessary for the U.S. to go into the Arab world and smash something in order to convince them not to bomb themselves and blow up civilians...
[Welcome to the club, Maureen. Not to worry, these days the slur “antisemite” usually just means that one is speaking truth to power. Erin go brach!]

Netanyahu, Not Iran, Is An Existential Threat To Israel | MJ Rosenberg
  One ex-Israeli official put it best. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seems to be “going berserk.” He is demanding that the United States set a “red line” that, once crossed, will automatically initiate a US attack on Iran. He doesn’t even bother to pretend that war with Iran is in US interests. He just wants his war trigger. But, and this seems literally to be driving him crazy, he sees the chances for war diminishing every day...

Blasphemy as a Tactic, by Thierry Meyssan | Information Clearing House
...This time, the manipulation of the Benghazi crowd by Israeli agents had as its goal the assassination of the U.S. Ambassador, an act of war not seen since the Israeli bombardment of the USS Liberty by the Israeli Air Force and Navy in 1967. This constitutes the first assassination of an ambassador in the line of duty since 1979. The act is all the more grievous considering that in a country where the current central government is a purely legal fiction, the U.S. Ambassador was not merely a diplomat but was functioning as Governor, as the de facto head of state...

The colonial-era division of spoils draws a map of Syria's uncertainty, by Charles Glass | The National
...In 2012, a new armed force, calling itself the Free Syrian Army, is rising in Syria. It has taken temporary hold of many Syrian towns and parts of its main cities. Like Feisal's volunteers, its members are a mixture of idealists and opportunists. There are other similarities: they receive weapons, training and commands from outsiders; they have no idea what demands the foreign powers - among them the old imperialists Britain and France, as well as the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar - will make of them if they should seize power in Damascus; and they do not know where their insurrection will lead the country...

Unlike Afghan leaders, Obama fights for power of indefinite military detention, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  In May, something extremely rare happened: a federal court applied the US constitution to impose some limits on the powers of the president. That happened when federal district court judge Katherine Forrest of the southern district of New York, an Obama appointee, preliminarily barred enforcement of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the statute enacted by Congress in December 2011 with broad bipartisan support and signed into law by President Obama (after he had threatened to veto it). That 2011 law expressly grants the president the power to indefinitely detain in military custody not only accused terrorists, but also their supporters, all without charges or trial...

A Militarist Foreign Policy Means More Death and Destruction, by Gregory Bresiger | FFF
  Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will continue an American empire that hurts the country and much of the rest of the world. They both believe in an interventionist, militarist foreign policy that goes back at least as far as 1945. It constitutes a grave a threat to American liberties and economic well-being. The foreign policy of nation building, bombing, and interventions around the globe will continue regardless of which major candidate wins. It is a bellicose bipartisan foreign policy...

The Howling: Embassy Riots Pale Next to State Terror Tempest | Chris Floyd
  Sparked by a deliberate provocation put together by Christian extremists, riots by groups of Islamic extremists are spreading across the world - a convenient symbiosis for both groups, as they use each other's actions to "justify" their hysterically constricted worldviews. There is an added layer to the reaction in the Muslim countries, as the extremists there can draw on the seething resentments built up by the depredations and atrocities inflicted indiscriminately on Muslims by the Western powers in recent decades, particularly since the launch of Terror War...

Yom Kippur 2012: Israel’s Un-Atonement | Roi Tov
...According to Jewish tradition, God writes each person’s fate for the coming year in the Book of Life on New Year’s Eve, and then waits until Yom Kippur to seal His verdict. This period is called “Yamim Noraim,” the “Frightening Days.” This atonement period and the subsequent verdict of God have nothing to do with similar terms in Christianity and Islam. Jews don’t want to be absolved by God in order to reach Heaven; they hope for another year on Earth, Hell’s Upper Neighborhood. Special traditions have developed along the years, and one of them is directly related to the State of Israel, the Six-Day War, and a very odd religious interpretation...

How England Helped Start the Great War, by Paul Gottfried | Taki's Magazine
  A vastly underexplored topic is the British government’s role in greasing the skids for World War I. Until recently it was hard to find scholars who would dispute the culturally comfortable judgment that “authoritarian Germany” unleashed the Great War out of militaristic arrogance. Supposedly the British only got involved after the Germans recklessly violated Belgian neutrality on their way to conquering “democratic“ France...

Has Israel groveler David Miliband changed his spots? | Redress Information & Analysis
  Stuart Littlewood voices surprise at the invitation issued by a pro-Palestinian medical charity to former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband – a proven apologist for and groveler to Israel – to speak at its annual fundraising gala...


Sep 20, 2012


Why the Mideast Exploded, Really, by Ray McGovern | Information Clearing House
...one key reason for the antipathy toward the U.S. among Muslims is the close identification of the U.S. with Israel and the widespread realization that support from Washington enables Israel’s policies of oppression and warmongering against the Palestinians and its regional neighbors.. As to “why they hate us,” I had time to recall three very telling things I had mentioned in an earlier article on this sensitive topic...

Behind the Deepening Crisis with Iran, by Mark H. Gaffney | Veterans Today
...Iran has achieved a conventional deterrent to Israel. Therefore, statements by Iranian officials that Iran has no nuclear weapons program are in my view probably correct. Presently, Iran does not need nukes to deter Israel. It can do so with its GPS-guided medium range missiles. The Israelis are no doubt gnashing their teeth over this, because they now find themselves threatened by their own WMD stockpiles, and by their own nuclear reactors, especially Dimona, all of which have become targets. A few direct hits by Iran could cause a toxic plume, killing thousands of Israelis. A worst case might signal the end of the Jewish state...

The ‘Pro-Israel’ Network Behind the Innocence Video, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
  If someone had planned to upend US foreign policy — to utterly destroy the very basis of all our diplomats (and military personnel) been working to achieve in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world — they couldn’t have done a better job of it than whoever put together Innocence of Muslims. As violent protests spread, the consequences continue to roll in: the suspension of joint US-Afghan military operations, the suspension of US aid talks with Egypt, the rapid decline of US prestige in the region, and the growing influence of the radical Islamist movement US support for the “Arab Spring” was designed to counter...

The Globalization of NATO, by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | Clarity Press
  “Nazemroaya’s book is a must-read for any European or other NATO state citizen who wants to understand the danger the American driven Alliance presents to world harmony and peace. I would hope that having done so, the reader would accept appropriate responsibility for actively pursuing ways to terminate this war machine that seeks out opportunities for warfare for all the wrong reasons.” ~ Denis J. Halliday, former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General...

A Sea Change in US-Israeli Relations? by Dave Lindorff | Counterpunch
...If Obama, as looks increasingly likely, manages to win re-election while continuing to resist Prime Minister Netanyahu’s blistering criticism and blustering calls for war, the longtime unseemly grip of AIPAC on US Middle East policy will likely be broken, and with it will go the influence of the neocons who have been pushing relentlessly for American imperial domination of the Middle East. Once a presidential candidate successfully stands up to AIPAC and to Israeli political threats and succeeds in nonetheless winning election, the lobby’s power to threaten and intimidate dissolves...

Charity Economics, Subservient Politics: Why Oslo Must Go, by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
...Abbas and Fayyad helped to redefine the old Palestinian discourse, a process that started following the Israel-PLO signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993. The accords were touted as signaling a new age of mutual respect, peace and security. In reality, they only cemented the status quo, allowing Israel to continue expanding its illegal settlements and determining every political outcome based on a protracted colonial vision. While no Israeli leader - left, right or center – has since deviated from this vision, Palestinians have grown in number within an ever shrinking space...

Crown Obama: It’s Over, by Ben Schreiner | Counterpunch
  The most remarkable aspect of the now widely watched video of an “off-the-cuff” Romney, paradoxically enough, was just how unremarkable his recorded comments really were. Sure, Romney managed to slur as parasitic all those who feel there is a human right to food, health care, and housing. Sure, Romney revealed his intention as president would be to obstruct peace in the Middle East. And sure, Romney even threw in a racist joke to boot. But how is any of this particularly surprising? How else does one think the elite speak of the working class, Palestinians, and minorities at their clandestine fundraisers?..

The "Secret" Revolution That Could Set the Middle East Aflame, by Jen Marlowe and Nick Turse | TomDispatch
  Jen Marlowe traveled to Bahrain this summer to witness the continuing uprising and the brutal government response firsthand, before being detained and then thrown out of the country. She offers a ground-level view of the “secret” revolution that few Americans have been able to follow and the reasons why they need to...

Israel’s Salafi foot soldiers in the wake of anti-Islam film, by Nureddin Sabir | Redress Information & Analysis
...We have always been firmly convinced that Israel’s dysfunctional behaviour and internal contradictions bear the seeds of its own destruction as a supremacist, racially-exclusive state. However, the increasingly high profile assumed by Salafis and Wahhabis in Arab societies since they began hijacking the Arab Spring has forced us to acknowledge the possibility that the real implosion might be that of Arab societies, and that this may yet offer new opportunities for the Jews-only state to extend its lease of life...

Justice for All: Alexander Cockburn, Palestine, and US Media, by Alison Weir | Palestine Chronicle
...The importance of what Cockburn and co-editor St. Clair have achieved in CounterPunch cannot be overstated. Without CounterPunch, it is quite likely that essential information on Israel-Palestine would have remained largely hidden from progressive American readers. CounterPunch not only published critical facts itself; by carrying thoroughly cited articles on information that had previously been buried, it also pushed other American publications and individuals into discussing Palestine with greater depth, frequency, and honesty...



Sep 19, 2012

Barack Obama and the Temple of Doom, by Thomas H. Naylor | Counterpunch
...There is only one fundamental question which really matters and it will not appear on the ballot anywhere. “Is there any justification whatsoever for the continued existence of the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most environmentally toxic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all-time – an empire which has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable, ungovernable, and unfixable?”..
Read more...

A Syrian quartet worth hearing, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online
  The Middle East political space has been dominated by unprecedented and widespread anti-American mass rallies sparked by a blasphemous film, but last week it was also the repository of fresh efforts to address the tragic conflict in Syria. While in Damascus, the new UN envoy on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, had his first audience with embattled President Bashar al-Assad, and in Beirut the visiting Pope Benedict XVI prayed for peace and condemned foreign import of arms into Syria as a "sin", the representatives of a brand new "quartet" consisting of Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran held their first meeting in Cairo, thanks to the singular initiative of Mohammed Morsi...
Read more...

Details emerge of US role in Sabra-Shatila massacre | Al Akhbar English
  Israel duped the United Stated into believing that “thousands of terrorists” remained in west Beirut following the expulsion of Palestinian fighters 30 years ago, providing cover for the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, according to recently declassified Israeli documents. The documents include verbatim transcripts of meetings between US and Israeli officials before and during the three-day massacre led by the right-wing Lebanese Christian Phalange militia that left roughly 2,000 people dead, mostly children, women and elderly men...
Read more...

Dollar no longer primary oil currency as China begins to sell oil using Yuan, by Kenneth Schortgen Jr | National Finance Examiner
  On Sept. 11, Pastor Lindsey Williams, former minister to the global oil companies during the building of the Alaskan pipeline, announced the most significant event to affect the U.S. dollar since its inception as a currency. For the first time since the 1970's, when Henry Kissinger forged a trade agreement with the Royal house of Saud to sell oil using only U.S. dollars, China announced its intention to bypass the dollar for global oil customers and began selling the commodity using their own currency...
[This could be the long awaited clear sign that the Empire is toast, burned to a crisp by the insatiable moneyed elite. And why should they kill the goose? The only answer I can come up with is
Greed and Ignorance.]

Read more...

Imperialism and the Logic of War-Making, by Joseph T. Salerno | Lew Rockwell
  Commentaries on war stretching back more than two millennia to the Peloponnesian Wars have enshrouded the fundamental causes of war in an almost impenetrable fog of myths, fallacies, and outright lies. In most studies, war is generally portrayed as the inevitable outcome of either complex historical forces or accidental circumstances generally beyond the understanding or control of the human combatants...
Read more...

Emerging Outlines of New International Monetary Order, by K.Gajendra Singh | MWC News
...at the end of WWII in 1944, agreements were drawn up at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA to establish a new monetary management system to avoid worldwide economic disasters like the great depression experienced in the 1930's. Under this agreement the International Monetary Fund was set up along with the World Bank. Both the institutions have been used to maintain and expand US financial hegemony around the world. Bretton Woods established the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world, replacing the British pound sterling and required world currencies to be pegged to the dollar rather than gold...
Read more...

Why Are We The Good Guys? by David Cromwell | Media Lens

  One of the unspoken assumptions of the Western world is that ‘we’ are great defenders of human rights, a free press and the benefits of market economics. Mistakes might be made along the way, perhaps even tragic errors of judgement such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the prevailing view is that 'the West' is essentially a force for good in the wider world. Why Are We The Good Guys? is a provocative challenge to this false ideology. The book digs beneath standard accounts of crucial issues such as foreign policy, climate change and the constant struggle between state-corporate power and genuine democracy...
Read more...

Islamophobia, Left and Right, by Jeff Sparrow | Counterpunch
...Should Muslims be worried about rising Islamophobia? Of course they should! As the recent report by the Institute of Race Relations, Pedlars of Hate, makes clear, anti-Islam bigotry is becoming a key element of the revival of the far Right – a Right that doesn’t merely slander Muslims but also takes action against them. The Innocence of Muslims was, quite obviously, intended as a provocation, and many Muslims have argued that the minority of shrill jihadis who raised their sectarian and violent slogans at protests around the world fell entirely into the intended trap...
Read more...

