The Corner Report

Second double veto of Syria resolution draws condemnation from rights groups and US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, exercising her well-honed diplomatic skills, calls it "unforgivable".

The vote came a day after activists reported the deaths of more than 200 people in an army assault on Homs [AFP]

Russia and China have vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government's deadly crackdown on protests for the second time.

Thirteen countries on Saturday voted for the resolution proposed by European and Arab nations to give strong backing to the Arab League's plan to end the crackdown.

But Russia and China made a repeat of their rare double veto carried out on October 5.

The move was immediately condemned by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) as "diplomatic cover" for the Syrian government.

Susan Rice, the company she keeps.

In a statement, the rights group said: "Vetoes by Russia and China are not only a slap in the face of the Arab League, they are also a betrayal of the Syrian people."

The HRW statement continued: "The death toll had more than doubled in the last four months, and the risk is high that the Assad regime will see this double veto as a green light for even more violence."

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Haaretz

Israel Defense Forces claimed woman wounded by rock thrown by protesters in village of Nabi Saleh, while Palestinian sources said she was hit by grenade; IDF says incident now under "investigation."

By Gili Cohen and Nir Hasson Tags: West Bank IDF

Protesters from the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh released video footage on Saturday showing that the French woman wounded during the weekly protest on Friday was hit by an Israel Defense Forces gas grenade

Palestinian sources reported on Friday that the French citizen was seriously wounded on Friday after being hit by a gas grenade. According to the reports, the grenade was fired at a demonstration by IDF forces. The French woman was taken to the hospital.

Nabi Saleh - AP - December 2, 2011, An Israeli border policeman fires tear gas at Palestinian protesters during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh near Ramallah, Friday.

The IDF spokesperson published a statement on Friday, however, saying that the woman was wounded by rocks that were thrown by other protesters.

“A border police officer and a French citizen were lightly wounded by rocks that were thrown at them during a disturbance of the peace,” the statement said.

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By Felicity Arbuthnot

'... the enduring power of our moral example, America is back.' -- President Obama, State of the Union address, 24 January 2012

First the world was sold imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with General Colin Powell, at the United Nations in February 2003, asserting:

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

Now it seems the world is sold a withdrawal from Iraq which was not quite what it seemed as presented by the Panetta-Obama-fest in the Baghdad, Fort Bragg speeches of just six weeks ago. At Fort Bragg: “The war in Iraq will soon belong to history …” said the President.

Well, not quite.

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By Eric Walberg – Cairo

The Third Annual BDS Conference opened 17 December at Hebron's Children's Happiness Centre, 'to expand Palestinian civil society's active implementation of BDS that is deeply rooted in the Palestinian struggle.' European BNC coordinator Michael Deas affirmed, 'BDS is now the main framework for solidarity. We are very close to closing the European market to Israel.'

A boycott bombshell in January was dropped by an 11th-grade American Jewish teenager, Jesse Lieberfeld, who won Dietrich College’s 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr Writing Award for his essay about his moral awakening when he realised his American Jewish culture was unavoidably identified with supporting Israel.

“I once belonged to a wonderful religion,” says young Jesse. “I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. ‘Genocide’ almost seemed the more appropriate term... Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides... I felt horrified at the realisation that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists.” Finally, at the synagogue, he asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” and was told by the rabbi, “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it? But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” “I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back.” When American youth like Jesse are forced to give up being Jewish because of Israeli crimes, it cannot be long before Israel crumbles under the weight of its accumulated crimes.

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Hanin Zoabi, a well-known Palestinian civil rights leader. (Xinhuanet)

By Ramzy Baroud

In a recent article, columnist Yaniv Halili described British author Ben White as 'anti-Semitic'. He also denounced Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi for writing a forward to White's latest book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy.

Those of us who can see through such distorted thinking know that White is a principled writer who has never displayed a shred of racism in his work. Zoabi is very well-known civil rights leader with a long-standing reputation of courage and poise.

How could anti-racist endeavors themselves become the subject of accusation by Halili and others like him?

It goes without saying there should be no room for any racist discourse - Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or any other - in the Palestine solidarity movement, which aims at achieving long-denied justice and rights for the Palestinian people. A racist discourse is predicated on racial supremacy, which is exactly what Palestinians are resisting in Israel and the occupied territories.

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Israel's propaganda machine carefully chooses its words to assert illegal ownership over Jerusalem and Palestine.

Israel maintains only "administrative control" over Jerusalem - illustrated by the fact that embassies, even the US embassy, are in Tel Aviv - although the government assert they "possess" the city [GALLO/GETTY]

The words which people use, often unconsciously, can have a critical impact upon the thoughts and attitudes of those who speak and write, as well as those who listen and read. Dangerously misleading terminology remains a major obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

It is normal practice for parties to a dispute to use terminology which favours them. In this regard, Israel has been spectacularly successful in imposing its terminology not simply on Israeli consciousness and American usage but even on many Arab parties and commentators. It has done so not simply in obvious ways like use of the terms "terrorism", "security", "Eretz Israel" or "Judea and Samaria" but also in more subtle ways which have had and continue to have a profound negative impact on perceptions of legal realities and other matters of substance.

The current initiative by Palestine to upgrade its status at the United Nations from "observer entity" to member state or, temporarily failing that, "observer state" is commonly referred to, by both supporters and opponents of this initiative, as an effort to "achieve statehood" or "recognition of statehood" through the United Nations. It is nothing of the sort.

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By Gulamhusein Abba

“The conflict is due to Jewish nationalism- Zionism, which pre-dates
the holocaust ….. my relatives who were murdered by the Nazis
did not die to give cover to Zionist crimes in Palestine, and did not die
to give him (Lerner) his ridiculous argument” ….Rich Siegel

Rabbi Michael Lerner's book discussion event on January 22 for his new book, "Embracing Israel/Palestine” went horribly wrong when it took a completely unexpected and shocking turn near the end.

Sponsored by Riverside Church Israel/PalestineTask Force, and Co-Sponsored by: Brooklyn For Peace, Jewish Voice For Peace,Tree of Life Education Fund, NY, Friends of Sabeel, North America, NY, and The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, USA, it was meant to be a dialogue between Rabbi Lerner and David Wildman, with a Special appearance by Rich Siegel, a former Zionist turned a peace activist, singing songs from his new CD “The Way to Peace”.

Everything went smoothly as planned. Rich sang one of his songs. Rabbi Lerner and David Wildman discussed the book and the topics it dealt with.

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By Sam Bahour

The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting--a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed.

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Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich (L) and Mitt Romney
US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has once again defended his statement about Palestinians being an “invented” people amid a wide-scale anti-Palestinian campaign by American presidential candidates.

During a debate in Florida on Thursday night, Gingrich reiterated his earlier comment on Palestinians and said,"It was technically an invention of the late 1970s," adding, "Prior to that they were Arabs."

Last month, Gingrich claimed that "we have had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community."

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The struggle of the Palestinians is a struggle against Zionism.

By Tariq Shadid

The essence of the Palestinian struggle is the battle against Zionism. It is a battle against its racism, against its murderous war crimes, against its insatiable territorial hunger, against its disdain for non-Jewish human rights, and against its devoted attempts to destroy Palestinian national identity. As voices of normalization are on the rise, and social media is invaded by paid pro-Zionist bloggers, there is an increased need for anti-Zionists to draw attention to the crimes committed by 'Israel', and to speak up against the ongoing media silence and the apologist activities of those misleadingly portraying themselves as 'peace doves'. Let us first look briefly at the history of the anti-Zionist struggle, and then see where we stand today.

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US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Five faculty from U.S. universities who recently completed a week-long visit to Occupied Palestine and Israel are calling on academic colleagues everywhere to support the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).

The professors, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan University; Robin D. G. Kelley, University of California Los Angeles; Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University; Nikihl Pal Singh, New York University, and Neferti Tadiar, Barnard College/Columbia University met with Palestinian scholars, university administrators, citizens, activists, and officials in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Haifa. They also visited the 5,000 person Aida Refugee Camp near Bethlehem.

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Media speak of right, left, center .. (Creative Commons)

By Ramzy Baroud

Regardless of who may rule Israel, little change ever occurs in the country's foreign policy. Winning parties remain obsessed with demographics and retaining absolute military dominance. They also remain unfailingly focused on their quest to initiate racist laws against non-Jewish residents of the state, and continue to hone the art of speaking of peace, while actually maintaining a permanent state of war.

Every few years the media become captivated by Israeli democracy. Commentators speak of right, left, center, and anything in between. Despite Israeli elections still being a year and a half away, media pundits are already discussing possible outcomes of the vote against the peace process, economic reforms, social equality, and so on.

In a recent article, Israeli columnist Uri Avnery decried the fact that the main opposition to the right-wing parties — “the Likud, the Lieberman party and various ultra-nationalist, pro-settlement and religious factions” — is no other than the center-left Kadima. The party, led by the “incompetent” Tzipi Livni, is allegedly in “shambles.” Moreover, left parties, such as Labor and Meretz, are not expected to pose a real threat to the right party conglomerate, despite their temporary rise in the polls.

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Another child detained. (Tamar Fleishman)

By Tamar Fleishman – The West Bank

'This place is the carbuncle on the ass of the occupation,' said Dalit Baum as the gates of Ofer prison closed behind us.

The Palestinian residents of the West Bank, who had been living under occupation for over forty years and are deprived of their basic rights, are brought to justice in military courts. This entire legal system- investigators, prosecutors and judges- is comprised of men and women, in uniform, who are subordinated to and serve, not the principles of justice and law, but the mechanism of the occupation.

Ofer prison/detention center/court sits on Palestinian lands that had been confiscated from their owners.

For some months I sat in court and documented what was taking place there. I had witnessed the attempts of the system to create an illusion of a court house that concurs to the articles of the treaties and the international law, while in reality it was nothing more than a cynical farce.

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Al Ahram
The slow economic collapse being witnessed across the occupied territories, while worsening now, is inevitable so long as Palestinians languish under occupation, writes Khaled Amayreh in Hebron

Protesting against the construction of Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Qalandia (photo: AP)

With high consumer prices, static or dwindling salaries, rising unemployment and over-taxation, many ordinary Palestinians are no longer able to make ends meet.

The situation has been described as both explosive as well as potentially destabilising as the Palestinian Authority (PA) stands virtually powerless to overcome or even mitigate the harshest economic crisis hitting the occupied territories since the PA's founding in 1994.

Some families have been forced to take their children out of college because they can no longer afford to pay tuition fees amounting to a thousand dollars per semester.

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By Gale Courey Toensing January 20, 2012

A federal appeals court has unanimously upheld a lower court ruling blocking the implementation of an Oklahoma state law that would prohibit the use of Islamic Sharia law or international law – including tribal law – in state courts. The ruling is a victory not only for Muslims, but also for Indian country and all Americans, legal experts said.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals judges on January 10 upheld a decision by Oklahoma federal court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange granting a preliminary injunction against the implementation of an amendment to Oklahoma’s Constitution that was approved by 70 percent of voters on a ballot measure in November 2010. The amendment, variously known as the Sharia Law Amendment, the Oklahoma International Law Amendment or the “Save Our State Amendment,” was a legislatively-referred constitutional amendment, meaning that the state legislature rather than citizens of the state, voted to put the measure before the voters.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

By Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

This is the front cover of a pamphlet produced by a Kuwaiti-based anti-Guantanamo organization to try and win the release of two Kuwaiti prisoners, pictured on the cover of the pamphlet, who are detained at the detention facility. The commander of Guantanamo, Rear Adm. David Woods, accused one of the detainee's attorneys of "smuggling" the pamphlet into Guantanamo three weeks before he issued a widely condemned order calling for a review of detainees' legal mail. (Image: Lt. Col. Barry Wingard)

Military attorney says false allegation preceded Guantanamo commander's recent order authorizing a team of Pentagon contractors to reveiw privileged, attorney-client communications. But was the claim leveled to justify the new policy?

Early last month, Air Force Capt. Michael Schwartz was summoned into the office of Rear Adm. David Woods, the new commander of Guantanamo, and was accused of “smuggling” into the detention facility an anti-Guantanamo pamphlet that featured the photographs of two Kuwaiti detainees, Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al Odha.

Schwartz, a military attorney and a member of al-Kandari’s legal team, was taken aback.

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By Maher Osseiran

People around the world are wondering when the suffering in the name of 9/11 will end; if we don’t stand up to the criminals the answer is never. people in the millions, directly and indirectly, are victims of 9/11. The many are paying dearly for the crimes of the very few. The reader might wonder if things could get worse – The answer is yes.

It gets worse when you learn the truth; the few who have committed the serious crimes are not bin Laden and his followers. The crimes are much bigger than anything bin Laden actually committed. The few who have committed those crimes are living worry free and come from within the Bush administration and those within the Obama administration who are capitalizing on the crimes.

If we do not prosecute those criminals, the suffering will never end.

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For more go to Indian Country Today Media Network

By Philip Giraldi - CNI

Defenders of the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, which declares the entire world to be a 'battlefield' against terrorism and authorizes the U.S. military to detain indefinitely anyone suspected of being a terrorism supporter, have claimed that the White House will only use its new power carefully and with due process. Opponents note that the White House has never hesitated to use any new authority, no matter how outrageous, and that the trend of law enforcement and security agencies is to expand on powers granted, not to rein them in or limit them.

The track record of the Obama administration on civil liberties is particularly bad, as it has broadened its definition of war powers, reneged on its promise to close Guantanamo Prison, and supported numerous dubious terrorism prosecutions. It has also become adept at silencing critics through the repeated exploitation of the state-secrets privilege, which effectively dismisses any case accusing the government of abuse or malfeasance.

So let us accept that the government now has the power to send a team of military police to anyone’s home in any state in the Union and can demand that that person surrender without any recourse to a lawyer or judicial due process. The military can then detain the individual incommunicado for any length of time and can presumably send him to Guantanamo for special confinement, claiming that the reason for the detention is support of terrorism, which can be almost anything, including a letter to the editor of the local paper complaining about the goonery of the Transportation Security Administration. Once in detention, the suspect only has such options as are granted to him by the military. He cannot see a lawyer, cannot invoke habeas corpus or other constitutional privileges, cannot confront any witnesses against him, and cannot challenge any information prejudicial to him even if it is hearsay or fabricated. In other words, the accused can be arrested for no reason and held indefinitely without any protections that enable him to push back against being detained. Most people would consider a criminal justice system that permits such detention ipso facto a police state.

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Palestinian Islamist party's political chief will retire at upcoming leadership elections, says group's former representative

By Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem


Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and the organisation's leadership in Gaza have been at odds on recent weeks over his suggestion that the group should turn away from armed struggle. Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi/EPA

Khaled Meshaal, the political chief of Hamas, is to step down from his position when elections for the leadership of the Palestinian Islamist organisation take place in the next few months, according to a senior colleague.

Meshaal will retire to allow a fresh leader to steer Hamas towards a new strategy, Mustafa Lidawi, a former representative of Hamas in Lebanon, wrote in an article on an Arab website.

Meshaal has been head of Hamas's political bureau since 1996, and has been based in Damascus since the following year.

In recent weeks, he has indicated that Hamas should make a strategic turn away from armed struggle to popular non-violent resistance in the wake of the Arab spring revolutions and the success of Islamist parties in elections.

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The purpose of the law was to criminalize refugees returning home.

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the homes and lands from which they had been expelled as Israel was established.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state's borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

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Falk: I salute the steadfastness of the Palestinian people.

Interviewed by Yousef M. Aljamal

(Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume, International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice - Routledge, 2008. He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.)

