Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Lies and Truths

Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web

“Palestine was a land without a people for a People without a land” and “Palestinians do not exist” are not just statements made decades ago by Zionist leaders but are made still today (even a US presidential candidate in 2012). The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/15/01) reported that: “… giving his audience (Likud leaders) a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers (Bejamin Netanyahu said): ‘Always, irrespective of whether you’re right or not, you must always present your side as right.'”

We are all familiar with the incredible PR repeated ad nauseum about Israel. From “security” to “terrorism” to “wanting peace”, we are inundated in corporate media with these images that are divorced from reality. With effort of Zionists, Wikipedia and other internet sites are full of this nonsense. It is not innocuous. Mythologies and lies are used to justify everything from ethnic cleansing to use of white phosphorous on civilians. They are the tools used to keep Jews and people around the world in a state of apathy and to confuse them with things like: Well: these “Arabs” and “Jews” have been fighting and it is almost genetic and nothing can be done to stop it. For an example to the callousness of these lies, see this video and then read the articles and data below that debunks these lies.

This year will mark 64 years since the founding of the state of Israel on the ruins of 540 Palestinian villages and towns. As 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians in the world remain refugees or displaced people denied basic human rights it is more important to debunk myths and lies. I updated this list to now include 64 lies/myths (one for each year). For those who want to further deepen their understanding, I suggest a list of books and documents in my syllabus on human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

Please send me your contributions/additions whether in other lies not mentioned here or in further quotes and data on the listed lies. Email contributions to mazin@qumsiyeh.org. Suggested use for the data as it accumulates is a handy place for finding information to develop your knowledge in a way that can be used in meaningful discussions and for sending to chat rooms, list-serves, editors, politicians and others.

As Nathan Chofshi wrote in the Jewish Newsletter: “We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we have to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil we committed… we  justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.”(New York, 9 February 1959, cited in Erskine Childers, ‘The Other Exodus’ in Spectator, London, 12 May 1961)