Jewish New Year: We Are back in 1947! | Roi Tov
...In recent months, Netanyahu kept warning that time is running out for an attack on Iran; pretty soon all nuclear installations of the latter country would be utterly protected against bombings. This mantra must be seen in the context that this year, Netanyahu will face elections. He is bound to win them; however, Minister of Defense Ehud Barak has no chance of keeping his position unless he conducts a successful war before the elections...
Read more...

What might Netanyahu do if Romney’s defeat becomes inevitable? | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Hart examines whether Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is mad enough to order an attack on Iran in what remains of Obama’s first term without the president’s blessing and American participation?..
Read more...

Pol Pot Revisited, by Israel Shamir | Counterpunch

...The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. He was brought up in royal palace circles; his aunt was a concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but instead of making money and a career, he returned home, and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers...
Read more...

Hidden Camera Video: Romney on Iran, Israel-Palestine, by John Glaser | Antiwar
...Network news is focusing primarily on a single portion of the candid-camera speech in which Romney derides “47 percent” of the population who doesn’t pay income taxes and therefore will automatically vote for Obama. This should be really effective at grabbing that 5 percent of swing voters, Ol’ Mitt. Truthfully, this is one of the most poorly run campaigns I’ve seen in a long time. But there are other parts of the video not being talked about as much. Via David Corn at Mother Jones, Romney also talks – off the script! – about Iran, Israel-Palestine, and broader foreign policy issues. They are shocking in their ignorance...
Read more, watch video...



Sep 18, 2012


Al Nakba (1) | YouTube
  A brilliant and comprehensive documentary on the history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine...
[See also Part 2]

Suicide-bombs without the suicides: why drones are so cool, by Paul Rogers | Open Democracy
...For now, the drones hold sway – but it is no more than a temporary phenomenon, a transient phase. Within a very few years, and maybe even only months, the next phase will commence as paramilitary groups respond. As with other elements of the “war on terror”, the seduction of short-term advantage disguises damaging longer-term consequences...

'Gazan kids suffer from barbaric siege' | PressTV
  Press TV in its program Remember Palestine has interviewed Ken O'Keefe, former US marine and activist for Palestine in London who is set to embark on a hunger strike himself in solidarity with the Palestinians. Ken talks about the human suffering and in his words, "a stain on human conscience" that is life for the many children and people of Palestine under brutal occupation by Israel. ...

A Never-Ending Horror Story: The Massacre at Sabra and Shatila, Thirty Years Later, by Sonja Karkar | Palestine Chronicle
...Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children – more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence...

False Flags and Imperial Mobilization: The Middle East Explodes on 9/11 Anniversary, by Larry Chin | Global Research
...The overriding elite military and intelligence agenda remains the conquest of oil and gas resources. 9/11/01 was the first act of desperation among elites to control all significant energy-related geography on the planet, while preventing rival powers from doing the same. Under the “war on terror”, the world has suffered eleven continuous years of false flag terror. Bombings. Destabilizations. Assassinations. Coups and counter-coups. Controlled and co-opted popular revolts and “mob violence”. Regime changes. Criminality beyond redemption...

Flynt Leverett on the Real Drivers of Anti-American Protests in the Arab and Muslim Worlds | The Race for Iran
...The proper perspective, at least from the vantage of the Muslim world, is that the United States has been, for many years now, an aggressive and a repressive force in the region. That’s the way the United States is perceived; every serious public opinion poll in the region would show that. And until the United States is prepared to come to terms with that reality, its own strategic position in this region is going to continue to decline precipitously.”..

Syria: Christians take up arms for first time, by Ruth Sherlock, Carol Malouf | Telegraph
  The Christian community has tried to avoid taking sides in the civil war. In Aleppo, it recruited vigilantes from the Boy Scout movement to protect churches, but as the war moved into the city and spread across its suburbs they have begun to accept weapons from the Syrian army and joined forces with Armenian groups to repel opposition guerrillas...

Occupy’s Not Dead, It Was on Vacation: Occupy, Year 2 Begins, by Vijay Prashad | Counterpunch
...“Reality is never a simple thing,” writes Kate Khatib, whose reflection summarizes what most writers indicate, “Our demand? We want everything and nothing. Our perspective? We are all a little bit right, and we are all a little bit wrong. What matters is that we are doing something.” All the paper I have read on Occupy suggests this fact: something is being done, taking over public space to begin with, and then drawing that energy into the fights against eviction and against banks, against this and against that...

U.S. Announces Wealth Creation Plan to Aid Wealthy, by Barb Weir | deLiberation
  U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has announced a new plan to stimulate the economy by using public funds to buy up toxic mortgage-backed securities. “Nobody else will buy this crap” said Bernanke, “so let’s get the American taxpayer to do it.” The Bernanke plan also guarantees that public funds will be made available to qualified borrowers at rates of between 0 and ¼ percent for at least another three years. To qualify, you must be a too-big-to-fail bank with at least $100 billion in assets and pay no taxes...

America and the Muslims, by Esam Al-Amin | Counterpunch
...many Islamophobes and Muslim haters have taken over the public space and the media so much so that appointments or inclusion of any Muslim figure in government or other public institutions have become a struggle, sometimes with costly consequences. The Republican Party has basically become the party associated with Muslim bashers and haters, while the Democratic Party has only given lip service to inclusion while it is still afraid of being attacked by the right as being sympathetic to “terrorists.” Meanwhile, the American Muslim community is alienated and the crude stereotype of America being the enemy of Islam is cemented in the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide...

Turkey's Syrian Misadventure, by Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle
  Turkey's intervention in Syria has been an act of unprecedented folly. Not since the republic was established in 1923 - not even when the military was in charge - has a Turkish government sought ‘regime change’ in another country. In sponsoring armed groups seeking to destroy the Syrian government, the collective calling itself ‘The Friends of the Syrian People’ appears to be committing serious violations of international law. While the focus has to remain on the prime victims of their intervention, the Syrian people, it is also the case that more than a year later the policy has not worked for Turkey and is blowing up in the face of its architects...

America’s War - Next Stop Iran: Who Will Save Us? by Colin Todhunter | Global Research
...As we watch the possible build up to a US-led war with Iran and bear witness to the wail of propaganda and the deception of peace through the barrel of a gun, the world is told that Iran threatens global stability. Due to what is becoming an incessant pro war media onslaught, an increasing number of US citizens now favour a military attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, despite no credible evidence that indicates Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons at all...
[The sheeple bleat on cue]

Syria's road from jihad to prison, by Robert Fisk | The Independent
...Two of the men spoke of their recruitment by Islamist preachers, another of how Arab satellite channels had persuaded him to travel to Syria to make jihad. These were stories that the Syrian authorities obviously wanted us to hear, but the prisoners – who must have given their interrogators the same accounts – were clearly anxious to talk to us, if only to meet Westerners and alert us to their presence after months in captivity...



Sep 17, 2012

The Wind and the Sun, by William A. Cook | Intifada Palestine
...Today there is no Ghandi to pen such a note to Mister Netanyahu as he thrashes about to launch an invasion against his perceived enemy, the state of Iran. His madness is manifest in his deafness to his own contradictions: his moral right to destroy the industrial development of a sister state; his moral right to impose his judgment and his will on the citizens of that state who have done nothing to the citizens of Israel; his moral right to impose his sickness on his fellow Jews despite their pleadings that he does not speak for them; his moral determination that his state has moral rights to the very weapons he’d deny to his neighbors...

Israel and Jewish identity and power, by Gilad Atzmon | Redress Information & Analysis
  The current “Jewish golden epoch” is coming to its inevitable end. Yet, the question that remains is whether Zionist and Israeli leaders would let our planet survive the collapse of their latest Jewish empire? Following Binyamin Netanyahu’s, Ehud Barak’s and AIPAC’s relentless push for Armageddon, and bearing in mind that collective suicidal narratives such as Samson and Masada are so precious within the Zionist and Israeli discourses, we should stay on high alert. Sadly, turning our planet into dust is fully consistent with the Israeli and Zionist mission...
Read more...

Are Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby now a threat to the survival of the US-Israel relationship? by Alan Hart | Veterans Today
...The shortest possible answer to the question of what drives and fuels violent, murderous Islamic fundamentalism in its various forms can be given in three words – American foreign policy. When President George “Dubya” Bush declared his “war on global terrorism”, American foreign policy became the best recruiting sergeant for Islam’s men of violence...

Salafism+CIA: The winning formula to destabilize Russia, the Middle East, by F. William Engdahl | Voltaire Network
  The assassination of the most respected Sufi religious leader in Dagestan, Russia’s volatile Caucasus, comes as Salafist jihadists in Libya murder a US Ambassador who was actually a key player in ousting Gaddafi and bringing the Salafist Muslim Brotherhood and Jihadists into power. Throughout the entire Islamic world today, a wave of hate is being unleashed in the name of Islamic fundamentalism that could bring a new world war. This is the consequence of the Greater Middle East Project put in play in 2010 and earlier by the Washington-London-Tel Aviv axis. Manipulating religious fervor is an explosive cocktail...

Who really killed Ambassador Stevens? It's the Zionists, stupid! by Kevin Barrett | Truthjihad
...Ambassador Stevens, who like me got to know the Arab world by living in Morocco, was (as far as I know) neither Jewish nor a committed Zionist. So why should Stevens, an American citizen and a representative of the American government, be murdered because a handful of fanatical Zionist lunatics have seized control of the US government and media, and dragged America into Israel's hopeless war against the world's almost 2 billion Muslims?..

Stockman: Our Problem is the Federal Reserve, by Kurt Nimmo | Prison Planet
  Former OMB boss David Stockman told CNBC that Romney’s vision of capitalism is not possible if the Federal Reserve continues to run the economy. Stockman said the only candidate that had it right was Ron Paul.. Stockman said that with the insane interest rate policies of the Fed, the crushing debt of entitlements and the neocon-driven war machine with a parasitical military-industrial complex in tow will continue to roll on unless something gives.. The Federal Reserve, of course, is not merely a gaggle of lunatics. It is a façade for a cartel of international banksters who know exactly what they are doing – destroying the greatest engine of wealth and prosperity the world has ever known...

Qaeda says Benghazi attack 'revenge' for leader's death | Radio Netherlands Worldwide
  Al-Qaeda said the deadly attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya was in revenge for the killing of the network's number two Sheikh Abu Yahya al-Libi..
The statement comes four days after Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a video eulogising Libi, his late deputy and propaganda chief who was killed in a drone strike in June. Mohammed al-Megaryef, the head of Libya's national assembly, said on Saturday that the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi was planned and "meticulously executed."..

Mufti condemns ambassador’s killers, blames government for not standing up to extremists | Libya Herald
  In his strongest attack to date of the actions of extremists, Libya’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Sadeq Al-Ghariani, has issued a fatwa condemning Tuesday’s killing of US Ambassador Chris Stevens along with three other American diplomatic staff and a number of Libya security guards. He said those involved were criminals who were damned by their action. He also condemned the production of any film, picture or article insulting the Prophet Mohammad or any of the prophets by “extreme fanatics” in the US or elsewhere...

Enjoy the ITF Rosh-Hashana greetings, by Ronnie Barkan | Facebook
  The most morally corrupt army in the world, living in cognitive dissonance...

NAM to boost Palestinian cause at UN, by Kaveh L Afrasiabi | Asia Times Online
  Led by Iran, the Non-Aligned Movement is gearing up to boost the Palestinian cause at the United Nations summit in New York this month. With tensions mounting in the occupied territories and virtually no sign of any Western initiative to address the long-dormant Middle East peace talks, NAM's prioritization of the Palestinian issue, reflected in the pro-Palestinian declarations at its recent summit in Tehran, is a timely antidote that may well breathe new life into last year's Palestinian bid at the United Nations for full statehood...

No ‘Red Line’ for Israel | Gilad Atzmon
...Obama has been quick to perceive a window of opportunity that may prove to be a game winner. Obama lets the Republican party and their presidential candidate Mitt Romney operate as Netanyahu’s Sabbath Goyim. Obama clears the stage to Romney who foolishly and voluntarily pushes for another Israeli war, he lets Romney be a Zionist mouthpiece, the one who scarifies America and American soldiers for Israel. Consequently, Obama presents himself as a reasonable, sensible and responsible leader – all in all, a ‘real American patriot’..

Putin opens Benghazi door for Obama, by M K Bhadrakumar | Asia Times Online
  At a time when the United States-Russia "reset" lies in limbo, it should come as no surprise that President Vladimir Putin has made one of the most important statements of his four-month-old presidency, drawing attention to the commonality of interests between the two major world powers and indeed between Russia and the West on one of the hottest issues of current world politics - the Middle Eastern question...
Read more...

A Jaw-Dropping Explanation of How Governments Are Complicit in the Illegal Drug Trade, by Lars Schall | Alternet
  The following interview helps us understand the drug war from a dramatically different perspective than the one the corporate media paints. Instead of the traditional portrayal of the war on drugs as a fight between law enforcement and illicit drug dealers, scholar Oliver Villar explains that the illegal drug trade is a tool of empire, a means of "social control" as much as profit...
Read more...

When War Correspondents Take Sides, by Leon Hadar | The National Interest
...this politicized genre of American war reporting has been celebrated as a courageous mission to discover the truth. But in reality, it has been a form of romantic adventurism in search of a political narrative performed by self-proclaimed “idealists” parachuting for the first time into an exotic part of the world—yet who are suddenly transformed into the leading experts about it. Concern with facts is replaced by the need to provide a dramatic morality tale...
Read more...



Sep 16, 2012

Dogs of War Bark Ever More Loudly | Cryptome
..Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2012. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency that was declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat...