How and why did you get involved in Palestinian Activism?

I suppose my interest in the Palestinian struggle is rooted in my professional identity as an international law teacher and writer, and my personal identification with the victims of the strong and abused. My friendships with Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad also pushed my professional support for the Palestinian struggle for justice in the direction of activism. And finally, my way of thinking about being a Jew led me to affirm the call for justice by Old Testament prophets. I was never a religious Jew in an institutional sense and never supported the Zionist project.

What is the legal status of the Palestinian territories?

The overwhelming international consensus is that the Palestinian territories are ‘occupied territories’ that are subject to administration by Israel as the occupier, but in accord with the Fourth Geneva Convention and the First Additional Protocol of 1977. This occupation that has lasted since 1967 goes beyond what is envisioned by international humanitarian law, and in the West Bank has in many aspects evolved into a form of unlawful de facto annexation, and in East Jerusalem this development is explicitly claimed by Israel through its effort to annex the part of the city occupied in 1967. Gaza, experiencing an unlawful blockade since mid-2007, continues to be occupied and criminally administered by Israel, but it has not experienced either de facto annexation or been the subject of Israel policies of either ethnic cleansing or territorial claims.

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Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at the Christ Central Community Center in Winnsboro, S.C., Wednesday, January, 18, 2012.

By Gale Courey Toensing

There’s a saying that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, a historian, hasn’t forgotten the past; in fact, he’d like to repeat it. Particularly Andrew Jackson’s “kill thine enemy” approach.

At the umpteenth Republican debate in front of a packed audience at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on January 16, Gingrich conjured up the spirit of Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh president, as a model for the way the U.S. should approach its “enemies” today.

“We’re in South Carolina,” Gingrich told the crowd, as if they needed to be reminded of where they were. “South Carolina and the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them!” The crowd roared its approval.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

By Ali Younes

In town hall meeting during campaign stop in Greenville, South Carolina, last Saturday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said to me, in response to my questions, that he supports attacking Iran with missiles, rockets and other weapons in order to stop it from developing nuclear weapons. On the issue of Palestinian -Israeli conflict he added that the issue is an internal Israeli matter and that Israel can do whatever it wants and no one should interfere in their internal affairs. Ostensibly, Santorum does not hide his ultra conservative views when it comes to the US foreign policy particularly over Iran and Israel. He in the same breath argued to the crowed why they should not elect a moderate, a reference to presidential candidate Mitt Romney when they vote in the primary later this week.

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MacDonald's new book points out the body foundational defects and provides guidelines on fixing them based on the concept of equality

By Ramzy Baroud, Special to Gulf News

Theodore MacDonald was too ill to attend the launch of his book, Preserving the United Nations; Our Best Hope for Mediating Human Rights. Less than three weeks later, on March 7, 2011, the longtime champion of human rights and social justice passed away.

Professor MacDonald’s last book was in many ways the intellectual zenith of a vision gleaned from lifelong experiences. He was a kindly, humble and ever-positive individual, with whom I had exchanged many letters in previous months. Palestine occupied much space in his thinking and writing, and was a major component in his vision aimed at achieving global peace and justice.

It is very telling that MacDonald’s last book was concerned with the arduous task of reforming the UN. “My main concern is international development and equity. The growing inequity between the First and Third World nations … is a matter of immense worry and cannot be sustained,” he wrote.

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The "Palestinian demographic bomb" is a myth created to continue discrimination against Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs.

Israel's Separation Wall and hundreds of checkpoints prevent travel between the occupied Palestinian territories and the state of Israel for most Palestinians and Israelis [GALLO/GETTY]

Irvine, California - Say what you will about Israel's High Court of Justice, it knows how to name a decision.

In titling last Wednesday's legal decision, upholding the controversial Citizenship Law that prevents Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from living in Israel "Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide", the court's majority well summed up the existential predicament Israel faces today - indeed, has always faced - as it attempts to be both Jewish and democratic.

"National suicide" is, of course, an incredibly loaded term in the Israeli context. In the historical shadow of the Holocaust, Chief Justice Asher Grunis's appellation immediately raised the spectre of an existential threat to the Jewish people, or nation (Am Yisrael), being posed by the mere possibility of Palestinian Arabs joining Israeli society through marriage.

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By ICTMN Staff January 17, 2012

The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the related Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) have caused uproar among Internet types and inspired many websites to vow to “go black” on January 18. Some content companies claim that the bill will protect their intellectual property from theft; critics of the bill say it threatens free speech and the very nature of the internet.

Their objection is that the bill uses very broad language to describe what constitutes a violation and allows for draconian punishments. The sites we all visit every day—from Wikipedia to Facebook to YouTube to this site you’re on now—are rife with (often unintentional, and mostly harmless) violations of the proposed legislation, and under its terms could be subject to any number of severe penalties.

Read the full story and view the video at Indian Country Today Media Network

It is time for the American public to hold AIPAC accountable. (CODEPINK)

By Clive Hambidge

Habituation writes James Austin M.D 'means that repeated stimuli yield a decreasing response.' Conversely and importantly he goes on, 'Sensitization implies that responses increase when stronger stimuli are repeated.' For in this understanding, 'we are addressing the basis of the freshness of vision of the artist or poet; focusing on the possible ways to relieve the depressed person held in the grip of a dreary grey world', or indeed a Nation, Palestine, gripped by the dreary politics “free of law” of an increasingly violent Israel. Moreover, “some people habituate consistently; others do not.” (Austin). It is crucial then that we, the right minded, faced with propaganda “habitually” spewed forth by the State, organs of the State and influencers of the State like American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to become “Enmeshed in a propaganda system of awesome effectiveness.” (Chomsky), in “locutions” pernicious and with a distinct narrative of organized violence, sucking us into the undertow of American Israeli hegemony, that we ask this simple question if “There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals. Given the equality of two intellects-which form the most reliable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted?” (Emerson). Having answered this satisfactorily, to know then “by our public force can we share and know the nature of things” (Emerson) we thereby free ourselves from the propagandists, and come upon this aphorism: it’s the law stupid! For “the law is the basis of the human mind. In us, it is inspiration; out there in Nature we see its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment” (Emerson).

So when in a spectacularly obtuse propagandist statement to a Parliamentary Committee, chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Benny Gantz is reported in the UK Guardian (Thursday 12 January 2012) as saying “For Iran, 2012 is a critical year, in combining the continuation of its nuclearisation, internal changes in the Iranian leadership, continuing and growing pressure from the international community, and things which [will] take place in an unnatural manner” (my emphasis) meaning “covertly” and illegally, in and to Iran’s infrastructure and innocent Iranians. Therefore, as we spare a thought for Mustafa Ahmadi Roshan who died in an “unnatural manner” a day later in Iran by extrajudicial execution, illegal under international law, one realises the scale of the problem and asks what other “unnatural” acts are being planned for Iran, Lebanon and Palestine? From this natural questions arise of the ‘unnatural’, of the perpetrators and supporters of such acts and their relationship with law for as Israel’s government stated “it’s not our policy to comment on this sort of speculation,” it must be then, our duty, the people, to comment on this sort of speculation, State and lobby ‘locutions’ and the rule of law.

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While political leaders talk of reconciliation, political prisoners keep mounting at the hands of Palestinian Authority security forces, writes Khaled Amayreh in Hebron


Palestinian Hamas supporters hold banners of prisoners arrested by the Palestinian Authority, during a protest calling for their release in the West Bank city of Nablus

This is not the first time I've been subject to harassment at the hands of Palestinian Authority (PA) security operatives. On several occasions in the past I was abused and imprisoned by these agencies. In one episode in 2009, I was made to sleep in a rancid cell after reporting that PA police were blocking and brutally suppressing demonstrations against Israel in protest against its 2008-09 onslaught against the Gaza Strip.

I thought the Arab Spring would convince the PA security apparatus to abandon or at least alleviate their police state tactics against dissent and show more respect for human rights and civil liberties. However, it seems that the PA, as far as its treatment of its people goes, remains largely unchanged. Old habits die hard, it seems.

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(Image: via CNIF)

The sanctions that recently took effect against the Iranian banking system can be construed as an act of war, particularly as Iran has not provided any casus belli.

By Philip Giraldi

Back in September 2007 I wrote an article for Antiwar.com called 'What World War III May Look Like.' The article, which presumed that an incident involving U.S. troops on the border between Iraq and Iran could easily escalate into what would eventually become a global conflict, was widely replayed in the alternative media and even in the mainstream. Well, I am pleased to report that no such war has yet started, though there has been a disturbing expansion of U.S. military activity through the deployment of drones to hit targets in assorted countries without having to worry about American casualties or niceties like declarations of war.

Other geopolitical elements that figured in my 2007 analysis have also changed, so I believe that the time has come for an update.

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Gantz: Iran should be expecting more 'unnatural' events. (Press TV)

By Dr. Ismail Salami - Tehran

'I saw a motorcycle. They were wearing ski masks - black ski masks. They were two people. I saw the motorcycle speed by. I saw them. It seemed as if they had something in their hands,' this is how a female witness described the scene of the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan.

As the blade of blame is being directed against the CIA and Mossad for orchestrating the brutal assassination of the 32-year-old Iranian scientist in broad daylight in Tehran on Wednesday morning, the duo have preferred to feign ignorance as to the identity of the main perpetrator of the crime.

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Boycott Sabra hummus flyers at DePaul University. (Shirien Damra/The Electronic Intifada)

By Nadine Darwish
The Electronic Intifada

While walking through the salad bar in my school’s cafeteria a couple months ago, I noticed Sabra hummus for sale. It may look harmless on the surface; however, that could not be farther from the truth.

Sabra hummus has become the target of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement because its mother company, the Strauss group, materially and financially supports the Israeli military.

When I saw Sabra on my school cafeteria shelves, I felt a lot of pressure to do something to get the product off my school’s shelves or at least convince my school to offer an alternative brand.

Not knowing where to start, I approached the lunch lady who works in the salad bar and explained to her the link between Sabra and Israel’s human rights violations. She told me she had already heard that Sabra supports the Israeli army human rights violations as a result of the Students for Justice in Palestine’s campaign at DePaul University in Chicago. She added that Sabra hummus was on backorder, meaning that she could not receive any more for the time being anyway, and that she would simply not order any more of the product. I was shocked at how easy ridding our cafeteria of Sabra hummus was.

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Rick Santorum has declared that all of the people living in the West Bank are Israelis. (Chris Maddolini/Newscom)

By Hasan Abu Nimah
Amman
The Electronic Intifada

Palestinians, like everyone else in the world, are not angels. Some among them have undoubtedly committed mistakes — for which collectively Palestinians have suffered and paid a price. Still, it is hard to think of an example of a people today who has been singled out as fair game for demonization and abuse for political gain like the Palestinians.

Nowhere is this more the case than in the United States, where the race for the Republican nomination for the November 2012 presidential election is in full swing. The US has big problems and there is no shortage of issues for the candidates to debate, from dealing with the economic crisis to extricating the country from the expanding wars that have drained its assets and potential. Yet, it seems that the Palestinians, or more precisely bashing and demonizing them, preoccupy a disproportionate amount of the candidates’ attention. Even more extraordinary is the fact that the Palestinians never sought to make Americans or the US their enemy nor did they do anything to harm the US.

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By Todd E. Pierce

The 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a detention facility and the diversion of terrorism prosecutions into a new military commission system is now upon us. Consequently, I thought I would take this opportunity to briefly explain why I, an Army Reserve Judge Advocate General officer with more than 30 years of active and reserve military service, would volunteer as defense counsel for prisoners being held there.

I might add that I consider myself to be a conservative. In the United States of America, that means to conserve the legal order that this nation was founded upon, the Constitution. In fact, as a member of the military, I took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I did not take an oath of allegiance to the "leader," or to the "state," as required in some other nations. Thus, it came as something of a shock to me when Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty began issuing legal opinions that the Geneva Conventions, a treaty incorporated into our law, were quaint and did not apply, or that the president could, at his or her sole discretion, suspend them.

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Saturday's protest. 'We've lost our shame'
Minister Peled. 'Blood froze in my veins'
Minister: Haredi Shoah display 'insane'
Neturei Karta leader: Zionist persecution of haredim worse than what Nazis did
Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg

Minister Yossi Peled, a Holocaust survivor, could not believe his eyes when he saw the pictures from the ultra-Orthodox protest in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim neighborhood on Saturday night.

"I admit that some things are inconceivable, like taking the horrifying picture of the little boy facing the Nazis with his hands up. Regardless of whether the struggle is justified or not, this points to something insane, irrational, immoral," he told Ynet on Sunday morning.

"Any word you say will be inappropriate. I may be naïve: I never believed, no matter which conflict we're talking about, that we would use symbols of the Jewish people's tragedy for an internal battle. It was our battle against an external threat. It's inconceivable. The blood froze in my veins."

Saturday's demonstration was organized by an extreme faction in Mea Shearim in protest of what has been defined as "the exclusion of haredim" and the start of the jail term of an ultra-Orthodox man convicted of assaulting an electronics store salesman.

Mordechai Hirsch, one of the leaders of the extreme Neturei Karta faction (and the son of Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, who served as minister in the Palestinian government), said his nephews, who are not even 10 years old, took part in the protest wearing a yellow patch.

"Of course I justify it," said Hirsch. "Yes, it's from the Holocaust and it's legitimate. There's no question about it. This protest reflects the Zionists' persecution of the haredi public, which we see as worse than what the Nazis did.

"The Germans just killed the body, but these people want to kill the soul, the spirit."

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Israeli politics is moving against history only. (Tamar Fleishman)

By Nicola Nasser

While the history of the world is moving decisively toward a culture of inclusion, diversity and pluralism, Israeli politics seems to challenge history by moving in the opposite direction of exclusion and unilateral self - righteous monopoly of geography, demography, history, archeology and culture, especially in Jerusalem, where Israelis are desperately trying to establish a “Jewish” capital for Israel and “the Jewish people” worldwide, excluding centuries old presence of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Christian deep-rooted existence and heritage, thus sowing the seeds of imminent conflict and foreseeable war by strangling a city that has historically been of diversified and pluralistic character and a flashpoint for human misery whenever exclusion becomes the rule of the day.

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WASHINGTON -- Indefinite military detention of Americans became the law of the land Saturday, as President Barack Obama signed a defense bill that codified that authority, even as he said he would not use it.

The National Defense Authorization Act states how the military is to be funded, but also includes a number of controversial provisions on arresting and holding suspected terrorists, which at first drove Obama to threaten a veto.

He retreated from that threat after Congress added provisions that took the ultimate authority to detain suspects from the military's hands and gave it to the president. Congress also clarified that civilian law enforcement agencies -- such as the FBI -- would still have authority to investigate terrorism and added a provision that asserts nothing in the detention measures changes current law regarding U.S. citizens.

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Senior political analyst Marwan Bishara explains why Newt Gingrich is no Tom Cruise, and why touting Israel is a mission impossible.

Former speaker of the House and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is a staunch suppoter of Israel [EPA]

The film "Mission Impossible 4" opened in US theatres in recent weeks, starring BMW, Apple and Tom Cruise. A two-hour-long commercial on steroids.

"I think that we've had invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community.
And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the nineteen-forties, and it’s tragic." h, former speaker of the House and Republican presidential candidate

"You can be sure that Gingrich did not care a whit for what Palestinians, here or in the US, would think. The Palestinian vote will not decide swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, or, above all, Florida"ck, New Yorker editor

"I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby." --- Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist

If you are unfamiliar with it, Paid Product Placement (PPP) is a big thing in the movie industry.