  • 1. Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land
    Palestine was not empty and inhabited by nomadic people
    Zionism at 100: The Myth of Palestine as “A Land Without People”  By Allan C. Brownfeld
    Palestine photos of the 1930s
    The Legal Status of Land in Palestine
    -Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Pluto Press 2004. – Chapter 2“People and the Land”
  • 2. Israel made the desert bloom/Palestine was destitute
    Statistical data on Palestine before the Nakba
    Who made the desert bloom?
  • 3. The myths of national origins, chosenness, collective rights for a religion etc
    – Archaeology refutes the Bible’s claim to history By Daniel Lazare
    Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids?
    King David Was a Nebbish: ROCKING ISRAEL TO ITS BIBLICAL CORE
    Shattering a ‘national mythology’ By Ofri Ilani
    Israeli Icon under fire
    The Origins of the Jews By Yossi Schwartz
    A mosaic of people: …the DNA evidence by Ellen Levy-Coffman
    Who is a Jew
    Palestine in Wikipedia
    Was there a place called Palestine
    Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary stories, we did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, we did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon. Those who take an interest have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and doesn’t want to hear about it Ha’aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999
    more here
    -Silberman, Neil Asher and Israel Finkelstein. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Touchstone, 2002.
    -Greenberg, Gary. 101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History. Sourcebooks, 2002.
    Whitelam, Keith W. The invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. New York, Routledge. 1997
    -Raed, Basem. Hidden Histories: Palestine and The Eastern Mediterranean. Pluto Press. 2010.
    -Sand, Shlomo (Author), Yael Lotan (Translator). The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso, 2009.
  • 4. Innocent Jews wanting to “return home” were rejected from the start by local Arabs for no good reason
    – Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg) wrote the following in 1891:  “In all things it is our custom to learn nothing from the past for the future. There is certainly one thing we could have learned from our past and present history: how careful we must be not to arouse the anger of other people against ourselves by reprehensible conduct. How much more, then, should we be careful, in our conduct toward a foreign people among whom we live once again, to walk together in love and respect, and needless to say in justice and righteousness. And what do our brethren in Eretz Israel do? Quite the opposite! They were slaves in their land of exile, and they suddenly find themselves with unlimited freedom, the kind of wild freedom to be found only in a country like Turkey. This sudden change has engendered in them an impulse to despotism, as always happens when ‘a slave becomes a king,’ (Proverbs 30:22) and behold they walk with the Arabs in hostility and cruelty, unjustly encroaching on them, shamefully beating them for no good reason, and even bragging about what they do, and there is no one to stand in the breach and call a halt to this dangerous and despicable impulse. To be sure our people are correct in saying that the Arab respects only those who demonstrate strength and courage, but this is relevant only when he feels that his rival is acting justly; it is not the case if there is reason to think his rival’s actions are oppressive and unjust. Then, even if he restrains himself and remains silent forever, the rage will remain in his heart and he is unrivaled in ‘taking vengeance and bearing a grudge.’ (Leviticus 19:18)” “Emet Me-Eretz Yisrael” (Truth from the Land of Israel),  29 May 1891, 21 Iyyar 5651 Translated by Alan Dowty.
    -Mandel, Neville J. The Arabs and Zionism before World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
    -Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of hope and empowerment. Pluto Press 2010. Chapter 5 on “Popular Resistance During the Ottoman Rule”
  • 5. Ben Gurion (who became Israel’s first Prime Minister) and Zionist leadership before 1948 war had no intention to drive the native Palestinians out.
    As early as 1917 (when Palestine was 96% Christian/Muslim and 3% Jewish), Ben Gurion stated “Within the the next twenty years, we must have a Jewish majority in Palestine.” (Shabtai Teveth, p. 43). In 1936 he stated that the future Israel must “become a force, and the Arabs respect force..these days it is not right but might which prevails. It is more important to have force than justice on one’s side” (Shabtai Teveth, p. 191). In 1937 he said “The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had…MORE than a state, government and sovereignty-this is national consolidation in a free homeland.” (Righteous Victims, p. 142). in 1938, he wrote “With compulsory transfer we have vast areas …. I support compulsory  transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it. But compulsory transfer could only be carried out by England …. Had its implementation been dependent merely on our proposal I would have proposed; but this would be dangerous to propose when the British government has disassociated itself from compulsory transfer. …. But this question should not be removed from the agenda because it is central question. There are two issues here : 1) sovereignty and 2) the removal of a certain number of Arabs, and we must insist on both of them.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 117). In Feb 1948 “The war will GIVE us the land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are ONLY CONCEPTS for peacetime, and during war they lose all their meaning.” (Benny Morris, p. 170 & Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 180). And in early May 1948, Ben-Gurion approved establishing the “Transfer Committee” to oversee “the cleaning up (nikui in Hebrew) of the Arab settlements, cultivation of fields and their settlement, and the creation of labor battalion to carry out this work.” (Benny Morris, p. 137). Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his diary soon after Lydda’s and Ramla’s occupation on 10th-11th of July 1948: “After attacking Lydda (later called Lod) and then Ramla, …. What would they do with the 50,000 civilians living in the two cities … What is to be done with the population?, waving his hand in a gesture which said: Drive them out!. ‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring, …. Psychologically, this was on of the most difficult actions we undertook”. (Soldier Of Peace, p. 140-141 & Benny Morris, p. 207) .David Ben Gurion also recognized that “The (upcoming) war will give us the land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are only concepts for peacetime, and during war they lose all their meaning”. In his diaries he said regarding Palestinian refugees “We must do everything to ensure they never do return” and to the Sunday Times “The old will die and the young will forget”. Under Ben Gurion’s direction, Transfer Committee was officially set up to effect ethnic cleansing.  I don’t understand your optimism. “Why should the Arabs make Peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country.” Ben Gurion in 1956 Quoted by Nahum Goldman, former President of World Zionist Congress, in “The Jewish Paradox” Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978, p99.
  • 6. Palestinians want/ed to drive Jews and Israel into the sea
    (variant: Israel was willing to share)
    Israel Pushed Palestinians into the Sea
    -Today 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians around the world are refugees or displaced people. Those who remain in Palestine are in shrinking areas that as of 2011 consisted of 8.3% of our historic homeland (they include areas in the Galilee, the triangle, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, teh Negev, and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli population according to the Israeli central bureau of statistics is 7,510,000 of which 5,984,500 are “Jews and others” (presumably the others are Druze, Russian non-Jews, and similar categories) and 1,525,500 Palestinian Arabs (1).  The population of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is 4 million allowed to live on areas A & B, small parts of the 22% of Palestine occupied since 1967 (2).  The total area allowed for Palestinian use is 2.5% of the area of pre-1967 Israel (3) plus areas A & B of the West Bank .  In total this comes to 2.5% of 78% and 29% of the 22% that is the West Bank and Gaza (4). The total geographic access to all remaining Palestinians(5.525 million) is thus 1.95%+6.38%=8.33% while the Jewish and other population (Zionist preferred) consists of 5.5 million with access to the remaining lands comprising 91.67% of historic Palestine.  What this means is that the Jewish population (most of it new immigrants) has access to about 9 times more land per person than the remaining native Palestinians.  If we add the Palestinian refugees outside the country (total Palestinian population per PCBS is 10.9 million), the disparity only gets more pronounced. When you consider that before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, 93% of the land was used by Palestinian natives and now only 8.3%, you can see the colossal level of land theft.
    References
    1) http://www.cbs.gov.il/www/yarhon/b1_e.htm
    2) http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=3&id=1746
    3) see http://www.indypendent.org/2007/12/09/israeli-democracy-arabs-need-not-apply
    4) http://www.poica.org/pal-in-a-century/pal-in-century.php
  • 7. Tiny Israel fended off large Arab armies in 1948
    Click here for detailed answer
  • 8. Land was purchased, Palestinians were not ethnically cleansed
    -See this chapter on refugees in my book which analysis all aspects of this including myths about origins of the refugee catastrophe
    – Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York, 1987, p. 223, citing Record of the Knesset, vol. 1, 1949, session 43
    – Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland. London/Boston: 1987, p. 145.
    – See also “How refugee land ended up as Jewish National Fund lands” (and it is not “abandoned” it was confiscated illegally and refugees are being prevented from returning to their lands by an illegal and racist apartheid system).
    With all due respect for the ‘blue box’ by Meron Benvenisty in Haaretz. In Hebrew
    – THE MYTH that the Arab refugees fled because the Arab radios urged them to do so was analyzed by Erskine B. Childers in the London Spectator May 12, 1961. An examination of British and US radio monitoring records turned up no such appeals; on the contrary there were appeals and “even orders to the civilians of Palestine, to stay put…”
    -see also these books
    Abu-Sitta, Salman. Google for writings available on the internet
    Benvenisti, Meron.  Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948.  Translated by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta.  Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000.
    Sami Hadawi. Bitter Harvest: A modern history of Palestine. Olive Branch Press, New York. 1998.
    Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
    Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
    Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
    Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
    Shlaim, Avi. Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
    Rogan, Eugene L. and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
    Segev, Tom. 1949, The First Israelis. New York: Owl Books by Henry Holt, 1998.
  • 9. There was an Exchange of population, Jews came from Arab Countries to Israel in exchange Arabs left Israel
    Variant: Jews of Iraq and Arab Countries were persecuted and expelled
    -See Jews of Iraq
    and this
    and this dedicated website
    (see for example an articulation of this by an AIPAC introduced bill in Congress that demands that “any explicit reference to the required resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue is matched by a similar explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.” (http://www.standwithus.com/website/news_post.asp?NPI=50)
    – Detailed answers are in resources listed under myth 8 above.  In brief, when Israel was founded, there were 600,000 Jews and 1.6 million Christians and Muslims in Palestine.n 700-800,000 Palestinians were made refugees by a deliberate process. It had nothing to do with the subsequent events in Poland, Morocco or any other country. Israel upon its foundi9ng of course was interested in bringing Jewish immigrants from many countries (these are not called refugees er international law).  To achieve this, the Zionist movement and the nascent state of Israel used all sorts of tactics from propaganda to incitement to even violence to scare Jews to leave their countries and come to occupied Palestine (the new state of Israel).  See for example what happened in Iraq articulated by Iraqi Jew Naeim Gilad in his book “Ben Gurion’s Scandals” (Mossad put bombs in front of Jewish community centers and even a synagogue to scare Iraqi Jews to leave). Also it was the Zionist movement that lobbied the US congress and other Western governments not to increase quoatas for European Jewish migration to those countries so as to leave only one door open: migration to Palestine.
  • 10. The UN Partitioned Palestine creating a Jewish state, Arabs rejected this and Zionists Accepted
    – See The myth of the UN Creation of Israel Detailed analysis
    -In 1947, Private land in Palestine was 93% owned by Christian and Muslim Palestinians and only 7% by Jews (and half of those wee not Zionists but native Palestinians).  Today many people like to cite one (but only this one) resolution of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 181) which included a RECOMMENDATION of partition. This resolution is not a binding resolution and was never implemented but let us deal with it (there were many others that also were not implemented including the one about the right of refugees to return to their homes and lands).
    -The partition resolution was pushed through by the US in violation of the UN Charter and its mandate to allow self-determination of local people.  A referendum was suggested but rejected.  The nascent Arab states also suggested a form of one state with equality and protection of all minorities but this was also rejected by the Zionists and the Truman administration. Truman reversed Roosevelt’s policies on this issue because he wanted to win election (favors wth the Zionist lobby, see Myth 39 below for details and sources). But in any case, the Zionist leadership did not accept most of the points in UNGA 181 (they rejected the borders, they rejected internationalization of Jerusalem, they rejected the admonition not to remove Palestinians from the Jewish state, they rejected economic union etc).  Since there was no leadership of the Palestinian people (decimated by the British by the end of 1939), it is meaningless to speak of rejecting this UNGA resolution by Palestinians.  It is true that the newly independent Arab countries (many of them puppets of Britain and France at the time) rejected it.  There was good reason to reject it by all people of good conscience (it divided a country against the wishes of its inhabitants). We must also recall that the recommendation was to give 55% of Palestine to a Jewish state and 45% to an aRAB STATE
    -The Conciliation Commission got the agreement of both Israel and Arab states on an identical document May 12, 1949 called the Lausanne Protocol. It stated:
    “The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, anxious to achieve as quickly as possible the objectives of the General Assembly resolution of 11 December 1948 (UNGA 194), regarding refugees, the respect for their rights and preservation of their property, as well as territorial and other questions, has proposed to the delegation of Israel and to the delegations of the Arab States that the working document attached hereto (UNGA Partition resolution 181 of 1947) be taken as a basis for discussions with the Commission. The interested delegations have accepted this proposal with the understanding that the exchanges of views which will be carried on by the Commission with the two parties will bear upon the territorial adjustments necessary to the above-indicated objectives.” For full link click here Lausanne, 12 May 1949)
    -Israel then rejected the partition boundaries and proposed to take over all of Palestine (but leaving the issue of the West Bank for “discussion”).  It also rejected implementing its obligations on the issue of Palestinian refugees .
    – In his guidelines to the delegation in Lausanne with respect to negotiating peace, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Moshe Sharett, pointed out that “it behooves us to do so not with haste and trepidation but by revealing strength and the ability to exist even without official peace”. According to Sharett, since official peace was not a vital necessity, Israel had nothing to lose from procrastination. (Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: 1987, p. 215)
    -In 1970 and 1971, Anwar Sadat approached Israel through the US for terms of peace that were more generous than what Israel accepted a few years later. Israel turned it down and it took a war (October 1973) to jolt them into understanding the limits of military power.
  • 11. Israel respects holy sites of other religions
    -See history erased by Haaretz
  • 12. Jerusalem “reunification” let people be treated equal regardless of religion
    variant: Israel is not Judaizing Jerusalem/Freedom of religion
    -See Former Military Jerusalem Governor confirms: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians Began Right After the Occupation Arnon Regular, Kol Ha’ir Weekly Magazine, July 26, 2001, Western Jerusalem
    -See this detail on status of Jerusalem
  • 13. The US is an “honest broker”
    -see Book by Naseer Aruri: Dishonest Broker for history of us involvement
    -“Israel’s dependence on the United States is far Greater than suggested by the sum of $3 billion. Israel’s physical existence depends on the Americans in both military and political terms.  Without the US, we would not be equipped with the latest fighter planes and all other advanced weapons. Without the American veto, we would long have been expelled from every international organization not to speak of the UN, which would have imposed sanctions on us that would have paralysed Israel’s International trade, since we cannot exist without importing raw materials.  For the same reason, it is wrong to divide the American money up into military aid of $1.8 billion and civilian aid of $1.2 billion. What we are getting is really unmarked dollar bills…” Nehemia Stressler, Haaretz, May 12, 1989
  • 14. Islam is intent on taking over the world
    A good summary of this Zionist pedaled discourse is in the book “Islamic Imperialism” by Efraim Karsh (2007, Yale University Press, New Haven and London) of which thousands were printed and distributed free to clergy and opinion makers around the US (the Zionist group cryptically named “Institute on Religion and Democracy”, Washington, D.C. was distributing it free). Muslims have been victimized by colonial powers for hundreds of years and have no coherent political or military power.  Most of the countries with Muslim majority are ruled by puppets of the US which are now being toppled by popular demand. US forces are in over 140 countries (at least two dozen Muslim majority). A lot of the fundamentalist groups that are now used as evidence of this pan-ISlamic desire to take on the world were created or supported by the West.  A religion that is the faith and inspiration of 1.6 billion people is like Christianity (2 billion people). Such a large number of people means by nature that some are bad people who use their religion for bad purposes. But in actually, the big wars in the world had nothing to do with religion (WWI and WWII). People use religion occasionally such as happened during the the Crusades and now with Zionist colonization of Palestine.
  • 15. “Israel’s centrality in Jewish life” manifest by the creed developed and advocated by Zionists “Am Yisrael Chai” meaning People of Israel (=Jews) live.
    – For this deep psychological pathos that puts Jews above any other humans, see these books
    Ellis, Marc, Out of the Ashes.
    Braverman, Mark. Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land.  Austin: Synergy Books, 2010.
    Kimmerling, Baruch. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: Society, Society and the Military. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
    Meyer, Hajo G.  The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed.  G.MeyerBooks, 2007
    Nathan, Susan. The Other Side of Israel: My Journey across the Jewish-Arab Divide. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
    Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. New York: Seven Stories, 2002.
    – also see My one and only Love
    – and Response to Rosenfeld
  • 16. Zionism had a positive influence on world affairs
    -Bishara Bahbah and Linda Butler, Israel and Latin America: The military Connection, ST Martin’s Press, NY, 1986
    Milton Jamail, Margo Gutierrez, It’s no secret: Israel’s military involvement in central America,
    Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1986
    Zionist Terrorists Arrested Inside Mexican Congress
    Israel hand seen in Ivorian clash (and other strives around the world)
    -“BERN, Switzerland – The Swiss government said today it had caught Israel’s spy agency trying to bug telephones on the outskirts of the Swiss capital. It was the second highly publicized Mossad bungle to embarrass the Israeli government in recent months. The espionage effort was aimed at foreigners living in Switzerland, federal prosecutor Carla del Ponte said, without elaborating. Del Ponte denied Israeli media reports that Iranian diplomats were  the target of the alleged spying. She said the targets were not diplomats.  Switzerland has demanded an apology from Israel, the Foreign Minstry said. It said it had had no immediate response from Israel. … At a news conference in Bern, del Ponte said five Israeli agents were  detained as they tried to plant the bugs a week ago. All but one were released and are believed to have left the country.  In Jerusalem today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that an Israeli citizen had been arrested in Switzerland, but declined to comment further. ” Another mess for Mossad: Israeli spy agency accused of bugging Swiss phones. The Associated Press  26 February 1998. by Irene Harnischberg
