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All in the Family: David Cameron’s Jewish Roots and the Coreligionists Who Brought Him to Power

EmpireStrikesBlack | January 7, 2014

cam1-300x173While speaking to a 500-strong group of Jewish lobbyists in London in 2007, UK Prime Minister David Cameron declared,(1) “I am a Zionist.” He went on to add, “I’m not just a good friend of Israel but I am, as you put it, good for Jews.”

These comments can easily be explained merely as fawning attempts to placate and appease the Jewish lobby – a necessary step for any who wish to assume high office. One has to ask the question though: why does ‘Anglican’ David Cameron conceal his own Jewish identity?

David Cameron is not merely of Jewish descent; he hails from a bloodline that can fairly be described as Jewish royalty, yet he claims never to have known this. As he spoke to the Movement for Reform Judaism in 2010 he described his learning of his Jewish ancestry(2) as the “highlight” of his year.

While studying the Cameron family tree in 2009,(3) Dr Yaakov Wise – a University of Manchester historian who specialises in Jewish history – found that David Cameron is descended from a highly distinguished Jewish family line (emphases added):

And according to Dr Wise, who has been using archival material to examine the Cameron family tree, the Tory leader could also be a direct descendent of the greatest ever Hebrew prophet, Moses.

Cameron is a descendent of banker Emile Levita, who came to Britain as a German immigrant in the 1850s. Emile Levita was himself a descendent of Elijah Levita, who lived from 1469-1549.

During the last years of his life Elijah Levita produced, among other works, two major books: the 1541 Translator’s Book, the first dictionary of the Targums or Aramaic commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.

His lexicon of 1542 explained much of the Mishnaic Hebrew language and was a supplement to two important earlier dictionaries.

Elijah Levita also wrote what is thought to be the first ever Yiddish novel – called the Bove-bukh (The Book of Bove) written in 1507 and printed in 1541.

The book is based on an Italian version of an Anglo-Norman tale about a queen who betrays her husband and causes his death.

Emile Levita, who was granted citizenship in 1871, is Cameron’s great great grandfather.

Cameron’s great-great grandfather, Emile Levita was a German Jewish financier who emigrated to Britain and obtained British citizenship in 1871. Levita was the director of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China which in 1969 became Standard Chartered Bank. Levita himself is descended from Elijah Levita, a Jewish scholar of out-and-out luminary status whose writings included not only a dictionary explaining much of the Talmudic Hebrew language (or ‘Mishnaic Hebrew’), but the first ever Yiddish novel (Yiddish, meaning literally “Jewish” is a language of German Ashkenazi Jews written in the Hebrew alphabet).

Considering the sheer historical eminence of his ancestors, it would take real gullibility to believe that David Cameron ‘found out’ about his roots one year before he assumed office. The question is not ‘why did Cameron have no knowledge of his Jewish roots’, but rather, why would he conceal his Jewish identity?

A 2006 report by the Jewish Chronicle(4) cited here by Stuart Littlewood(5) perhaps goes some way in explaining this. The report titled ‘Team Cameron’s big Jewish backers‘ is a laundry list of powerful members of the Jewish community who donated over £1 million to David Cameron, explaining his inexplicable rise to power after a relatively mundane and unremarkable political career.

The biggest Jewish donor to the party while Mr Cameron has been leader is gaming magnate Lord Steinberg, who has donated £530,000, plus a loan of £250,000. Hedge-fund owner Stanley Fink has donated £103,000, even though he was a declared supporter of Mr Cameron’s leadership rival, Liam Fox. A further £250,000 has been loaned by philanthropist Dame Vivien Duffield.

During Mr Cameron’s campaign to lead his party, Jewish figures gave his team (as opposed to the party) additional donations of more than £60,000. According to the JC’s inquiries, direct donations to “Team Cameron” in the leadership battle came from philanthropist Trevor Pears (around £20,000), Bicom chair Poju Zabludowicz (£15,000 plus £25,000 to the party), Next chief executive Simon Wolfson (£10,000 plus £50,000 to the party), former Carlton TV boss Michael Green (£10,000) and Tory deputy treasurer and key Cameron fundraiser Andrew Feldman (£10,000 through his family firm, Jayroma).