This is how it works: Hollywood places in its movies certain watches, cars or a laptop brands; preferably worn by George Clooney, driven by Angelina Jolie or placed in front of Meg Ryan. In "The Transformers", for example, GM’s Cameros lead with Megan Fox.

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Binyamin Ben-Eliezer

A member of Israel's Labor Party has called on Egyptian officials to pay back Tel Aviv's bribes to Cairo during the regime of Hosni Mubarak.

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Israel gave 300 million dollars to former dictator Mubarak to change the educational materials in order to reduce tensions between Israel and Egypt, IRNA reported.

He added that the money was given to the family members of Mubarak.

Reports said Mubarak's wife, Suzanne, had several meetings with Israeli officials and educational experts over the project.

Suzanne Mubarak led the Egyptian UN delegation in conferences relating to women and children.

Mubarak was toppled in February following 18 days of demonstrations in protest against poverty, corruption and his regime's repressive measures.

Press TV

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant (Ambassador to Iraq, Edward Peck). Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised…” – Jeremiah Wright, September 16, 2001.

by William A. Cook

Prophets fare poorly in their own country, yet countries would do well to hearken to their prophets. Scorn, ridicule, and innuendo attend their pronouncements as the righteous defend their actions as logical, existential and necessary. Jeremiah Wright suffered such scorn and mockery because he understood the consequences of revenge on the innocent and the defenceless, justified by whatever inane discourse. Wright spoke truth to power that Sunday after 9/11 and the righteous cried to heaven condemning him to perdition for defaming America, for even suggesting that revenge for the sake of revenge is the motivation of the arch fiend against the Almighty, the foulest, most ignorant, most amoral rational for action.

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MaanImages/ Bilin popular committee

Santa Clauses with Palestinian flags rallied against Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, Dec. 23, ahead of Christmas. Soldiers dispersed the protest with tear gas.

At the rally, Palestinians called for national unity, resistance and freedom for prisoners.

The Bilin popular committee appealed to the Palestinian and Egyptian leaderships in addition to human rights organizations to work on freeing female detainees who remain in Israeli jails.

Maan News Agency

In Jerusalem meeting of 100 Israeli diplomats, Foreign Ministry official speaks of death of the Mideast peace process; N.Y. Consul-General: Israel's image in U.S. is worse than ever.

Avigdor Lieberman and Danny Ayalon at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, Dec. 28, 2011. Photo by: Olivier Fitoussi

By Barak Ravid
Haaretz

On Tuesday morning, 100 Israeli ambassadors gathered on Mount Scopus, and together with their host, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, looked out onto Silwan and the Temple Mount. Later they turned their gazes toward Abu-Dis, and, in that direction, they peered at the border area and the separation fence. Last year, Barkat and the city he manages caused many of these Israeli diplomats to work overtime, preparing explanations to foreign ministries or media outlets in the countries where they serve. It can be assumed that in 2012, their work will only get harder.

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Tamir Pardo says Israel using various means to foil Iran's nuclear program, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean destruction of Israel.

By Barak Ravid

Haaretz

A nuclear-armed Iran wouldn't necessarily constitute a threat to Israel's continued existence, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo reportedly hinted earlier this week.

On Tuesday evening, Pardo addressed an audience of about 100 Israeli ambassadors. According to three ambassadors present at the briefing, the intelligence chief said that Israel was using various means to foil Iran's nuclear program and would continue do so, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean the destruction of the State of Israel.

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The Arab Spring is an opportunity to mend fortunes by rebranding Palestinian politics for statehood and good governance.

If 'a Palestinian state sees the light of day' over the next decade, 'Cairo will have a hand in it' [GALLO/GETTY]

On a "win-loss" scale, Hamas features more as amongst the "winners" not "losers" of the Arab Spring. Ismail Haniyeh's current diplomacy "shuttle" around several Arab capitals is designed, amongst other things, as a declaratory policy embracing the Arab Spring.

However, the embrace remains a little ill-defined around the edge, and faces many challenges.

The Arab Spring, like that "sudden" light, creating a desperately needed opening in a tunnelled Palestinian cause, illuminating the path for Haniyeh, amongst other chiefs of the Palestinian polity, including Fatah.

Egypt's newly empowered Muslim Brotherhood (EMB), through free and fair elections, will stamp its diplomacy with more than the rhetorical championing of the Palestinian cause. Primarily, and this is the first significance of Haniyeh's visist to Cairo, the Palestinian cause will cease to be treated as a security file. It is a political file. This is the single most important pillar of Mubarak's legacy that is being smashed to smithereens.

Haniyeh lands in Cairo around the same time in December three years ago when a buoyant Tzipi Livni more or less declared the war on Gaza with total indifference from Mubarak's ousted Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al-Ghait in December 2008. Maybe not by design, but the timing of Haniyeh's visit is not without political symbolism.

No one can predict when Livni will get back to Cairo. But what is certain: Haniyeh's visit will not be his last to Egypt's capital.

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We will never forget the hurt of 3 years ago. (Zoriah.net)

Besieged Gaza, Occupied Palestine

We, Palestinians of Gaza, 3 years on from the 22-day long massacre in Israel's operation 'Cast Lead', are calling on international civil society to make 2012 the year when solidarity with us in Palestine captures the spark of the revolutions around the Arab world and never looks back. On this anniversary we demand an international liberation movement that eventually leads to just that, liberation for us Palestinians from 63 years of brutal military occupation and ethnic cleansing that pours shame on any organisation or government claiming to endorse universal human rights.

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By Eric Walberg - Cairo

A Tunisian fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in a public square in a small town in December 2010, sparking protests that brought down dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, and began a tidal wave of change both in the Middle East and farther afield. Add in the 2011 American withdrawal from Iraq and failed attempts to subdue Afghanistan and Iran, and the writing on the wall for empire is written boldly — in blood.

After a century of scheming in the Middle East and Central Asia by first Britain and then the US, the tables turned much faster than anyone could have imagined. As the pivotal 2011 draws to a close, it is the perfect moment to look at how we got here. The rollercoaster ride has been long and terrifying, and it is vital to understand where it is taking us.

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Funeral of Mustafa Tamimi, Nabi Salih, West Bank. (Activestills)

By Ramzy Baroud

Mustafa Tamimi was a 28-year-old resident of the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. His meticulously trimmed beard served as the centerpiece of his handsome face.

In December 2009, when an Israeli soldier shot him from a short distance with a tear gas canister, half of Mustafa’s face went missing. More soldiers laughed as his horrified family tried to accompany him to a nearby hospital, according to activists present at the scene. Only the mother was finally able to obtain a special permit from the Israeli military, which allowed her to be with her son.

Mustafa’s crime? He, along with Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists, protested the besiegement of Nabi Saleh by the illegal Jewish settlement of Halamish. Halamish has existed since 1977 and drastically grown in size and population ever since, taking over privately-owned Palestinian land. As of late, Nabi Saleh has been struggling for mere survival as its fresh water spring has also been seized by settlers under the watchful eye of the Israeli army.

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By Mohammed Suliman
The Electronic Intifada

Boy plays with balloon amongst rubble of destroyed building
The memory of Israel’s 22 days of bombing in Gaza evokes sadness, anger, pain and inexplicable pride. (Ashraf Amra / APA images)

It was a few minutes past eleven. I woke up “early” to start preparing for my school exams that were due to start in a couple of weeks. It was a lovely morning, warm and sunny. The December sunlight filtered through the curtained windows and so beautifully decorated the carpeted floor.

Everything was completely normal, except that the sky seemed clearer than usual with the absence of the Israeli unmanned drones that would fly and buzz in the sky above. No abnormal signs, no reason to worry, and not a single harbinger of an impending war.

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By Hugh Naylor (Foreign Correspondent)
Dec 25, 2011

RAMALLAH // Hamas has reduced the size of its headquarters in Syria's capital because of the brutal suppression of pro-reform demonstrators by the regime of President Bashar Al Assad, Palestinian officials and foreign diplomats here have said.

The Islamist movement, which for a decade has relied on its base in Damascus to conduct diplomacy, raise money and wage war in its campaign to replace Israel with an Islamic Palestinian state, decided that its presence in the embattled country was no longer politically tenable and began in October sending all but its most senior officials abroad, the sources said in recent days.

While maintaining a nominal presence in Damascus, the organisation was also seeking a new location for its headquarters, the sources added.

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Newt Gingrich's controversial statement begs the question: Who invented a nationality? The Palestinians or the Israelis?

The state of Israel and the Israeli people were invented from scratch by the Zionist movement [GALLO/GETTY]

It is hard to believe that anyone who defends Israel's legitimacy as a state would buy into former Speaker Newt Gingrich's argument that Palestine is an "invented nation".

The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not born until 1882. His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the Bible.

The founder of the Israeli state was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), an assimilated Viennese writer who was convinced by the Dreyfus trial in France - and the horrendous right-wing anti-Semitism that resulted from it - that Jews had to get out of Europe.

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Hamas' conundrum may prove too difficult to solve. (Aljazeera)

By Ramzy Baroud

Ever since Hamas emerged victorious in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, myriad public opinion polls revealed that its popularity in the Occupied Territories was on a steady decline.

However, there are actually few indications that Hamas as a popular movement will be departing the Palestinian political landscape anytime soon. Ongoing talks in Cairo between Hamas and Fatah officials, sometimes involving the Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself, indicate that Hamas’ imprint is likely to be felt in political institutions like the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the near future.

In the few weeks following the latest round of unity talks between Abbas and Hamas’ leader, Khalid Mesha’al, in Cairo, Hamas has outdone itself in commemorating its anniversary. The Gaza rally on December 14 was a stage for Hamas leaders to recount the achievements of their movement over the course of 24 years, including the number of rockets fired at Israel since 2000 (the year the Second Uprising began) in retaliation for the numerous Israeli attacks and incursions. Such recounting was meant to assert that the armed wing of Hamas — a small force armed with homemade rockets and smuggled light weapons — was a strong contender to the Israeli army.

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By Kathy Kelly – Kabul

Beneath our flat, here in Kabul, wedding guests crowded into a restaurant and celebrated throughout the night. Guests sounded joyful and the music, mostly disco, thumped loudly. When the regular call to prayer sounded out at 5:20 a.m., the sounds seemed to collide in an odd cacophony, making all music indistinguishable. I smiled, remembering the prayer call’s durable exhortation to live in peace, heard worldwide for centuries, and went back to sleep.

Through most of my life, I’ve found it easy to resonate with the ringing and beautiful Christmas narrative found in the Gospel of Luke, but less so with that jangling discord with which westerners are so familiar—the annual collision between (on the one hand) the orgy of gift-purchasing and gift-consumption surrounding the holiday and the sweeter, simpler proclamations of peace on earth heralded by the newborn’s arrival. I’ve found myself quite surprisingly happy to spend many Christmases either in U.S. jails or among Muslims living in places like Bosnia, Iraq, Jordan and now Afghanistan. My hosts and friends in these places have been people who are enduring wars or fleeing wars, including, as in the case of U.S. jails, a war against the poor in the United States.

The Christmas narrative that imagines living beings coming together across divides, the houseless family with no room at the inn, the shepherds and the foreign royals arriving, all awakening to unimagined possibilities of peace, comes alive quite beautifully in the community with which I’m graced to find myself here in Kabul.

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The latest bombings in Baghdad killed 72. (Via Aljazeera)

By Ismail Salami – Tehran

There is a new fear emerging in Iraq that the country will plunge even more into turmoil and political disequilibrium as the US troops cased in their colors and left behind a country which they helped lay bare to waste and dereliction.

This feeling of angst deepened when a string of 16 bomb explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital on Thursday, the worst in four months, leaving 72 people dead and 217 others fatally wounded.

Roughly coinciding with the homecoming of the US troops, the incident was opportunistically ascribed by Western observers to the security vacuum created as a result of the withdrawal of the US forces.

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As Fatah and Hamas bury some of their differences, Tel Aviv says the move is a step back towards terror

By Matthew Kalman
Saturday, 24 December 2011

A breakthrough agreement between Fatah, Hamas and other radical groups that could unify all Palestinian factions under a single political umbrella was yesterday greeted with scorn by Israeli officials, who said it marked a step away from peace and back towards terror.

Following talks in Cairo with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, and the Islamic Jihad leader, Ramadan Shallah, the Palestinian President and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Mahmoud Abbas, announced that a joint committee with representatives of all the groups would meet in Amman on 12 January to prepare for elections to the Palestine National Council, the ruling plenary body of the PLO.

It may take years to convene the PNC, but presidential and parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Authority have tentatively been set for May.

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Despite knowing that settlements have broken the peace process, Israel is forging ahead with plans to build new Jew-only colonies on Arab land, writes Khaled Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem

Al Ahram

Palestinians use sling-shots to hurl stones at Israeli troops during a protest against the expansion of the Jewish settlement of Halamish near Ramallah

Taking advantage of the ongoing turbulence in the Arab world, the proximity of the US presidential elections, and the international community's manifest powerlessness to check aggressive Israeli unilateralism, the Israeli government has been stepping up hostile measures against the largely unprotected Palestinian community.

The measures, which include the seizure of a large swathe of Palestinian-owned land for settlement expansion, wanton home demolition as well as unrelenting attacks and acts of vandalism against Palestinians and their property, are aimed at rendering unrealistic and impossible the goal of establishing a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state on the West Bank.

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The Republican Party's presidential hopefuls are stumbling over themselves to insult Palestinians and Arabs and laud Israel, writes James Zogby

Al Ahram

On 7 December 2012, six Republican candidates for president (Ron Paul was not invited) appeared before the Republican Jewish Coalition (NRC) to campaign for Christian votes. There are Jewish Republicans, to be sure, but not enough to make a difference in this primary contest. No, the real prize that drew the candidates to the NRC event were the 40 per cent of Republican primary voters who are declared "born-again" Christians who fervently believe that Israel can do no wrong and that it is their religious duty to support any and all Israeli policies as a prerequisite to hasten the "Day of Judgement".

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With the Muslim Brotherhood on the rise in Egypt, Tel Aviv knows that its latitude to strike Hamas will soon diminish, writes Saleh Al-Naami

Al Ahram

The signs of joy were obvious on 10-year-old Ramadan's face as he kissed his mother goodnight on Thursday night. His father, Bahgat Al-Zaalan, 37, had promised that he would take him Friday morning with the rest of his siblings and mother on an outing to the amusement park, and thereafter they would have lunch at a restaurant in Gaza City.

While Ramadan and the rest of his family slept in their family home west of Al-Nasr district in northern Gaza, they were attacked by missiles that destroyed the house, killing Bahgat and fatally injuring Ramadan. His mother and three siblings are injured, one critically, and his grandparents in the next door house were also injured.

While Ramadan's family were asleep dreaming about an exciting day in the morning, three US-made Israeli Apache helicopters fired several missiles at a Hamas military location close to the Al-Zaalan home. Three missiles landed on the house, leveling it and causing much destruction to the neighbouring house. Palestinian security sources insist that the Israeli army targeted the house on purpose, since many times Israeli planes are able to selectively target small cars on busy streets without harming other vehicles.