    -“A senior Israeli intelligence officer says that the hit team arrested in Switzerland were on the trail of two businessmen with Hezbollah sympathies. As contacts continued between Israel and Switzerland yesterday to free a Mossad agent detained in Berne last month, a senior Mossad officer said the true purpose of the bungled operation had been assassination and not bugging as claimed. ” March 3 1998. Times of London
    – There is some evidence that World War One was expanded instead of ending in peace because Zionists pushed Brits and French to continue promising to get US to enter the war IF THEY gave them Palestine after the war. Samuel Landman, a noted British Zionist, carefully articulated in 1936 the machination of the leading Zionists on this front (http://desip.igc.org/1939sLandman.htm Samuel Landman Great Britain, The Jews and Palestine , 1936 New Zionist Press)
    Michael Berkowitz, 2003. Nationalism, Zionism and ethnic mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and beyond. Brill Academic Publishers
    Balfour was a reward for the Zionists getting the US to enter the war entry The Balfour Declaration and the Zimmermann Note By John Cornelius, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 1997, pages 18-20 http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0897/9708018.html
    Lord Sydenham of the British House of Deputies replied prophetically to Balfour: “… the harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country – Arab all around in the hinterland – may never be remedied … what we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.” (UN: The Origins And Evolution Of Palestine Problem, section IV)
    -see also The origin of the Balfour Declaration
    -Israel’s industrial and military espionage in the US
  • 17. The 1967 war was a defensive war by Israel against enemies who wanted to destroy it
    Alan Hart on the 1967 propaganda and myth
    http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/06/04/six_day_war/
    -Moshe Dayan described kibbutz residents who pressed Israel to take Syria’s Golan Heights in a 1997 New York Times interview: “They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land … We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was … The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.”
    -From POLITICIDE, Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, by Baruch Kimmerling, Verso, 2003, pages 57-59):
    “In May 1967, Gamal Abd al-Nasser made his biggest political miscalculation. After a long and bloody intervention in the Yemeni civil war, he had lost prestige in the Arab world. In order to regain that prestige and affirm Egyptian sovereignty, he made two spectacular moves: he ordered Egyptian military forces to cross the Suez Canal and, at the same time, demanded the withdrawal of UN forces deployed along the 1957 ceasefire lines. After the Yemeni debacle, the Egyptian army was certainly not ready for a war with Israel, but the Israeli General Staff had planned for many years to destroy the Egyptian military, which had been re-equipped and restructured by the Soviet Union after the 1956 War. Nasser’s move was exploited by the Israeli Government, which depicted it as a causus belli and a real threat to Israel’s security. The Israeli armed forces mobilized their full reserve system. While the two armies were positioned face-to-face, the Israeli Government, headed by Levy Eshkol, hesitated, doubting both the reality of the Egyptian threat and the necessity of resolving it militarily rather than diplomatically. Another consideration was the severe economic hardship and social strain that would result from the prolonged mobilization of almost the entire male labor force. While the government weighed its options, military officers (including Sharon) seized the opportunity to convince the public that Israel faced a genuine threat to its existence. Demonstrations called on Eshkol to quit. The increasing public pressure in addition to the hidden pressure from many on the general staff led to the establishment of a new war-oriented Cabinet that included the hawkish Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense and, for the first time, members of the ultra-nationalist party Herut, headed by Menachem Begin. The war was so well planned and prepared that at dawn, on June 5, the Israeli military intelligence and air force knew the precise location of every Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian aircraft and destroyed most of them on the ground in several hours. Sharon, in his autobiography, briefly mentioned that “on the morning of June 5, Israel’s air force was to launch a pre-preemptive attack on Egypt’s airfields.” When Israeli infantry and tank brigades attacked Egyptian military concentrations, fortifications, and bases, they already had almost absolute air superiority. One of the most significant myths rooted in the collective memory of both the Israeli and Western public is that during the 1967 War (or as the Israelis arrogantly called it, “the Six Day War”), Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, a belief that is used to justify the legitimacy of the occupation to this day.
    -Both Yitzhak Rabin and Ezer Weizman clearly allude in their autobiographies to the fact that, prior to the attack of June 1967, the Israeli general staff organized a putsch, and barred any and all political solutions to the crisis. Rabin, Chief of Staff, admitted that: “Nasser didn’t want war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war He knew it and we knew it.” (Le Monde, February 28, 1968).
    Levy Eshkol himself admitted that “the Egyptian layout in Sinai and the general build up there testified to a militarily defensive Egyptian set-up, south of Israel” (Yediot Ahronot, October 16, 1967).
    -On August 8, 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, defending the invasion of Lebanon, said: “In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”(New York Times, August 21, 1982).”
  • 18. The International Solidarity Movement supports violence
    – see Wikepedia, a bit biased but has links
    -See The ISM Website
  • 19. The Road map is an international effort for peace in the Middle East and Palestinians reject it
    -The road map is 2218 words and lacks four key words: International Law and Human Rights. It was drafted in the State Department supposedly based on the speech Bush gave in 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020624-3.html ).  Bush’s speech writers at the time were both Zionists: Michael Gerson and David Frum.
    -The writings of Karen Kwiatkowski who retired from the Pentagon clearly documents the stranglehold of Zionist “group think” on US policy. It is claimed by official US sources that the State Department wrote the Road Map.  If that is the case, this would fall under the purview of then under secretary for Political Affairs (from 2001 to 2005) Marc Grossman who is also Zionist.  Other Zionists who were likely involved or at least had to give their blessings include Elliott Abrams (National Security Council Advisor) and Richard Haass (Director of Policy Planning at the State Department).
    -Despite this bias, Arafat and the PNC accepted the road map and the Palestinian Authority obeys it (getting back in line under threat of withholding their tax money occasionally). Sharon said he would accept it with 14 reservations that basically make it meaningless. The Israeli government violated it regularly most conspicuously on the issue of expanding settlements and refusing to keep the territorial integrity of the WB and Gaza: restrictions on movement etc increased even started to build a wall which is contrary to this document.
  • 20. Palestinians militants use human shields and send their kids to be killed for propaganda
    -such offensive and racist statements are beneath contempt as no mother or father or human being sacrifices their children or their relatives for public relations
    The reality
  • 21. Arabs only understand the language of force
    Check this
  • 22. Zionists teach peace and democracy, Palestinian Society teaches hate
    Anti-Arab racism and incitement in Israel
    – Nathan Brown of George Washington University investigated Palestinian textbooks, his full report is posted here
    – see also related Report by Dr. Fouad Moughrabi
    – See Education and hate  Assay on who teaches what to whom, July 2004.  Also published in French as Education et haine
    -A study by The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs concluded Israeli textbooks and children’s literature promote racism and hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs. (See http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0999/9909019.html.)
    Jewish Settlers’ on the record: racism and bigotry funded by US taxpayers
    – see http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/ speeches and articles
    – Former Chief Rabbi advocates genocide (this is not an average Israeli Rabbi, this person carries lots of weight and the position was created based on Israeli state laws)
    http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6987.shtml
    – The myth of incitement in Palestinian schools (this is an oft repeated smear by Zionists trying to distract world attention from continued colonization activities and ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians)
    http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=1&id=911
    http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/47093.pdf
    http://www.ifamericansknew.org/download/pal_children.pdf
    http://www.geocities.com/nathanbrown1/CAJE.htm
    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
    – Israel is as a Theocratic state whee there is no separation between state and religion, see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/relig.html
    – Yesha Rabbinical Council: “During time of war, enemy has no innocents Ma’ariv 30 July 2006 “The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that “according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as ‘innocents’ of the enemy.” All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians,” the statement said. (Efrat Weiss) ” http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/1,7340,L-3283720,00.html (Yesha is the name given to the council that oversees the 450,000 settlers in the West Bank)
    – See also “Israel’s house of horrors” By Ali Abunimah http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6975.shtml
    Harvard Lawyer Alan Dershowitz’ calls for War crimes
    Martin Sherman calls for ending Palestinian rights by giving them money and relocating them all
    -“Israel should have exploited the  repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention  focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the  Arabs of the territories.”Benjamin Netanyahu told students at Bar-Ilan University in 1989
    – “In the old city of Jerusalem they (Palestinians) are swarming like ants. They should go to hell — and the Messiah will speed them on their way,” Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, leader of the influential Shas party in a weekly sermon broadcast on army radio (Reuters, July 27, 2001).
    Ovadia Yosef: “The role of the Gentiles – is to serve the Jews”
    -Another investigation by Le Monde Diplomatique concluded the textbooks’ real error was to refute Israel’s version of Palestinian history. (Log onto http://mondediplo.com /2001/07/11textbook.)
    -While many Israelis and supporters terrorize Palestinians, they demonize all Palestinians as terrorists. While they teach intolerance and hate, they claim Palestinians teach their kids hate. Human Rights Watch documented the discrimination against Palestinian-Arab children in Israel’s schools. (Log onto http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2/).
    -An article by Dr. Peled-Elhanan of the Hebrew University put it this way: “Palestinians, both the lawful citizens of the state and the ones living under occupation, are presented stereotypically, in racist vocabulary and racist visuals, as a demographic threat . . . their discrimination is represented as a national necessity. . . occupied
    territories are depicted as part of the state of Israel but their Palestinian inhabitants, cities and cultural sites are missing from maps, photographs and graphs. The books promote the ideal of an Arab-free land as a condition for the existence of the Jewish state.”
    – Israel’s education system http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/2507
    -Israeli company fires 21 Arab employees at once and gets away with its racism http://972mag.com/israeli-supermarket-fires-21-arab-employees-at-once/
  • 23. Palestinians don’t use nonviolent resistance but instead blow themselves up with innocent civilians
    See the detailed in my book Popular Resistance in Palestine
    Statement to Israeli public on non-violence
  • 24. Israel takes great care not to harm civilians and never targets civilians; Israeli army most ethical army
    – See Targeting Civilians
    – “As a young soldier serving in the Israeli army, I was ordered to commit grave human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My platoon meted out collective punishment on Palestinian communities, shot and killed unarmed Palestinian civilians, and enforced prolonged curfews on Palestinian villages. I witnessed the arbitrary destruction of Palestinian houses, property and agricultural land. These acts were not rare occurrences, nor were they the result of overly cruel soldiers. It was part of the norm; a habit that an Occupation soldier gets used to doing. These daily occurrences constituted, as I later understood, war crimes.” http://alawda.rso.wisc.edu/why.htm
    – “I participated in the fighting on Temple Mount. I was and also shot at the demonstrations in Umm Al Fahm. But the worst event was the riots in Tiberias. Hundreds of violent Jews closed a main road and also threw firebombs at us. They almost set our car on fire, but luckily we put the fire out on time. There was stone throwing, firecrackers, and glass bottles were thrown and broke between our feet. They crossed all the red lines, my people attacked me with enormous force, and it hurts. The violence there was just like in Umm Al Fahm. According to the open-fire regulations, when firebombs are thrown, there is authorization to shoot. But we handle Jewish riots differently. To a demo like this we know in advance that we come without weapons. These are the orders from above, and we used only gas”. Tal Etlinger, a border police soldier, Yediot Aharonot, 17/11/2000 (translated by Irit Katriel, iritka@internet-zahav.net.il)
    – “The Israeli soldiers who volunteers to serve in the occupied territories are considered heroes, while in truth their volunteering can be compared to that of German volunteers who served in the SS” Moshe Zimmerman, at the time Chair of Department of Germanic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, interview Yerushalayim, 4/28/1995. From the “Founding Myths of Modern Israel by Roger Garaudy
    – We killed (Palestinian) police for revenge, Israeli soldiers confess By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem, The Independent
    Maariv in Hebrew published admissions of Israeli soldiers to committing war crimes
    – Palestinians Continue to be used as human shields (Video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tomdEkOgdKU
    Use of Palestinians as human shields
    Amnesty International 2006 report on Israeli violations of Human Rights
    – Article by Jonathan Cook on Targeting Civilians http://mostlywater.org/node/8568
    – Israeli army forces women to strip at checkpoints http://www.imemc.org/article/49215
    – Israel hits center of Red Cross http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/ambulancehit.jpg
    American NLG Lawyers Findings that Israel Violated International Law, US Domestic Law in Gaza
    Statistics on number of people killed
    Israeli who revealed “medieval-style” torture of Palestinians faces virulent backlash
  • 25. Israel attacks infrastructure only if it is linked to terrorists
    Lebanon war
    Amnesty Report
    Wanton Destruction of Infrastructure and homes
  • 26. The Deir Yassin Massacre (one of hundreds committed during the ethnic cleansing of 1947-1949) was committed by rogue elements and not mainstream Zionists
    What happened in Deir Yassin
    – When the Haganah command learned of the plan of the Irgun and Lehi to conquer Deir Yassin, David Shaltiel, Haganah Commander in Jerusalem, asked them to coordinate the timing of the operation with the scheduled renewed assault on Kastel. He dispatched identical letters to Mordechai Raanan (Irgun Commander in Jerusalem) and Yehoshua Zetler (Lehi Commander in Jerusalem), in which he gave their operation his approval:
    To: Shapira (code-name of Zetler)
    From: District Commander
    I have learned that you intend to carry out an operation against Deir Yassin. I would like to call your attention to the fact that the conquest and continued occupation of Deir Yassin is one of the stages in our overall plan. I have no objection to your carrying out the operation on condition that you are capable of holding on to it. If you are incapable of doing so, I caution you against blowing up the village, since this will lead to the flight of the inhabitants and subsequent occupation of the ruins and the abandoned homes by enemy forces. This will make things difficult rather than contributing to the general campaign, and reoccupation of the site will entail heavy casualties for our men. An additional argument I would like to cite is that if enemy forces are drawn to the place, this will disrupt the plan to establish an aerodrome there.
    Ezel website
  • 27. The massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in Lebanon was not the responsibility of the Israelis
    Details on website indict Sharon
    Robert Fisk explains
    Qumsiyeh Review of book on subject
  • 28. The lies and distortions about the Lavon affair
    From Mideastweb files
    – Israel’s second Prime Minister Sharret had interesting admissions in his diary including about the Lavon affair, in which Israeli provocateurs exploded bombs in U.S. cultural centers and diplomatic establishments in Cairo and Alexandria in 1954 after being told “to break the West’s confidence in the existing (Nasser) regime… The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origins should be totally covered.” The idea was to provoke mayhem, increase Jewish immigration and with other acts eventually provoke a war to acquire more territory (which happened in 1967). As retired US foreign service officer Richard Curtis wrote in the WRMEA (March 18, 1985): “When the provocateurs (young Egyptian-born Jews trained in Israel and returned to their homeland) were caught and tried, Sharett publicly denied Israeli complicity and accused the Egyptians of ‘vicious hostility to… the Jewish people.'” But in his diaries Sharett not only admitted the affair but lamented Israel’s “unleashing of the basest instincts of hate and revenge…” In another part of the diary we see this interesting tidbit: “Ben Gurion reported to the cabinet … how our four youngsters (Israeli paratrooper reservists) captured the Beduin boys one by one, how they took them to the wadi, how they knifed them to death one after the other… When I arrived in Tel Aviv an officer… came to tell me that the whole revenge operation was organized with the active help of Arik Sharon, the commander of the paratroopers battalion.”
  • 29. Martin Luther King Jr supported Israel and Zionism and equated criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism
    See Martin Luther King
  • 30. Israel was trying to save Arab Jews
    Details on Arab Jews
    See also the Lavon Affair (up)
  • 31. Palestinians and other Arabs largely rejoiced after 9/11 attacks/Variant is that Muslims do not denounce terrorism
    – See Arabs and Palestinians on September 11]
    9/11 statements
  • 32. Barak Made a generous offer at Camp David, Arafat rejected it and went back and started a bloody intifada
    – See Robert Malley’s Fictions About the Failure at Camp David
    – Uri Avnery on 12 conventional lies [http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story658.html]
    Gush Shalom data
    EI myth 5
    Electronic Intifada
    Cactus 1948
    IAP
    Mideast Facts
    Gush Shalom
    Pal Remembered
    Ottawa summary
    – Aaron David Miller, a senior negotiator on the Clinton team at Camp David and an Orthodox Jew revealed that rather than serve as a true mediator in peace negotiations, successive U.S. administrations including Clinton’s have acted as “Israel’s attorney.” Kathleen Christison, “Anatomy of A Frame-Up: Camp David Redux, Counterpunch, August 15, 2005. On line here
    Press release showing that the sides were really close to hammering out an agreement at Taba which was a continuation of the negotiations until Israel withdrew (not Palestinians)
    – “The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel’s colonization of Palestine. There were just a few hundred settlers in the West Bank and Gaza when I became president, but the Likud government expanded settlement activity after I left office. President Ronald Reagan condemned this policy, and reaffirmed that Resolution 242 remained “the foundation stone of America’s Middle East peace effort.” President George H.W. Bush even threatened to reduce American aid to Israel. Although President Bill Clinton made strong efforts to promote peace, a massive increase of settlers occurred during his administration, to 225,000, mostly while Ehud Barak was prime minister. Their best official offer to the Palestinians was to withdraw 20 percent of them, leaving 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 5 percent of the occupied land.” President Jimmy Carter
    -“The narrative blaming Yasser Arafat now joins a whole string of myths: the Tel Hai myth, the myth of the runaway refugees in 1948, the myth of the War of Independence as a defensive war that broke out because of an invasion by Arab armies, the myth of the few against the many, and the myth of the liberation of the homeland from the British boot – just to mention a few of the many myths that have been created here to deal with the reality that gave birth to many crises and second thoughts about the situation.” Challenging the Camp David myth, By Meron Benvenisti. Ha’aretz, Thursday, August 02, 2001
  • 33. Christians, Jews and others should support Israel because of the Promised land/Bible issues.
    -See Web site on Christian Zionism
    Hagee preaches support for Israel
    – see also these   Links of Palestinian Christian and others who truly follow Christ’s teachings