Aside from these donations from powerful Jewish figures, a ‘small but influential’ group of Jewish Conservative officials and politicians were also ‘key players’ in Cameron’s campaign for leadership, the Jewish Chronicle report goes on to mention.(4)

In the aforementioned piece,(5) Stuart Littlewood makes an observation about the extent to which Jews are over-represented in the British parliament (emphases added):

While nobody is suggesting, I hope, that Jews have no place in our law-making, it is not unreasonable to wish the number to reflect their presence in the population. Three years ago the Jewish Chronicle published a list of Jewish MPs in Britain’s Parliament, naming 24. The Jewish population in the UK at that time was – and probably still is – around 280,000 or just under 0.5 per cent. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons so, on a proportional basis, Jews could expect three seats. But with 24 they were eight times over-represented. Which meant, of course, that other groups were under-represented.

The UK’s Muslim population is about 2.4 million or nearly 4 per cent. Similarly, their quota would be 25 seats but they had only eight – a serious shortfall. If Muslims were over-represented to the same extent as Jews (i.e. eight times) they’d have 200 seats. Imagine the hullabaloo.

David Cameron appointed the UK’s first Jewish ambassador(6) to the Zionist regime, Matthew Gould.

Succeeded by David Cameron, the previous leader of the Conservative party, Michael Howard, is also Jewish,(7) as is the current leader of the UK Labour party, Ed Miliband.(8) Not bad going for a group that constitutes less than 0.5% of Britain’s population.

If the British public were to consider Cameron’s very real pursuance of Zionist policies in the context of his rise to power on the back of Jewish money, there would be a public awakening (which would no-doubt be labelled as ‘anti-Semitism’). In light of this, the decision to conceal his Jewish identity can easily be understood.

It is not democratic for a holder of high office to be put in place by the money of powerful political pressure groups. Nor is it democratic for one ethno-religious group to be grossly over-represented within the corridors of power.

If the interests of the Zionist regime and the powerful Jewish community were to conflict with those of the United Kingdom, who would David ‘I’m a Zionist‘ Cameron really represent? If the recent wars on Libya and Syria are anything to go by, this question need not be asked.

Notes

(1) ‘Cameron declares himself a Zionist’ – The Jerusalem Post, 13 June 2007.
(2) ‘David Cameron Speaks to the Movement for Reform Judaism’ – Written by Movement for Reform Judaism, 12 April 2010.
(3) ‘Illustrious Jewish roots of Tory leader revealed’ – The University of Manchester, 10 July 2009.
(4) ‘Special report: Team Cameron’s big Jewish backers’ – Bernard Josephs and Leon Symons – The Jewish Chronicle, 12 October 2006.
(5) ‘David Cameron’s “Torah” government: Britain’s unbearable shame’, by Stuart Littlewood.
(6) ‘Interview: The UK’s new Jewish ambassador to Israel’ – The Jewish Chronicle, 10 December 2009.
(7) ‘Britain’s Conservative Party To Elect First Jewish Leader’ – The Jewish Federations of North America, 6 November 2010.
(8) ‘The Jewishness of Ed Miliband: Labour’s first Jewish leader bravely faces up to the Left’s anti-Semitic streak’ – The Telegraph, 25 May 2012

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January 8, 2014 Posted by | Aletho News | 2 Comments

The GAO’s Office In The NSA Is Collecting Dust Because Congress Hasn’t Asked For A Report In Years

By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | January 8, 2014

The NSA’s defenders go to great lengths to convince everyone (the public and many angered legislators) that it operates under a tremendous amount of oversight — so much though that even THINKING about abusing its capabilities is out of the question. The leaks have repeatedly proven this assertion false as members of the supposedly stringent oversight continue to state their shock and dismay over what’s been uncovered.

Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News points out there’s another layer of oversight that’s gone unutilized for years as well.

Years ago, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, conducted routine audits and investigations of the National Security Agency, such that the two agencies were in “nearly continuous contact” with one another. In the post-Snowden era, GAO could perform that oversight function once again.

“NSA advises that the GAO maintains a team permanently in residence at NSA, resulting in nearly continuous contact between the two organizations,” according to a 1994 CIA memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence.

Why haven’t we read any damning reports from the GAO about the NSA’s abuses over the past several years? Well, apparently it’s because no one wants to know.

At a 2008 Senate hearing, Sen. Daniel Akaka asked the GAO about its relationship with NSA. “I understand that GAO even had an office at the NSA,” Sen. Akaka noted.