History repeated: Why Iran sanctions will backfire on the hapless Obama administration | Iran Affairs
...If the Obama administration is betting that the sanctions will cause public sentiment to swing against the regime on the nuclear issue thus causing Tehran to "soften" its negotiating position.. it is not just a stupid policy but it also shows a profound misunderstanding of the Iranian national psyche and their narrative of their history, something that may be a mystery to most Americans including the policy-makers, but which Iranian children read all about in their high school history books...

US media angrily marvels at the lack of Muslim gratitude, by Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
  NBC News, along with a leading US newspaper, insist that Egyptians should be grateful to the US for having 'freed' them...

Controversy over Red Hot Chili Peppers heats up, by Remi Kanazi | Al Jazeera English
...It is an easy choice to stand on the wrong side of history, when the history books have yet to be written. It is easy to call a show in Israel just another show when few accurately label Israel an apartheid state. At the moment, it still takes little effort to ignore the plight and call of millions of occupied Palestinians. But it is not the just stand. Martin Luther King once proclaimed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"..
Read more...

Blowback in Benghazi? by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
...the Libyan “security” team assigned to guard the compound helpfully pointed out where the Americans were located: presumably they did this in the process of fleeing. Whether they did it to save their own lives, or out of sympathy for the rioters, is an open question. The timing is significant. The United States is currently in the midst of a perilous maneuver: in an attempt to forestall an anticipated wave of radical Islamist upsurges on traditionally pro-American turf, Washington has launched a pro-Sunni pro-“democracy” turn in the Middle East. The idea is to co-opt the “Arab Spring,” and use its energy to install moderate and pro-Western regimes on the Turkish model.. the new strategy went into high gear with the Libyan intervention...

Former Iran nuclear negotiator: Iran was forced to enrich 20% by the US | Iran Affairs
  Seyed Hossein Mousavian's informative lecture on Iran nuclear issue in the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco.. in which he points out that Iran was forced to enrich uranium to 20% to make its own fuel for a medical reactor that treats cancer patients, when the US interferred in Iran's attempts to simply buy the necessary fuel as usual.. I should point out that there was no "non-proliferation" goal served by this US interference in the purchase of fuel rods for this reactor, since reactor fuel rods practically cannot be used to make nukes, and this particular reactor not only operates under constant international monitoring, but it is also far too small to be used to make nukes anyway...

A Bunch of Tits | Craig Murray
...Just as all Muslims were not responsible for Islamic terrorists, so all westerners are not responsible for the far right purveyors of anti-Muslim hatred. All decent people must despair at the prospect of yet another cycle of violence. Powerful interests both in the West and in the Middle East are not amongst those decent people.Of all the signals the West could send out to try to end the horrors wrought by the promoters of the “Clash of Civilisations”, the most powerful would be to arraign Bush and Blair for war crimes. This is not a deluded hope of idealists; it is an essential step if the world is ever to heal...

A new hasbara campaign: Countering the 'Arab Narrative,' by Ben White | Al Jazeera English
...A propaganda initiative by the Israeli government is taking direct aim at the core issue of Palestinian refugees through a manipulation of the stories of Jews who left Arab countries in the years after 1948. The main instigator of this ‘Justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries’ campaign - the name of a recent conference in Jerusalem - is Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, whose previous efforts have included laughing in the face of international law over dinner jazz...

Cyberwar and the Threat to Civilization, by Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam
  The American Interest published an essay, Hacking the Next War, which explores the juxtaposition between the traditional internet and the myriad benefits it’s offered to modern society, with the unplumbed destructive capacity of cyberwarfare. The founding principles of the internet were openness and trust. Issues like security and anticipation of abuse were after-thoughts, since the premise was that those who used the internet would behave with the best of intentions. In many ways, the founders believed fundamentally that human beings were good...

NYT Buries the Lead on Iran, by Peter Hart | FAIR
...Israeli leaders are unhappy with the White House position: "’Israeli officials, however, say this guarantee may not be enough for Israel, which Iranian leaders have repeatedly threatened with annihilation.’ Have Iranians "repeatedly threatened" to annihilate Israel? There are a few incidents that are usually presented to make this case, but there remains considerable skepticism over the meaning of some of these statements. And it's important to remember that the current threats are going in other direction, as Israeli and U.S. officials describe in public when and if they might start bombing Iran...

Revealed: inside story of US envoy's assassination, by Kim Sengupta | The Independent
...There is growing belief that the attack was in revenge for the killing in a drone strike in Pakistan of Mohammed Hassan Qaed, an al-Qa'ida operative who was, as his nom-de-guerre Abu Yahya al-Libi suggests, from Libya, and timed for the anniversary of the 11 September attacks. Senator Bill Nelson, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: "I am asking my colleagues on the committee to immediately investigate what role al-Qa'ida or its affiliates may have played in the attack and to take appropriate action."..

US-Backed Terrorists Murder US Ambassador in Libya, by Tony Cartalucci | Intifada Palestine
...The violence, Western media claims, stems from an anti-Islamic film produced in the US. In reality, the coordinated nature of the attacks on both the US Embassy in Libya, as well as its embassy in Cairo, Egypt, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, are most likely using the Neo-Conservative Clarion Fund-esque propaganda film as a false pretense for violence long-planned. The Clarion Fund regularly produces anti-Muslim propaganda, like “Iranium,” specifically to maintain a strategy of tension using fear and anger to drive a wedge between Western civilization and Islam to promote perpetual global wars of profit...

The Lonely Redemption of Sandy Lewis, Wall Street Provocateur, by Michael Powell and Danny Hakim | NYT
...News reports have revealed a world he knows intimately. Goldman Sachs pays vast fines to avoid prosecution for mortgage securities fraud. Barclays manipulates interest rates. The Senate exposes HSBC as a racketeering enterprise, laundering money for drug cartels. Banks are laden with bad assets. And Wall Street, Washington, the press corps, everyone sits and stares like so many dumb cows. “The complicity on Wall Street is sickness!”..


Sep 15, 2012

The Reality Behind the “Free Speech” Argument: America and the Muslims, by Esam Al-Amin | Counterpunch
  Thousands of angry Muslims demonstrated in front of American embassies and consulates in Egypt and Libya because of a newly released film that deliberately insulted and mockingly falsified the life of the prophet of Islam. The protests soon spread to Yemen, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere. Taking advantage of the chaos outside the American consulate in Benghazi, it appears that Al-Qaeda affiliates infiltrated the protesters, then attacked and firebombed the consulate building. Clearly there was no justification whatsoever for such reprehensible acts...

Growing Isolation: Boycott of Israel Crosses to Governments’ Realm, by by Ramzy Baroud | Foreign Policy Journal
  Should Israel be worried? Very much so, for the age of total impunity is coming to an end. Critical voices of the Israeli occupation and mistreatment of Palestinians are rising—not only within civil society circles, but among world governments as well...

21st Century Robotic Wars, by Jamal Kanj | Intifada Palestine
...Earlier this month, a drone using the newly introduced, more accurate Small Smart Weapon or Scorpion missile, delivered a direct hit, by mistake, killing 13 family members near the town of Rada, Yemen. Following the raid, Yemeni activist Nasr Abdulla said: “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of Al Qaeda… This part of Yemen takes revenge very seriously.” Last May, a Yemeni official told The Washington Post: “There is a psychological acceptance of Al Qaeda because of US strikes.” In modern history, no military power was able to unequivocally win a guerilla war. The hardest fought battle is for the hearts and minds of the average person; the US is squarely losing this war...

Stop Rep. Rohrabacher's Resolution Calling for Dividing Iran Along Ethnic Lines | NIAC
...Congressman Rohrabacher knows that playing on ethnic tensions is a recipe for the worst kinds of violence, and that’s exactly what he’d like to see happen in Iran. In fact, Rohrabacher has admitted that he supports the terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq over peaceful opposition groups because of the Mujahedin’s willingness to use violence...

Weighing Benefits and Costs of Military Action Against Iran | Think Progress
  This paper draws no final conclusions and offers no recommendations. It offers an objective description of some of the prerequisites for thinking about the use of military force against Iran: the need to establish clear objectives, evaluate the capacity of the U.S. military to achieve those objectives, plan an exit strategy, and then weigh the benefits and costs of the military options...

Nothing is Ever Frozen: Protest in Ramallah, by Uri Avnery | Counterpunch
...Despite the economic troubles, the picture of the Palestinians as a helpless, pitiable victim is far removed from reality. Israelis may like to think so, as well as pro-Palestinian sympathizers around the world. But the Palestinian spirit is unbroken. Palestinian society is vibrant and self-reliant. Most Palestinians are determined to achieve a state of their own...
[Avnery is a diehard supporter of the thoroughly discredited and and fantasy driven “two-state solution.” When he finally wakes up that will be a sea change indeed.]

Mr Blowback rising, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
  ..Once upon a time, during George "Dubya" Bush's "war on terra", the Forces of Good in Afghanistan captured - and duly tortured - one evil terrorist, Abu Yahya al-Libi. Abu Yahya al-Libi was, of course, Libyan. He slaved three years in the bowels of Bagram prison near Kabul, but somehow managed to escape that supposedly impregnable fortress in July 2005. At the time, the Forces of Good were merrily in bed with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - whose intelligence services, to the delight of the Bush administration, were doing their nastiest to exterminate or at least isolate al-Qaeda-style Salafi-jihadis of the al-Libi kind...

What "Undivided Jerusalem" Is Really About, by Yousef Munayyer | The Daily Beast
...For the United States to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel—even West Jerusalem—would mean recognizing the legitimacy of Israeli territorial claims outside those recognized by the U.S. in the partition plan. That plan itself was not well-liked in Washington either. By the spring of 1948, the U.S. withdrew its support for the plan and when President Truman recognized Israel it almost caused a mutiny from the State Department. In short, the tradition of U.S. Presidents (who always have election interests in mind) sparring with the State Department on this issue goes back to the very inception of the modern state of Israel...

Monopolizing War?: What America Knows How to Do Best, by Tom Engelhard | TomDispatch
...in the post-2001 era, along with two disastrous wars on the Eurasian mainland, we’ve been regularly sending in the Marines or special operations forces, as well as naval, air, and robotic power. Such acts are, by now, so ordinary that they are seldom considered worthy of much discussion here, even though no other country acts (or even has the capacity to act) this way. This is simply what Washington’s National Security Complex does for a living...
Read more...

Musings on Pussy Riot , "Sam Bacile"and modern "blasphemers" | The Vineyard of the Saker
...modern "blasphemies" which are clearly not aimed at deities or sacred figures, are in reality aimed at specific social groups and they therefore constitute the quintessential psychological hate crime. And "psychological" does not mean unreal or somehow easily dismissible. Not at all. A psychological hate crime is to a physical hate crime what psychological torture is to physical torture: definitely not a lesser form of assault and arguably a worse one...

The Best Democracies Money Can Buy, by Saul Landau and Nelson Valdes | Counterpunch
...The oligarchs decided, long ago, that they were to permanently rule. The most recent development gained the Supreme Court’s help (Citizens United) so that the super-rich could “own” the 2012 election. The reactionary high court opened the door for super corporate donations to political campaigns. Compare gambling casino mogul Sheldon Adelson’s pledge of $100 million to the modest amount a working person could afford to contribute...

Sinister September: Zionist Anti-Islam Plot Simmering, by Ismail Salami | Palestine Chronicle
  The month of September has witnessed an accelerated trend of coordinated attempts to desecrate Islam and tarnish the image of the Muslims across the globe. That a blasphemous movie desecrating the person of the holy Prophet of Islam has been released in the United States simultaneously with the 9/11 tragic incident cannot be looked upon as sheer coincidence...

The US-NATO “New Great Game” In Central Asia: Boris Volkhonsky interviews Lt. Gen'l Mohammad Asad Durrani | Global Research
...Call it a new “Great Game” if you like. It is a very big one. It is about strategic influence, strategic areas, about natural resources. The alliances that are emerging, in my view, are unexpected alliances. The whole region is coming together – Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran. India also is not very far away. All of them say, “If we do not play together, then no one will be able to play at all.”..
Read more...



Sep 14, 2012


Once More Into the Breach, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar
  I really did not want to write about Israel again this week, but the outrageous manipulation of the Democratic Party platform, moves in California to make any criticism of Israel a hate crime, and news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had dressed down the U.S. ambassador in the presence of a congressman before insisting that the United States has no moral right to judge Israel has made it unavoidable to go “once more into the breach, dear friends.”..
Read more...

The German-Israeli Love Affair Must End, by Ghada Karmi | Telepolis
...why should this friendliness towards Israel be coupled with an equal antipathy for Palestinians, the very people who were sacrificed to compensate for the crimes of Nazism, whose country became Israel while they became stateless refugees? I saw this conundrum in action in Germany recently. Last February I was invited to speak on Palestine at a Middle East conference at the University of Bremen. But at the last minute the invitation was withdrawn because the university heads considered my views were "not appropriate"...
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The Terrorist War Against Syria, by Dr. Elias Akleh | Intifada Palestine
  The daily incremental violent Syrian attacks and the orchestrated anti-Syrian political postures of most of the Western countries and some of the Arab states had become a low level war, spear-headed by foreign terrorist groups, some misguided Syrian groups, and vastly divided Syrian political opposition, aimed at the destruction of Syrian civil infrastructure and social fabric rather than the alleged declared goal of ousting of Al-Assad’s regime and the installation of Western-type democracy...
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Iran Attack Could Spark Caucasus War and Economic Trouble, by Robert Bruce Ware | Antiwar
  Russia’s Kavkaz-2012 strategic military training exercise later this month in the North Caucasus region may portend economic problems for the West. This is because the exercise is strategically linked to Russian expectations that Iran will be destabilized by the end of this year. If Iran is destabilized, Russia will uphold its obligations to Armenia under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Russia could cut a military corridor through the center of Georgia, taking control of all oil and gas lines leading westward from the rich fields of the Caspian Sea. If this is combined with fighting in the Persian Gulf, energy prices may spike...
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Joe Klein: Netanyahu trying to push US into war with Iran, by Paul Mutter | Lobe Log
  On today’s MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Israeli Deputy Knesset Speaker Danny Danon disapproved of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments regarding deadlines on Iran’s nuclear program. After claiming that “we know that Iran is building a nuclear bomb” and blaming President Obama for “deciding not to decide”, Danon said that the threat Israel perceives from Iran will come to “your [the US’s] shores” one day. He added that war against Iran should be a “joint effort”..