  • 34. The people of the West Bank benefited from Israeli rule
    – In September 1967 Moshe Dayan told senior staff in the Israeli Occupation Army in the West Bank that some 200,000 Palestinian Arabs had left the West Bank and Gaza Strip: “we must understand the motives and causes of the continued emigration of the Arabs, from both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and not to undermine these cause after all, we want to create a new map.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 338).
    -“The guideline of our policy has always been the idea that a permanent situation of no peace and a latent war is the best situation for us, and that it must be maintained at all costs. … we are becoming stronger year by year in a situation of impending conflict where it is possible that actual fighting may break out from time to time. Such wars will usually be short and the results guaranteed in advance, since the gap between us and the Arabs is increasing. In this way we shall move on from occupation to further occupation. … this criminally mischievous policy has led us into the crisis we are living through today…We have not been seeking peace for twenty-five years — all declarations to that effect have been no more than coloured statements or deliberate lies. There is of course no assurance that we could have made peace with the Arabs if we had wanted to. However, it has to be heavily emphasized that we have not only made no attempts to seek peace, but have deliberately and with premeditation, sabotaged every possibility of doing so.” (Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 30 November 1973)
    -From former Israel Attorney General Michael Ben Yair who wrote on 3/3/2002: “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupie territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one – progressive, liberal – in Israel; and the other – cruel, injurious – in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”
  • 35. Christians are leaving Palestine because of persecution by Muslims not because of Zionist occupation and colonization
    See links and resources from all main Palestinian Christian denominations and other Christians around the world.
    – The Christian presence in Palestine under Israeli military rule. A short clip from the award-winning film from Occupation 101 titled Voices of the Silenced Majority.
    – Palestinian Christians make action against construction of Israel’s separation barrier on Palestinian Christian lands in Wadi Nis village (South of Bethlehem area,) marking Good Friday
    -Christians and Muslims join hands to march on Palm Sunday insisting on right of freedom of movement. Many were arrested.
    Example here
    and here
    and here
    – In Arabic,  report about Christianity in the Middle East
  • 36. The 1967 Occupation follows International law
    -Aruri, Naseer H., ed. Occupation: Israel over Palestine, 2nd ed. Belmont, MA: AAUG Press, 1989.
    -Benvenisti,  Eyal “The Applicability of Human Rights Conventions to Israel and to the Occupied Territories”, Israel Law Review, Vol. 26, 1992, pp. 24-35
    -Convention relative to the Protection of Civilians Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949.
    -Also see General Assembly Resolution 64/92, Applicability of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the other occupied Arab territories, 19 January 2010
    -International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004
    -Nasrallah, Rami and Rassem Khamaisi (ed.)  The Jerusalem Urban Fabric.  Jerusalem: A publication of the International Peace and Cooperation Center, 2003
    -Playfair, Emma, ed. International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Oxford, UK: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
    -Qafisheh, Mutaz M. The International Law Foundations of Palestinian Nationality (Boston and the Hague: Brill, 2008).
    -Segal, Rafael and Eyal Weizman (editors). A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. Babel (Tel Aviv) and Verso (London). 2003.
    -Shehadeh, Raja. From Occupation to Interim Accords: Israel and the Palestinian Territories. London; Boston: Kluwer Law International, 1997
  • 37. Iran’s President is a Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying, Islamo-fascist who stated he will “wipe Israel off the map”
    -The actual quote from Ahmedinujad: Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).
    An article explaining the effort to put words in his mouth
    and this
    and another analysis
  • 38. Zionists did not push for the war on Iraq and the conflict with Iran is also about US security not Zionist perceived self-interest.
    Letter by leading Zionists and neoconservatives asking US to attack Iraq and change its regime January 26, 1998
    -See Book by Mearsheimer and Walt “Israel Lobby”
    -“Groups Push For Sanctions, Fear US Will Falter on Iran,” By Ori Nir, Forward – Sep 1, 2006 issue
    -“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat and actually has been since 1990 – it’s the threat against Israel.. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t  want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.” Pentagon -Defense Intelligence Board Member Philip Zeikow, 10 September 2002
    Declassified Documents show early manipulation of US media and attempts to shape public opinion
    Contrary to Chomsky, the US has no interest in supporting Israel
    -Challenging the power of the Israeli lobby: what should be done
    -VIDEO: from Jewish Telegraphic Agency: The power of AIPAC and what they pushed for
    -Lengthy but important analysis of Israeli power
  • 39. Israel is beneficial to US interests in the Middle East
    Cost of Israel to the US
    Declassified: Massive Israeli Manipulation of US Media Exposed
    – “Israel secretly maintains a large and active intelligence-gathering operation in the United States that has long attempted to recruit U.S. officials as spies and to procure classified documents, U.S. government officials said.” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2004
    – see  target=new>[The Lobby]
    – [Michael Lind] Article on the Lobby’s negative influence
    – Jewish Groups To Challenge Ethics Reform, By Nathan Guttman, Forward [http://www.forward.com/articles/jewish-groups-to-challenge-ethics-reform/]
    Does the Israeli Tail Wag the American Dog?
    – If the United States is unable to distinguish the world’s or its own real needs from those of another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot say that it always acts in its own best interests. By Kathleen and Bill Christison (ex CIA Analysts) [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17217.htm]
    – Is Americans’ support of Israel unshakeable? By Linda S. Heard, Online Journal
    – Israel and US interests aren’t identical By Antony Loewenstein [http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4387]
    – [http://www.muckrakerreport.com/]
    – Excerpt from the secret CIA assessment released November 28, 1947 on the eve of the UN “vote” and titled “The Consequences of the Partition of Palestine” (Declassified document)
    “Armed hostilities between Jews and Arabs will break out if the UN General Assembly accepts the plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states…. The Jews are expected to be able to mobilize some 200,000 fighters in Palestine.. The Jewish armed groups in Palestine are well equipped and well trained in commando tactics.  Initially they will achieve marked success over the Arabs because of superior organization and equipment… The US by supporting partition has already lost much of its prestige in the Near East In the event that partition is imposed on Palestine, the resulting conflict will seriously disturb the social, economic, and political stability of the Arab world, and US commercial and strategic interests will be dangerously jeopardized. … The poverty, unrest, and hopelessness upon which Communist propaganda thrives will increase throughout the Arab world. (and later in the document, p. 6) US prestige on the other hand has steadily decreased with each new indication that the US supports the Zionists. The good will enjoyed by the US at the time of the Rosevelt-Ibn Saud Conference and following backing of Lebanese and Syrian claims for independence was short lived as a result of President Truman’s support of Jewish immigration to Palestine and of the Anglo-American Committee report. Because of the long standing cultural ties between the US and the Arab world, the friendly role that the US played in the achievement of Syrian and Lebanese independence, the partial dependence of certain Arab states on oil royalties from US companies, and the promise of increased royalties in the future, the Arab states would like to maintain friendly relations with the US. … Little of this (positive) development will be possible, if the US supports a Jewish state in Palestine.”
    [http://tinyurl.com/2c4kh3]
    Or original here
    – Truman helped establish Israel (actually was the critical element in arm-twisting countries to vote for partition which was contrary to the UN Charter of self determination). Zionist propaganda has it that this support was because of deeply held beliefs in that cause (Jews were persecuted so need a country of their own).  But facts are otherwise.  Truman himself admitted in a private cabinet meeting that he is doing it for money and votes. – “when the election was coming up in 1946 in New York, the group of New York Jews called upon Mr. Truman. [Alan Taylor, op. cit. p.93] Emmanuel Cellar was the head of this committee. Rabbi Steven Wise and several others were in it. They called upon Mr. Truman and said, “We have just been talking with Mr. Thomas Dewey. He is willing to come out and declare for a Jewish state, and we are going to turn our money and urge the Jews to vote for him unless you beat him to it.” Then Emmanuel Cellar pounded upon Mr. Truman’s desk and said, “And if you don’t come out for a Jewish state we’ll run you out of town.” This, I’m sure, is the threat that Mr. Truman refers to in his book, saying, “The extreme Zionists threatened me.” They were Emmanuel Cellar, Rabbi Steven Wise, etc. These are not the extreme Zionists, these are just the run of the mill Zionists. What Mr. Truman did was to cave in to these threats that they would support Mr. Dewey. In that way he got the Jewish money and the Jewish vote. His decision was not made from the point of view of what was going to result in the Middle East, but what was going on in the United States.” Edwin M. Wright at the time of the State Department (source [http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm] )
    – See also [http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/26309.html] and Truman diaries which show how he really thought:
    [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40678-2003Jul10]
    -Israel stole US nuclear technology [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/washington/29nixon.html]
    – “How the Israel Lobby Took Control of the U.S. Congress” (most people have no idea how methodically AIPAC & Co. went about this):
    http://criminalstate.com/2009/07/how-the-israel-lobby-took-control-of-us-foreign-policy/
    – A longer analysis appears in the introduction to Guilt By Association which appears on the Criminal State website (just above Chomsky’s blurb):
    http://criminalstate.com/guilt-by-association/
    – Prof. Wm. Robinson stood up to the ADL Thought Police at UC Santa Barbara when he refused to fold his hand (he’s Jewish): http://criminalstate.com/2009/07/treason-in-plain-sight/
    Note the background role of UC President Mark Yudof and his wife. In an Information Age, if the conduct described is not treason, what is?
  • 40. Israel accidentally attacked the USS Liberty in International waters because it was mistaken for an Egyptian ship
    – CIA Director Richard Helms said: “The board of inquiry (concluded) that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing …”
    See [http://ussliberty.org] for lots of other data including testimony of survivors.
    – Alison Wier on USA Today and USS Liberty [http://counterpunch.org/weir06232007.html]
    – WHY SHOULD MY FAMILY STILL LOVE ME?
    [http://ussliberty.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/why-should-my-family-still-love-me/]
  • 41. Zionist in America are loyal to the US Constitution and have no Tribal allegiances to contradict US interests
    – Secret trials for terrorists, says US judge: A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being “hog-tied” by the US constitution. Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had ‘over-invested’ in them…”
    [http://rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Ftheaustralian.news.com.au%2Fstory%2F0%2C20867%2C21986986-2702%2C00.html%3F]
    – The New Israel Lobby in Action (David Noble)
    http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2005/11/01/209/
    – See this cartoon by Bendib on the clamour of presidential candidates to suck up to the Zionist lobby.
    http://www.bendib.com/newones/2007/june/small/6-9-The-Race.jpg
  • 42. Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed while protecting the house of terrorist
    [http://www.rachelcorrie.org/]
    [http://www.criticalconcern.com/rachelcorrie.html]
    [http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/309199_corrierebut28.html]
    [http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=DF899DD539B2344385256CEC007008D5]
  • 43. Israel did not deliberately attack a UN Compound in Qana, Lebanon.  “We want it to be clear it was not a deliberate attack because Israel would never target a UN force. It is not part of our policies; it is not part of our values”  Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
    – From Robert Fisk’s April 19, 1996 article “Massacre in Sanctuary” in The Independent (UK): “Qana, southern Lebanon – It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world’s protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong. In front of a burning building of the UN’s Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: “My father, my father.” A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child. “The Israelis have just told us they’ll stop shelling the area”, a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. “…
    [http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/robert_fisk_qana.html]
  • 44. The “security barrier” Israel is building is not a land grab and is about Security
    Facts about “the wall”
    -After most of the residents were ethnically cleansed, a wall of fences was built around remaining 3500 Palestinians in Al-Majdal to starve them until they agreed to leave “voluntarily” in 1951 (long after the end of the 1948 war). The city was renamed Ashqelon
    -The wall around Gaza was completed before even the first Palestinian suicide bombing
    -The wall was less than 25% complete when Hamas made a political decision to stop bombings and run for elections in 2006. Hamas held on to its end of this even though they were not allowed to govern.
    -International court of justice ruled it illegal regardless of any consideration since it is built in the occupied areas (just like the colonies illegal and subject to 4th Geneva convention)
    -Even today in 2013, the wall is actually less than 70% complete; nearly 10,000 Palestinians cross to the Israeli side without Israeli permission to work DAILY and so any person interested in doing violence could do it
    -The wall zig zags in ways clearly intended to capture maximum agricultural lands and natural resources instead of being more secure straighter lines in most of its currently built course.
    -There are Palestinians on both sides of the wall (hundreds of thousands on the so called “Israeli side”)
    -There are Israelis on both sides of it so it cannot be a security issue.
    – See Stop the wall resources and fact sheets
    Video
    – see also this discussion in electronic intifada on the naming issue
  • 45. Israel Demolishes Homes for security
    – [http://www.icahd.org/eng/faq.asp?menu=9&submenu=1]
    – Rafah Aerial maps before and after
    [http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Rafah-16-10-03/Gaza%20segregation%20wall.jpg]
    [http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Rafah-16-10-03/Rafah.jpg]
  • 46. Israel only imprisons those responsible for terrorism
    – Over 11,000 political prisoners are held by Israel today.  Over the past 40 years, Israel imprisoned nearly 40% of male population of the occupied areas. One third are/were held in administrative detention without charge or trial. Hundreds of minors are also held at any one time.
    – See “A regrettable indifference” By Amira Hass Haaretz  [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/797419.html]
  • 47. Israel does not make or use weapons of mass destruction
    – Dai Williams’ report on the use of uranium weapons by Israel in Lebanon last summer is at: UN priorities for investigating uranium and other suspected illegal weapons in the Israel/Lebanon conflict. – by Dai Williams – 2006-09-01  [http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060901&articleId=3123]. The weapons were flown by the US to Israel.  The airplane was supposed to land for refueling at Ireland’s shannon Internation Airport, but the Irish government refused permission for it to land on Irish soil, so the plane landed at Prestwick, a small airport in Scotland, south of Glasgow. This subsequently caused some difficulties for the Blair Government. At that time, Dai Williams, an internation expert on DU, advised the Scots that if the plane crashed on landing or take-off, all of southern Scotland would be contaminated by the radioactive weapons on board. This incident was not known in the US.  If you need more information on it, look at
    [http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/campanas/stopwar/uranium_weapons/index.html].
    – William Broad, “The Hidden Travels of The Bomb,” NY Times, 12/9/08: “Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Liverpool weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation” to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and – most important – the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states… It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like Isidor I. Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel’s nuclear arms… A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists “were observing and participating in” the French program of weapons design. The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, “two nations went nuclear.” And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel’s own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test “2,600 feet under the Negev desert.” The next year it built its first bomb.  Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.”
  • 48. Israel complies with International law and International obligations
    – [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/un.html]
    – [http://www.muckrakerreport.com/id396.html]
  • 49. Arabs in Israel are treated equal.  Variant, Israel is a Democracy
    – See detailed analysis of some Israeli laws here: [http://www.mediamonitors.net/mazin6.html] and her [http://qumsiyeh.org/chapter7/]
    Database of Discriminatory Israeli laws compiled by Adalah
    – Amnesty International reported: “In Israel several laws are explicitly discriminatory. These can be traced back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 which, driven primarily by the racist genocide suffered by Jews in Europe during the Second World War, was based on the notion of a Jewish state for Jewish people. Some of Israel’s laws reflect this principle and as a result discriminate against non-Jews, particularly Palestinians who had lived on the lands for generations. Various areas of Israeli law discriminate against Palestinians. The Law of Return, for instance, provides automatic Israeli citizenship for Jewish immigrants, whereas Palestinian refugees who were born and raised in what is now Israel are denied even the right to return home. Other statutes explicitly grant preferential treatment to Jewish citizens in education, public housing, health, and employment.” ‘Racism and the Administration of Justice’, Amnesty International (2001), also found at [http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/racismreport.pdf]
    – Human Rights Watch on an aspect of Israel racist structures
    “The state controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, and a government agency, the Israel Land Administration (ILA), manages and allocates this land. The ILA lacks any mandate to disburse land in a fair and just fashion, and members of the Jewish National Fund, which has an explicit mandate to develop land for Jewish use only, constitute almost half of the ILA’s governing council, occupying all the seats not held by Israeli government ministries.” [http://hrw.org/reports/2008/iopt0308/]
    – To quote Israeli Arab writer and Knesset Member, Ahmed Tibi: “…dutifully defining the state [of Israel] as ‘Jewish and democratic,’ ignores the fact that in practice ‘democratic’ refers to Jews, and the Arabs are nothing more than citizens without citizenship.” (Ma’ariv, 1.6.2005)
    Jewishness versus democracy – By Azmi Bishara
    Is Israel a democracy
    – U.S. State Department report on International Religious Freedom: “Arabs in Israel…are subject to various forms of discrimination.. (the government)  does not provide Israeli Arabs…with the same quality of education, housing,  employment opportunities as Jews.”
    – Ronnie Kasrils, minister for intelligence in the South African government and of the Jewish faith: “The Palestinian minority in Israel has for decades been denied basic equality in health, education, housing and land possession, solely because it is not Jewish. The fact that this minority is allowed to vote hardly redresses the rampant injustice in all other basic human rights. They are excluded from the very definition of the ‘Jewish state’, and have virtually no influence on the laws, or political, social and economic policies.  Hence, their similarity to the black South Africans [under apartheid].” (The Guardian, 25 May 2005)
    – “The Committee [UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights] notes with grave concern that the Status Law of 1952 authorizes the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency and its subsidiaries, including the Jewish National Fund, to control most of the land in Israel, since these institutions are chartered to benefit Jews exclusively. Despite the fact that the institutions are chartered under private law, the State of Israel nevertheless has a decisive influence on their policies and thus remains responsible for their activities. A State party cannot divest itself of its obligations under the Covenant by privatizing governmental functions. The Committee takes the view that large-scale and systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and property by the State and the transfer of that property to these agencies constitute an institutionalized form of discrimination because these agencies by definition would deny the use of these properties to non-Jews. Thus, these practices constitute a breach of Israel’s obligations under the Covenant. [http://www.unhchr.ch:80/tbs/doc.nsf/Symbol/df35bf5b5ee94d01802566d5003dd6cd?Opendocument]