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By Virginia Tilley

Introduction: Finally, we have someone prepared to call the
Christian Churches out on their feeble caution and empty
prayers on Palestine. Virginia Tilley does it with the razor
sharpness of one who knows her business - not prepared to
mince words or pay lip service to mealy-mouthed assurances
of Christian concern for Palestinian suffering while doing
nothing to hold Israel to account. It is long overdue as one
denomination after another pussyfoots around Israel too
afraid to call a spade a spade. In recalling the 1985 Kairos
document composed by Archbishop Tutu during South
Africa’s anti-Apartheid struggle, Virginia Tilley says it should
be read “just to show how clear-headed Christian activism can
get when it truly girds its loins. The 1985 Kairos had no truck
with empty talk of ‘peace’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘dialogue’.”
Tilley’s article is an important expose of how the Christian
church, for all its efforts in giving succor to the Palestinians,
has been woefully lacking in moral fortitude. As Tilley says
so eloquently, “the tasks in Palestine have long been plain.
The evangelical Christian right must be approached about its
gullible equation of a modern military state with spiritual
rebirth. Israel’s instrumental deceit about Jewish life in the
Holy Land constituting a path to Christian salvation must be
exposed. The sins of ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored
bigotry must be confronted. The malevolent whispers
circulated by Zionist plants in Jerusalem and Palestine, which
attempt to demonize Islam for Christians and Christianity for
Muslims, must be openly and unanimously denounced. In the
spirit of the 1985 Kairos, the true meaning of Christian love
must show its moral fist to reject false symmetry and the sinful
notion of reconciliation with oppression.” It is something to
think about as we gear up for the usual Christmas festivities
celebrating the birth of Jesus more than 2000 years ago in
Bethlehem, long before walls, barbed wire and checkpoints
imprisoned the city from the rest of Palestine. Perhaps it will
make for more sober reflection about the part we all have
played in perpetuating the intolerable Palestinian predicament.
At five minutes to midnight, it is really time for the Christian
church to “gird its loins” and call for true justice for the
Palestinians.
-- Sonja Karkar, Editor
http://australiansforpalestine.com

***********************

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned* that the Arab Spring is threatening the safety of Christian communities in the Middle East. He did not realise it, but this public warning—much as President Obama’s UN speech** in September struck the death knell for US credibility in the Middle East—has dealt still another fatal moral blow to other central Middle East actors: the world’s Christian Churches, already suffering from a wobbly posture regarding ethnic and religious relations in the Middle East. For those within the faith, it impels a collective “j’accuse” to Christian leaderships and an unqualified call for principled action. For it must now be said plainly, and confronted honestly: it is morally unacceptable for the Christian churches to continue to dither and wander morally on sectarian relations in the Middle East by ducking the question of Palestine.

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America Ends Its Mission in Iraq
Getty Images

The US has officially declared the war in Iraq to be over with a flag-casing ceremony in Baghdad. President Barack Obama said that America was leaving behind a "sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq." German commentators ask if the conflict, which lasted almost nine years, was worth the toll.
Info

In May 2003, then-US President George W. Bush stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier in front of a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" and announced that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. At the time, few would have imagined that it would take another eight years before the US officially declared the conflict over.

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By Gale Courey Toensing December 16, 2011



The Los Angeles Times called it a “cop out.” The Huffington Post said it was “so appropriate.” Frontpage described it as “dishonest and delusional.” The buzz is around Time Magazine’s selection of “The Protester” as Person of the Year, the weekly publication’s annual end-of-the-year anointing of a person, group or idea that the editors believe had the greatest impact – for good or evil – on culture and the news during the past 12 months.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

By Gale Courey Toensing

Guantanamo Bay - National Defense Authorization Act
AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File
In this file photo made June 27, 2006, reviewed by a U.S. Department of Defense official, U.S. military guards walk within Camp Delta military-run prison, at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. Secret documents about detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison reveal new information about some of the men that the United States believes to be terrorists, according to reports about the files released Sunday, April 24, 2011, by several American and European newspapers. The U.S. government criticized the publication as "unfortunate."

President Obama is expected to sign a military defense bill perhaps as early as today, Friday, December 16, which gives him and future presidents unprecedented power to seize American citizens and others suspected of terrorism on U.S. soil and hold them in military detention indefinitely without charge or trial.

Obama had previously promised to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (NDAA) because he objected to the military custody provision of the bill. “Applying this military custody requirement to individuals inside the United States, as some Members of Congress have suggested is their intention, would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets,” the administration said in a statement November 17. He repeated his promise to veto the bill as recently as December 9.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

By Ralph Nader

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of Capitol Hill. A majority of Congress is just about to put the finishing touches on an amendment to the military budget authorization legislation that will finish off some critical American rights under our Constitution. [Congress and the Senate approved a so-called revised bill on Dec. 14 and 15, respectively. The bill now awaits the president's signature.)

Here is how two retired 4 star marine generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, described in the New York Times the stripmining of your freedom to resist tyranny in urging a veto by President Obama:

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Freedom riders of Palestine. (Activestills)

By Eric Walberg – Cairo

Just in case there was an iota of doubt left in your mind, Israel was officially declared an apartheid state during a session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town on 7 November.

Among depositions, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza cited the Fourth Geneva Convention and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which prohibits “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

This was just in time to honour the UN-endorsed International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, marked on 29 November to coincide with the anniversary of the UN vote for the Partition Plan, and first celebrated in 1976. Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists in 10 European countries staged more than 60 actions as part of a Day of Action calling on supermarkets and governments to “Take Apartheid off the Menu”.

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Intifada. (Art: Sauda Camo)

By Mohammed ALNadi - Gaza

As I write this, I'm listening to 'Ween el Malayeen' song, meaning 'where are the millions', a revolutionary song which used to stir the patriotic emotions inside millions of raging Arabs at the time of the first Intifada. This song is the Intifada's trademark which is reminiscent of vivid bittersweet memories of Palestinians in their most courageous images. It is associated with the unarmed, bare-chested Palestinian who stood firmly catapulting his stone at the Israeli killing machine, and who dared to grab the fuming tear gas grenade with his bare hands and throw it back at the Israeli soldier.

The first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, began 24 years ago, as an accumulative result of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, and its mounting brutal, repressive actions against Palestinians in all the occupied territories.

Every year on December 8, Palestinians all over the world commemorate this remarkably significant event in the history of Palestinian armed resistance. For them, it is one of the most honorable memories of which we are most proud, because it embodies the Palestinian unified spirit of defiance and perseverance against oppression and injustice.

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Israel has become a hub of all the world's racists. (Wikipedia Commons)

By Uri Avnery

My God, what a bizarre lot these Republican aspirants for the US presidency are!

What a sorry bunch of ignoramuses and downright crazies. Or, at best, what a bunch of cheats and cynics! (With the possible exception of the good doctor Ron Paul)”.

Is this the best a great and proud nation can produce? How frightening the thought that one of them may actually become the most powerful person in the world, with a finger on the biggest nuclear button!

But let’s concentrate on the present front-runner. (Republicans seem to change front-runners like a fastidious beau changes socks.)

It’s Newt Gingrich. Remember him? The Speaker of the House who had an extra-marital affair with an intern while at the same time leading the campaign to impeach President Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern.

But that’s not the point. The point is that this intellectual giant – named after Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist ever – has discovered a great historical truth.

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Ray McGovern introduces a short documentary deconstructing events revealed by Wikileaks

By Ghali Hassan

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." Frederic Bastiat, French thinker (1801-1850).

The U.S. and its allies are preparing for aggression against the Syria as part of the U.S.-Israel destabilisation agenda in the region. The pretext is, as usual; the “protection of civilians” and installing of Western-style “democracy”. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The aim is to topple the current Syrian government and replace it with a puppet government subservient to U.S.-Israel Zionist interests.

It should be note that because of Syria's support for the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israel's terror and Syria's ties with Iran, the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad deemed a ”threat” to U.S. and Israel interests. Hence, a Syrian regime subservient to U.S.-Israel dictates is vital to isolate Iran and ignores Israel's Zionist expansion.

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Latin Americans should share their experiences with democratisation with other countries in the global South.
By Pepe Escobar

Now the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff was tortured in 1970 by the country's military junta [Ricardo Amaral]

Take a good look at this 1970 photo.

The 22-year-old woman in the photo is about to be examined by a bunch of subtropical inquisitors.

She has just been tortured, electrocuted and waterboarded - what Dick Cheney dismisses as "enhanced interrogation" - for 22 days.

Yet she didn't break down.

Today this woman, Dilma Rousseff, is the President of Brazil - the perennial "country of the future", the world's seventh-largest economy by purchasing power parity (ahead of the UK, France and Italy), a member of the BRICS, and exercising a soft power way beyond music, football and joy of living.

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Obama should demand an immediate halt to all Israeli destruction of Palestinian property in the West Bank.

By Yousef Munayyer

Many Palestinians have been left homeless after occupying Israeli forces demolished their homes [EPA]

Washington, DC - Much was made of what many in the media described as a "confrontation" between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama over the building of illegal Israeli settlements (or colonies) in Occupied Palestinian Territory. From the very beginning of the Obama administration, the pursuit of a freeze on Israeli settlement activity was a stated goal - one that was never really accomplished and never adequately pursued.

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By Gale Courey Toensing December 9, 2011

The hacktivist group Anonymous, famous for hacking former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s e-mails, among other things, has issued a warning to the U.S. Senate for passing a bill that brings the United States closer to military rule and further from democracy: “US SENATE: Expect us!!”

The Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act on December 1 in a bipartisan vote of 93-7. The bill gives the military the unprecedented power to seize suspected terrorists anywhere in the world, including American citizens on U.S. soil, and keep them locked up indefinitely without charge or trial. Indigenous Peoples worried that the legislation could be used against them for asserting their rights to self-determination and sovereignty or for protecting their lands and resources against exploitation by governments or corporations.

The controversial bill has alarmed and outraged many who say it violates the due process rights of the U.S. Constitution and takes the country one step further on the wrong path toward tyranny. The bill also enraged Anonymous, a nebulous Internet community that opposes censorship and oppression. The group’s latest video is a “Message to the American People” and begins with the salutation, “Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes!”

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. AP Photo/Brennan Linsley
FILE - In this file photo made June 27, 2006, reviewed by a U.S. Department of Defense official, U.S. military guards walk within Camp Delta military-run prison, at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. Secret documents about detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison reveal new information about some of the men that the United States believes to be terrorists, according to reports about the files released Sunday, April 24, 2011, by several American and European newspapers. The U.S. government criticized the publication as "unfortunate."

By Gale Courey Toensing December 8, 2011

While people in Tahrir Square and elsewhere around the world are putting their lives on the line in order to free themselves from the grip of military rule and create democratic societies, the U.S. Senate has moved America in the opposite direction, passing a bill that gives the military unprecedented power to seize suspected terrorists, including American citizens, anywhere in the world, including on U.S. soil, and keep them locked up indefinitely without charge or trial.

The $662 billion National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, S. 1867 (NDAA) was approved in the Senate on Thursday, December 1 by a vote of 93-7. After passing the measure, the Senate incorporated it into the related House bill—H.R. 1540—which passed in Congress on May 25 by a vote of 322-96. Since Congress does not have the authority under the Constitution to initiate appropriations, the bill now returns to Congress for reconciliation.

Opponents of the bill say it violates the due process rights of the U.S. Constitution and gives states too much power. When the House version of the bill passed last spring Indigenous Peoples worried that the legislation could be used against them for asserting their rights to self-determination and sovereignty or for protecting their lands and resources against exploitation by governments or corporations.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

NEW YORK (Ma'an) -- Hamas has ordered the departure of nearly all its staff at its Damascus headquarters by next week following pressure from Turkey and Qatar, a US newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a Hamas official saying the two regional US allies were trying to isolate Syrian President Bashar Assad amid an eight-month crackdown on antiregime protests.

Hamas will establish new headquarters in Cairo and Qatar to replace its operations in Syria, the official told the Journal, apparently on the condition of anonymity.

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Allegiance must not lie with any particular faction. (Latuff)

By Ramzy Baroud

The Palestinian Uprising or Intifada of 1987 remains the single most significant triumph of popular mobilization in Palestinian history.

The First Intifada, as it is commonly known, had, once and for all, placed the Palestinian people as a collective on the political map of a region that previously had room only for Israeli Merkava tanks and US ‘peace envoys’. The Arab body politic had been led by mostly powerless leaders, and Palestinian factions with multiple allegiances were led by men with numerous nom de guerres.

Not discounting the fact that some of the Palestinian factions had, in fact, contributed to the long and arduous struggle for Palestinian freedom, a chasm had long existed between the larger mass of the Palestinian people and those who claimed to represent them.

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By M.J. Rosenberg

Any doubt we might have that the Israeli right has lost its mind should be eliminated by the latest column from one of its most prominent media figures, Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post.

Glick, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, has flipped out over some remarks (which we'll get to later) made last week by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman. And here is how she explains those remarks.

Her first explanation is that "the Obama administration is an ideological echo chamber in which only certain positions are permitted."

Restrained by ideological thought police that outlaw critical thought about the dominant forces in the Islamic world today, US officials have little choice but to place all the blame for everything that goes wrong on the one society they are free to criticize — Israel.

That, in itself, borders on hilarious.

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GENEVA – United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, will undertake a fact-finding mission to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory from 6 to 18 December 2011, in what will be the first visit by the mandate.

“During my mission, I will meet with Government officials from both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, as well as with human rights defenders, journalists and media professionals, individuals and UN agencies to gather first-hand information on the situation of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and freedom of the media,” said the independent expert.

“The main purpose of this mission,” Mr. La Rue added, “is to contribute, through collaborative engagement with all interlocutors, to enhance the enjoyment of the right to freedom of expression for all.”

The Special Rapporteur will visit the occupied Palestinian territory from 6 to 11 December, and Israel from 12 to 17 December. He plans to visit Tel Aviv, the Negev, Ramallah, Gaza and other places in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.

A press conference will be held at 15h00 on 18 December 2011 at the American Colony Hotel (Pacha room, One Louis Vincent Street, Jerusalem).

The Special Rapporteur will present his findings and recommendations in his report to the Human Rights Council in June 2012.

Frank La Rue was appointed as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in August 2008 by the United Nations Human Rights Council. As Special Rapporteur, he is independent from any Government or organization and serves in his individual capacity.

For further information on the Special Rapporteur’s mandate, log on to: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/opinion/index.htm

OHCHR Country Page – Occupied Palestinian Territories: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/countries/MENARegion/Pages/PSIndex.aspx

OHCHR Country Page – Israel: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/MENARegion/Pages/ILIndex.aspx

For press inquiries and additional information on the Special Rapporteur’s mission, please contact Ms. Momoko Nomura (Mobile: +972 54 280 2116 / Mnomura@ohchr.org) or write to freedex@ohchr.org.

There are loud words these days about democracy, especially from the West, but no mention of imperialism, notes Ramzy Baroud

Al Ahram

The so-called Arab Spring is creating an intellectual divide that threatens any sensible understanding of the turmoil engulfing several Arab countries.

While it is widely understood that revolutions endeavour to overthrow political structures and aim to change the social order and power paradigm within any given society, there is still no single, inclusive understanding of what actually constitutes a revolution. Nor is there any consensus as to exactly what a revolution is supposed to achieve.

An ordinary Egyptian is likely to determine his/her take on revolution from various angles: measurable economic advancement -- or lack thereof; the ability to voice an opinion without fear of censorship or retaliation; the right to participate in collective action, and influence the overall direction of his/her country.

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Despite the fact that the US war on Iraq was a disaster, the same talking heads that sold the war remain influential in US politics, writes James Zogby

Al Ahram

With the date for US forces to be fully withdrawn from Iraq fast approaching, it is important to remind ourselves how we got into that long and deadly war in the first place, to recognise that this conflict is far from over, and to hold accountable those responsible for the horrors they created during the past eight years.