Iran: The Hawks' Fantasyland, by Bruce Fein | The National Interest
...Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran’s ruling mullahs have predictably acted to advance national interests and to seek money and power in lieu of exporting Shia Islam around the world with force and violence. Ruling clerics and their flocks have shown no enthusiasm for emulating the Jewish mass suicide at Masada in protest of Roman paganism...
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Libyan attack: it should have been clear deposing Gaddafi was the easy bit, by Simon Tisdall | The Guardian
...Once again, the western powers have started a fire they cannot extinguish. A year after David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy jointly travelled to Libya to lay claim to a liberator's bogus laurels, the Libyan revolution they fanned and fuelled is in danger of degenerating into a chaotic, violent free-for-all...
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‘I Am a Refugee’: Israel’s splashy new victimhood campaign, by Larry Derfner | +972 Magazine
  As if Israel hasn’t been playing the victim long enough, as if it hasn’t exploited the Six Million to the absolute limit, now comes a new weapon: the “Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries.” This has long been an Israeli answer to the Palestinian refugees – that roughly as many Middle Eastern Jews as Palestinians lost their homes because of the 1948 war. This week, though, the government made the issue a major new front in its information war...
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Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby: a threat to the US-Israel relationship? | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Hart argues that the attempts by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel’s American lobbyists to push the United States into war with Iran is driving a wedge into the US-Israeli special relationship...
[I’ll take a sledgehammer to that wedge any day of the week]
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US Diplomacy and America’s “Enablers of Terror,” by Nile Bowie | Global Research
...The recent armed attack on a lightly defended United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya that took the life of Ambassador Christopher Stevens is an alarming reminder of the disastrous foreign policy direction being taken by Washington. Tired euphemisms of “liberation” and “freedom fighters” have grossly distorted public opinion into supporting a narrative that has very little relationship with reality...
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Civil War a Lose-Lose for Syria’s Christian Minority, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar
Syria’s Civil War is a miserable time for virtually everyone in the country, but members of President Assad’s Alawite minority can hope for a victory for the regime, while Sunnis can hope for a better day if the rebels win. For Syria’s Christians, there is no silver lining. Suffering like everybody else under the increasingly sectarian civil war, many members of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities are looking at leaving, fearing what is yet to come...
Read more...



Sep 13, 2012

Jewish Funders Behind Explosive Anti-Islam Film | Jewish Daily Forward
  Widespread riots in the Middle East that led to the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya came following the release online of an Arabic translation of a movie directed by Sam Bacile, a 56-year-old California real-estate developer, titled “Innocence of Muslims.” The two-hour movie, which according to the Associated Press cost $5 million to make and was financed by more than 100 Jewish donors, attacks the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, making him out to be a fraud. It also depicts him engaged in sexual acts...
[Some people have a real problem grasping the concept of cause and effect (or was blowback the intended outcome?)]

An Israeli film-maker, 100 Jewish donors and their Salafi allies | Redress Information & Analysis
...My suspicion is that the aim of Mr Bacile and his 100 Jewish donors is simply to provoke the very reactions we have seen in Cairo and Benghazi, in order to tarnish the image of Arabs and Muslims and the Arab Spring in general. Another aim might be to provoke retaliatory attacks against Jews in the United States and Europe, and thereby furnish the anti-Semitism industry with "evidence" to back up the propaganda that Jews living in a gentile world will always be vulnerable to violence and therefore need a racially exclusive "Jewish state" at least as a haven of last resort...
[Suggestion: herd the Zionists and the Salafis/Wahhabis onto an island and let them annihilate one another – presto magico, many major world problems solved. Unless before chopping one another to bits they recognize that they are twins and conspire together to obliterate the rest of humanity. Uh oh. Nah, they're too far gone in delusion and hate.]

An Ugly Stalemate: The Uprising in Syria, by Tariq Ali | Counterpunch
  Angered by the non-stop, one-sided propaganda on CNN and BBC World, usually a prelude to NATO bombing campaigns (including the six-month onslaught on Libya, the casualties of which are still hidden from the public) or direct occupations, I was asked to explain my views on RTV. I did so, denouncing the promotion of the Syrian National Council by western media networks and pointing out that some of the armed-struggle opposition were perfectly capable of carrying out their own massacres and blaming them on the regime...

Seven Lean Years of Peacemaking, by Daniel Levy | NYT
...Forty-five years of Israeli impunity as settlements metastasized in defiance of international law has bred an understandable sense of invincibility. Add to that mix the emaciated state of liberal Israeli politics, the messianic orientation that infuses religious nationalism and the catastrophism endemic to much Zionist thinking — and the seven lean years look set to continue. But don’t be under any illusions; such injustice will not be sustainable...

Criticism and anti-Semitism: Let's Start Talking to Each Other, by Judith Butler | European Graduate School
  I am not altogether surprised that the General Secretary of the Jewish Council, Mr. Kramer, has objected to my point of view, but I cannot tell on the basis of his remarks whether he has actually sought to understand my point of view, or the range of views that I hold. His remarks are denunciations, and they are meant to signal a profound rejection of my perceived position. Given his authority in the German-Jewish community, the denunciation is also, I presume, meant to carry that authority and to speak in the name of the community...

Lies About the Past, Clamoring for War in the Future: New Yorker Magazine Concocts Case for Bombing Syria, by John W. Farley | Counterpunch
  In the September 17 issue of The New Yorker, David Makovsky has a piece entitled The Silent Strike: How Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation and kept it secret Makovsky tells a tale about how Israel took out a Syrian nuclear threat. There is one slight problem: Makovsky’s tale should have been published as “fiction”. How do I know? I’ve heard this story before...

Our Truth, and Theirs, by Justin Raimondo | Antiwar
...The “truther” epithet is meant to obscure an important distinction. It is one thing to claim the World Trade Center was struck down by an alien space ray commandeered by Dick Cheney (who, by the way, is really a Space Alien!): it is quite another to cite presidential briefings and other documentary evidence showing a concerted effort was made within the administration to effectively block any meaningful action which might have stopped the 9/11 hijackers...

9/11 and its legacy of fear, by Gene Healy | Washington Examiner
...2008's promises to bring our National Surveillance State under the rule of law have vanished from the 2012 Democratic platform. In the middle of a fiscal crisis, Congress and President Obama have been subsidizing dystopia -- using Homeland Security grants to fund the proliferation of surveillance cameras, drones and military ordnance for small-town police departments...

Why a US attack on Iran is inevitable | The Vineyard of the Saker
...Iran is a major regional power, a rich country sitting on top of large energy reserves, which dares to openly defy the USA, Israel and even, crime of crimes, the international financial system. Think of Iran as "Hezbollah, only at a nation-state level, with much more money and resources". The other "crime" Iran is guilty of being an independent and sovereign Shia state with a very competent diplomatic and intelligence community. In other words, Iran makes controlling the Middle-East very difficult for the USA and Israel. And since the Shia have the bad taste of mostly living in oil-rich parts of the Middle-East, they are a direct threat to the US-NATO-Israeli-al-Qaeda alliance...

The Driving Force Behind Anti-Americanism: Humiliation and Rage in Libya, by Vijay Prashad | Counterpunch
...A comprehensive Human Rights Watch report, Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya, released last week details the stories of a number of the leading figures who were arrested around the world, tortured in US-run prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and then delivered back to Libya. They were handed over to the Libyan authorities with full-awareness that they were going to be tortured or even killed...

Cozying up to Israeli Propaganda, by Eric Walberg | Palestine Chronicle
  The empire requires a nice juicy enemy to keep people's minds off its own sins. During the Cold War, Hollywood responded admirably to the challenge, churning out anti-communist thrillers with Russian bad guys, most memorably during Reagan's surreal presidency, when "Red Dawn" and "Rocky IV" reduced international politics to a comic book parody. Given who the official enemy is these days, it is no surprise that the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which boasts of 72 participating countries, did not include a 'Spotlight on Iranian cinema' this year. On the contrary, it showcased the latest serving of propaganda against Iran...



Sep 12, 2012

9/11
9/11 and the Smiling Face of Shimon Peres, by Richard Edmondson | Uprooted Palestinians
9/11 was a surgical strike on a nation’s sanity
It is a national disease
An annual exercise in self-absorption
It is the smiling face of Shimon Peres...

THAT Day and This 9/11, by Eileen Fleming | deLiberation
  We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world – no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men, and it has gotten much worse since Woodrow Wilson stated such...



Bahrain? Never Heard of It, by Kelley B. Vlahos | Antiwar
  News that a civilian appeals court in Bahrain upheld the harsh prison terms - including several life sentences - of 13 “Arab Spring” activists last week, drew rapid fire from the human rights community. Their “crimes” - organizing largely peaceful protests to demand social and economic reforms from the ruling monarchy in 2011 - had branded them convicted traitors and terrorists, the kind of appalling injustice that American patriots had fought against more than 200 years ago...

How We Became Israel, by Andrew Bacevich | The American Conservative
...A nation seeking peace-as-dominion will use force more freely. This has long been an Israeli predilection. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, however, it has become America’s as well. As a consequence, U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. This “Israelification” of U.S. policy may prove beneficial for Israel. Based on the available evidence, it’s not likely to be good for the United States...

Is Amnesty International Abandoning Human Rights? by Bev Cotton | Transcend
  Why do increasing numbers of people believe that Amnesty has abandoned the cause of human rights? As Francis Boyle, ex board member of Amnesty International USA - and renowned expert in international law puts it: “Amnesty International is primarily motivated not by human rights but by publicity. Second comes money… if it’s dealing with violations of human rights by the United States, Britain, Israel, then it’s like pulling teeth to get them to really do something on the situation”..

Obama Surrenders again on Palestine but Will He Benefit? by Franklin Lamb | Al Manar
  As a former law professor President Obama knows something about international law and US constitutional law which he taught at the University of Chicago. But he besmirched his academic bona fides, violated Democratic Party rules and hurt his campaign on 12/5/12 by ordering the Democratic Party to summarily change an earlier and twice debated and unanimously adopted plank of the Democratic Platform on the subject of the status of Jerusalem...

Zionist self love: Israeli use of language, by Richard Morris | deLiberation
  What appear to be innocent words in Israeli announcements are coded to smear the opponent. They are in effect a militarised country’s demonstration of a regime based on verbal orders and an unquestioning acceptance of violence and mayhem to be used in controlling the Palestinians, a tradition handed down by the arch liar, Ben Gurion and perpetuated by Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Peres, Rabin, Olmert, Barack, Netanyahu and dozens of other killers...

A Sorry Spectacle: The Democratic Party is a Big Fraud, by Dave Lindorff | Counterpunch
...while the Republican Party and its elected officials do a fairly good job of representing its troglodyte voter base, the Democratic Party is a gigantic fraud. It pretends every four years to be representing those voters that it needs to keep going to the polls and electing its candidates to office, but time after time, it turns around, once the election is over, and betrays its voting base.. the Democratic Party is basically run by and in the interest of large corporate interests, but since those interests don’t bring many votes to the table on election day, has to keep pretending to be the party of the people...

Ariel Upgraded Towards Israeli Elections | Roi Tov
...Ariel is probably the most strategic Israeli settlement in the West Bank. It is also deeply related to the Likud, which in recent years has found itself on the defensive against more militant settlers. That was enough for Netanyahu to award the status of university to a high-school-level establishment, known worldwide for its invaluable contributions in research into the History of the Likud. On election day, this is worth expensive votes. On Judgment Day, this will be worth condemnation...

American Democracy: The Funeral | YouTube
..It really doesn't matter who wins the upcoming Presidential Election. Either way the American people and the rest of the world will lose...

Inside Britain's Israel Lobby | YouTube
   This is the a very important film about the Jewish Lobby in Britain...

The Enemy Within? | Gilad Atzmon
  An opportunity to listen to the voices of the people who live in the biggest Jewish ghetto ever. Israel is the Jewish State, it is racially driven and Judeo-centric to the bone. Israel is about to implode, the enemy is within and it isn't the Palestinians, the Arabs or the Goyim. It is Jewish supremacy and morbid tribalism that is inherent to Jewish political collectivism...

What planet are the Ultra Orthodox from? (maybe it’s the Death Star): "The Rebbe said to me ..." | Maurice Pinay
..“Rashi comes and tells a five year old child: 'You come into contact with non-Jews, and when they come to you and claim that you're a thief; that you stole the land of Israel from the non-Jewish nations, do not invent your own responses but tell him the truth as stated in Torah: God recorded his mighty works in the Book of Genesis only in order to document the Jewish peoples' right to the land of Israel.' And since the Torah of Truth [that is, Rashi's commentary on Genesis] tells you that this should be your response, there's no doubt that in the end it will be effective."..
[the “Christian” Zionists have taken it even one step further, trumping even the Talmudic Jews with their genocidal interpretation of that fetid nightmare entitled 'Revelations']

US democracy takes a hit | Redress Information & Analysis
  Lawrence Davidson argues that the Obama camp's obsession with pre-empting attacks from domestic Israel flag-waving foes through appeasement is now such that they are no longer concerned with the damage this does to their natural allies...