“We still actually do have space at the NSA,” replied David M. Walker, then-Comptroller General, the head of the GAO. “We just don’t use it. And the reason we don’t use it is we are not getting any requests [from Congress]. So I do not want to have people sitting out there twiddling their thumbs.”

There’s that oversight at work again. Idle for “years” by 2008 and no signs that anything has occurred since then. The GAO maintains an office (currently unstaffed) within the NSA but because if no one’s asking any questions, it’s not providing any answers.

If there’s something the GAO does well, it’s track down internal issues and problematic behavior. Unfortunately, it’s limited to recommending courses of action rather than mandating any serious changes, meaning its follow-up reports are generally filled with descriptions of how these audited entities failed to pursue the recommendations and (often) performed considerably worse during the interim.

On the other hand, the GAO’s reports do at least make it clear to the American public exactly what’s wrong with nearly everything the government spends its money on. It’s very limited accountability that does nothing to change the underlying agency ethos, but at least it prevents them from pretending these problems don’t exist.

Being in-house should naturally raise concerns about the GAO’s objectivity. Unfortunately, considering the nature of the agency’s intelligence work, there’s probably no way around that. But the first step in renewing this layer of oversight is to remind Congress of its existence. It has the power to order a GAO investigation, but until it does, the office will continue to gather dust and the NSA’s internal problems will worsen — or at least go unnoticed by Congress.

Aftergood points out that James Clapper has ordered the agency to be responsive to GAO inquiries, apparently in the eventuality that it ever gets back to the business of asking questions.

In Intelligence Community Directive 114, issued in 2011 following years of stagnation in GAO oversight of intelligence, DNI James Clapper instructed U.S. intelligence agencies to be responsive to GAO, at least within certain boundaries.

“It is IC policy to cooperate with the Comptroller General, through the GAO, to the fullest extent possible, and to provide timely responses to requests for information,” the DNI wrote.

Of course, Clapper’s definition of “responsive” probably differs greatly from the normally-accepted usage of the word. Having Clapper condone cooperation with an agency that exists to find flaws and misconduct is a bit underwhelming. The NSA’s top men have been less than cooperative in the many hearings since the Snowden leaks began, most often recycling old talking points and insisting on discussing it in the context of one program (Section 215) when everyone else is clearly focused on another area.

Still, whatever the GAO finds (that somehow doesn’t get blotted out with black ink) will provide more useful information for its Congressional overseers. This certainly shouldn’t be used in place of more independent oversight committees, but it should prove to be a valuable addition. The real question Congress needs to answer is why it has ignored this option for so many years.

January 8, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

7 Things You Missed If You Didn’t Read Wired’s Big Story On How The NSA Is Killing The Internet

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | January 7, 2014

Steven Levy, who specializes in massive articles looking into aspects of the tech industry, has a new one for Wired, called How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet. It basically looks at how the NSA legally coerced the tech companies into having to comply with certain court orders to hand over information, and how the tech companies have been gagged from explaining what’s going on. And then… he gets the NSA’s side of the story. Much of what’s in there is stuff that you probably already know (especially if you read Techdirt regularly), but I wanted to call out a few tidbits that I hadn’t seen or heard anywhere else before:

  1. Google doesn’t charge the government for requests for information:

    FISA requires the government to reimburse companies for the cost of retrieving information. Google says it doesn’t bother to charge the government. But one company says it uses that clause, hoping to limit the extent of the requests. “At first, we thought we shouldn’t charge for it,” says an executive of that company. “Then we realized, it’s good—it forces them to stop and think.”

    This is kind of a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” situation. I know plenty of folks in the civil liberties community go back and forth on it. When companies do charge, then you see articles about how companies are “making a profit” off of violating our privacy. If they don’t charge, then you see arguments about how they’re making it too easy for the government to get info. Either way, the standard has been to charge basic costs, so it’s interesting to see that Google doesn’t charge at all, probably betting on the fact that if they did, it would be misrepresented. Of course, the fact that they don’t might be misrepresented as well.

  2. The NSA has no response to fear of future abuse of programs beyond “we’d never do that.” Seriously.

    Critics charge that while there is not yet any evidence of massive abuse of the NSA’s collected data, there is also no guarantee that a future regime won’t ignore these touted protections. These officials discounted that possibility, saying that the majority of NSA employees wouldn’t stand for such a policy. “If that happened, there would be lines at the Inspector General’s office here, and at Congress as well—longer than a Disneyland line,” Ledgett says. (The fates of several NSA employees-turned-whistleblowers indicate that anyone in that hypothetical queue would be in for a ride far wilder than anything in Anaheim.)