In a word, the road to Baghdad was paved with "lies". I don't just mean the fictions of "weapons of mass destruction" or of "Saddam's connection with Al-Qaeda" that were used by the Bush administration to justify their case for war. In both instances, the White House and its minions throughout the government worked overtime, relying on embellishment, distortion and outright fabrication to make their arguments for war. What they did in manufacturing and marketing these lies was wrong, both morally and legally.

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The divisions have been institutionalized. (Markus Balázs Göransson)

By Markus Balázs Göransson

The center of Hebron is surreal and terrifying. It is strange and overwhelming to see this schizophrenic place with my own eyes. As I walk along the streets, my senses are heightened yet I cannot fully process what I see. It feels like I am walking in a dream or on an empty movie set. The legacy of violence is stark and in your face and I am reminded of the ruins and craters that I saw when visiting Srebrenica in Bosnia several years ago. Yet, unlike Srebrenica, there has been no attempt to move past the divisions in Hebron. Instead, the divisions have been frozen and institutionalized and today Hebron is relatively quiet only because people are kept physically apart.

A handful of Jewish settlers – 800, in a city of 170 000 – have moved into the heart of the city and to protect them the Israeli army has created “sterilized zones” where the movement, residence and business of Palestinians are sharply restricted. On parts of some streets Palestinians are allowed to pass but when they do so they walk swiftly with their heads down to escape notice by Israeli settlers and soldiers. Other streets are closed to Palestinians, who cannot work or walk there. Technically, they are allowed to live in some buildings but the front doors of these buildings have been bolted shut and the residents are able to enter and leave them only through back windows or over rooftops.

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On the 15th of November, six Palestinian activists: Nadeem Al-Sharbate, Huwaida Arraf, Dr. Mazin Qumsieyeh, Fadi Qura'an, Basel Al-Araj, and Badee' Dwaik, boarded a segregated Israeli bus used by Israeli settlers to Jerusalem in an attempt to highlight the regime of discrimination on freedom of movement in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the fact that Palestinians cannot access Jerusalem freely. After boarding the bus without incidents, the bus was stopped at the Hizme checkpoint, where all the activists were arrested and violently forcibly removed from the bus.

By Gale Courey Toensing November 26, 2011

Yellow police tape marked off the crime scene at the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation's pavilion which was torched by an as yet unknown arsonist on November 14.

KENT, Conn. – The only building on the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation’s reservation where tribal members could gather has been destroyed by fire.

The Connecticut State Police Major Crime Squad is investigating the blaze that devastated the structure – a wooden pavilion that was used both as a longhouse for ceremonies and for social gatherings. The building stood at the center of the nation’s 400-acre reservation on Schaghticoke Mountain. Police have determined that the fire was arson and have posted a notice offering $2,500 for information about the arsonist.

The fire took place on November 14 around 10:30 p.m., according to police documents. There were no human injuries, but the 60-foot x 22-foot structure that tribal members call “the pavilion” was heavily damaged, police said. “During the course of the investigation, Fire Marshall Stan MacMillan, along with Connecticut State police detectives assigned to the Fire and Explosion Investigation Unity determined that the fire had been intentionally set,” the police said.

Schaghticoke Tribal Nation Chief Richard Velky and tribal council member Chuck Kilson said they spent much of the rest of the week after the fire on the reservation. They said they were both saddened and outraged at the loss of the pavilion.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

New York Times

(Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
A view inside a mosque, which was set on fire on Oct. 3, in Tuba Zangaria, an Arab town in northern Israel.

By GERSHOM GORENBERG
November 25, 2011

“CLEARLY, there’s a war here, sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,” the yeshiva student said. “It’s not a war with guns. It’s a war of light against darkness.”

We were sitting in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Acre in Israel. The war he described was another front in the struggle he knew from growing up in a settlement in the northern West Bank, or Samaria: the daily contest between Jews and Palestinians for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The explicit reason that his yeshiva had been established in Acre was to serve as a bridgehead in that struggle, just as West Bank settlements are built to bolster the Jewish hold on land there.
Israeli politicians and pundits labeled the Oct. 3 burning of a mosque in Tuba Zangaria, an Arab community in northern Israel, and the subsequent desecration of Arab graves in Jaffa as a sudden escalation. But they were mistaken.

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By whitewashing the Libyan rebels and demonising the Gaddafi regime did the leading US intellectual Noam Chomsky help facilitate an imperialist invasion? In a wide-ranging interview with Chomsky, Dan Glazebrook asks him

'There were two interventions, not one, by NATO. One of them lasted about five minutes. That's the one that was taken under UN Security Resolution 1973, which called for a no-fly zone over Benghazi when there was the threat of a serious massacre there... but the three traditional imperial powers of France, Britain and the United States carried out a second intervention that had nothing to do with protecting civilians and certainly wasn't a no-fly zone, but was rather about participating in a rebel uprising'

This was a difficult interview for me. It was Noam Chomsky who first opened my eyes to the basic neo-colonial structure of the world and to the role of the corporate media in both disguising and legitimising this structure.

Chomsky has consistently demonstrated how, ever since the end of World War II, military regimes have been imposed on the Third World by the US and its European allies with an ascribed role to keep wages low (and thus investment opportunities high) by wiping out communists, trade unionists, and anyone else deemed a potential threat to empire. He has been at the forefront of exposing the lies and real motives behind the aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia in recent years, and against Central America and Southeast Asia before that. But on Libya, in my opinion, he has been terrible.

Don't get me wrong: now the conquest is nearly over, Chomsky can be quite forthright in his denunciation of it, as he makes clear during the interview. "Right now, at this moment, NATO is bombing a home base of the largest tribe in Libya," he tells me. "It's not getting reported much, but if you read the Red Cross reports they're describing a horrifying humanitarian crisis in the city that's under attack, with hospitals collapsing, no drugs, people dying, people fleeing on foot into the desert to try to get away from it and so on. That's happening under the NATO mandate of protecting civilians."

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Ron Cobb's Thanksgiving in America, (Los Angeles Free Press, 1968).

http://acardott.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/cobbthanksgiving.jpg

The US is not taking any practical steps to ensure a nuclear-free Middle East, says the author.

By Noam Chomsky Last

The UN could establish a Nuclear-Free Middle East Zone with the help of the US that is busy securing oil supplies [EPA]

Though the Iranian threat is not military aggression, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is considered an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II. As one influential figure advised, expressing a common understanding, control of these resources yields "substantial control of the world" (A A Berle)

The dire threat of Iran is widely recognised to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed Services in March 2010 that "the Iranian regime is the primary state-level threat to stability" in the US Central Command area of responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of US global concerns. The term "stability" here has its usual technical meaning: firmly under US control. In June 2010 Congress strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding US offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 "bunker busters" used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these "massive ordnance penetrators", the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

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What's the real story behind Washington sending a bunch of marines to Australia?

By Pepe Escobar 22 Nov 2011

US Marines being dispatched to station in northern Australia are meant to symbolise a new focus on the Pacific [Getty]

"The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay." That was US President Barack Obama, in his current Asia-Pacific swing, addressing the Australian Parliament.

One would expect a Pacific/peaceful power to promote, well, diplomacy and peace. Not really. Not when the key scriptwriters of the President's offensive - "turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific" - come from the Pentagon.

Washington may not be on the verge of an Occupy Australia gambit - but one's got to start somewhere. The start is 250 US Marines deployed as part of an Air-Ground Task Force to bases in Australia's Northern Territory, including Darwin - which is a stone's throw from Indonesia, and thus, Southeast Asia.

US Air Force fighter jets will also be in the house, with the Marines on six-month tours starting in the summer of 2012 up to an eventual rotation of 2,500 troops.

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Israeli government plans to exhume 1,000 bodies from historic Muslim cemetery

Thousands of graves containing the remains of the companions of the prophet, scholars and martyrs.

A member of Fatah's Revolutionary Council has warned of Israeli plans to exhume 1,000 bodies from the historic Ma'man Allah Cemetery in occupied Jerusalem. In a press release on Monday, Dmitri Dalyani said that digging and excavation works in the cemetery "continue unabated with the consent of all Israeli authorities concerned, principally the Antiquities Department and the Jerusalem Municipality."

This was confirmed by the Aqsa Foundation for Endowments and Heritage, which added that in recent days "unusual" activities have taken place in a fenced-off area of the cemetery earmarked by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre to build the so-called "Museum of Tolerance". The Foundation condemned the lack of respect for the cemetery by the Israeli authorities.

According to reports from representatives of the Aqsa Foundation who have visited the site, digging equipment and a large number of workers, including engineers, have entered the site, which has been cordoned off with extremely high fences and barbed wire. The actual excavation site has been covered over and security patrols have been stepped up significantly.

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By Dr. Hanan Chehata
November 17, 2011

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

The Reverend Allan Aubrey Boesak is a veteran of the South African anti-apartheid struggle. He is the former president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and is a signatory of the South African Christian response to the Kairos Palestine Document. This year he gave expert testimony at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine session in Cape Town, at which he spoke to MEMO's Hanan Chahata.

Hanan Chahata: You were one of the signatories of the South African Christian response to the Kairos Palestine Document. In this you said that the Palestinian experience of apartheid is "in its practical manifestation even worse than South African apartheid". Can you explain what you meant by this?

Allan Boesak: It is worse, not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it, so to speak; sharpened it. For instance, we had the Bantustans and we had the Group Areas Act and we had the separate schools and all of that but I don't think it ever even entered the mind of any apartheid planner to design a town in such a way that there is a physical wall that separates people and that that wall denotes your freedom of movement, your freedom of economic gain, of employment, and at the same time is a tool of intimidation and dehumanisation. We carried passes as the Palestinians have their ID documents but that did not mean that we could not go from one place in the city to another place in the city. The judicial system was absolutely skewed of course, all the judges in their judgements sought to protect white privilege and power and so forth, and we had a series of what they called "hanging judges" in those days, but they did not go far as to openly, blatantly have two separate justice systems as they do for Palestinians [who are tried in Israeli military courts] and Israelis [who are tried in civil, not military courts]. So in many ways the Israeli system is worse.

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Sam Husseini Questions Saudi Prince Turki about Legitimacy of Saudi Regime

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Fri, 11/18/2011 - 16:10
Electronic Intifada

Sam Husseini, best known for his work with Washington Stakeout, has been suspended from the National Press Club in Washington, apparently for no other reason than asking Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, a tough question.

Husseini explains:

On Monday I went to a news conference at the National Press Club, where I am a member, titled “His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia.” I asked a tough question at the news conference – a question that dealt with the very legitimacy of the Saudi regime. Before the end of the day, I’d received a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club “due to your conduct at a news conference.” The letter, signed by the executive director of the Club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting “boisterous and unseemly conduct or language.”

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The Israeli government hopes to draw attention away from its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and ongoing human rights abuses by recruiting minorities and members of the lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual (LGBT) community to conduct "public diplomacy" and to "sell Israel as a democracy"


A demonstrator holds a sign that protests Israel's efforts to pinkwash the occupation. Israel's propaganda attempts are sometimes called hasbara. The Israeli government often relies on volunteers to conduct "public diplomacy" by advocating for Israel to acquaintances and on the internet (Photo: flickr/Nerdeeeeen)

Israel’s Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs has published a call for applications to voluntary positions in Israeli public diplomacy, targeting, in particular, “minority members, representatives of the gay community and people representing the variety of opinions and world-views in Israeli society.”

According to the call, the Ministry seeks to expand its base of Israeli volunteers interested in conducting international “public diplomacy” on the country’s behalf. The Ministry is now “primarily interested in receiving applications from people representing the diverse faces of Israeli society,” and gives the specific examples listed above.

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With Iran on an international charm offensive, for now Israel appears edging back from bellicose threats to strike its nuclear facilities, writes Khaled Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem

Israelis mark the 16th anniversary of the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by an ultra-nationalist Jew

Having succeeded in alerting the international community, especially Western powers, to the "immediate Iranian nuclear danger", Israel has been toning down its threats to carry out imminent air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Israel, which has a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including an estimated 200-250 nuclear weapons, claims Iran is on the verge of producing a nuclear device.

Israeli pugnacity reached its height last week when Israeli President Shimon Peres said during a televised interview that the chances of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear targets were becoming more probable than ever, especially after the release of an IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) report on Iran.

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Arabs have historically revolted every decade against rulers and the west has counter-revolted most attempts.

By Joseph Massad 18 Nov 2011 10:45

Arafat's Road to Olslo began in the 1970s with the large scale funding pouring in from the Gulf countries [EPA]

New York, New York - The current popular challenges to the Western-sponsored Arab dictatorships are hardly a new occurrence in modern Arab history. We have seen such uprisings against European colonialism in the region since its advent in Algeria in 1830 and in Egypt in 1882. Revolts in Syria in the 1920s against French rule and especially in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 against British colonial rule and Zionist settler-colonialism were massive by global standards. Indeed the Palestinian Revolt would inspire others in the colonised world and would remain an inspiration to Arabs for the rest of the century and beyond. Anti-colonial resistance which also opposed the colonially-installed Arab regimes continued in Jordan, in Egypt, in Bahrain, Iraq, North and South Yemen, Oman, Morocco, and Sudan. The massive anti-colonial revolt in Algeria would finally bring about independence in 1962 from French settler colonialism. The liberation of Algeria meant that one of the two European settler-colonies in the Arab world was down, and only one remained: Palestine. On the territorial colonial front, much of the Arabian Gulf remained occupied by the British until the 1960s and early 1970s, and awaited liberation.

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by Alan Hart

In advance of the formal burial of the Palestinian Authority’s bid for state recognition at the UN, BBC Radio 4′s flagship Today programme was on the right track. In his introduction to a quite revealing report, presenter John Humphrys said reporter Kevin Connolly had gone to Israel to find out “what hopes there are, if any, for the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Among those Connolly interviewed were Akiva Eldar, the Ha’aretz columnist who has been a constant critic of Israel’s settlement policy. He said. “The settlers have won and Israel has lost… Israel must now live with the consequences.”

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By Carrie E. Garrow, adjunct professor at Syracuse University’s College of Law, where she is executive director of the Center for Indigenous Law, Governance and Citizenship. The eighth annual Haudenosaunee Conference is happening Nov. 18 and 19 at Syracuse University.

Published: Thursday, November 17, 2011, 5:00 AM

To the Editor:
In the beginning of the fall semester, you can usually spot the first-year law students in the hallway — bright and optimistic, true believers in the U.S. legal system. If you look closely, it is often just as easy to identify the American Indian students. Not by the stereotypical images portrayed by popular culture, but by looking into their eyes. They know the truth about the U.S. legal system — that the doors of justice are closed to Indian nations.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of the Oneida Indian Nation land claims appeal is a case in point. The federal courts acknowledged that New York took Indian land in violation of federal law. But rather than dispensing justice, the courts focus on the “disruptive nature” of Indian land claims. The jurists cringe, contemplating an imagined disruption that towns and counties might suffer if Indian nations were to win their case — despite the fact that the only remedy considered was financial damages from the state and federal government to compensate for the illegal taking of land.

Why is there no weighing of the disruption to the Indian nations, such as the loss of millions of acres? What about the disruption caused by the Thomas Indian Boarding School, run by the state from 1875 to 1957, where Indian children, sometimes forcibly removed from their homes and separated from their siblings and parents, suffered abuse and a regimented, military-type lifestyle?