U.S. Supports Japan, Confronts China And Russia Over Island Disputes, by Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO
  In a six-day span the U.S. State Department has bluntly affirmed unequivocal backing for Japanese territorial claims against both Russia and China, even invoking a defense treaty provision that could lead to direct military intervention and war with the world’s most populous nation...
[See also Japan's further provocation | China Daily (a Chinese govt. mouthpiece) 9/11/2012]

U.S. Democratic Party Narrowly Averts Threat of Democracy, by Barb Weir | deLiberation
  In a historic and unprecedented move, the U.S. Democratic Party asked the delegates at its 2012 national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina to use democratic procedures to approve a platform amendment. At the last minute, however, they avoided the whim of popular will by creatively interpreting an evenly divided voice vote as a two-thirds majority approval. At stake were two issues combined in one amendment: the inclusion of a reference to God in the plank on religion and a declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. As usual, these changes were introduced by the Republican Party, which has assumed a role of leadership in the Democratic Party in recent years...


Sep 11, 2012

The 11th Anniversary of 9/11 | Paul Craig Roberts
..In order to understand the improbability of the government’s explanation of 9/11, it is not necessary to know anything about what force or forces brought down the three World Trade Center buildings, what hit the Pentagon or caused the explosion, the flying skills or lack thereof of the alleged hijackers, whether the airliner crashed in Pennsylvania or was shot down, whether cell phone calls made at the altitudes could be received, or any other debated aspect of the controversy. You only have to know two things...
[Cui bono?]
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What I’ve Learned About US Foreign Policy:
The War Against the Third World, by Frank Dorrel | Aletho News
  There can be little doubt in anyones mind anymore about the role or impact the CIA has had in manipulating world affairs. The following post by Aletho News is ”a 2-hour video compilation featuring 10 segments about CIA covert operations and military interventions since WWII”...

In leaked e-mail exchange, FBI official says NYPD intelligence activities are 'felonious,' by Alex Kane | Mondoweiss
...the full e-mail message “hints at even worse civil liberties violations not yet disclosed.” The senior FBI official also says that the NYPD’s activities would make “[former FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover, COINTEL[PRO], [and the] Red Squads” look like “rank” amateurs.. The NYPD’s intelligence division is responsible for the department’s widespread practice of spying on Muslims in the Northeast with no probable cause. NYPD informants infiltrated mosques, Muslim student groups and Middle Eastern-owned restaurants, eavesdropped on conversations and recorded what they heard in police files...

The Zionist Terror Network, by Mark Weber | Institute for Historical Review
..This booklet documents the background and criminal activities of Jewish Zionist terrorist groups, and especially the Jewish Defense League. Particular emphasis is given here to terror -- including murder -- against "thought criminals" who question the Holocaust story that six million Jews were systematically killed during the Second World War...

Flynt Leverett on Israeli and Iranian Decision-Making | The Race for Iran
...myriad indications coming from Israel suggest that Netanyahu, today, does not have the requisite degree of consensus to order an attack on the Islamic Republic. We have argued before that Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to line up the United States to take on the mission of striking Iran militarily. But the Obama administration is not about to start an overt war against Iran before the U.S. presidential election (a covert war, of course, has been underway for some time). Netanyahu is playing a longer-term game than that. We anticipate that this game will come to a head in 2013—either with a re-elected President Obama or with a new Romney administration—not before November 6, 2012...

SNC is a gang that can’t shoot straight, by Malik Al-Abdeh | Syria in Transition
...The SNC’s fundamental failure is not one of organization but of imagination. The SNC claims to draw legitimacy from the Syrian people. In reality, it sources of legitimacy are external: Arab money and western recognition. For now, Arab money still flows into its coffers but the West has grown impatient and is looking for alternatives. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to meet an SNC delegation in Istanbul last month; she opted to meet with independent activists instead. Recent diplomatic activity points to an incipient consensus in London, Washington, and Paris that encouraging a credible alternative to Assad based around the SNC is a policy that has failed...

US love affair with Israel masks a real history of mistrust, by Jonathan Cook | The National
...Politicians may prefer to express admiration of Israel, and hand over billions of dollars in aid, but the US security establishment has - at least in private - always regarded Israel as an untrustworthy partner. The distrust has been particularly hard to hide in relation to Iran. Mounting pressure from Israel appears to be designed to manoeuvre Washington into supporting an attack on Tehran to stop it supposedly developing a nuclear weapon...

Israel is the Battlegound State | YouTube
[Hoo-yah! Israel uber Alles! Heil Hasbara!]

The Judas Kiss: Politics of Betrayal, by William A. Cook | Palestine Chronicle
..'Nirvana is desire of greed forever ended, anger forever ended, ignorance forever ended, and afflictions forever ended.' - The Connected Discourses of the Budda. The Gospels’ narrative of the betrayal of Jesus encompasses a moral lesson dutifully taught and dutifully ignored. It is eloquent in its simplicity. Jesus as Son of the Father brings truth to all who inhabit this earth, lessons learned through parables and sermons, most especially the Sermon on the Mount and that of the Last Judgment; disciples forgo all to follow Him, to learn the truths he bears; most importantly they learn that Love binds all even to the lowest of humankind...

Canada's Diplomatic Disaster, by Eric Walberg | OpEd News
...Humiliation is indeed the operative word for Canada in particular. The past five years of Conservative rule in Canada under the fiercely pro-Israeli Prime Minister Stephen Harper have brought nothing but disgrace to Canada internationally, and this present move adds further humiliation. As if scripted, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately commended Canada’s decision. With good cause, as it looks suspiciously like a response to a direct Israeli request...

We Are Still at War, by Johnny Barber | Palestine Chronicle
  'We are at War. Somebody is Going to Pay,' said George W. Bush on Sept 11th, 2001. Eleven years later, we are still at war. Bullets, mortars and drones are still extracting payment. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions have paid in full. Children and even those yet to be born will continue to pay for decades to come. On a single day in Iraq last week there were 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilians and wounding another 235...

Eyewitnesses Reveal Daraya Massacre Carried Out By U.S.-Backed Rebels, by Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars
  In an extraordinary account of the Daraya massacre by veteran journalist Robert Fisk, eyewitnesses reveal that it was U.S.-backed FSA rebels and not the Syrian Army who were responsible for the slaughter of 245 men, women and children. The massacre, which took place last weekend, was instantly blamed on President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces by the global media despite video footage from the scene showing victims welcoming the presence of Syrian Army troops and blaming the violence on armed rebels...

Abusing children "part and parcel" of Israeli ideology, says rights defender: Adri Nieuwhof interviews Rifat Kassis | The Electronic Intifada
...As an organization working in the field, and as one that works to monitor and document Israeli violations of Palestinian children’s rights, the information revealed by the Breaking the Silence report is not news to me. But my first impression was — as I often reflect during my work with DCI-Palestine — that these practises do not just affect Palestinian children. Rather, they also affect the Israeli soldiers themselves, as well as Israeli society at large: at the end of the day, these soldiers will return home and deal with their own children or their own siblings as changed men and women...
[Yes, the Israelis too are victims of Zionism, although not in the way they like to tell it.]

The Capital of Palestine: Arab-Free in 2015, by Maath Musleh | Al Akhbar English
  The Israeli Government is racing against time in a bid to put the finishing touches on its plan to annex and Judaize East Jerusalem. Palestinians represent roughly 58 per cent of the residents of East Jerusalem today. The Israeli plans in place aim to decrease the percentage of Palestinians in East Jerusalem to about 10 percent. Israel has been determined to force irreversible facts on ground since day one of the occupation...


Sep 10, 2012


Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity, by Rabbi Brant Rosen | Mondoweiss
..Through my work, I have come to discover increasing numbers of Jews—particularly young Jews—who genuinely seek a home in the Jewish community but cannot countenance the Jewish establishment’s orthodoxy on Israel. I have also met many non-Jews—including Palestinians, interfaith colleagues, and fellow political activists—who constitute a new, exciting, ever-growing community of conscience...

MSF Doctor: At Least Half Of Insurgents Are Foreigners And Jihadis | Moon of Alabama
...Jacques Beres, co-founder of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, returned from Syria on Friday evening after spending two weeks working clandestinely in a hospital in the besieged northern Syrian city. In an interview with Reuters in his central Paris apartment on Saturday, the 71-year-old said that contrary to his previous visits to Homs and Idlib earlier this year about 60 percent of those he had treated this time had been rebel fighters and that at least half of them had been non-Syrian. "It's really something strange to see. They are directly saying that they aren't interested in Bashar al-Assad's fall, but are thinking about how to take power afterwards...

Pink Shrouds Aimed to Draw Attention to Iran Military Site, Analysts Say, by Gareth Porter | Antiwar
  Diplomats from an unidentified country and a Washington research organisation considered close to the International Atomic Energy Agency have alleged in recent weeks that Iran has covered two buildings at a military site to hide a clean-up of evidence of nuclear weapons related testing. But two former intelligence analysts with experience in interpreting satellite photographs of military facilities say the coverings on the two buildings in published images of the site don’t appear to be aimed at hiding anything...

'Egypt in league with Israel on Gaza': interview with Ralph Schoenman | PressTV on YouTube
..The Egyptian Army says it has destroyed 31 Gaza supply tunnels in its recent operation in the Sinai Peninsula. Due to the Israeli blockade, some 1.5 million residents of Gaza are being denied their basic rights, including freedom of movement, the right to a decent standard of living, and proper employment, healthcare, and education...

Contagious Paranoia, by Dr. Paul J Balles | deLiberation
...The U.S. and Israel are acting as paranoid as the Jim Jones cult that led to the murder/suicide of over 900 people. The entire cold war was an expression of national paranoia on the parts of both America and Russia. As soon as both sides in the cold war relaxed, the U.S. started its moves to create paranoia through its threatening activities...

Israel did 9/11: All The Proof In The World | The Information Underground
...It doesn't take a structural engineer to tell you that two 110 story buildings and a 47 story steel skyscraper plummeting to the ground at nearly free-fall speed requires the assistance of explosives. All you need is two eyes that can see and a brain that thinks to come to that sound conclusion. This is why it is of my opinion that more emphasis should be placed on the "who" instead of the "how". It should be obvious to anyone that discovering who did 9/11 is infinitely more important than discovering how they did it...

The Economic Religion of Finance Capital, by Frank Scott | Legalienate
...Philosophers who once claimed that god was dead encountered little resistance since no material evidence could oppose an immaterial charge. But the time for secular and spiritual communities to unite and proclaim that the financial market-god is dead may be at hand, before fanatic faith in this deity of the dollar obliterates us all...

Eastern Limit of Western Power | Roi Tov
...A few days from now, 18 months from the beginning of the Syrian conflict would be commemorated. Back then, it took everybody by surprise. The Syrian president never thought it will break at all; Syria is known for its mighty security forces. Yet, help and mercenaries kept pouring from outside and the rebels survived. In the byzantine reality of the Middle East everybody expects the unexpected. The USA and NATO were probably the most surprised; they didn’t expect Bashar al-Assad to survive for so long...

Missing Links: Hidden Agenda of the Israeli Government | YouTube
The Israeli MOSSAD did 9-11 and recently Israeli security in charge of Japanese nuclear plant prior to the devastating disaster that hit Japan. Japan knows something about Israel and their foreign affairs and how they end up on the Israeli hit list.
Remember the U.S.S. Liberty...


Sep 9, 2012


9/11 Truth will out: The Vancouver Hearings, by Jim Fetzer | Veterans Today
  The array of ongoing attacks on the 9/11 Truth movement has reached astonishing proportions. A “10th anniversary 9/11 Truth ‘Hit Piece’ Roundup” published on 12 September 2011, a year and a day after 9/11, included excerpts from and links to no less than 32 attacks, where the majority emphasize the psychological needs of those who embrace “conspiracy theories” to give meaning, coherence and security to their lives—as though the belief that your government has perpetrated crimes of such magnitude could enhance your sense of security! But logic and reason are not their strong suits...

Chomsky: ‘I support Israel, but…’ | Rehmat's World
  The Jewish-American political analyst, professor Avram Noam Chomsky (born 1928), knows how to cover his personal agenda behind literary smokescreen. That’s what he did in his recent article published at AlterNet on September 3, 2012, entitled ‘Why America and Israel Are the Greatest Threats to Peace‘. His article begins with the statement: “Imagine if Iran – or any other country – did a fraction of what Americans and Israel do at will“. However, after criticizing both the US and Israel for their warmongering policies toward the Islamic Republic – Chomsky drops the Zionist entity from his list of “brutal and repressive regimes” in the region...

Israeli DM: Military Ready to ‘Conquer and Rule’ Gaza Strip, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar
  Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is said to be backing down from his support for an autumn attack on Iran, but is he just going to substitute Gaza? It’s an open question today after Barak openly discussed the idea of attacking. “If the cabinet deems it needed, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) can conquer and rule Gaza,” Barak insisted, praising the military for the 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza though saying he believes the war could have ended 10 days earlier...

Israel’s Nuclear Smuggling, with Grant F. Smith | The Corbett Report
  Grant F. Smith, Research Director for the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy at IRmep.org, joins us to discuss the secret Israeli espionage program that smuggled nuclear materials out of the United States to help start the Israeli nuclear program in the 1960s. We go over the declassified documents tying Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to the smuggling ring, and explore Smith’s book, Divert!: NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the diversion of US weapons grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program...