    – “The Israeli-Arab sector suffers from discrimination with regards to government services”, outgoing Israeli Northern Police District chief, Commissioner Ya’akov Borovsky to Maariv newspaper, 8/31/04 [http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=printArticle&articleID=10778]
    – Israel’s Strategic Threat by NEVE GORDON (on the persecution of anyone trying to change Israel to a democratic state for its citizens), The Nation, 4/30/07
    [http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070430/gordon]
    – “Unrecognized Palestinians” (on the racism and oppression of Palestinians within the “Green line”/Palestine 1948) [http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6719]
    – Israel: Multiple patterns of internal displacement affect several ethnic and religious groups.  Summary report in PDF: [http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/179CDBD849DB9626C125734700336ADC/$file/Israel_Overview_Aug 07.pdf]
    Full report in PDF: http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/19DE321CE3CA6F50C125734700346BA5/$file/Israel+-August+2007.pdf
    Click here for very interesting program (four videos) about Palestinians in ’48. It’s called Blue ID and is a 5 part program being shown on an Israeli TV channel. In Artabic and Hebrew
    – Palestinians in Israel: You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet By Anton Shammas
    [http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol3no1/palest.html]
    – “The following lists may not run in the elections: A list which acts directly or indirectly against the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people ….”
    [http://www.knesset.gov.il/deSCRIPTion/eng/eng_mimshal_beh.htm#6]
    In other words, if you oppose Israel being “the state of the Jewish people” (ie. advocate that it be a state of its citizens) you cannot run.
    – Ehud Olmert, then Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, commented in April 2004 that; “More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.”[29] Olmert made a similar remark in November 2007: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.”[30][31][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analogy]
    -¨Hazem Jamjoum: Not an Analogy: Israel and the Crime of Apartheid.¨http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10440.shtml
  • 50. Israel does not torture Palestinian Prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions
    -[http://www.stoptorture.org.il/eng/]
    Israeli torture specialist telling lies
    Truth on Torture by Amnesty International
  • 51. Zionists believe in and allow free speech
    – [The case is closed]: How human rights activists are targeted
    Zionism’s first political assassination: When Dutch poet and journalist Jacob Israel de Haan became too vocal with his anti-Zionist writing in Mandatory Palestine, the Haganah silenced him
  • 52. Zionism was a response to anti-Semitism (corollary Palestinians are anti-Semites)
    – I urge everyone top read Lenni Brenner’s book “51 Documents: History of Nazi-Zionist Collaboration”. Click here for a take. Here is an example of a message to Nazi Germany asking for alliance by a group led by a future Prime Minister of Israel (Menachem Begin) and a leader of Likud (Sharon’s party).
    -Who broke the boycott of Nazi Germany in the 1930s (yes, it was the Zionists), see Edwin Black, the Transfer agreement.
    – FDR, Ruth Gruber and me: Zionists stymie WWII rescue plan, by Ronald Bleier October 2006
    – See also this from Kasztner
    – Bauer, Yehuda, Jews for sale?: Nazi-Jewish negotiations, 1933-1945, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1994.
    – There are lots more data.  A summary is in Chapter 6 of my book.
    – “Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting” by Ruth Linn, Cornell U. Press, 2004. It’s about Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 and gave detailed information to the Jewish Council of Slovakia that could have saved a large proportion of the Hungarian Jews who had not yet been deported. But the Jewish Council suppressed the information in order to get a trainload of their own (Zionist) people out and aided in the death of 437,000 Hungarian Jews.
    -Holocaust survivors speak out on Israel (videos): Hajo Meyer (author of The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed.  G. MeyerBooks, 2007) and Hedy Epstein (strip searched at Ben Gurion’s airport)
    -This note from Hajo G. Meyer, 85 y.o. survivor of the concentration camps: “Are you aware that besides the Ha’avarah agreement the terrorist and murderer Avraham Stern had written to the Nazis on January 11th 1941 to fight with his Irgun forces together with the Nazis against the British! That is, I think, still stronger stuff.  Cordial regards. Hajo “
  • 53. Zionists do not deny other peoples sufferings (other than Palestinians)
    The long term denial and lobby against recognition of the Armenian Genocide remains the classic example.
  • 54. Israel is not an apartheid regime
    – Read the study:  Apartheid; Ancient, Past, and Present: Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, Vienna: Gesellschaft fur Phenomenologie und kritische Anthropologie, 2007, 3 rd edition, [http://www.dada.at/gems/gesellschaft/Apartheid.pdf]
    – “Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria,” By Chris McGreal,  The Guardian, February 7, 2006
    [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel]
    -In March 2002, former attorney-general, Michael Ben-Yair even admitted Israel’s apartheid essence: “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one “progressive, liberal” in Israel; and the other “cruel, injurious” in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”
    -The architect of apartheid in South Africa — Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd  — wrote in 1961: “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hendrik_Verwoerd]
    – Israeli laws is an apartheid state [http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2008/summer/articles02.htm]
    -The collaboration between apartheid Israel and the apartheid regime of South Africa. “During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship – A-bomb technology” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1704037,00.html]
    – [http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1703245,00.html]
    -“Disengagement in Gaza, Consolidation in the West Bank”.. Ariel Sharon and his right hand man Dov Weisglass
    -“Us here, them there” Ehaud Barak
    Arnon Sofer calls for an explicit policy of “geographic separation and ethnic separation” to solve the “demographic problem”
    -From former Israel Attorney General Michael Ben Yair who wrote on 3/3/2002: “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupie territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one – progressive, liberal – in Israel; and the other – cruel, injurious – in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.
    -Desmond Tutu on israeli apartheid [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1957644.stm]
    Apartheid Israel: A Beacon of Hope? By Prof. VIRGINIA TILLEY Counterpunch, 5 December 2006 [http://counterpunch.org/tilley12052006.html]
    – Shulamit Aloni, a former minister of education in Israel, confirms, in an article in the Israeli daily, the aparheid nature of Israeli policies: “The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. … Indeed Apartheid does exist here. …” { Yediot Acharonot, Jan. 5, 2007}
    – Derek Tozer, an Israeli thinker, stated: “The official policy of the government (of Israel) is unequivocal. Arabs, like the Jews in Nazi Germany, are officially “class B citizens, a fact which is recorded on their identity cards.”
    – The late Professor Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, summed it up accurately in his statement: “It is my considered opinion that the state of Israel is a racist state in the full meaning of this term. In this state, people are discriminated against, in the most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin. This racist discrimination began in Zionism and is carried today mainly in co-operation with the institutions of the Zionist movement.” (Quote taken from “The Racist Nature of Zionism and of the Zionist State of Israel”, an article published in Pi-Ha’aton, the weekly newspaper of the students of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 1975.)
    – the architect of apartheid in South Africa — Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd  — wrote in 1961:  “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state”. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hendrik_Verwoerd
    http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2008/summer/articles02.htm
    Recommended Books
    – Settler Colonialism in South Africa and the Middle East, George Jabbour, 1970;
    – Israel and South Africa: The Progression of a Relationship, Richard Stevens and Abdelwahhab Elmessiri, 1976;
    – Undercutting Sanctions: Israel, the U.S. and South Africa, Jane Hunter, 1986;
    – Besieged Bedfellows: Israel and the Land of Apartheid, Benjamin Joseph, 1988
  • 55. Israel won the confrontation with Hizballah in summer 2006
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ12Ak01.html
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ13Ak01.html
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ14Ak01.html
  • 56. Muslims cannot assimilate in Western countries
    On Muslims in America: “Assimilation is Not a Disappearing Act”
  • 57. Jihad and Mujahideen refers to violence against infidels/non-muslims
    – Partial Translation of Sunan Abu-Dawud, Book 37: Book 37, Number 4330: Narrated AbuSa’id al-Khudri:
    The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said: The best jihad in the path of Allah is (to speak) a word of justice to an oppressive ruler.
    http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/abudawud/037.sat.html#037.4330
  • 58. Israeli academics are generally liberals who support human rights
    Silence means a boycott is justified: Israeli academics are not standing up for their Palestinian counterparts, and a boycott is the best way forward, says Amjad Barham May 24, 2007
    http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/news/catindex28
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1003-05.htm
    http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/2011/education%20book.pdf
  • 59. Israel seeks peace with Syria
    Operation peace for the winery: Israel does not want peace with Syria by Gideon Levy [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/769339.html]
    CCR client Maher Arar was changing planes at JFK on his way home to Canada from a family vacation when he was detained by the U.S. authorities (themselves collaborating with Israel) and ‘rendered’ to Syria, where he was tortured and held for nearly a year video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ufVGy]
  • 60. The mainstream media is biased against Israel
    The reverse is true. There are lots of objective and documented evidence to the bias against Palestinians.
    Great analysis with statistical data  is found at [http://ifamericansknew.org]
    Buying the War on Palestinians: The US Media, The New York Times and Israel by Patrick O’Connor [http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=12742]
    Video [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/goldberg.html]
    American Media Miss the boat: For USA Today Freedom of the Press Means the Right to Report It Wrong” [http://ifamericansknew.org/media/misslib.html]
    [http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=262&aid=530&pg=1]
    Article on Israel-centric media folks pushing teh war on Iraq with an appendix compiled by Jewish American writer on list of Zionist Jews in the media [http://desip.igc.org/ConvergingAgendas.html]
  • 61. Boycotts and Divestment are immoral and anti-Semitic
    – Visit [Boycotts and Divestment] for compilations of websites and information
  • 62. Zionism represent Jews or at least mainstream Judaism
    – There are literally hundreds of books on the subject of Jewish Anti-Zionism. A Statement to the 1919 Peace Conference by prominent U.S. Jews (including one Congressman): “We raise our voices in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. This demand not only misrepresents the trend of the history of the Jews, who ceased to be a nation 2000 years ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the larger claims of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in which those rights are not yet secure. For the very reason that the new era upon which the world is entering aims to establish government everywhere on principles of true democracy, we reject the Zionistic project of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” … As to the future of Palestine, it is our fervent hope that what was once a “promised land” for the Jews may become a “land of promise” for all races and creeds, safeguarded by the League of Nations which, it is expected, will be one of the fruits of the Peace Conference to whose deliberations the world now looks forward so anxiously and so full of hope. We ask that Palestine be constituted as a free and independent state, to be governed under a democratic form of government recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or ethnic descent, and with adequate power to protect the country against oppression of any kind. We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State
    Quoted in Roselle Tekiner, Samir Abed-Rabbo and Norton Mezvinsky, eds., Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, (New York: Amana Books, 1988). [http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/ziondark/zionopp01.html]
  • 63. Arabs oppress women
    – The forgotten “-ism”: An Arab American Women’s perspective on Zionism, Racism, and Sexism [http://www.awsa.net/forgottenism.pdf]
  • 64. Zionsits have been honest (Many more lies uncovered)
    – Israel’s surprising best seller contradicts founding ideology, Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 8 October 2008
    [http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9884.shtml]
    – Book refuting Jewish taboo on Israel’s bestseller list[http://thenational.ae/article/20081006/FOREIGN/279853798]
    – 12 Conventional lies by Uri Avnery [http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story658.html]
    The fake Lebanese
    Zionist Rabbi fakes his own stabbing
    Delusional fabrication: Propaganda tools of Israel and American Zionists By Paul J. Balles
    -The many false flag operations from the Lavon Affairs to assasinations of faction leaders blaming it on other leaders.
    -‘Undercover Israeli combatants threw stones at IDF soldiers in West Bank’: Testimony by commander of the Israeli Prison Service’s elite ‘Masada’ unit sheds light on IDF methods in countering demonstrations against barrier. By Chaim Levinson
    French women sentenced for faking anti-Semitic attack
    “The IDF acknowledged Friday that Israeli gunfire was responsible for the wounding of the American photographer shot last week in Bethlehem. Yola Monakhov, 26, was on assignment for The Associated Press last Saturday when she was shot in the abdomen. She suffered extensive internal injuries and fractures to the pelvis … Previously, the army said it had no evidence of a journalist being shot that afternoon. An army spokesman, Yarden Vatikay, had said a soldier fired only one live round very accurately at the leg of a Palestinian man. The army also had suggested that Monakhov may have been shot by a Palestinian bullet.” Associated Press November 17, 2000
    – “The (Israeli military psychological warfare) unit’s activities have been controversial for years. In October 1999, Aluf Benn revealed in Haaretz that members of the unit used the Israeli media to emphasize reports initiated by the unit that it managed to place in the Arab press. He reported that the news reports focused on Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in terror activity. Psychological warfare officers were in touch with Israeli journalists covering the Arab world, gave them translated articles from Arab papers (which were planted by the IDF) and pressed the Israeli reporters to publish the same news here.” IDF reviving psychological warfare unit, Haaretz 1/25/05 [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/531712.html]
    Mossad Exposed in Phony Palestinian Al-Qaeda’ Caper
    Israeli torture specialist telling lies
    – In an article in USA Today titled “Let our kids alone, Arafat told,” Matthew Kalman reported (December 8, 2000) that “In a rare letter of protest sent this week to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian women’s group demanded that the Palestinian Authority stop using children as cannon fodder.”  He goes on to state that this group is a Women Union in Tulkarem.” I took the liberty to investigate this outrageous claim and the messages I got so far from Women Associations in the West Bank in general and Tulkarm in specific showed no evidence for his claim.(contacts Suheir Azzouni watcorg@palnet.com  and gupw@palnet.com (letter of Dec 19, 2000)
    – “The Secretary-General has reviewed the report by the Investigation Team from the Secretariat which has inquired into the Israeli allegations against UNRWA personnel. The Secretary-General takes note of the Team’s conclusion that the allegation that a rocket was loaded into an UNRWA ambulance was unjustified as the object, in fact, was a folding stretcher of the type carried as normal equipment in UNRWA ambulances. He also takes note that, following the Team’s visit, the Government of Israel has admitted that it wrongly identified the stretcher as a Qassam Rocket and has publicly withdrawn the allegations.” SECRETARY-GENERAL NOTES ISRAEL’S WITHDRAWAL OF ROCKET ALLEGATION AGAINST UNRWA Report, UN News, 27 October 2004
    – Darfur used for Israeli PR efforts [http://ww4report.com/node/2582]
    – Israel use of “targeted killing” is defended by Israeli spokesperson but is extrajudicial executions that are illegal under international law (see reposrts by Human rights organizations like Amnesty, Human Righst Watch etc)65. Palestinian law implements a death penalty on anyone who sells lands to Jews.We are a people under occupation and remain so.  The Palestinian authority does not legislate anything that is contrary to Israeli wishes because they do not have that kind of authority (read Oslo I and Oslo II accords).  The Palestinian authority does recognize Jordanian laws operating in this area before and after 1967.  This is because International law says that laws cannot be changed by an occupier (in this case Israel) and Israel indeed could not change any of the operating Jordanian laws. Of course they did selective enforcement of these laws.  There happens to be a Jordanian law of 1973 which proscribes selling lands to the enemy as treason because such lands would be used as bases for infiltration.  The enemy is Israel not Jews.  For example native Samaritans bought and sold lands in Nablus area in the West Bank from/to fellow Palestinians (Christians and Muslims) before and after 1967 and before and after this law of 1973.  Selling to Jews is not the same as selling to the enemy. Imagine what would happen in the US if a US citizen sold a track of land in 1942 to non US citizens who are citizens and supporters of the Third Reich.  Treason is treason. The Jordanian law that proscribes selling land to the enemy (Being Israel is an enemy) is posted here http://www.lob.gov.jo/ui/laws/search_no.jsp?no=30&year=1973
    And it does not mention death penalty but does mention treason (which I guess can carry death penalties in most countries depending on severity of treason)I myself am against the death penalty but the US has death penalty including for for severe acts of treason and it was carried out fairly frequently.  Nearly half the countries on earth still do. To my knowledge no Palestinian was executed under this Jordanian law (one from Hebron who was buying lands from fellow Palestinians and selling it systematically to Zionists was convicted under the law but to my knowledge he was not executed). Now you have to realize that Israel is a colonial state built by theft from Palestinians.  Only a very tiny fraction of the 93% of the land of Palestine (less than 2%) was actually purchased from Palestinians (and no they were not executed).  Most of the land now under control by the Jewish National Fund and Israel Land Authority and most of the private lands controlled by Jewish Israelis was acquired via the usual colonial methods (there are about 101 such ways other than a willing commercial transaction). Finally, International law says the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza are occupied territories subject to the fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to the occupied lands.  Such violations of International law are considered crimes against humanity.  So even if a Palestinian was willing to sell knowingly to a colonial occupier, both the buyer and the seller are engaged in crimes against humanity. BTW, colonized people in the past all behaved the same in that most of them condemned treason and some of them did engage in treason (Algerians, South Africans, Vietnamese, Native Americans etc).As for “Sharia law” (and most common law), I do not know what this person is talking about or its relevance here.  If you injure someone you should compensate them for the injury.  When you kill someone, you do not only pay money.  If you steal something and still have it, restitution means return of stolen property (plus punishment per common law). In the case of Palestinian property taken from them, there is basic International law (applicable to inhabitants and their descendants of the 534 Palestinian towns and villages that were destroyed and ethnically cleansed in the process of creating a “Jewish state” in Palestine).For the right of refugees to return to their homes and lands (a totally unrelated subject), see
    http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-qumsiyeh.html
    http://qumsiyeh.org/chapter4/-For other issues on lands etc, see http://qumsiyeh.org/liesandtruths/