    Sure, except there’s a very long history of the NSA and the FBI doing exactly the opposite (the claim of no evidence of massive abuse is not actually true). And, as Levy notes in that final parenthetical, the way whistleblowers are treated these days would probably shorten that line quite a bit.

  3. Keith Alexander admits that companies were compelled to comply and admits that we should stand up for the companies not to be harmed by all of this:

    “This isn’t the companies’ fault. They were compelled to do it. As a nation, we have a responsibility to stand up for the companies, both domestically and internationally. That is our nation’s best interest. We don’t want our companies to lose their economic capability and advantage. It’s for the future of our country.”

    Those words could have come from a policy spokesperson for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo. Or one of the legislators criticizing the NSA’s tactics. Or even a civil liberties group opposing the NSA. But the source is US Army general Keith Alexander, director of the NSA. Still, even as he acknowledges that tech companies have been forced into a tough position, he insists that his programs are legal, necessary, and respectful of privacy.

    This is just bizarre. If he doesn’t want the companies to lose their economic capability and advantage, maybe he shouldn’t have undermined a large portion of it.

  4. Companies were given about 90 minutes to respond to the (misleading) claims in the original PRISM article that they had given the NSA direct access to their servers.

    “We had 90 minutes to respond,” says Facebook’s head of security, Joe Sullivan. No one at the company had ever heard of a program called Prism. And the most damning implication—that Facebook and the other companies granted the NSA direct access to their servers in order to suck up vast quantities of information—seemed outright wrong. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was taken aback by the charge and asked his executives whether it was true. Their answer: no.

    Similar panicked conversations were taking place at Google, Apple, and Microsoft. “We asked around: Are there any surreptitious ways of getting information?” says Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “No.”

    This remains one of the most unfortunate bits about the Snowden leaks. While I think that Barton Gellman, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have done an incredible job with most of their reporting, the original PRISM stories that appeared in the Washington Post and Guardian both came out rushed and were misleading, which is still impacting how people are reporting on these things today. The PRISM program and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act have serious issues that need exploring, but it’s all been distorted by the misleading initial claims, which implied things that just weren’t true.

  5. The NSA claims it uses the very same encryption that it tries to push everyone else to use. Yes, the same encryption that Snowden docs have revealed was compromised by the NSA.

    And the NSA insists that, despite the implications of those Snowden-leaked documents, it does not engage in weakening encryption standards. “The same standards we recommend are the standards we use,” Ledgett says. “We would not use standards we thought were vulnerable. That would be insane.”

    Sorry, but no one believes that one at all. The clear takeover by the NSA of NIST standards shows that’s clearly not true.

  6. The NSA still doesn’t realize how serious all of this is. They still think it’s just been blown out of proportion.

    They understand that journalism conferences routinely host sessions on protecting information from government snoops, as if we were living in some Soviet society. And they are aware that multiple security specialists in the nation’s top tech corporations now consider the US government their prime adversary.

    But they do not see any of those points as a reason to stop gathering data. They chalk all of that negativity up to monumental misunderstandings triggered by a lone leaker and a hostile press.

  7. Patent troll Nathan Myhrvold is also completely clueless about national security:

    Former Microsoft research head Nathan Myhrvold recently wrote a hair-raising treatise arguing that, considering the threat of terrorists with biology degrees who could wipe out a good portion of humanity, tough surveillance measures might not be so bad. Myhrvold calls out the tech companies for hypocrisy. They argue that the NSA should stop exploiting information in the name of national security, he says, but they are more than happy to do the same thing in pursuit of their bottom lines. “The cost is going to be lower efficiency in finding terrorist plots—and that cost means blood,” he says.

    This is stupid on so many levels. First, the old argument that it’s somehow equivalent of tech companies and the NSA to make use of information — a claim that Levy ridiculously repeats multiple times in his article — is a line that has been debunked so many times it’s really beneath Levy to give it any life at all, let alone refuse to point out how stupid it is. Companies provide a direct service to users, and they make a decision: If I give this information, I get this service in return. It’s a decision made by the consumer, and a trade-off where they decide if it’s worth it. We can argue that people should have more information about the costs and benefits, but it’s still a trade-off where the final decision is their own. The NSA, on the other hand, is not providing a choice or a trade-off. They’re just taking everything in exchange for nothing. And, oh yeah, they have guns and can put you in jail — something no company can do.