Obama Finally Talks Drone War, But It's Almost Impossible to Believe Him, by Noah Shachtman | Wired
  President Obama doesn’t like to talk about how he uses drones to kill suspected militants — including American citizens. Explanations about who gets picked for remote-control death and who does the picking are left to underlings and aides. Just a few days ago, for example, Obama blew off a local Cincinnati television reporter who asked the president about his “kill list.” On Wednesday, however, CNN’s Jessica Yellin managed to get Obama to open up, just a little, about his criteria for approving drone attacks. His comments may have been the president’s most extensive so far on robot warfare. They were also total baloney, outside experts say...

The Triumph and Tragedy of Greater Israel, by Henry Siegman | The National Interest
...The question can no longer be whether the current impasse may lead to a one-state outcome; it has already done so. There is also no longer any question whether this government's policies will lead to what can legitimately be called apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders predicted they would. Palestinians live in a one-state reality, deprived of all rights, and enclosed in enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints, separation walls, roadblocks, barbed-wire barriers and a network of “for-Jews-only” highways...

Canada Severs All Ties With Iran, Expels Diplomats, by Jason Ditz | Antiwar
  Much to the delight of Israeli hawks, the Canadian government announced today that it is severing all diplomatic ties with Iran, closing its Tehran embassy and expelling every Iranian diplomat from Canada. Foreign Minister John Baird, detailing the move, condemned Iran as a “threat to global security” and insisted the move was a response to Iran’s hostility toward Israel. Israel has regularly been threatening to attack Iran, though in recent days it is suggested that they are climbing down off that threat. The move was loudly praised by Israeli officials as well as the ADL...
[Oh, Canada! Your moral and diplomatic standing in the world has just plummeted to its nadir. One hopes that the generous support of the "Canadian Friends of Israel" makes it all worthwhile.]

The conversion of Joel Kovel, by Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss
  Because I take Kovel so seriously-- and because the question of conversion is such a fascinating one; consider such influential figures as Heinrich Heine, Annie Dillard, Muriel Spark, and Bob Dylan - I asked if I could interview him about his conversion. We met at his Upper West Side apartment on August 22; and I followed up with a short interview by phone on September 2...

South East China Sea: A Perfect Crisis for the International Crisis Group, by Christopher Black, James Henry Fetzer et al | nsnbc
...The failing of the US/EU economies has required the western military doctrine to be adjusted to a return to nuclear confrontation for the containment of unmanageable military responses to NATO expansionism by Russia and China, combined with low cost mercenary warfare with the aid of Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, in fact any militant or terrorist organization that can be utilized in the creation of national and regional crisis which are created to destabilize nations and to justify aggression as “interventions” under pretexts like human rights, security or the the slogan “responsibility to protect”..

'Teachable moments' loom in Syrian conflict, by Christof Lehmann | Asia Times Online
  After more than 18 months of belligerent action against the government de jure of the Syrian Arab Republic, the regime is still maintaining relative stability and security. A peaceful resolution however, becomes increasingly illusive while the potentially catastrophic regional and global consequences of the failure to broker a peaceful resolution seem to be a harbinger of a return to global barbarism, anarchy and unspeakable human suffering...



Sep 8, 2012

The Democrats’ Jerusalem Arithmetic, by Alison Weir | Counterpunch
  Not often is a political fix so public. The Democratic committee that develops the party’s campaign platform recently failed to include the apparently obligatory “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel” pronouncement. This statement, which is largely untrue and has a number of problems, had been part of previous platforms. Its omission caused an immense brouhaha, and party bigwigs decided that the ongoing Democratic National Convention needed to reinsert it...

UNICEF monitors escalation in Israeli attacks on Palestinian children | Voice of Palestine
  An international report published on Sunday monitored a noticeable escalation in Israeli targeting of Palestinian children over a period of two months. UNICEF said in its report that the Israeli occupation forces killed ten Palestinian children including a girl while 117 were wounded including 4 girls in March and April of 2011. It pointed out that the figures reflected acute rise compared to the months of January and February 2011 when 3 children were killed and 64 were injured...

Parliament Proposes Statue to Tony Blair: A Suggestion, by Felicity Arbuthnot | Palestine Chronicle
...Since this proposed Orwellian tribute to a man that numerous leading international law experts are indeed working to have tried in the Hague will be at the taxpayers expense, the tax payer should surely have some say in the matter. Last year, sculptress May Ayres held an eye watering exhibition of her work at St. John's Church, in London’s Bethnal Green. "God's Wars", was dedicated to the victims of Blair's lies, the broken lives, broken bodies, broken babies, accompanied by chilling depictions of Blair, Negroponte and the worst of deviant military might...

Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts | Sott.net
  The first ever GAO (Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke (pictured to the right), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets...

Two Parties for the One-Percent: Disposable America, by Paul Craig Roberts | Counterpunch
  If political conventions are ranked on a one to ten scale for intelligence, I give the Republican Convention zero and the Democrats one. How can the United States be a superpower when both political parties are unaware of everything that is happening at home and abroad? The Republicans are relying for victory on four years of anti-Obama propaganda and their proprietary programed electronic voting machines...

Palestinians Tortured and Isolated: Incarcerated Inside Israel, by Graham Peebles | Counterpunch
  Detention without trial, the presumption of guilt, denial of family visits, solitary confinement, torture, violent interrogation, and denial of access to appropriate health care, such is the Israeli judicial system and prison confinement experienced by Palestinian men, women and indeed children...

Dumb and dumber, by John Feffer | Asia Times Online
  US President Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the past four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on "smart power" - a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global - has been a smart move politically at home. It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national-security card in this election year. But "smart power" has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself...

The Liberal Way to Run the World: “Improve” or We’ll Kill You, by John Pilger | Global Research
  What is the world’s most powerful and violent “ism”? The question will summon the usual demons, such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged,” because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism...

Perpetual War, by John Scales Avery | Countercurrents
  Because the world spends roughly a trillion dollars each year on armaments, it follows that very many people make their living from war. This is the reason why it is correct to speak of war as a social, political and economic institution, and also one of the main reasons why war persists, although everyone realizes that it is the cause of much of the suffering of humanity. We know that war is madness, but it persists.

Israeli leaders score own goal over non-aligned summit in Iran | Redress Information & Analysis
  Uri Avnery argues that the Israeli premier’s and defence minister’s reactions to the UN and Egyptian leaders’ participation in the Tehran non-aligned summit show their ideological fixations, mental outlook and low intelligence...

Thinking About Revolution, by John Spritzler and Dave Stratman | New Democracy World
..Instead of a British king we have a ruling class of bankers and billionaires who control the government and all the important institutions of society. Despite the electoral circus and other trappings of democracy, the big shots call the tune. Politicians serve them, not us. This dictatorship of the rich has pushed economic inequality to obscene levels, has left more and more Americans unemployed or working at jobs that pay too little, has driven homes into foreclosure, deprived families of adequate medical care, saddled young people with huge student loans, caused environmental disasters like BP in the Gulf, and sent loved ones to kill or be killed in wars based on lies...



Sep 7, 2012

Arabs back Palestinian bid for U.N. non-member status, denounce Syria violence | Al Arabiya
  Arab nations will back a Palestinian plans later this month to seek a non-member status at the United Nations, Arab League Secretary Nabil al-Arabi said on Wednesday. “It has been decided to back the request of Palestine for non-member status at the United Nations because of the difficulty to obtain a full membership, a matter which requires Security Council approval,” Arabi told reporters. On August 4, Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki said president Mahmoud Abbas would make the upgrade request on September 27 during the UN General Assembly...

A Policy of Displacement: Israeli House Demolitions in Gaza and the West Bank | Visualizing Palestine

Morsi in Tehran, by Dan Glazebrook | Counterpunch
...Morsi’s Egypt remains financially dependent on the US, and now also Saudi Arabia. The US famously provides $1.3billion military aid annually, whilst Saudi Arabia has been the only country to provide loans to Egypt – to the tune of $4billion – since last year’s uprising. Meanwhile, the country has been suffering under the double hammer blows of world recession and the loss of tourism. Egypt’s financial stability depends, in the short term at least, on keeping its two backers happy...

What Bibi Wants, by Philip Giraldi | Antiwar
..surely as the swallows are preparing to depart Capistrano, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arriving in New York. It is an annual ritual, with Netanyahu explaining to a skeptical U.N. General Assembly why Israel is not bound by the rules that most other nations observe. Last year the theme was Palestinian statehood, meaning that the Palestinians should not have any such thing until Israel says it’s okay. This year it is all about Iran, with Netanyahu preparing to “tell the nations of the world in a clear voice the truth about the terror regime of Iran which represents the greatest threat to world peace.”..

Obama's Vietnam | The National Interest
..The president and senior staff sally forth with claims of progress in an attempt to conceal a defeat reminiscent of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon in the Vietnam War. Senator George Aiken’s sage advice of 1966 went unheeded: declare victory in Vietnam and leave. Instead, President Obama, like his predecessor, mulishly insisted on putting tens of thousands of American soldiers in harm’s way. He should have remembered that last episode, when his predecessors squandered over $750 billion fighting an enemy we are now defending against China over the South China Sea...

Palestinians slipping deeper into poverty | AlertNet
  The United Nations UNCTAD agency issued a gloomy outlook for the Palestinian economy on Wednesday, arguing that tougher Israeli policies and settlement expansion were pushing the occupied territories and Gaza deeper into poverty. The situation had been aggravated in 2011 by a sharp drop in foreign aid, which for years provided a vital support, dimming any hope for an upswing even in the longer term, a report from the trade and development body said.

Inside the CIA Dossier on Iraq, by Vijay Prashad | Counterpunch
  Last week, Bishop Desmond Tutu was to sit beside former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at the cringingly named Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Tutu, one of the main moral voices in the anti-Apartheid struggle, decided to withdraw. He could not stand to sit next to Blair, or to Tony’s mate, George W. Bush because they had “fabricated the grounds [for war on Iraq] to behave like playground bullies.”..

NAM: Iran's Strategic Diplomatic Victory, by James Petras | Palestine Chronicle
...the NAM meeting highlighted the superiority of Iran’s diplomacy over and against Washington’s bellicose posturing and improvised diversionary tactics. The fact that the meeting took place in Teheran, that Iran was elected chair, that a major part of the NAM agenda and subsequent resolutions coincided with Iran’s democratic foreign policy, highlights Washington’s policy failures and its isolation on issues of major concern to the larger international community. Pandering to the domestic Zionist power configuration has a high cost in the sphere of international politics...

Palestinian Refugees from Syria Lost and 'Betrayed,' by Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle
...There are nearly half a million Palestinian refugees in Syria. Despite all attempts at sparing them the bloody outcomes of the conflict, they have still become embroiled in the fight. Regional powers desperate to gain ground in Syria have used their media to exploit the Palestinian issue, knowing well the sentimental value of the Palestinian narrative within the larger Arab discourse. The outcome has been devastating, and many Palestinians have been on the run for nearly a year and a half. Areas with a concentration of Palestinian refugees are no longer neutral territories. Despite pleas and assurances, Palestinian refugees in Syria remain most vulnerable...

Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars, by Peter Dale Scott | Asia-Pacific Journal
  The most urgent political challenge to the world today is how to prevent the so-called “pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like the 19th-century so-called “pax Britannica” before it, into major global warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” in its final stages, became less and less peaceful, less and less orderly, more and more a naked imposition of belligerent competitive power based on inequality. To define this prevention of war as an achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are above all achievable here at home in America...

America’s Takeover of the United Nations, by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya | Global Research
...The visibly shaken Jeffrey Feltman, who was uncomfortably sitting with Iranian officials in Tehran alongside his new boss Ban Ki-moon, can testify to all this. Feltman is a clear symbol of how contaminated the United Nations has become by the imperialist interests of Washington. The manipulation of the United Nations for imperialist interests, however, goes back a long way. From its inception, the United Nations was meant to facilitate the global influence of the US after the Second World War...

Zio-Nazi group attacks academics critical of Israel, by Khalid Amayreh | Voice of Palestine
  A small supremacist Jewish group is launching a smear campaign against a number of professors and academics on North American campuses for daring to criticize racist Israeli policies against native Palestinians. The group, called Campus Watch and headed by David Horowitz, an extremist Zionist stalwart, has published advertisements inciting to hatred against a number of prominent professors on American campuses...



Sep 6, 2012

Israel says “Rachel made me do it” | Redress Information & Analysis
  Lawrence Davidson argues that behind the Israeli court ruling that Rachel Corrie, the US peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home, lies a culture of pathological racism that considers all Palestinians and their allies as terrorists.. in the name of “national security”, we can justify almost anything, including killing kids in Gaza and torturing people to death in some dungeon, the whereabouts of which is classified, as well as running over a 23-year-old peace activist with a massive bulldozer. That is certainly what the Corrie episode has shown to be the case in Israel...
Read more...