    Finally I do feel these issues are mostly distractions from the core issues such as role of Zionism among Jews, tribalism, racism, colonialism etc. Those are the issues that should be discussed. I suggest that Ron read books like those by Jewish theologian Marc Ellis and Jewish intellectual Mark Braverman instead of trying to reiterate typical (and long discredited) Zionist talking points… We are 12 million Palestinians, 7 million of us are refugees or displaced people. Trying to vilify the victims with red herrings just does not work in the 21st century (unfortunately it partially worked in 16-18th century North America).

    66. We left Gaza only to continue to be attacked
    “The Gaza Bombshell”, by David Rose in “Vanity Fair”, APRIL 2008
    SYNOPSIS: “After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever”
    [http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804]

    ———————–
    U.S. Army Officers Say: ‘Mossad May Blame Arabs

    No more heroes? Digging deeper into the Masada myth
    50 years after the first archaeological digs, mystery remains: Did any battle happen there at all?
    http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-1.563888

    “In what may be part of a systematic effort by Israeli internal security forces to use journalism as a cover for intelligence-gathering, agents from Israel’s General Security Services, also known as the Shin Bet, impersonated a veteran Israeli television news correspondent.”
    Committee for the Protection of Journalists, 1997

    Statement by prominent American Jews to the Paris peace conference 1919 stating their opposition to a Jewish state

    CRITICISM OF ISRAEL ANTI-SEMITIC? Shooting the messengers [http://MondeDiplo.com/2007/09/06carter]

    Whose arming Israel? (a concise report that could be made into a flyer)

    “I have always said that if the deepest and profoundest hope symbolizing redemption is the re-building of the Jewish Temple . . . then it is obvious that those mosques (al-Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa) will have, one way or another, to disappear one of these days . . . Had it not been for Deir Yasin – half a million Arabs would be living in the state of lsrael. The state of Israel would not have existed. We must not disregard this, with full awareness of the responsibility involved. All wars are cruel. There is no way out of that. This country will either be Eretz Israel with an absolute Jewish majority and a small Arab minority, or Eretz Ishmael, and Jewish emigration will begin again if we do not expel the Arabs one way or another”. (Israel Eldad (Scheib), leader of LEHI terror group with Shamir. ‘On the Spirit That Was Revealed in the People’, De’ot, Winter 1968; as quoted in Davis and Mezvinsky (eds.) Documents from Israel (1967-1973, pp.l86-7).