    Second, Myhrvold incorrectly buys completely the line that all this data collection has been helpful in stopping terrorists. There’s just one problem: there is no evidence to support that. Besides, based on his idiotic reasoning, we might as well just do away with pretty much all our rights. For example, I’m pretty sure that we could all have protected Myhrvold more completely if there were video cameras streaming video of everything he did within the privacy of his own home, cars, office or just walking around, right? We could certainly make sure that no one was attacking him or, better yet, that he wasn’t about to attack anyone. The cost of not spying on every moment of Nathan Myhrvold might mean “blood.” So, based on his own logic, we should violate his privacy, right?

All in all there’s a lot in the article that’s worth reading, but those were a few key points that really stood out.

January 8, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Official 9/11 story crumbling, Washington blames Saudis

By Michael Rivero | What Really Happened | January 7, 2014

The official story of 9-11 is collapsing almost as fast as the Obamacare website. Most Americans are now well aware of the strange collapse of WTC Building 7, the video that captures the sound of the actual explosion that initiates the collapse of WTC7, the very strange behavior of the Secret Service as President Bush read about goats at Booker Elementary School. We have all seen the photographs that confirm the remains of demolition “cutter charges” in the remains of the towers. And we all know how the BBC reported that Building 7 collapsed 26 minutes before it actually happened. indicating a script was being followed (but alas, not carefully enough).

With the official story in free fall, Americans are wondering just who did this heinous deed. With the US Government itself the prime suspect, many are asking if the US Government had help from an outside nation, one with a long track record of world-changing dirty tricks.

There is a great deal of evidence that implicates the nation of Israel as a co-conspirator with the Bush administration. First, there was the massive Israeli spy ring uncovered in the United States just before 9-11, and how some of the “Dancing Israelis” arrested after being seen cheering and dancing as the World Trade Towers collapsed turned out to be Mossad spies! Then there was the strange case of Odigo, an Israeli-owned company whose New York offices received a warning about the attacks before the planes used in the attacks had even left the ground! All four of the hijacked planes departed from airport gates whose security was provided by the same Israeli security company. Israel has a long track record of playing dirty tricks against the United States and other countries, including the Lavon affair (framed on Egypt), Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty (initially framed on Egypt), and Israel’s smuggling a radio transmitter into Libya that was used to send fake messages that tricked President Reagan into bombing Libya.

As people start to seriously examine the plethora of evidence regarding Israel’s numerous perfidies it comes as no surprise that recently we have seen Israel’s “useful idiots” launch a propaganda campaign to claim that Saudi Arabia was behind the 9-11 attacks, based on a lawsuit brought against Saudi Arabia by the families of the victims. But anyone can bring a lawsuit against anyone for anything. That does not mean the lawsuit allegations are true. Nonsense lawsuits are a reality of the modern US court system, as are lawsuits staged primarily as political and propaganda stunts, which is what this appears to be. At the very least this propaganda is intended to deflect interest away from Israel. At worst, it is the start of the campaign to justify military invasion of that country, just as Saddam’s nuclear weapons were the excuse to invade Iraq, and the more recently (and thankfully failed) attempt to justify invasion of Syria by claiming Syria’s government was gassing their own people.

As I have mentioned before, the best way to tell if you are being lied to is to look for what should be there but isn’t. In the case of the claim that Saudi Arabia was behind 9-11, what should be there and isn’t is a motive for Saudi Arabia to do something like that.

George Bush had a motive to do 9-11. He needed that “new Pearl Harbor” to enrage Americans into the century of war called for by the Project For The New American Century. Israel certainly had a motive to do 9-11 and frame Muslims for it, to trick Americans into siding with Israel’s continued land grabs and wars against Israel’s enemies, with Israel’s agenda being (as it was with the Lavon affair, the USS Liberty, and the Libyan radio hoax) that Americans fight those wars for them!

Saudi Arabia does not have a history of dirty tricks, nor a demonstrated ability to carry out such deceptions. More to the point, Saudi Arabia has no motive to attack the United States. The Saudi princes have grown very rich indeed through the Petrodollar arrangement. Saudi Arabia buys many American products and weapons ($61 billion in 2011), and unlike Israel, the American taxpayer does not have to give them the money first with which to buy those weapons. Whereas Israel constantly takes money out of the US, the Saudis pour it in! Private Saudi investment in the US economy is over $400 billion. Saudi Arabia is a major creditor to the US Government. Exact figures are hard to find but Saudi Arabia has loaned the US Government hundreds of billions of dollars.