Israel’s Propaganda War on Iran | Roi Tov
...Netanyahu keeps warning of Iran’s aggressiveness and of an imminent war. The justifications change according to the circumstances, yet the mantra seems eternal: “Iran is an existential threat to Israel.” Netanyahu—as his ministers—constantly ignore any assessments showing their claims are false, including the CIA assessments regarding the defensive nature of the Iranian military forces. For so long is Netanyahu shouting “Iran, Iran!” that probably even the most dedicated Zionists are beginning to question the cry...
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US and Israeli Tensions Over Iran Strike Bared, by Gary Leupp | Counterpunch
  It’s been clear for some time that there’s a real difference of opinion between Washington and the Israeli leadership about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. (We should all ask, actually: why does it need to be “dealt with” at all, since the IAEA , U.S. and Israeli intelligence agree that there’s no hard evidence for a military dimension to it? Why must Iran be treated differently than, say, Brazil?)..
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Capitalism’s Vanishing Appeal, by James Rothenberg | Counterpunch
...If you changed every politician in Washington, not a single thing would change because Washington is but a figurehead. It takes its directions from Wall Street. Permanent control of the country rests in the hands of the private sector. Corporations would still run the show, fitting because they own it. All perfectly legal...
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[See also The Corporation]
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An Israeli strike won’t delay Iran’s nuclear weapons program - it will start it, by Yousaf Butt | Christian Science Monitor
...While Iran’s ongoing nuclear enrichment program could be used to gather the material needed for a bomb, there is no definitive evidence that Iran has kicked off such a weaponization effort. The one thing that would almost surely launch an Iranian drive to weaponize, however, would be an Israeli strike...
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The Hague will always be a tool of the West, by Patrick Hayes | Spiked
...‘How is it possible that we have a situation where every indicted individual at the ICC is African and every investigation is, guess where, Africa? The ICC was set up to try those lesser breeds without the law – the Africans. This is the same civilising mission from the late nineteenth century and I find it, as a black man, totally objectionable.’..
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Sep 5, 2012


Entangled With Israel, by Philip Giraldi | The American Conservative
  Israel’s attempt to steer American foreign policy has been nowhere more evident than in the sustained campaign to move the United States in the direction of war with Iran, a war that serves no American interest unless one believes that Tehran is willing to spend billions of dollars to develop a nuclear weapon only to hand off the result to a terrorist group...
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Radio Free Palestine: A wake up call, by Stuart Littlewood | deLiberation
  Irrepressible Palestinian children… But smiles of happiness may turn to tears of frustration when they grow up to find their dreams dashed in a country ravaged by decades of military occupation… where lands and resources have been stolen, education curtailed, freedom cancelled and travel made almost impossible...
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The 9/11 Reader: The September 11, 2001 Terror Attacks. edited by Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research
..Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11. September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society.. Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” were set in motion. 9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”. September 11, 2001 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism”, used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest...
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Peace With The Usurper: The Road To Perdition, by Daniel Mabsout | deLiberation
...How did the Palestinians who are the oppressed people by excellence, victims of the world order, turn into hired thugs by this same world order that has usurped their country, killed their children and is violating every minute their rights, supplying their enemy daily with money and weapons? How have they been brainwashed into fighting against the same people and rulers who are defending their rights and siding with them and promoting their cause? How did they turn enemies of their own selves?..
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Obama Denies Deal With Iran: Won’t Back Israeli Strike if Iran Steers Clear of US Assets in Persian Gulf, by John Glaser | Antiwar
...According to the report, the Obama administration used covert channels through two European countries to confirm to Iran that Washington will not participate in any Israeli attack, so long as Iran does not choose to react to such an attack by striking US military bases or interests in the Persian Gulf...
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The "Only in America Myth,"by Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America
  "Only in America" is a refrain heard time and again in this country's political discourse. According to both Democrats and Republicans, the United States is a singular nation: one in which anyone can achieve anything if you have a dream and the will to work hard; a place wherein upward mobility is assumed and someone born into crushing poverty and brutal socioeconomic conditions can reach the highest levels of wealth, success and power by sheer grit and determination. Obviously the reality in this exceptional nation of ours is quite different...
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Price tag vandals attack Latrun Monastery; set fire to door and spray paint 'Jesus is a monkey,' by Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss
...The monks appeared very offended by the incident. "I know there is some tension, but I don't understand why it has to do with us," said Father Louie. "We're Christians and we have nothing to do with it. We try to do everything with love. We are saddened by this incident. It's a shame that some people are unwilling to live with and accept people who are different."..
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Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals | TBIJ
...research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children. A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts. Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama...
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Shunning Evil: Tutu Sets Example in Call for Blair and Bush Indictments | Chris Floyd
  Archbishop Desmond Tutu refused to attend a conference last week for a very good reason – he did not want to be publicly associated with a war criminal. That war criminal was Tony Blair, who had been paid his usual whopping fee ($238,000 in this case) to deliver his usual sanctimonious blather at a South African conference on “leadership.” Tutu – who was speaking for no fee – withdrew from the meeting when he heard Blair was coming...
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California passes resolution defining criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, by Tom Carter | Global Research
  Last month, the California State Assembly passed a resolution urging state educational institutions to more aggressively crack down on criticism of the State of Israel on campuses, which the resolution defines as “anti-Semitism.” The anti-democratic resolution is the latest step in the broader campaign to stifle and suppress dissent on California’s increasingly volatile campuses...
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On Trial at the Doorstep of the UN: The Crimes Behind Israel’s Crimes, by Sherry Wolf | Counterpunch
  Last Friday, Palestinian activist Mohammed Khatib, dubbed “a modern-day Gandhi” by the LA Times, was beaten by Israeli armed forces at a peaceful protest. A leader of popular resistance in the West Bank town of Bil’in, Khatib lives by the credo: “Nonviolence is our most powerful weapon.” That perhaps, along with global exposure of the documented human rights abuses and recognized violations of international law by the state of Israel and its collaborators. In 2009, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine was founded to do exactly that...
[I guess NYC was a better choice than California]
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No Accountability for Torturers, by Marjorie Cohn | Common Dreams
  The Obama administration has closed the books on prosecutions of those who violated our laws by authorizing and conducting the torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that his office would investigate only two incidents, in which CIA interrogations ended in deaths. He said the Justice Department “has determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted.” With that decision, Holder conferred amnesty on countless Bush officials, lawyers and interrogators who set and carried out a policy of cruel treatment...
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Sep 4, 2012

Palestinian Legislative Council Elections: A Different Point of View, by Haidar Eid | Palestine Chronicle
...The democratic alternative is one that reflects the collective will of the Palestinian people. This alternative lies in elections to the Palestinian National Council (PNC), after reconstructing the PLO on the basis of true democracy to ensure genuine representation of all national and Islamic factions. PNC elections will ensure representation of the Diaspora away from the mentality of false independence cultivated under an oppressive occupier. These elections can bring the Palestinian people closer to self-determination, as defined by international law, while restoring their legitimate right to multiple forms of resistance...
[Haidar publishes the One Democratic State – Gaza website; he’s one of many Palestinian heroes and close to my heart.]

Gabi Baramki: Boundless giving, undefeatable spirit | PACBI
  Days before he departed, Gabi asked his life companion, Mrs. Haifa Baramki, to read for him the latest email from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), so he could contribute to the discussion and share his views regarding a letter PACBI was drafting to encourage BDS campaigners in South African Universities to intensify their efforts. We in PACBI’s Steering Committee were astonished to see Gabi’s timely answer to the email! How could anyone in the intensive care unit, barely clinging on to his life, keep on thinking about resistance and his contribution to the national struggle till his last breath?..

At This Checkpoint They Operate Only According to Orders, by Tamar Fleishman | Palestine Chronicle
...At the time of the prayer at El-Aqsa a young Imam stepped on an improvised stage, he held a prayer before the crowd, after which they stood in long straight lines and replied with their own prayer, they raised their hands upward and knelt on the ground, some on prayer mats and others on a piece of carton or random pages from a newspaper. And before the armed soldiers some young Palestinians assembled a choir, they raised their arms and together repeatedly yelled: "In our millions we shall go to Al-Aqsa, even if we are killed we shall go.."
[The Zionists have managed to pervert the Arabic word for “martyr” into the imperialist canard “terrorist.” This may fool brainwashed Americans, but not the Muslims or other decent people, including Israelis like Tamar Fleishman.]

Anne Frank and Rachel Corrie: a Legacy of Two Martyrs, by Jennifer Loewenstein | Counterpunch
...I believe she would have been mortified by the way her own Diary and the death she was subjected to were used as moral justifications for the actions of a state defined by blood and soil, and by the way her own popularity was buoyed by an ideology she would most probably have found repugnant and contrary to the lessons she herself had learned and the horror she experienced. I believe Anne Frank would have agreed with Rachel’s mother, Cindy, who – when asked if she thought Rachel should have moved away from the bulldozer –replied, “I don’t think that Rachel should have moved. I think we should all have been standing there with her.”..

Is Palestine a lost cause? | Redress Information & Analysis
  Alan Hart outlines a strategy for saving the Palestinian cause from extinction: making Israel accountable for its occupation by dissolving the quisling Palestinian Authority and exposing Zionism’s propaganda, and mobilizing Palestinians everywhere to engage by peaceful and democratic means in the struggle to end the Zionization of their homeland...

NAM: Towards Breaking Western Stranglehold of Power, by Ismail Salami | Palestine Chronicle
  Despite the West's deliberate inattention to and willful disregard for Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Tehran, there is no denying the fact that the summit has occasioned extreme chagrin in Washington and Israel and that dialogue among civilizations in achieving global peace is still a powerful feasibility...

After Zionism: Only a One State Solution is Possible, by Karen Dabrowska | Alresalah Press
  Time has run out for the two-state solution because of the unending and permanent Jewish colonization of Palestinian land. That is the conclusion of Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor the authors of After Zionism, which brings together some of the world’s leading thinkers on the Middle East question to dissect the century-long conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians and to explore possible forms of the one state solution...

Palestine is Drying Up Before Our Eyes, by Danny Muller | Counterpunch
...This water catastrophe — this other type of nakba — is definitively the result of Israel’s apartheid policies that are being conducted continuously, evident in the waterborne disease spreading throughout Palestinian refugee camps that are perhaps not an accident, an inconvenient oversight. Perhaps they are part of the continuing collateral damage of a so-called unsolvable crisis that in person, feels much more like the combination of a big lie and a large land grab...

Iranian Soft Power, Lakhdar Brahimi, and the Prospects for Peace in Syria | The Race for Iran
  CNN’s Nicole Dow featured Hillary in an interview on “Iran’s Soft Power Messaging” last week in connection with the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran. Hillary also appeared on Al Jazeera over the weekend to talk about the new United Nations/Arab League envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, and the prospects for progress toward resolving the conflict there. Her two interviews bring together a number of important points about Iranian foreign policy and the requirements for a political settlement in Syria...

Implementing the Feltman Project: Is the Syrian Crisis Being Leveraged to Weaken Hezbollah? by Franklin Lamb | Counterpunch
...Hezbollah’s internal and external opponents are reportedly seeking a quick “modernizing” of the current airport at Kleit near Sunni Akkar close to Tripoli in North Lebanon. According to one Member of Parliament, “The Americans and some internal sides had already “dusted off” the file of the revival of the Sunni Kleiat Airport.” One of its intended uses is expected to house international troops and American forces for “training, storage and forward supply.”..

The New Normal: Police State, by David Rovics | Songwriter's Notebook
  I'm pretty sure I have just experienced the most disproportionate reaction to a protest in a supposedly democratic society ever, at least since labor organizer Mother Jones faced off all by herself with one hundred members of the National Guard around a century ago. As someone who has personally been fairly actively attending protests since the early 1980's, and as a student of the history of social movements that happened before my time as well, it seems difficult to put what just happened in Florida into some kind of relevant context...

Delaying Apocalypse: Iran Announces Missile Drones | Roi Tov
  There aren’t many reasons for praising the violent epoch we live in; the most violent states in human history claim being egalitarian and kind, while in fact they persecute everybody daring to efficiently criticize them. Their violent presidents receive Peace Nobel Prizes and congratulate each other by shaking their bloody hands. Under this scary reality, even Genghis Khan is beginning to look like an enlightened leader worth of being remembered fondly; at least he attacked openly and frontwards as honorable men do...



Sep 3, 2012

NATO Terrorists to Target Syria's Civilian Airports, by Tony Cartalucci | Land Destroyer
  With dozens of dedicated military airbases and airfields to choose from, NATO-backed terrorists have decided instead to target Syria's two main civilian airports, not because of military or defensive objectives, but to terrorize Syria's population, undermine the government politically, and paralyze civilian infrastructure. This unconscionable act of blatant terrorism will have no impact on Syria's security operations and is yet another demonstration of the absolute illegitimacy of both the so-called "Free Syrian Army" and their Western sponsors...

Understanding the IAEA inspection standards for Iran | Iran Affairs
  Some people have asked so let me make this stuff about "undeclared nuclear material" in Iran clear: The Non Proliferation Treaty - which Iran signed in 1968 - has three "pillars". First...

FP 50 Inadvertently Reveals Israel’s Dominance of GOP | The Passionate Attachment
...Although only about 20% of American Jews supported the GOP in 2008, the FP 50 features as many as 20 Jewish partisans of Israel, including Weekly Standard editor William Kristol (#2), Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan (#4), and casino mogul and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson (#9) who make its top 10 most powerful Republicans on foreign policy. Also at number 8 is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the stridently pro-Israel chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee...

The Emperor Has No Clothes, by Paul Balles | Information Clearing House
...“There are now some 60,000 Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) operatives, whom the president can dispatch to kill without seeking congressional approval or informing the public.” No one, apart from the rulers, can really know how many military bases the US has around the world. The estimates range from 700 to more than 1,000 in about 130 countries. The Department of Defense has been called a charade--like the emperor who has no clothes--as there's nothing to defend against and no threat of invasion. There's always a slogan, however, to keep the population under control...