What about the disruption caused by New York state demanding the federal government give it criminal jurisdiction over the Indian territories within its borders? Isn’t it a good thing to protect crime victims? Maybe, but that’s not happening in Indian Country, as national statistics indicate American Indians are twice as likely as other races to experience rape and sexual assault.

And it’s not Indians committing these crimes. Sex crimes against Native women are disproportionately committed by non-Native men — a staggering 86 percent. Native women are often silent victims, because not only are they scared to report crimes to a state that has a history of stealing their children, they also do not vote or pay property taxes. But let’s not consider the disruption these Indian women feel as they fall victim to violent crimes.

Volumes have been and will be written about the disruption felt by the Indian Nations due to the laws and policies of New York. It is not a surprise that what most concerns the federal courts is any potential disruption that a town or county might suffer. As the late New York State Assemblyman Frank A. Walkley noted in 1970 at a public hearing discussing a potential Indian land claim settlement, “If (the Oneida Indian Nation) claim is a valid one and settlement is made, what I am trying to avoid is another wrong on a town or village.”

Walkley would have been pleased to see that the federal courts did step up to protect the towns and villages built upon land taken illegally by the state. This is no surprise to the Native students at the College of Law — it is just another chapter in 234 years of dealings between the Indian nations and New York.

In the courts of the colonizer, justice is never on our side. But after 234 years of broken treaties and confiscated property, the Nations are still here. The battle is not over.

Syracuse

Neglecting Asia's importance over the last decade may impair the US' ability to regain its former power position.
By Francis Wade

The US is trying to exploit opportunities silently against China such as the Burmese Myitsone Dam project [EPA]

Standing on a platform in Honolulu last week as United States military officials and heads of Pacific islands looked on, Hillary Clinton charted Washington's course for re-entry to the Asia-Pacific. The hour-long talk, the content of which was first thrashed out in a seven-page article in Foreign Policy magazine last month, set the framework for Clinton's visit to the region this week. There she will strike out on a path that, beset with difficulties, is crucial to the US' continued status as the world's sole superpower.

The plan she lays out is ambitious and, for the sceptic, weighed down with a sense of foreboding familiarity: she speaks repeatedly of the need for the US to gain a foothold here, but said in the knowledge that her government's myopic focus on the Middle East over the past decade has cleared the way for China to stretch its tentacles across the region. This China has done adeptly: its deployment of soft power, buoyed by the ability to find common ground with the nationalistic sentiment that dictates the policy of its neighbours, has won it favour with nations wary of the historically aggressive track record of the US here. As such Hillary et al face a difficult task in convincing wavering governments to 'look West' rather than be drawn further into Beijing's strategic orbit.

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Israeli defence minister walks back from comments that appeared to empathise with Tehran's alleged nuclear quest.

Iranian students at a demonstration to show their support for Iran's nuclear programme in Isfahan [Reuters]

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, has reassured Israelis about his government's resolve after he appeared to empathise with Iran's alleged quest for nuclear weapons during a US television interview.

Barak's suggestion that, were he Iranian, he would "probably" seek the bomb made headlines in Israel, where the government feels threatened by the Islamic republic but has looked to world powers to intervene with tough diplomacy.

Taking time off from a visit to Canada to brief Israel's main radio broadcasters, Barak said on Thursday that his remarks, which were in English, had been partly misunderstood.

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By Stuart Littlewood

When new recruits join British Petroleum (BP) they are fed romantic tales about how the company came into being.

William Knox D'Arcy, a Devon man, studied law and, after emigrating to Australia, made a fortune from the Mount Morgan gold-mining operations in the 1880s. Returning to England he agreed to fund a search for oil and minerals in Persia and negotiations with the Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar began in 1901. A sixty year concession to explore for oil gave D'Arcy the oil rights to the entire country except for five provinces in Northern Iran. The Iranian government would receive16% of the oil company's annual profits.

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The 'great game' of 'losing Syria' is currently being played out. (SANA)

By Maidhc Ó Cathail

In 1996, an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, prepared 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm' for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In that seminal report, the Richard Perle-led study group suggested that Israel could 'shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.' Comprised mainly of American-based pro-Israel advocates, the group stressed, “Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.”

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An arbitrary victim was taken from his own home.. (Tamar Fleishman)

By Tamar Fleishman – The West Bank

Jaba checkpoint is a great example of the deep connection between the infliction of the checkpoint regime in the West Bank on the Palestinian population, and the effort to satisfy the settlers' needs and caprices.

Jaba checkpoint lies on the road leading from Qalandiya to Ramallah, it merges with road number 60 which is the main road running along the length of the West Bank.

Unlike the tens of checkpoints that are scattered around the Bank, never has the existence of this checkpoint been ascribed an ideological reasoning. While the other checkpoints detain vehicles heading towards towns populated with Jewish communities, Jaba checkpoint is the opposite: the checkpoint faces settlements in the depth of Palestine, ignoring those driving from Qalandiya/Ramallah, and the inspections preformed are to identify the nationality of the passengers, so as to protect Jews by preventing them from heading on- the original reason was that some settlers which had arrived at the entrance of Qalandiya refugee camp were stoned.

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By Jim Loney

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The U.S. military is vacating Saddam Hussein's ornate palaces at its war headquarters in Baghdad and will turn the property over to Iraq next month, but Saddam's prison toilet is leaving with the Americans.

The stainless steel commode and a reinforced steel door have been removed from the cell where the dictator spent two years before his 2006 execution and is destined for a military police museum in the United States.

"We're not taking anything that the Iraqis had. We are only taking stuff that we put in, we utilized, and when we didn't need it any more, we took it home," Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Brooks, a U.S. military historian, said on a tour of the site on Monday.

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By MATTI FRIEDMAN

JERUSALEM (AP) — UNESCO has reprimanded Israel over a newspaper cartoon showing the Israeli prime minister telling pilots to bomb the U. N. agency's office after bombing Iran, a spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry said Friday.

The U.N.'s Paris-based cultural arm called in Israel's ambassador, Nimrod Barkan, on Wednesday and handed him a protest note saying the cartoon "endangers the lives of unarmed diplomats," according to the Israeli spokesman, Yigal Palmor.

The note came from the organization's director-general, Irina Bokova, he said. Officials at UNESCO in Paris were not immediately available for comment Friday.

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Zahhar says Hamas will not negotiate with Israel (MaanImages/Wissam Nassar)

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Hamas will not become a carbon copy of rivals Fatah after their reconciliation deal, but welcomes the prospect of Palestinian elections, senior party official Mahmoud Zahhar said Saturday.

Hamas will not negotiate with Israel, Zahhar said in an Eid al-Adha celebration in Gaza City.

The May deal between Hamas and Fatah sought to end years of animosity between the parties that split Palestinians into rival administrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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The same people who lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to start a war are pushing for war on Iran, MJ Rosenberg writes.

Israeli PM Netanyahu 'seems to think it's always 1938' and that Iran has channeled the spirit of Nazi Germany to commit another holocaust against a powerless and weak Jewish community [GALLO/GETTY]

Christmas did not arrive early for the "Bomb Iran" crowd.

Over the past several weeks, neoconservative hawks were gleefully predicting that the International Atomic Energy Agency's new report on Iran's nuclear program would provide the spark needed to ignite and justify a US or Israeli attack.

Sadly for them, the report did no such thing and the issue has been overshadowed by other stories. In fact, there was so little new in the IAEA report that Iran experts who had been scheduled to do media spots discussing the issue were told not to bother coming in. The Penn State cover-up, the Herman Cain sexual harassment scandal, and now the Rick Perry brain freeze would continue to dominate the news cycle.

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On 1 November, scholars and intellectuals marked the birth anniversary of Edward Said. In commemoration of the occasion, Al-Ahram Weekly publishes an abridged version of the Said Memorial Lecture given by John Carlos Rowe at the American University in Cairo

Edward Said

Al Ahram

Edward Said's criticism of US imperialism, especially in the Middle East, is the real basis for the claim several of us have made for him as a scholar-activist of American Studies. A scholar of great intellect and justifiable ego, Said was also the first to insist that we should not venerate our predecessors, but always locate them historically. On the mere evidence of Said's extensive work on US imperialism in the Middle East, ranging from Orientalism (1978) through Covering Islam (1981) and Blaming the Victims (1988) to Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), scholars in American Studies ought to have undertaken the more concerted studies of relations between the United States and the Arabic and Islamic worlds that are just today beginning to have an impact.

Said was indeed "out of place" in the United States in this regard, insofar as his regular columns in Arabic journals, including the Al-Ahram Weekly here in Cairo, were virtually unknown in US scholarly circles. Published just last year, Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom's collection of essays, Edward Said: Emancipation and Representation helps overcome this American provincialism, as do the many valuable studies of Said published in the Arab world before and after his death, including the issue of Alif devoted to his work in 2005. Of course, the phrase "ahead of his time" applies more accurately than "out of place" to Said's actual anticipation of the new scholarly attention in American Studies devoted to the Arab and Islamic worlds.

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A Response to Michael Neumann

by JONATHAN COOK

Counterpunch

This is at least the third time in the past four years that philosophy professor Michael Neumann has used these pages to lambast the supporters of a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. On each occasion he has offered a little more insight into why he so vehemently objects to what he terms the “delusions” of those who oppose – or, at least, gave up on – the two-state solution.

In his most recent essay, Neumann suggests that his previous reluctance to be more forthright was motivated by “politeness”. Well, I for one wish the professor had been franker from the outset. It might have saved us a lot of time and effort.

Even though I have identified myself as a supporter of the one-state solution, I find much to agree with in what Neumann writes on this occasion. Like him, I do not believe that a particular solution, or resolution, will occur simply because the Palestinians or their wellwishers make a good moral case for it. Success for the Palestinians will come when a wide array of regional developments force Israel to conclude that its current behaviour is untenable.

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To have or not to have nuclear weapons is a question of human security and not European privilege.

The US and Israel tell Iran it is a threat to world peace if it were to possess a nuclear device [AFP]

Joseph Massad

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - How many times must this story be retold? It is common knowledge in the United States, in Europe, in the Arab World, indeed in the entire world. The international press has been reporting on it since the late 1960s. The historical details of the story are also well known. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower gave Israel its first small nuclear reactor at Nahal Sorek; in 1964, the French built for Israel its much larger and major Dimona nuclear reactor in the Naqab (Negev) Desert; in 1965, Israel stole 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from the United States through its spies at the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation company in Pennsylvania; in 1968, Israel hijacked a Liberian ship in international waters and stole its 200-ton shipment of yellowcake. Israel has possessed nuclear bombs since the early 1970s. Despite official US denials, Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel, reportedly prepared to launch 13 nuclear bombs on Syria and Egypt in 1973 and was stopped short of committing this genocidal act when Henry Kissinger gave Israel the most massive weapons airlift in history at the time to reverse the course of the 1973 war (as Time Magazine reported the story). Israel has had an ongoing nuclear weapons collaboration with the South African Apartheid regime for decades, which only ended with the collapse of the regime in 1994.

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Contacts:
Jane Hirschmann 917-679-8343, 212-222-6721
Felice Gelman 917-912-2597
Medea Benjamin (in Turkey with ground crew) 90 531 888 8927

New York, NY 11/4/11

Canadian and Irish ships, the Tahrir and the Saoirse, sailing with Freedom Waves to Gaza have been illegally boarded by the Israeli military in international waters, about 50 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza, around 9:30 am EDT. The IDF spokesperson confirmed that the vessels were taken to the port of Ashdod, and the passengers were taken into custody by the Israeli police. Although the IDF spokesperson claimed they took “every precaution to ensure the safety of the activists,” Freedom Waves to Gaza organizers have been unable to communicate with the ships since soon after the vessels were approached by Israeli warships earlier this morning.

U.S. Coordinator Jane Hirschmann commented, “Had the passengers been permitted to proceed to Gaza rather than being stopped on the high seas by armed force, there would have been no threat to their safety. The IDF's statement is like the mugger promising to escort his victim home safely.”

The Canadian boat Tahrir confirmed that the Israeli navy had contacted them asking for their destination at around 7 a.m EDT to which Ehab Lotayef, an activist on board the ship, replied 'The conscience of humanity'. When the Israelis again demanded to know the destination of the ship Lotayef replied; 'The betterment of mankind'.

Ann Wright, one of the organizers of the Freedom Flotilla that attempted to sail to Gaza in June, said "It's a little hard to imagine how 27 unarmed civilians on two small boats carrying medicine and letters threaten Israel's security. Israel is simply determined to maintain its policy of collective punishment against the 1.6 million civilians in Gaza. This is a crime against humanity and violation of international law. Despite Israel's consistent use of military force against nonviolent protests and demonstrations, activists around the world will continue to challenge the occupation of Palestine and the blockade and Gaza.”

Passengers on the boats are citizens of Canada, Ireland, the U.S., Australia, and Palestine. The U.S. citizen on the Tahrir is Kit Kittredge of Quilcene, Washington. She is a massage therapist and emergency medical technician.

Cain at a Jewish holy site in Jerusalem

By Ali Gharib

Former pizza company CEO and GOP candidate Herman Cain started his presidential campaign — quite by accident, it seems — as an advocate for a cherished Palestinian ideal to return to their homelands throughout historic Palestine by endorsing the “right of return.” But he’s come a long way since then. Cain’s not “foreign policy dumb,” he says, and now he’s challenging reporters to take on his expertise in global affairs. He’s come so far on the Palestinian issue that he is even hedging about whether or not Palestinians have a national identity at all.

In an interview with the free Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom (or Israel Today), Cain, in attempt to show how President Obama’s “lack of a firm stand regarding Israel has emboldened Israel’s enemies,” made his most disparaging comments yet about Palestinians, verging on denying their existence as a people:

I think that the so-called Palestinian people have this urge for unilateral recognition because they see this president as weak.

In reality, the Palestinian national movement is decades old, if not more — and certainly older than Obama. But the most shocking part of Cain’s statement was his equivocation on the existence of the Palestinian people. As Center for American Progress analyst Matt Duss wrote last year:

Despite the fact that scholars such as Rashid Khalidi have established the emergence of a distinct Palestinian national consciousness in the 19th century, the offensive idea that the Palestinians don’t exist — or the equally offensive idea that they only exist as a negative reaction to the creation of Israel — is unfortunately still a fairly common belief among Israel hawks. [...]

As Peter Beinart noted in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself made the claim in his 1993 book A Place Among the Nations.

With regard to Duss’s last point, it seems Israel Hayom is the perfect place for Cain to make his statement. In a 2008 New Yorker profile of the daily paper’s owner, American right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson, Connie Bruck wrote:

In the Israeli media world, Israel Hayom is referred to as Bibi-ton, because many believe that it serves as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, whose nickname is Bibi, and who has long received extraordinarily negative press coverage in Israel.

Cain’s latest comments about the “so-called Palestinian people” and his bogus interpretation of their national movement should give us an idea of what kind of progress (or lack thereof) a Cain presidency would make in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Think Progress

Sheikh Raed Salah was arrested in his hotel room three days after legally entering the UK in June. (Ashraf Amra / APA images)

By Asa Winstanley
The Electronic Intifada

London
27 October 2011

A UK immigration court ruled yesterday that popular Palestinian leader Sheikh Raed Salah could be deported from the country, after being banned by Home Secretary Theresa May in June.

The Electronic Intifada can now also exclusively reveal new details of an Israeli government role in the UK plot to exclude Salah.

Following yesterday’s decision, Salah could now take his appeal to a higher court, and meanwhile will remain in the UK on bail. Salah’s lawyer told The Electronic Intifada yesterday that his legal team were considering the judgment very carefully and could not comment further for the time being.