Saudi Arabia is not going to risk an attack on the US because all that wealth would vanish. The Saudi wealth inside the US would be frozen or seized, and the outstanding loans to the US would never be repaid. The “useful idiots” trying to save Israel by blaming 9-11 on Saudi Arabia have yet to come up with a motive for the Saudis to do something like 9-11 that risks losing all that cash.

Remember that Saudi Arabia was being framed for 9-11 right from the start. One of the accused hijackers, a Saudi Pilot named Saeed Al-Ghamdi, was still alive after 9-11 and sued the US Government for defaming him.

And finally, here is some common sense that totally undermines the attempt to frame Saudi Arabia for 9-11. If Saudi Arabia really wanted to hurt the United States, they don’t need to fly airplanes into skyscrapers to do it. All they have to do is ask for their money back, all at once. The resulting damage to the US financial system would make 9-11 look like a minor inconvenience in comparison.

And it would be perfectly legal for Saudi Arabia to ask for their money back.

Which is why we know that the claim that Saudi Arabia was behind 9-11 has no more basis in fact than the claim that Saddam had nuclear weapons or that Assad gassed his own people right in front of the UN chemical weapons inspectors.

As the media tries to blame Saudi Arabia for 9-11, it is worth recalling that the Bush administration initially claimed that Iraq was behind 9-11 to sell the 2003 invasion, then later admitted Iraq had actually been innocent. So there is a pattern of the US simply using 9-11 as a “one size fits all” excuse to invade yet another oil rich nation.

Related article

January 8, 2014 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Dutch pension fund divests from Israeli banks over illegal settlements

Al-Akhbar | January 8, 2014

Dutch pension asset manager PGGM, one of the largest in the country, said on Wednesday it was divesting from five Israeli banks because they finance illegal settlements.

The announcement comes a month after a major Dutch water supplier ended a partnership with an Israeli water company which supplies Israeli towns and settlements in the occupied West Bank.

“PGGM recently decided to no longer invest in five Israeli banks,” said the company, which manages about 153 billion euros in funds.

“The reason for this was their involvement in financing Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories,” PGGM said in a statement.

PGGM said there was “a concern, as the settlements in the Palestinian territories are considered illegal under humanitarian law,” and regarded by international observers as an “important obstacle to a peaceful (two-state) solution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”

It said it would no longer do business with the Hapoalim and Leumi banks, the First National Bank of Israel, the Israel Discount Bank and the Mizrahi Tefahot Bank.

PGGM added it based its decision on a 2004 UN International Court of Justice ruling that the Jewish settlements were in breach of the Geneva Convention relating to occupying powers transferring their own citizens into occupied territories.

The group said it had been discussing the issue with the Israeli banks “for several years” but that the banks “have limited to no possibilities to end their involvement in the financing of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

“Therefore, it was concluded that engagement as a tool to bring about change will not be effective in this case,” PGGM said.

All investment in the banks ended on January 1 “as concerns remain and changes are not expected in the foreseeable future,” it added.

PGGM’s investments in Israeli banks amount to a few tens of millions of euros, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

“But its decision is liable to damage the banks’ image, and could lead other business concerns in Europe to follow suit,” the paper said.

Palestinians welcomed the PGGM’s decision to divest from the banks, Wafa news agency reported.

Palestinian Authority Parliament Member Qais Abdul Karim, said in a statement that he hoped such action would inspire other members of the European Union to follow suit and force Israel to abide by international law.

“Israel should understand that it will pay a heavy price if it continues to occupy Palestinian land and ignore international resolutions,” Wafa quoted him as saying.

In September, Dutch engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV withdrew from the construction of a sewage treatment plant in East Jerusalem, citing the Israeli’s project’s violation of international law.

Last month, Dutch water supplier Vitens ended a partnership with Israeli water company Mekorot due to the “political context.”

The decision came days after a visit to the Mekorot offices in Israel by Dutch trade minister Lilianne Ploumen was abruptly cancelled.

The visit was part of a larger tour of Israel by Prime Minister Mark Rutte that was marred by a dispute over a Dutch-made security scanner intended to check goods leaving Gaza for the West Bank.

Rutte was to have inaugurated the scanner on the isolated territory’s border with Occupied Palestine, but the ceremony was broken off after Israel said it did not want Gazan goods going to the West Bank.