    Besides the lies, there is what is not permitted to be told.  Facts long suppressed
    Huntleigh USA that oversaw security at Newark and Boston airports during 9/11/01 is a wholly-owned subsidiary of an Israeli company called International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS) International N.V., a Netherlands-based aviation and transportation security firm headed by Israelis.

    Other lies (we will collect documents on these in due time)

    Mavi Marmara report (challenges the Israeli lies about their murders) http://coldtype.net/Assets.11/pdfs/0311.Mavi.hr.pdf

    The Checkpoint: Terror, Power, and Cruelty by Oded Na’aman (an insight into the thinking of the Israeli occupation soldiers) http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defense_forces_palestinians_occupation.php

    Palestinians (e.g. the Mufti of Jerusalem) supported Hitler because they hated Jews.
    Which was more important: Mufti-Nazi or Zionist-Nazi collaboration?
    http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56434.shtml

    Israel attacked Lebanon in the summer of 2006 because Arabs were holding Israeli soldiers captive.  These soldiers had never strayed onto Lebanese territory.

    There is no partner for peace
    Arab League proposal)

    Israel accepted partition plan
    Israel didn’t accept the partition plan/ they violated it immediately)

    Palestinian Muslims are responsible for any measurable decrease in the Christian population of the occupied areas

    ============
    In follow-up to the issues of organ trading in Israel and by Israel-linked individuals, I compiled a few relevant links:
    Translation of the Swiss Article:
    http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
    And other relevant stories/articles that illustrate that there is more to this subject than meets the eye:
    AlisonWier’s examination of Israeli organ theft and trafficking has just been published by CounterPunch:¨http://www.counterpunch.org/weir08282009.html
    Gilad Atzmon – Organ Donation and Theft in Contemporary Jewish Folklore
    http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/08/30/gilad-atzmon-organ-donation-and-theft-in-contemporary-jewish-folklore/
    Khalid Amayrah analyzes the Israeli frenzied attack on the newspaper
    http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/962/re53.htm
    The Hidden Truth About Israel Kidney Theft Ring (Tying in the New Jersey arrests)
    http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2009/07/butchers-hidden-truth-about-israels.html
    Israeli suspected of organ trafficking
    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1178020745802
    Suspect in international organ trafficking ring testifies Israeli government financed transplants
    http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0YUG/is_2_14/ai_n17208591/
    Portrait of Gaddy Tauber: Organs Trafficker, Holocaust Survivor

    Click to access CLASFall2006-ScheperHughes-small.pdf

    International organ trafficking scheme has transplant community scrambling.
    http://www.thefreelibrary.com/International+organ+trafficking+scheme+has+transplant+community…-a0129565045
    http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=129565045     (same as above link)

    There are maps at (see Geopolitical Map of Jerusalem)
    http://www.arij.org/eye-on-palestine/maps.html

    For a report on Silwan, see
    http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1053
    For a report on Sheikh Jarrah, see
    http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1472

    For additional information, visit:
    Silwan Information Center http://silwanic.net/
    Civil Coalition for Defending the Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem http://www.ccdprj.ps
    Jerusalem Legal Aid & Human Rights Center  http://www.mosaada.org/

    13 Israelis on world’s billionaires list
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4200001,00.html

    Who are the world’s richest Jews?
    http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/who-are-the-world-s-richest-jews-1.284252

    Example of World billionaires and their political views on Israel
    Bill Gates Microsoft invested heavily in apartheid Israel and Gates think Israel is part of Silicon Valley
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3159576,00.html
    Warren Buffett Thinks Israel best place to invest
    http://www.takeapen.org/Takeapen/Templates/showpage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=84&FID=733
    Bernard Arnault: Jewish and supporter of Apartheid Israel (numerous statements and investments)
    Larry Ellison (of Oracle): Jewish and strong supporter of Zionism http://jn1.tv/video/israel?media_id=18408
    Stefen Persson (H&M) findis Israel vogue
    http://mondoweiss.net/2010/03/pressure-mounts-on-swedish-clothing-chain-that-finds-israel-vogue.html
    Karl Albrecht gave numerous seminars in Israel and considers Israeli businessmen (most of tehm ex-military officials) to be ethnical leaders
    Charles Koch funds islamophobia to help Israel
    http://alexbkane.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/koch-brothers-also-funding-islamophobia/

    Ben-Yehuda, Nachman, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Myth-
    making in Israel (U of Wisconsin, 1995)
    Fox, Edward, Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr. Albert Glock and the
    Archaeology of the Holy Land (Harper Collins, 2001)
    Gottwald, Norman, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, 1979)

    A review of the film by Yotam Feldman “The Lab” which discusses how Israel tests weapons on us the Palestinians so that they can make billions selling these weapons to other oppressors. Palestinians as Laboratory Guinea Pigs

    Israelis Turning Blood into Money: The Lab Review

    Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons

March 31, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Jimmy Carter concerned about possible breach of international law by Washington

MEMO | March 31, 2014

Former American President Jimmy Carter has warned the US Secretary of State John Kerry of violating international law in his potential peace framework agreement between the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation.

He also expressed his concerns about the remarks of Kerry’s senior aides Martin Indyk, which were delivered before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other Jewish groups.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s official news agency Wafa said Carter had shown the letter he sent to Kerry to the PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The letter included efforts to save the peace process and stressed on reaching an agreement to be accepted by the two sides.

According to Wafa, Carter warned of formulating an agreement which “in any form, breaches international law and the reinforced international precedents regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict which have been accepted since 1967.”

Carter reiterated the necessity to abide by UN resolution 242, which was accepted by the former Israeli PM Menachem Begin as part of the Camp David peace accords and supported by the Quartet, Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

The sponsor of the first peace treaty between Israel and the Arabs said: “Official US proposal to cancel or breach international law will make it impossible for the Palestinians in the Holy Lands, or outside, to accept the framework agreement as a new basis for peace talks.”

March 31, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ex-Israeli PM Olmert guilty of “filthy” corruption: court

Al-Akhbar | March 31, 2014

Ehud Olmert (1993–2003)

Tel Aviv district court on Monday convicted former prime minister Ehud Olmert in a trial for corruption linked to a major property development in Jerusalem, Israeli media reports said.

The ruling marks the first time a former Israeli premier has been convicted of bribery in what has been called one of the worst corruption scandals in the country’s history.

According to public Channel 1 television, Olmert was convicted on two counts of receiving bribes linked to construction of Jerusalem’s massive Holyland residential complex dating from when he was the city’s mayor.

Olmert, 68, who could face up to 10 years in prison when sentencing is handed down at a later date, will appeal the verdict, his spokesman Jacob Galanti said.

In 2012, Olmert was acquitted of major charges in separate cases involving his links to a US businessman while he was Jerusalem mayor and an Israeli cabinet minister.

Handing down the conviction on Monday, Judge David Rosen told Tel Aviv District Court the case “exposed governance that grew more corrupt and rotten over the years”, with bribes paid to public officials.

“We’re talking about corrupt and filthy practices,” David Rosen said while reading out the verdict, his remarks playing out across all Israeli media.

He also spoke of a “corrupt political system which has decayed over the years… and in which hundreds of thousands of shekels were transferred to elected officials.”

Rosen also said the former premier had lied to the court in a bid to “blacken the name” of the state’s witness.

Olmert, who is remembered in Lebanon for spearheading the 2006 assault on the country that killed over 1,200 people, reportedly sat expressionless throughout the verdict.

In 2010, Olmert was named the key suspect in the so-called Holyland affair on suspicion that he received bribes totaling some 1.5 million shekels ($430,000, 312,000 euros at today’s exchange rate), although the prosecution later reduced the sum received by about half.

He was mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003, after which he served as a cabinet minister, holding the trade and industry portfolio as well as several others, before becoming premier in 2006.

He resigned from the premiership in September 2008 after police recommended that he be indicted in several graft cases.

In July 2012, a Jerusalem court found Olmert guilty of breach of trust in a closely watched corruption case, but cleared him on two more serious charges related to the alleged receipt of cash-stuffed envelopes and multiple billing for trips abroad.

He was fined $19,000 and given a suspended jail sentence for graft.

The conviction related to favors that Olmert granted a former colleague while serving as the trade and industry minister.

(AFP, Reuters Al-Akhbar)

March 31, 2014 Posted by | Corruption | , , | Leave a comment

NATO to promote ties with Ukraine, boost military presence in Eastern Europe

RT | March 31, 2014

NATO will strengthen relations with Ukraine and send more troops to Eastern Europe, the bloc’s outgoing chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said. The Ukrainian coup-imposed foreign minister is to fly to Brussels to take part in Ukraine-NATO talks.

Days after seconding US President Barack Obama’s statements on “ensuring a regular NATO presence” in “vulnerable” countries, NATO’s Secretary General Rasmussen spoke to the German media detailing the alliance’s plans in Eastern Europe.

Speaking to Welt am Sonntag, Rasmussen said that NATO’s expansion in the region has been “one of the greatest success stories of our time.” However, the alliance’s “task is not yet complete,” the NATO chief added.

NATO’s partnership with Ukraine has been getting “ever stronger,” Rasmussen noted, accusing Russia of violating the country’s right to “freely determine its own destiny,” as well as its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Georgia have already sought NATO membership and are already working on reforms to achieve it, he said.

“We are now considering revised operational plans, military manoeuvres and adequate troop reinforcements. We will, for example, relocate more aircrafts to the Baltic States,” Rasmussen told Focus magazine.

While this does not apply to Ukraine, which, according to the NATO chief, does not see membership a priority “in the foreseeable future,” NATO will help to “reform” Ukraine’s armed forces.

At the same time, NATO seeks “diplomatic solution to the crisis” in Ukraine, Rasmussen said, and will “keep the channels of communication with Moscow open.” This comes days after the alliance’s chief tweeted that NATO is to “review viability” of its relationship with Russia.

The Ukrainian coup-imposed government is set to discuss cooperation with NATO as early as next week, according to Kiev-picked acting foreign minister Andrey Deshchytsa.

Deshchytsa told journalists on Saturday he will take part in the extraordinary session of Ukraine-NATO Commission in Brussels on April 1-2, will “hold meetings and consultations” with US and UK foreign ministers, as well as attend the meeting of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on April 2-3.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have been holding an unexpected meeting on Ukraine in Paris. Kerry abruptly changed his travel route and decided to meet his Russian counterpart on Saturday after speaking with Lavrov over the phone. The latest round of Russian-US diplomacy over Ukraine started with President Vladimir Putin and President Barack Obama discussing the situation in the Eastern European country by phone on Friday.

March 31, 2014 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | 1 Comment

Americans protest US police shootings

356640_Albuquerque-Protest

Press TV – March 31, 2014

Hundreds of American demonstrators held a march in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Sunday to protest fatal shootings by the police, including the one that led to the killing of James Boyd, a homeless man who lived on the foothills of a mountain outside the city.

The protest came days after the emergence of a YouTube video which threatened retaliation of the police shooting of Boyd and called for protest marches.

The demonstration began Sunday afternoon and continued into the early evening as people marched around the city and chanted “no justice, no peace!” Police said the march was an unlawful assembly.

Alexander Siderits, 23, said he was “fed up” with how police treat citizens. “It has reached a boiling point,” he said, “and people just can’t take it anymore.”

A similar demonstration was also held last Tuesday during which protestors chanted “We want justice,” holding signs “APD is guilty,” and demanded justice for Boyd.

Boyd, 38, was killed on March 16 by police officers while camping in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains on the east side of Albuquerque. Police accused him of setting up an illegal camp in an open space and fired six times at him.