The judgment that Salah could be deported for “unacceptable behavior” comes as The Electronic Intifada reveals new details of the Israeli role in Salah’s June-July detention by the UK government. Government emails obtained by The Electronic Intifada contain evidence that the Israeli embassy in London gave information to the British government later used in an attempt to deport him from the country.
Read the full story at: The Electronic Intifada

Aid to Israel should be conditional upon the government fulfilling its obligations from negotiations with Palestine.

Like Egypt's aid is contingent upon peace with Israel, Israel's aid should also depend on negotiations and taking the necessary steps towards peace with Palestine [GALLO/GETTY]

By MJ Rosenberg

In my last piece, I highlighted a Washington Post in which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus urged that the $3bn aid package to Israel be re-examined.

Israel, with a population of seven million, receives $3bn a year from the United States while the entire continent of Africa, with a population over a billion, receives $8bn. Israel is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, while many countries in Africa languish in poverty and disease, especially HIV/AIDS. Obviously, these relative aid levels are ridiculous.

Nonetheless, I am now having second thoughts about the issue as a result of a call from a friend who works to increase aid levels for Africa.

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Fukushima's Israeli Connection

By Richard Walker -

A leading Japanese journalist recently made two incredible claims about the Fukushima power plant that suffered a nuclear meltdown in March 2011, sending shockwaves around the world. First, the former editor of a national newspaper in Japan says the U.S. and Israel knew Fukushima had weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that were exposed to the atmosphere after a massive tsunami wave hit the reactor. Second, he contends that Israeli intelligence sabotaged the reactor in retaliation for Japan’s support of an independent Palestinian state.

According to Yoishi Shimatsu, a former editor of Japan Times Weekly, these nuclear materials were shipped to the plant in 2007 on the orders of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, with the connivance of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The shipment was in the form of warhead cores secretly removed from the U.S. nuclear warheads facility BWXT Plantex near Amarillo, Texas. While acting as the middleman, Israel transported warheads from the port of Houston, and in the process kept the best ones while giving the Japanese older warhead cores that had to be further enriched at Fukushima.

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'The tide of war is receding,' said Obama. (Zoriah - zoriah.net)

By Ramzy Baroud

In a White House Statement on October 21, US President Barack Obama pledged that his country would finally withdraw forces from Iraq.

“After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over,” he said.

Providing some context to Obama’s announcement, a CBSNews.com report published on the same day stated, “The war in Iraq has meant the death of more than 4,400 U.S. troops and come at a cost of more than $700 billion.”

The US media is now failing to process any facts aside from the losses suffered by the US, who wrought war and destruction on a country in urgent need of peace and humanitarian assistance. For over a decade prior to the war, Iraq was reeling under US-led UN sanctions, which left the country’s infrastructure in a state of near collapse.

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By Ira Glunts

Hasbara is the Hebrew word for a particular type of pernicious propaganda first employed by early Zionists leaders to explain the unexplainable actions of the Jewish administration in Palestine. In recent years, hasbara has been disseminated by certain Christian fundamentalists who believe supporting Israel brings them closer to God, and also by many members of the United States Congress who have been co-opted by the powerful pro-Israel lobby. Now the lobby has its sights set on a new group of potential collaborators: African Americans.

A group of 18 African American local and state politicians, including the presidents of the City Councils of Atlanta and Detroit, recently enjoyed a tour of Israel courtesy of the American-Israel Educational Foundation (AIEF). AIEF was also the sponsor of the infamous 2011 US Congressional summer trip to Israel, during which 81 American lawmakers diverted their attention from the budget debate and the U.S. financial crisis in order to focus on the sightseeing pleasures of the Holy Land-- and to be propagandized by the Netanyahu government. AIEF is part of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the biggest pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S.

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Seif Gaddafi

By Franklin Lamb

During the late evening of 10/20/11 the White House, the Office of the Secretary of State, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Libyan Embassy in Washington, DC received a faxed communication from an American organized international legal team currently preparing their departure to Libya.

The international lawyers, whose assistance has been arranged through Gadhafi family members and friends, has accepted the obligation to represent Seif al Islam against charges filed by the International Criminal Court on June 26, 2011 and to represent him in any and all legal proceedings that the NTC government may bring against him in Libya. They have been advised by Gadafi supporters in Libya and neighboring countries that the NTC at the direction of NATO, fully intends to see Seif al Islam killed before he can address the international media and his supporters, following the transfer of his father’s leadership authority to Seif on August 29, 2011. Seif has been planning to announce his candidacy in the planned coming election. Informal polls throughout Libya have shown him garnering close to 70% of the vote if he is allowed to stand for office under the now NATO controlled country.

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CounterPunch Diary
Imperial Massacres
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Denied post mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world now has at its disposal photographs of Muammar Qaddafi, dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte. Did the terminal command, Finish Him Off, come via cell phone from the US State Department whose Secretary, Hillary Clinton, had earlier called for his death, or by dint of local initiative? At all events, since Qaddafi was a prisoner at the time of his execution, it was a war crime and I trust that in the years of her retirement Mrs Clinton will be detained amid some foreign vacation and handed a subpoena.

My friend and neighbor in Petrolia, Joe Paff, wrote a response to a dreadful story about Qaddafi’s killing on Yahoo’s site, commenting “This kind of gloating is bound to come back and bite your butt. Imagine how many people in the world would like to see Netanyahu or Obama dragged from their hiding holes and tortured. It will take about six months for everyone to regret the ‘new’ Libyan ‘democrats.’”

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Members of Hamas military wing and people greet freed prisoners upon arrival
at Rafah Crossing with Egypt in Gaza, Oct. 18, 2011.
(Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

Maan News
\\
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Israel will not release top security prisoners, nor common criminals, in the second phase of its prisoner swap deal with Hamas, senior official in the Gaza-ruling faction Mahmoud Zahhar said Sunday.

Under the second phase of the deal reached last week, 550 Palestinians -- who remain unnamed -- will be freed from Israeli jails within two months, coming after the release of 477 prisoners in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit on Tuesday.

While the Gaza militants who kidnapped Shalit will not directly negotiate the list in the second phase, Hamas leader Zahhar told Ma'an the movement had set the criteria for which prisoners would be freed, and Egypt -- who brokered the deal -- would guarantee their observation by Israel.

His comments come after Israeli intelligence officials told Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth on Sunday that petty criminals rather than security prisoners would be selected by Israel for release in the deal's second part.

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By William A. Cook

' … disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people …' -- (United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Today the American people, in concert with their brothers and sisters around the world, proclaim the rights to which they are entitled by birth and citizenship, by Constitutional law and Proclamation, and by membership in the collective body of nations that has universalized recognition of these rights for all humanity. And today, in cities and hamlets across this nation, and in many nations around the world, people gather in peace to demand of their governments’ recognition of these rights that have been abrogated by the few and denied to many.

Citizens no longer control their government; they are slaves to it. Representatives no longer serve the citizen seeking their consent to govern, they are servants of the corporations and lobbies that control the economic system to which the citizen is enslaved. Presidents no longer lead, they are the obedient lackeys of their corporate overseers. Freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want do not determine the needs of humans, economics of the market place supersedes all at the expense of the citizen and human rights. We exist in a corporate world of unending wars, of vengeance and recrimination, of fear as a commodity that imprisons the mind, of greed that destroys the resources of this planet without remorse, and of insatiable arrogance that harbors no concern for those it destroys.

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By Clive Hambidge

Does Israel really care for its returned son? Or was he used as a political pawn? As a young soldier returns home to assuage the "righteous indignation" of a nation state, no longer "sensitive [even] to its image of democracy", one can only agonize on the return of other soldiers and civilians of no blame apart from being under the yoke of Israel. They are those who, on being released from Israeli prisons, there incarcerated for resisting a "brutal occupation", find themselves in another prison, Gaza, while many are sent into exile and an uncertain future.

Does Israel really care for its returned son? Or was he used as a political pawn? Was "partial intelligence" soon after his capture enough to effect a rescue operation? Evidence suggests that it was, but more importantly what of Gaza and the conditions inside Israel's notorious prisons? The world must seek the testimonies of the returned sons and daughters of Palestine and learn of and from their ordeal.

The late Rachel Corrie said of Gaza in January 2003, "I couldn't even believe that a place like this existed." Almost 150 square miles packed with human suffering only matched by human stoicism and dignity. Over 1.5 million people, two thirds of whom are refugees, toil in an open prison created and sustained by Israel through the pernicious and unconscionable use of "de-development", the "deliberate, systematic and progressive dismemberment of an indigenous economy by a dominant one, where economic -and by extension, societal- potential is not only distorted but denied." This, it has to be said, done to encourage a Semitic exodus. For those (Palestinian) Semites who would leave, a denial of any return and their "residence rights". For those that would stay, a life of subsistence under an illegal blockade and the expression by successive Israeli governments of the worst aspects of the human condition; hate, leading to the inevitable expression of the evils of Apartheid.

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Announcing new plans to build thousands of settler units, Israel continues to undermine efforts to see direct peace talks resume with the Palestinian Authority, writes Khaled Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem

Al Ahram

Seemingly hell-bent on thwarting renewed efforts by the International Quartet to encourage the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Israeli government has announced fresh plans to build a large settlement south of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.

The new colony, slated to include thousands of settler units, is designed to create an irreversible demographic barrier between occupied Arab East Jerusalem and the Bethlehem region, which includes the Palestinian towns of Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahur as well as dozens of smaller towns and villages.

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced the appointment of a panel that would look for ways to "legalise" colonies and outposts illegally built on private Palestinian lands. According to international law, all Jewish settlements established on land occupied since 1967 are illegal.

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October 21, 2011 - - Russia’s NATO envoy has written in his microblog that the Western elation over the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could have sadistic grounds.

­“The faces of the leaders of ‘world democracies’ are so happy, as if they remembered how they hanged stray cats in basements in their childhoods,” Russian envoy to NATO and the leader of the Congress of Russian Communities, Dmitry Rogozin, wrote in his twitter status on Friday.

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"In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn't lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past." -- Joe Biden

By Pepe Escobar

Asia Times

They are fighting over the carcass as vultures. The French Ministry of Defense said they got him with a Rafale fighter jet firing over his convoy. The Pentagon said they got him with a Predator firing a Hellfire missile. After a wounded Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sought refuge in a filthy drain underneath a highway - an eerie echo of Saddam Hussein's "hole" - he was found by Transitional National Council (TNC) "rebels". And then duly executed.

Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a Libyan doctor who accompanied Gaddafi's body in an ambulance and examined it, said he died from two bullets, one to the chest, one to the head.

The TNC - which has peddled lies, lies and more lies for months - swears he died in "crossfire". It may have been a mob. It may have been Mohammad al-Bibi, a 20-year-old sporting a New York Yankees baseball cap who posed to the whole world brandishing Gaddafi's golden pistol; his ticket perhaps to collect the hefty $20 million dangled as the bounty for Gaddafi "dead or alive".

It gets curioser and curioser when one remembers that this is exactly what US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her lightning visit to Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before; Gaddafi should be "captured or killed". The Fairy Queenie satisfied Clinton's wishes, who learned about it by watching the screen of a BlackBerry - and reacting with the semantic earthquake "Wow!"

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Information Clearinghouse

By Corbett B. Daly

October 21, 2011 "CBS" - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.

"We came, we saw, he died," she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi's death by an aide in between formal interviews.

Clinton was in Tripoli earlier this week for talks with leaders of Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC).

The reporter asked if Qaddafi's death had anything to do with her surprise visit to show support for the Libyan people.

"No," she replied, before rolling her eyes and saying "I'm sure it did" with a chuckle.

Palestinian freedom is non-negotiable. (FreeGaza.org)

(The following is a condensed version of Susan Abulhawa's speech at the Al-Awda Center grand opening)

By Susan Abulhawa

Summary: Susan Abulhawa presents an argument to abandon all negotiations with Israel and to abandon calls for the One State and Two State solutions; and in fact, to abandon academic debates on a political construct in favor of embracing the basic calls of Palestinian civil society for essential human rights. This strategy includes the need for a consensus and unified call originating from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and agreed upon with the various Palestinian communities that make up the Palestinian Nation, including: Palestinians of the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, refugee camps outside of Palestine, the worldwide Diaspora and Palestinians of 1948. She argues that the greatest and unstoppable power available to Palestinians lies in their roots, the moral authority of their struggle for freedom. Harnessing that power, to which Israel has no real defenses, is the most practical path forward and it is rests on the need for 1) a unified call for freedom and the full range of human rights and dignities 2) a point of synergy among the multitude of internal and external movements which include direct action and solidarity activities inside Palestine and around the world and 3) sustained mobilization from the bottom up, hopefully with the assistance of the Palestinian Authority, but at least without interference from them.

To try to comprehend the PA’s UN bid for statehood and to figure out what the ramifications are on many fronts, it behooves us to take a look at history because, this is, after all, not the first time that a Palestinian state was formally declared. I know there are legal differences between the declaration of state in the 1980s and the current application for recognition, but for all intents and purposes, they are both attempts to achieve statehood by seeking international recognition, which, I feel, is the wrong approach for our struggle at this moment in history and, in my opinion is also probably a cynically calculated move that has little to do with actually achieving statehood.

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Hamas, not Fatah, is gaining popularity in the West Bank after the deal with Israel to release Palestinian prisoners

By Ian Black


Mahmoud Abbas addresses newly released Palestinian prisoners in Ramallah. Photograph: Abed Omar Qusini/Reuters

Palestinians in the West Bank are celebrating the release of the hundreds of prisoners exchanged for captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, but the political implications of the unprecedented deal look like bad news for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority as well as the PLO and its main group, Fatah, addressed a rally in Ramallah – unusually, with Sheikh Hassan Yousef, Hamas's leader in the West Bank – in a ceremony which included laying a wreath at Yasser Arafat's tomb.

"Your efforts have not been in vain," he told a crowd of thousands, which included 133 of the freed prisoners. "You have sacrificed, fought and paid the price. You will see the results of your struggle by the inception of a free and independent Palestinian state whose capital is Jerusalem."

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Finally a prisoner swap deal has been reached -- widely seen as a victory for Hamas -- on captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, writes Khaled Amayreh in occupied Palestine
Al Ahram

Having lost all hope of rescuing or securing the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by military means, Israel has finally agreed to accept nearly all Hamas's conditions for a prisoner swap deal that would also see the release from Israeli prisons of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including men, women and children.

In an emergency meeting that lasted several hours Tuesday night, the Israeli cabinet approved the prisoner swap deal by a large margin, with only three ministers voting against the deal. The head of the Shin Bet (Israel's domestic security agency) Yoram Cohen Israel was forced to accept the deal, seemingly because there was no other way to bring Shalit home.

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An open-ended hunger strike by Palestinians in Israeli prisons highlights the barbarous conditions to which they are subject, writes Saleh Al-Naami
Al Ahram

A Palestinian schoolboy walks past a mural depicting captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip

In the dead of silence, the sound of Jamal Hassan's fall onto the floor of his cell in Shatta Prison in Israel was especially loud on Friday evening. When the guards opened the door to his cell, they found blood flowing from his head and he had lost consciousness. He was transferred to a nearby Israeli hospital. Hassan, 31, is one of hundreds of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails who 18 days ago began an open-ended hunger strike to protest the brutal conditions they are subjected to. These conditions include a long series of procedures ordered by Binyamin Netanyahu's cabinet in an attempt to pressure Hamas to speed up the prisoner exchange deal and abandon preconditions for releasing the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Hassan, who is serving a life term in prison, succumbed to hunger, thirst and solitary confinement and passed out. The Israeli authorities are not releasing any information about his health condition, while Palestinian sources assert that the Israelis are concealing the fact that they transferred a large number of Palestinian prisoners to hospitals, out of concern that this news would trigger an angry reaction among the Palestinian public.