Israel’s defense ministry wants to isolate the two Palestinian regions, while Dutch officials had hoped the scanner might boost commerce between them.

Israeli deputy Foreign minister Zeev Elkin last month said he was “blindsided” by Vitens’ pullout “and a few more European companies have made similar decisions in the past months, which have blindsided us exactly in parallel with the peace process.”

Zeev, speaking to Israeli military radio, said that peace initiatives should mean “that people don’t breathe down our neck”, but “unfortunately this doesn’t work.”

Since peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials began in July, Israel has announced the construction of thousands of settler homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, sparking tensions in already difficult negotiations.

(AFP, Al-Akhbar)

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January 8, 2014 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | 1 Comment

ln Israel, Greenwald reveals whose agenda he is serving

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | January 7, 2014

When waging unconventional warfare, timing is everything.

In some pro-Israel circles, President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are now being hysterically compared to Neville Chamberlain for their alleged “betrayal” of the self-defined “Jewish state” to yet another imminent Holocaust as a result of Obama’s historic, albeit so far limited, rapprochement with today’s supposed equivalent of a genocidal Nazi regime in Tehran and Kerry’s sustained diplomatic effort to get Israel to return to its so-called “Auschwitz borders” prior to its premeditated 1967 Land Grab. In light of this dual “existential threat” posed by the Obama administration to a Greater Israel, the interview given to Israeli TV by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the scope of U.S. spying worldwide, is as close to a “game theory warfare” smoking gun as you’re going to get.

Speaking to Israel’s Channel 10 — whose biggest shareholder, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder, is President of the World Jewish Congress — Greenwald criticized “the continued imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard,” who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after passing more than a million highly classified documents to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. (Incidentally, Channel 10 owner Lauder is also a supporter of clemency for Pollard.) As reported today by Haaretz, here’s what Greenwald told his Israeli audience about the spy, who, in the words of former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “did more damage to the United States than any spy in history”:

Greenwald agreed that the Snowden revelations are relevant to Pollard’s case. “When the U.S. government goes around the world criticizing other countries for spying on allies and prosecuting them,” he said, “are they going to maintain that with a straight face when they’re doing exactly that?”

It’s proper to raise Pollard’s case in the context of U.S. spying on its Israeli ally, he continued, because that underscores the hypocrisy of what the U.S. itself is doing. The U.S. government, Greenwald charged, does exactly what it accuses its enemies of doing, and no country has the right to say other countries shouldn’t do something while it is secretly violating that very same taboo.

While some may be willing to concede that Greenwald’s charge of U.S. government hypocrisy is perfectly valid, the acclaimed “independent” journalist’s remarks that American national security does not require surveillance of its so-called “ally” in Tel Aviv is at best naïve, at worst disingenuous:

Asked about the U.S. government’s claim that the purpose of the eavesdropping is to fight terrorism, he responded by citing the documents’ revelations that the NSA eavesdropped on both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli officials, asking, Does the U.S. government think Angela Merkel is a terrorist? Or that democratically elected Israeli officials are involved in terror?

Although many Greeks and other Europeans may justifiably view Chancellor Merkel’s austerity measures as a form of economic terrorism, could Greenwald seriously be oblivious to Israel’s long track record of terrorism, not only its state terrorism against the indigenous Palestinians and their neighbours but its less widely-known, albeit acknowledged, false flag terror attacks on its American benefactor and imperial proxy?

Given the account of the “Five Dancing Shlomos” caught celebrating in Liberty Park, New Jersey as the twin towers burned on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as much other well-documented evidence pointing toward Israeli complicity in the 9/11 attacks — seized on with great alacrity by Israel loyalists such as Joe Lieberman as a pretext to strip Americans of much of their constitutional rights while others such as Michael Chertoff profited from the hyped “need” for greater “security” in the post-9/11 “Homeland” — what kind of journalist genuinely concerned about civil liberties would deny that monitoring the conversations of a “spook, terrorist or criminal” such as Netanyahu, a harsh critic of NSA spying who infamously admitted that 9/11 as “very good” for Israel, is an essential requirement of any genuine fight against terrorism?

Like that other much-adored Jewish “critic of Israel” Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald would appear to be just the latest branded anti-imperial “hero” serving to provide cover for a less transparent Israeli agenda.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter @O_Cathail.

January 8, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | 2 Comments