The Mirage of Our Lives: book review by Chris Hedges | Truthdig
  Dave Eggers’ gem of a book, “A Hologram for the King,” is a parable about the decadence, fragility and heartlessness of late, decayed corporate capitalism. It is about the small, largely colorless men and women who serve as managers in our suicidal outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and the methodical breaking of labor unions. It is about the lie of globalization, a lie that impoverishes us all to increase corporate profits...

The Strange Case of Gwenyth Todd & the Foiling of War on Iran, by Juan Cole | Informed Comment
  In spring of 2007, someone in the Bush administration (unindicted co-conspirator Richard Bruce Cheney? Neocons?) Sends uber hawk Vice Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff to Oil Gulf with instructions to provoke a war with Iran. He allegedly toys with challenging Iran’s claim to half of the Shatt al-Arab. He certainly decided abruptly to bring two aircraft carriers to the Gulf, in hopes of provoking Iran into doing something stupid, and without telling the State Department or the White House...

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, by Greg Palast | Investigative Reporter
  If you're not sick and outraged and ready to vomit, then don't talk to me. When I see a cruel bucket of garbage and winky-winky racism and bullshit and venom like Paul Ryan who talks to America like he's some kind of Boy Scout, I want a gun, or a TV network where I can tell the truth or a giant washing machine to dunk America and rinse off the crud of lies and pure manipulative evil that they're feeding us...

America Planning for a Post-Israel Middle East? by Franklin Lamb | Al Manar
...So what is all the fuss about? It’s a paper entitled: Preparing For A Post Israel Middle East, an 82 page analysis that concludes that the American national interest in fundamentally at odds with that of Zionist Israel. The authors concludes that Israel is currently the greatest threat to US national interests because its nature and actions prevent normal US relations with Arab and Muslim countries and, to a growing degree, the wider international community. The study was commissioned by the US Intelligence Community comprising 16 American intelligence agencies...

Tutu Says Bush and Blair Should Face Court Over Iraq | NYT
  The Nobel laureate Desmond M. Tutu called Sunday for former President George W. Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to face prosecution at the International Criminal Court for their role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Archbishop Tutu, the Anglican archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, wrote in the British newspaper The Observer that the two former leaders should be made to “answer for their actions.”..

Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon, by Kelley Vlahos | The American Conservative
  It was 2007, the shimmery dawn of the group think experiment we now call the mass COIN (counterinsurgency) delusion. Nagl’s boss, Gen. David Petraeus, Washington’s newest demigod, had convinced everyone that his Surge Strategy could tame the wild disaster that had become the Iraq War. Nagl, who had positioned himself at Petraeus’s elbow to sell that formula, was now sitting in full dress uniform, his hair in regulation “high and tight,” whacking nimbly at the pathetic softballs lobbed by Jon Stewart who was being embarrassingly — and uncharacteristically — deferential to his decorated guest...



Sep 2, 2012

Obama's Logic of War, by Sheldon Richman | FFF
...For more than a decade, American and Israeli belligerents have warned in dire tones that an Iranian bomb is just a few years away. Yet Iran’s uranium, which is under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has not been enriched to weapons grade. Iran complies with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran insists its nuclear research is for electricity and medicine, and no one has hard evidence to the contrary. Moreover, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei for years has said that Islam forbids possession of nuclear weapons...

Dempsey: War On Iran Would Be Illegal | Moon of Alabama
  The U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, has always cautioned against a go-it-alone approach, but he appeared to up the ante this week by saying Washington did not want to be blamed for any Israeli initiative. "I don't want to be complicit if they (Israel) choose to do it," Dempsey was quoted as saying by Britain's Guardian newspaper on Friday, suggesting that he would view an Israeli attack as reprehensible or illegal.. An attack on Iran, by Israel alone or by some U.S. led gang, would indeed be highly illegal. It would a war of aggression and thereby a supreme crime...

The 'Arab Spring' and other American seasons, by Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera English
...the uprisings in the Arab world have been protesting the effects of neoliberalism which increased impoverishment of the poor and middle classes and the disappearance of the social net that protected some of them in previous decades, censorship and control of the media, the unpopular alliances with Israel by the regimes as well as US sponsorship and training of these repressive Arab dictatorships in most Arab countries, and lack of official solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and the continued lack of accountability and representativity...

Sibel Edmonds on Lew Rockwell Show | YouTube
  Sibel Edmonds talks to Lew about the government's attempts to stop her from telling the truth...

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, by Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
...this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time...

Venezuela’s Oil Refinery Blaze: Seven Good Reasons to Suspect Sabotage | James Petras
..Immediately following the explosion and fire, on script, all the mass media in the US and Great Britain, and the right wing Venezuelan opposition launched a blanket condemnation of the government as the perpetrator of the disaster accusing it of “gross negligence” and “under-investment” in safety standards. Yet there are strong reasons to reject these self-serving accusations and to formulate a more plausible hypothesis, namely that the explosion was an act of sabotage, planned and executed by a clandestine group of terrorist specialists acting on behalf of the US government. There are powerful arguments to sustain and pursue this line of inquiry...

Swindler’s List: A Brief Look at the Holocaust Reparations Racket, by Richard Edmondson | deLiberation
...Few people—or at any rate few who aren’t Jewish, or who don’t make a regular habit of reading the Jewish press—would guess that today, fully 67 years after the war, Germany continues to pay reparations to Jews, or that the benefits doled out keep going up every year, rather than down. But this is indeed the case...

From Syria to Palestine: A Shift in Focus? by Immanuel Wallerstein | Middle East Online
  It seems at least a good guess that, by 2013, Egypt will have muted the worldwide discussion about Syria and achieved its replacement with a worldwide discussion about Palestine. The Israelis will be deeply unhappy. The Saudis will find themselves sidelined and therefore they will need to assert much more vigorously their own pro-Palestine credentials...

IAEA Report Shows Iran Reduced Its Breakout Capacity, by Gareth Porter | Inter Press Service
  The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report made public Thursday reveals that Iran has actually reduced the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium available for any possible “breakout” to weapons grade enrichment over the last three months rather than increasing it. Contrary to the impression conveyed by most news media coverage, the report provides new evidence that Iran’s enrichment strategy is aimed at enhancing its bargaining position in negotiations with the United States rather than amassing such a breakout capability...

Israeli Logic: 'Iranian diplomatic successes legitimize IDF strike' | Jerusalem Post
  An Israeli military strike has been granted increased legitimacy due to the events of the past week, former minister Tzachi Hanegbi said Saturday at a cultural event in Kiryat Motzkin. Putting a positive spin on what can be considered Iranian diplomatic victories in the past week - the country's successful hosting of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran and its continued expansion of an illicit nuclear program as detailed by a new IAEA report - Hanegbi said that the possibility of a military strike could actually have been strengthened...

Manufacturing Dissent
  Manufacturing Dissent is a documentary about the psychological warfare by the media and political establishment of the west and their allies aimed at facilitating the US, European and Israeli agenda of getting rid of the current Syrian government. It demonstrates how the media has directly contributed to the bloodshed in Syria. The documentary deconstructs the main allegations those actors have presented, namely that the Syrian government was systematically repressing peaceful protests and that it has lost legitimacy...


Sep 1, 2012


Morsi trip marks China's rise in Middle East, by Brendan O'Reilly | Asia Times Online
...Currently, the dominant foreign investors in Egypt are Saudi Arabia and the United States. Beyond traditional investments, the latter currently bankrolls the Egyptian government to the tune of about US$2 billion a year - $1.4 billion of which goes to the military. This money comes with strings attached - especially regarding Egyptian policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Chinese investments could counterbalance US influence and help Morsi steer an independent foreign policy more in line with the expectations of the Egyptian electorate...
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Will the Chosen People and the Exceptional People Go Down Together?: Is There a Way Beyond Israeli Madness? by John Grant | Counterpunch
...the Israeli narcissistic and arrogant mindset would benefit from a little Buddhist detachment, more of the posture that sees the world not of separate individual selves and egos but of human beings as part of a larger flow of life. The Buddhists call the self-obsessed, separatist state-of-mind that Israel thrives on and defends with weapons as “the illusory self.” “Once one identifies with a permanent self-concept, the pride and craving adhering to this become the pivot from which an egocentric world arises,” writes Gay Watson, a psychotherapist attuned to Buddhism...
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Independent nations must move toward New World Order: Jean Bricmont interviewed by Kourosh Ziabari | Veterans Today
...the world is becoming multipolar, whether one likes it or not. I see at least two dangers: that the decline of the U.S. will produce some crazy reaction, leading to war, or that the collapse of the American empire creates chaos, a bit like the collapse of the Roman Empire did. It is the responsibility of the Non-Aligned Movement and the BRICS countries to insure an orderly transition towards a really new world order...
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The Blind And The Seeing And Who Leads Who, by Daniel Mabsout | deLiberation
...The one party rule, or the economic difficulties, or the corruption of some Syrian officials, does not mean that we should kill the patient. These are all curable diseases that could be dealt with and- even if they are not dealt with – they present a condition that is common to most countries- not only restricted to Syria – and that does not require an open heart surgery which is threatening to the life of the patient. In Syria , we started up asking for some reforms and we ended up destroying a whole country. We ended up with massacres and slaughter and disintegration of a society and a country...
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Morsi delivers his calling card, by Pepe Escobar | Asia Times Online
...Tampa-Tehran. Talk about the ultimate snapshot of the current geopolitical divide. On one side, the 1% crowd yelling for blood - be it from Barack Obama or from assorted Muslims. On the other side, the bulk of the real "international community", practically the whole global South (including observers such as China, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico) refusing to bend over to imperial military/financial diktats. Reaffirming its impeccable journalistic credentials, US corporate media dismisses it all as just "a Third World jamboree"..
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Interview with Franklin Lamb: NATO caught sending 150 Tons of Weapons to Al-Qaeda and Terrorist Extremists in Syria! | RT on YouTube

A Profile in Treason, by Ariadna Theokopoulos | deLiberation
  Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, whom Alan Hart called the “Zionist lobby’s First Lady” and “Zionist lobby’s chief stooge,” provides an emblematic case study of a sayan in a high position of power in the American government who works to further Israel’s and jewish power’s interests not only in disregard of but against the interests of the American people...
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No Right to Exist: the Corrie Verdict and the Jewish State’s Belligerence, by Richard Edmondson | Uprooted Palestinians
  Will President Obama summon his courage and utter a timid peep of protest at the Israeli court’s ruling in the Rachel Corrie case? As I write this it has been about 13 hours since the verdict was announced, and so far we’ve heard nothing. And my guess is we won’t. In case you haven’t heard, the Haifa District Court has come to the conclusion that the Israeli military is not in any way liable for the death of 23-year-old Rachel, who was crushed beneath a Caterpillar bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier on March 16, 2003. Further, while allowing that her death was “regrettable,” Judge Oded Gershon asserted his view that Rachel, and Rachel alone, is to blame for what happened...
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"Bashar must die!": The Brahimi Plan, by Thierry Meyssan | Information Clearing House
In the aftermath of the second Russian-Chinese veto which formally prohibited foreign intervention in Syria on February 4, the West feigned seeking peace while actively organizing a vast secret war. On the diplomatic front, they appeared to accept the Lavrov-Annan Plan, even as these same countries were facilitating the movement into Syria of tens of thousands of mercenaries and while UN Observers were escorting the leaders of the Free Syrian Army to get them through the roadblocks...
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Romney’s Key in Israeli Attack on Iran | Roi Tov
...we are not in the 1950s; Mossad cannot recreate its Unit 131—the one active in the Lavon Affair—and attack American targets while disguised as Iranians; at least not easily so. Israel may have lost that operational power from the past, but nowadays it owns mightier weapons. Netanyahu’s support of Romney is in part result of their personal friendship forged back in 1976. It is also the result of similar worldviews; otherwise Romney wouldn’t have been so unconditionally supportive of Israel. However, there is more than that in this love story...
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Israel’s underemployed foreign minister seeks attention through mischief | Redress Information & Analysis
  Uri Avnery argues that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s bizarre letter to the Middle East “Quartet”, in which he accused the Palestinian Authority of “diplomatic terrorism”, is a symptom of an attention-seeking disorder rooted in the fact that Lieberman is underemployed...
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The Christian Right vs. Deism: The Age of Unreason, by Robert Hunziker | Counterpunch
  The reign of capitalism is now a worldwide phenomenon, achieving a pinnacle of influence that dominates politics and societal behaviour. Never before throughout the history of humankind has one principle of socio/economic theory had such profound impact on the world, rivaling the impact of the fabulous Age of Enlightenment. However, whereas the Age of Enlightenment led to major positives, significant progress for all of humankind, the current stage of U.S. capitalistic democracy is sputtering and regressing into darkness, similar to the dark cloud the Napoleonic Wars cast over the Age of Enlightenment...
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Why the Neocon Clamor For Intervention in Syria Is About Israeli Regional Dominance, by Mitchell Plitnick | Alternet
  As fighting in Syria continues to rage, the Obama administration's wait-and-see approach to the conflict is coming under increasing assault. Not coincidentally, the advocates for US intervention in Syria are represented by a coalition of the same strange bedfellows that pushed for an invasion of Iraq a decade ago: neoconservatives and liberal hawks. And, like the Iraqi misadventure, their calls are guided by misconceptions, a lack of understanding of the region and a blurring of US, global political and Israeli interests...
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The remapping of the Middle East: Claudio Gallo interviews Jeremy Salt | Asia Times Online
...What we are witnessing behind the immediate scenes of horror in Syria is the most comprehensive attempt to reshape the Middle East since World War I. The Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 set out the geostrategic parameters of the modern Middle East but the model no longer works for the imperial/post-imperial powers and their regional allies...
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