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The former intelligence analyst, Robert Baer, joins The World Today and warns the Obama adminstration to step back from blaming Iran for the foiled assasination plot against the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The former CIA case agent says the attack doesn't appear to have been planned by Iran, and that the US may have got its assessment dangerously wrong. He says the US must open a direct diplomatic channel with the Iranian regime .. or risk igniting an uncontrollable war.
Eleanor Hall

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-12/ex-cia-warns-us-dangerously-wrong-on-iran/3553704?section=world

Transcript

ELEANOR HALL: Now to the United States where a former intelligence analyst is warning the Obama administration to step back from blaming Iran for the foiled assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

The US attorney-general says Iran is behind what would have been a blatant act of international terrorism and which investigating authorities said was intended to be a prelude to other attacks.

The Iranian regime is denying any involvement in the plot and says the allegations are US propaganda.

At a press conference announcing the plot and the charging of two Iranians, attorney-general Eric Holder said that the US would "hold Iran accountable for its actions".

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By Ismail Salami

In a 'united against Iran campaign,' the US government has accused Tehran of orchestrating an assassination plot against the Saudi envoy in Washington, a move which is to be seen as part of a US stratagem to carry on with its plan of demonizing and isolating the Islamic Republic of Iran.

US Vice President Joe Biden said on "The Early Show" on Wednesday that "It's critically important that we unite the world in the isolation of and dealing with the Iranians. That's the surest way to be able to get results."

Obviously, the US officials will use the fabricated occasion to press for new international sanctions as they say that Iranian agents have sought to hire a purported member of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi envoy on American soil.

Regardless of the impertinence and hollowness of the claim, one should not disregard the influence of the powerful Zionist lobby in the new mudslinging plan which is, as Iran's Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani puts it, a 'tactless and childish game.”

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Tehran would have to be terminally foolish to try to snuff out an ambassador on US soil, author says.
By Pepe Escobar

Washington is looking to increase sanctions on Iran as a result of the plot to kill a Saudi ambassador [EPA]

No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum - piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism - Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted the Iran-masterminded terror plot "reads like the pages of a Hollywood script". It does. And quite a sloppy script at that. Fast and Furious duo Paul Walker/Vin Diesel wouldn't be caught dead near it.

The good guys in this Washington production are the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they uncovered "a deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign Ambassador on US soil with explosives".

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By MJ Rosenberg

Political Correction

A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, I attended a big holiday dinner with family and friends. Naturally much of the conversation revolved around the terrorist attacks and the rage and sorrow we all felt. There was also considerable discussion about President George W. Bush's handling of the catastrophe and his decision to send troops to Afghanistan in pursuit of the perpetrators and to eliminate the Taliban regime that was hosting them.

Everyone at the table approved of the president's actions and believed that there was no alternative. Moreover, and this was somewhat surprising considering that none of us thought Bush had been legitimately elected, we all believed that he was being honest about the situation the United States faced and the options that were before him.

There was, however, one dissenter. My younger son, then in college, was absolutely opposed to going into Afghanistan. He said that there had to be a better way to respond than rushing into a war that, in his opinion, would likely expand and last "forever." Besides, he added, "I don't believe a word that comes out of Bush's mouth."

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The Obama administration continues to claim the Iranian government helped orchestrate the plot, while admitting evidence is lacking

by John Glaser

United States officials in the Obama administration and Justice Department have explicitly claimed that Iran’s supreme leader and the Quds Force covert operations unit were likely aware of the so-called terror plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States. But evidence of that is lacking and many officials have admitted there are gaps in their understanding of the plot.

The Obama administration has combatively blamed the highest echelons of the Iranian government and promised impending consequences, despite the fact that there is no solid information about “exactly how high it goes,” as one official put it.

Anonymous government officials speaking to various media outlets have said that their belief that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “more than likely” had prior knowledge of the plot is based on inference. The Quds Force operates, they reason, in accordance and obedience to Iran’s supreme leadership, so a rogue actor is unlikely.

Read the full story at Anti-war

The idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous may be comforting to Americans. Too bad it's not true.

BY STEPHEN M. WALT | NOVEMBER 2011
Foreign Policy

Over the last two centuries, prominent Americans have described the United States as an "empire of liberty," a "shining city on a hill," the "last best hope of Earth," the "leader of the free world," and the "indispensable nation." These enduring tropes explain why all presidential candidates feel compelled to offer ritualistic paeans to America's greatness and why President Barack Obama landed in hot water -- most recently, from Mitt Romney -- for saying that while he believed in "American exceptionalism," it was no different from "British exceptionalism," "Greek exceptionalism," or any other country's brand of patriotic chest-thumping.

Most statements of "American exceptionalism" presume that America's values, political system, and history are unique and worthy of universal admiration. They also imply that the United States is both destined and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage.

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The alleged Iranian plot would make great material for a spy novel, but it would go against Iran's own interests and past behavior

Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Adel al-Jubeir speaks in Annapolis / Reuters

By Max Fisher
The Atlantic

It's entirely possible that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement today is exactly what it looks like: the U.S. discovery and foiling of a plot by Iranian government agents to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a bomb attack, possibly in Washington, DC. Iran has a record sponsoring terrorism, and Iran-Saudi competition can sometimes look like a Cold War of the Middle East. But, for all the plausibility that Iran might be willing to blow up a Saudi ambassador, it's not at all apparent what they would gain from it. Iran has never been shy about sponsoring terrorism, but only when it was within their interests, or at least their perceived interests. It's hard to see how they could have possibly decided on a plot like the one that Holder claimed today.

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Not even good propaganda
By Justin Raimondo, October 12, 2011

Antiwar Forum

Fake, fake, fake – I’m talking about the latest anti-Iranian propaganda coming out of Washington, which claims the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were involved in a “plot” to take out the Saudi ambassador to the US and blow up both the Saudi and Israeli embassies. The narrative reads like a formulaic melodrama: two Iranians, one a naturalized US citizen, purportedly approached someone they thought was a member of a Mexican drug cartel – according to the indictment ( http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/A_U.S.%20news/Security/IranPlotComplaint.pdf ), it was a “sophisticated” drug cartel, not the plebeian sort – and proposed paying him $1.5 million to murder Adel al Jubeir, the Kingdom’s ambassador in Washington – oh, and by the way, the Iranians supposedly said, “Are you guys any good with explosives?”

The key to understanding just how fake this story is can be found in the New York Times report, which informs us:

“For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, said in the news conference. ‘So no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere,’ he said, ‘and no one was actually in ever in any danger.’”

Translation: the whole thing is phony from beginning to end.

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By Steve Newcomb

10 October 2011

Greetings on Colonization Day,

I begin by prayerfully remembering our free and independent ancestors, the Lenape and all the Original Nations and Peoples of this vast Turtle Island (Mother Earth), and of the entire Western Hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.

As you ‘occupy Wall Street,’ I ask you to reflect: You are on the island upon which our Indigenous ancestors lived and thrived for thousands and thousands of years. Please take a moment to recognize that we, the Original Nations, still exist here on Turtle Island. We have the right to exist as free and distinct nations with full self-determination.

What is the true source of our many grievances? It is the mentality and behavior of greed. The word ‘America’ is the combination of two Latin words ame (a command form of ‘love!’) and rica (riches and wealth). The effects of an insatiable desire for and the pursuit of riches and wealth first afflicted our Indigenous nations and peoples, and now afflict all peoples. Clearly, we need to address and rectify the political economy of greed, and the destruction it has caused and continues to cause.

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Written by: Mondoweiss
October 12, 2011

By Amirah Mizrahi, Antonia House and Emily Ratner

When we disrupted Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s keynote speech at the Jewish Federations of North America’s annual general meeting last November in New Orleans, we were met with hisses, boos, verbal harassment and even physical attacks from other members of the audience. But criminal charges were never so much as mentioned. Yet, on September 23rd, ten students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine in February 2010 were convicted of two misdemeanors for their participation in that protest. Today, October 11, 2011, is a national day of action to protest those unjust convictions. We think it’s a perfect opportunity to look at the similarities and differences in these two actions.

In both protests, each person who stood up to bring attention to crimes committed by the Israeli government acted non-violently, and cooperated fully with security personnel and the police. So what was the difference? Why were we not arrested, charged and tried while the Irvine 11 were? Logically, the opposite should have been true: our target was bigger – the Prime Minister of Israel; our venue was bigger – the largest Jewish event in North America; and our protest came later – inspired in part by the brave actions of the Irvine 11. But there is one more difference, and it proved to be the crucial one: we are Jews and the Irvine 11 are Muslims.

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According to Nixon, an Israeli official asked an Egyptian general convalescing in hospital, “We have defeated you Arabs three times (1948, 1967 & 1973) why to you continue to resist us?” The Egyptian replied, "You may have defeated us three times, and you may defeat us 11 times. But the 12th time we will win and Palestine will be liberated."

By Franklin Lamb

09 October, 2011

Beirut: Three weeks after being named by President Obama in January 2009 as the 19th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and during his first day on the job which was February 12, 2009, Leon Panetta, now US Secretary of Defense, signed off on a March 2009 “eyes only” CIA Report that had just been completed by his new agency.

As reported at the time, the CIA Report predicted the demise of Israel within 20 years, if present political trends in the region continued. The CIA intelligence analysts concluded that it was unlikely that Israeli leaders would grant even minimal concessions in order to achieve a settlement with their neighbors, which comprise increasingly disillusioned and rapidly growing dignity and justice seeking populations.

The CIA Report noted that Israeli officials felt emboldened in taking Palestinian land by the myriad support Israel was receiving from the leadership of Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and three other Arab leaders.

Israel and its two most powerful US lobbies, the US Congress and AIPAC, quickly squelched the 2009 Report and only seven copies were eventually acknowledged, one by AIPAC and the others by staffers of select supporters of Israel on key Congressional Committees.

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The Palestinian president is caught between the anvil of domestic public opinion and the hammer of US economic sanctions as the UN bid for recognition proceeds, writes Saleh Al-Naami

Omar did not expect his family to be so distraught and despondent when he came home Friday to his home in the town of Al-Khedr on the outskirts of Bethlehem. His father's health took a sharp blow after occupation forces seized large sections of family land to expand the Jewish settlement of Nogdeem, where Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman lives. Omar, a university student and an activist in Al-Shebiba movement, the on-campus student arm of Fatah, was one of thousands of Palestinians who welcomed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas upon his return from New York, in an expression of support of what he said in his speech to the UN General Assembly.

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Following Abbas's celebrated speech in New York, Palestinians wonder whether international support in the UN will help them attain freedom and national rights, writes Khaled Amayreh

A Palestinian protester throws back a gas canister, previously fired by Israeli troops during a demonstration against the expansion of the Jewish settlement of Halamish, in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh

Palestinians are quickly returning to reality following the brief euphoria generated by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas's landmark speech at the United Nations on 23 September.

PA officials, who have been overenthusiastic about the creation of an international momentum that would dramatically expedite Palestinian statehood, are now realising that reality is more complex than they previously thought.

This is not to say that Palestinians, including the PA, are having second thoughts about the PA bid to gain UN membership for a prospective state. Far from it, there is a great consensus among Palestinians that Abbas's speech was positive, if not impressive.

However, there is renewed realisation that speeches alone, even if eloquent, alone don't produce statehood and that a lot of struggle, bitterness, as well as sacrifices are still required to convince the world of the long-overdue entitlement of Palestinian statehood, independence and freedom.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement has taken root across the nation. Organizers say protestors are drawing attention to the 1% of the population who have destroyed the country and its values through greed.

While many people in Indian Country can sympathize with the protestors’ claims, there is also some growing criticism for the idea behind its name, which overlooks the first occupants of the Wall Street area. This has given rise to the response from Native bloggers and activists to not Occupy Wall Street but Decolonize Wall Street.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

By Jamil Dakwar

It is now an undisputed fact, confirmed by President Obama: the United States has executed two American citizens far away from zones of actual armed conflict and without due process. More than anything, the targeted killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in Yemen represent serious challenges to the United States’ reputation for abiding by the rule of law. The killings further complicate US foreign policy in a region currently witnessing bloody revolutions and uprisings motivated by a desire for stronger protection of human rights. It is hard to escape the impression that Obama’s unlawful targeted killings program will ultimately stain this administration’s legacy much like the torture and Guantanamo programs tainted that of the Bush Administration, at least in so far as both administrations have violated international law and evaded transparency and accountability for human rights.

The Obama administration’s rhetoric regarding targeted killings is reminiscent of both the Bush administration’s mantra of “we don’t torture” and its claim that all detainees and prisoners in US custody were treated humanely and in line with domestic laws and applicable treaty obligations. The Bush Administraton spread this misleading legal analysis and lie all over the world, from testimonies in front of Congress to statements at the U.N. Committee against Torture. We now know the ugly truth that the highest levels of American government, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, sanctioned torture, widespread cruelty and abuse in violation of international law. While not identical by any means, over the past three years the Obama Administration has engaged in similar practices. Consider its repeated mantra of “trust us” arguing that “US targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.”

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By Gale Courey Toensing October 4, 2011


AP Photo/Troy Maben
Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA), who has made hate-mongering remarks about the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.

You might say he’s an equal opportunity bigot.

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA), who has made hate-mongering remarks about the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island, African Americans, Muslims, gays and grizzly bears revealed recently that he isn’t too fond of Mormons, either.

On a recent episode of his television show Focal Point, Fischer said that the First Amendment does not apply to Mormons and that the Church of Latter Day Saints still supports polygamy. But next week, Fischer will be sharing a stage with America’s most famous Mormon, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, TPM reports in a story headlined “Awkward: Mitt Romney Set to Share Stage with Anti-Mormon Shock Jock.” Despite the “inflammatory, hateful and occasionally just plain bizarre remarks” Fischer has made on his show, Republicans vying for the presidency, including Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich all made appearances on Fischer’s show earlier this year, TPM reports.

Read the full story at Indian Country Today Media Network

By Rashid Khalidi
September 30, 2011
The National Interest

As the dust settles after last week’s “showdown” at the United Nations over the Palestinian application for membership, several initial conclusions can be drawn.

First, the United States now is thoroughly out of touch with most of the international community when it comes to Palestine and Israel. It has positioned itself to the right of the most right-wing, pro-settler government in Israeli history. This was reflected in the joyful reception of President Obama’s speech by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and his right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as well as in the Israel lobby’s satisfied response to Obama’s caving in to Israeli demands all along the line.

In an almost surreal display of pandering, Republican presidential candidates—notably Texas governor Rick Perry—disparaged the president for “appeasing” the Palestinians and thereby betraying Israel. This rhetoric came despite the fact that Obama single-handedly sabotaged the Palestinians’ UN bid while publicly lecturing them and the entire General Assembly on the suffering of Israelis without so much as a word acknowledging Israeli occupation, violence and settlements—not to mention the Palestinian suffering caused by these American-supported policies. Obama's domestic electioneering in the face of a historic demand by the long-suffering Palestinians was not lost on the world. Taken in the context of the Arab Spring and its wave of popular demands for human and political rights, it means that the United States has lost all credibility as an honest broker in this conflict.

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Ibrahim's death