A helmet camera video showed the homeless gathering his belongings and turning away to leave the area just before the police shot him.

Last week, Albuquerque police shot another man dead at a public housing complex.

Since 2010, the city’s police officers have been involved in 37 shooting incidents, 23 of them deadly, with critics saying that is far too many for a department serving a city of about 555,000.

The police department has been under investigation by the US Justice Department for more than a year. It now faces complaints of civil rights violations and allegations of excessive use of force.

~~~

See also: Tear gas & batons: Albuquerque riot police disperse protesters

March 31, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

Obama’s War On History

340939_US-Barack-Obama

By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | March 29, 2014

President Obama’s speech in Brussels this week was a shocking mélange of ignorance and arrogance masquerading as foreign policy.

Attempting to justify placing the US on war footing with Russia over the recent referendum in Crimea, the president stated:

Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized not outside the boundaries of international law, but in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo’s neighbors. None of that even came close to happening in Crimea.

Of course anyone who followed the Kosovo fiasco knows that never happened. There was no such thing. Made up. The Kosovo parliament declared independence unilaterally backed up by US/NATO military power to ensure the change of borders.

The US press? Silent on this monumental display of ignorance by the US commander in chief.

Speaking of changing borders, Obama said:

…in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future.

But that is just what the United States did 15 years ago this week via the 78 day bombing of Serbia to change the borders and extract Kosovo as an independent (though profoundly dysfunctional) state. The US bombing of Serbia was of course outside international law, as was US invasion and occupation of Iraq, attack and invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Libya, bombing of Pakistan, Yemen, etc.

The president celebrated…

…the belief that through conscience and free will, each of us has the right to live as we choose, the belief that power is derived from the consent of the governed and that laws and institutions should be established to protect that understanding.

But in the modern world he champions — as opposed to his bad old system of using force to establish legitimacy — that consent of the governed is determined at the ballot box, rather than in burned-out buildings occupied by gangs of molotov cocktail throwing “activists.”

Indeed, as David Hendrickson recently wrote in the National Interest :

Americans have previously acknowledged a right of revolution in a circumstance where there has been no previous instance of an election and no possibility of one. But in a regime that has a constitution and that has prescribed rules for the transfer of power? Revolution in those circumstances has been generally seen as deeply illegitimate, and for the simple reason that once you depart from that rule you are in no man’s land.

So where Obama may see…

…the young people of Ukraine, who were determined to take back their future from a government rotted by corruption…

…the modern world he touts — free of the oppression where “order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign” — can only be brought about by his own terms through the rule of law and respect of the sovereignty of all the people through a free and fair vote. Otherwise, logic is clear, we are precisely back in those bad old days where might makes right.

How can two contradictory concepts both be true at the same time?

The president claims to…

…believe in democracy, with elections that are free and fair, and independent judiciaries and opposition parties, civil society and uncensored information so that individuals can make their own choices.

All the while he champions a regime that came to power in Ukraine in the opposite manner from that which he recognizes as legitimate. Recognizing this fact depends not on whether one agrees with the political persuasion of the ancien or nouveau régime in Kiev.

The president displays another astonishing disconnect with historical reality when he claims that “even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system.”

It is not apocryphal that the United States precisely violated international law in its attack on Iraq, as it ignored the United Nations Security Council and instead made its own ad hoc “coalition of the willing” which through sheer will of the US was supposedly granted some manner of legitimacy. As if from some magic fairy dust.

Or could it have been through the very notion condemned in Obama’s speech “that bigger nations can bully smaller ones to get their way – that recycled maxim that might makes right.”

What is perhaps most troubling is the president (and his advisors) have demostrated that the policies that may well determine whether we all will perish in a World War III are being made by people without even a passing familiarity with recent history. Those who would rather Tweet “selfies” like self-obsessed adolescents rather than open a history book.

Or, sadly perhaps, it is cynicism in the extreme: perhaps they do know better but count on the ignorance of the rest of us. Is that a safe bet?

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | 2 Comments

Aid to Ukraine Is a Bad Deal For All

By Ron Paul | March 30, 2014

Last week Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill approving a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine and more sanctions on Russia. The bill will likely receive the president’s signature within days. If you think this is the last time US citizens will have their money sent to Ukraine, you should think again. This is only the beginning.

This $1 billion for Ukraine is a rip-off for the America taxpayer, but it is also a bad deal for Ukrainians. Not a single needy Ukrainian will see a penny of this money, as it will be used to bail out international banks who hold Ukrainian government debt. According to the terms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-designed plan for Ukraine, life is about to get much more difficult for average Ukrainians. The government will freeze some wage increases, significantly raise taxes, and increase energy prices by a considerable margin.

But the bankers will get paid and the IMF will get control over the Ukrainian economy.

The bill also authorizes more US taxpayer money for government-funded “democracy promotion” NGOs, and more money to broadcast US government propaganda into Ukraine via Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. It also includes some saber-rattling, directing the US Secretary of State to “provide enhanced security cooperation with Central and Eastern European NATO member states.”

The US has been “promoting democracy” in Ukraine for more than ten years now, but it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Recently a democratically-elected government was overthrown by violent protestors. That is the opposite of democracy, where governments are changed by free and fair elections. What is shocking is that the US government and its NGOs were on the side of the protestors! If we really cared about democracy we would not have taken either side, as it is none of our business.

Washington does not want to talk about its own actions that led to the coup, instead focusing on attacking the Russian reaction to US-instigated unrest next door to them. So the new bill passed by Congress will expand sanctions against Russia for its role in backing a referendum in Crimea, where most of the population voted to join Russia. The US, which has participated in the forced change of borders in Serbia and elsewhere, suddenly declares that international borders cannot be challenged in Ukraine.

Of course, those who disagree with me and others like me who are less than gung-ho about sanctions, manipulating elections, and sending our troops overseas are criticized as somehow being unpatriotic. It happened before when so many of us were opposed to the Iraq war, the US attack on Libya, and elsewhere. And it is happening again to those of us not eager to get in another cold — or hot — war with Russia over a small peninsula that means absolutely nothing to the US or its security.

I would argue that real patriotism is defending this country and making sure that our freedoms are not undermined here. Unfortunately, while so many are focused on freedoms in Crimea and Ukraine, the US Congress is set to pass an NSA “reform” bill that will force private companies to retain our personal data and make it even easier for the NSA to spy on the rest of us. We need to refocus our priorities toward promoting liberty in the United States!

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Weight of Tradition: Why Judaism is Not Like Other Religions

By Mark Weber  | July, 2009

Many critics of Israel and its policies make a sharp distinction between Israel and its state ideology, Zionism, on the one hand, and Judaism, or the Jewish religious tradition and outlook, on the other.

Anti-Zionist groups, with names such as “Jewish Voice for Peace” or “Jews for Justice for Palestinians,” and anti-Zionist periodicals such as The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, emphasize humanistic aspects of the Jewish tradition. They urge Jews to reject Zionism and instead embrace humanistic features of Judaism. Such groups, while critical of Israel and its policies, take the view that the Jewish community has played a basically positive role in society, but that sometime in the twentieth century most Jews somehow jumped the track by embracing Zionism and its aggressive ethnic nationalism.

In fact, the often cruel and arrogant policies of Israel, and the often arrogant attitudes of what is called the “Israel Lobby,” the Jewish lobby, or the organized Jewish community, are not an aberration, but rather are deeply rooted in Jewish religious writings and in centuries of Jewish tradition.

Most people prefer pleasant myths to unpleasant truths, and prefer to believe what is most comfortable and agreeable. That’s one reason why so many of us like to think that all religions share common humanistic core values, and are all striving, each in its own way, toward the same ultimate truth.

But Judaism is not just “another religion.” It’s unique among the world’s major religions. The core values and ethos of Judaism are markedly unlike those of Christianity, Islam, and the other great faiths.

Christians believe that Jesus suffered and died for all people, and Christians are called upon to spread the Christian message to humanity. In the same way, Muslims believe that the message of the Koran is meant for all humanity, and they are called upon to bring everyone to Islam.

But that’s not the message of Judaism. Its teachings are not meant for all people. Its morality is not universal. Judaism is a religion for one particular people. The Jewish religion is based not on a relationship between God and humanity, but rather on a “covenant,” or contract, between God and a “chosen” people — the community known as the Jews, the Jewish People, the Israelites, the Hebrews, or the “People of Israel.”

One major reason why the role of the organized Jewish community is a problem in our society is because most American Jews manifest a strong loyalty to a foreign country, Israel, that since its founding in 1948 has been embroiled in seemingly endless crises and conflicts with its neighbors. But there is another reason.

The role of the Jewish community is also a harmful one because Jews are encouraged to regard themselves as separate from the rest of humanity, and as members of a community with interests quite distinct from those of everyone else. This “Us vs. Them” attitude — this mindset that sees Jews as dis­tinct from the rest of humanity, and which views non-Jews with distrust — is rooted in the Jewish religion, and in centuries of tradition.

Christians are supposed to live their lives in accord with the Bible, and especially the teachings of Jesus as laid out in the four Gospels of the New Testament, just as Muslims are called upon to live their lives in accord with the Koran. Similarly, Jews are supposed to live their lives in accord with the principles laid out in the Hebrew scriptures, the “Tanakh,” which is also known as the Old Testament. These writings tell how Jews should think of themselves, and how they should interact with non-Jews.

A core message of the Hebrew scriptures is that Jews are a divinely “chosen” people — a unique community distinct from the rest of humanity. In the book of Deuteronomy, for example, we read: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.” /1

The Jewish scriptures also refer to Jews or Hebrews as a “People that Shall Dwell Alone,” or, in another translation, as “a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations.” In the book of Exodus, we read of the Jews as a people “distinct … from all other people that are upon the face of the earth.” / 2

The scriptures also explain that if Jews uphold the “covenant,” and maintain their separateness from all others, they will be rewarded with great wealth and power over other peoples. In the book of Deuteronomy, Jews are promised that God “will set you high above all the nations of the earth,” and that “All the people of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you.” In another passage God tells the Jews: “For the Lord your God will bless you, as he promised you, and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow; and you shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you.” / 3

In the book of Genesis, we read: “May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine. Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you.” In another passage in the book of Deuteronomy, God promises to Jews “to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant…” / 4

In the book of Isaiah, we read: “Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you … For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish … The sons of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet … Aliens shall stand and feed your flocks, foreigners shall be your plowmen and vinedressers … you shall eat the wealth of the nations, and in their riches you shall glory.” / 5

In the book of Joshua, we read: “I will give you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you dwell therein; you eat the fruit of vineyards and olive yards which you did not plant.” And in the book of Psalms, God says to the Jews: “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s wheel.” / 6

In the book of Deuteronomy, Jews are promised: “Then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourselves. Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours … No man shall be able to stand against you. The Lord your God will lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that you shall tread, as he promised you.” In another passage, we are told that God says to his chosen people: “This day I will begin to put the dread and fear of you upon the peoples that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear the report of you and shall tremble and be in anguish because of you.” / 7

The moral code laid out in the Hebrew scriptures commands one standard for the “chosen people,” and another for non-Jews. In keeping with this ethno-centric morality, Jews are told that they must discriminate against non-Jews. In the book of Deuteronomy, God commands the Jews: “You shall not lend upon interest to your brother, interest on money, interest on victuals, interest on anything that is lent for interest. To a foreigner [that is, a non-Jew] you may lend upon interest, but to your brother you shall not lend upon interest.” / 8

Many portions of the Hebrew scriptures — especially the books of Joshua, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — tell of genocidal mass killings of non-Jews. The Jewish God repeatedly calls on his chosen people to exterminate non-Jews. The Jewish scriptures are perhaps the oldest historical record anywhere of systematic genocide.

In the seventh chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, we read: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites — seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them … And you shall destroy all the peoples that the Lord your god will give over to you, your eye shall not pity them.” / 9

In the book of Esther, we read: “So the Jews struck down all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and destroying them, and did as they pleased to those who hated them. In the citadel of Susa the Jews killed and destroyed five hundred people … Now the other Jews who were in the king’s provinces also gathered to defend their lives, and gained relief from their enemies, and killed seventy-five thousand of those who hated them…” In another passage in Deuteronomy, we read: “And we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed every city, men, women and children; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took as spoil for ourselves, with the booty of the cites which we captured.” / 10

In the twentieth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, we read: “When you draw near a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if the answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you … But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God give you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them…” / 11

In the book of Joshua, we read this harrowing account:

“When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them, and when all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai, and attacked it with the edge of the sword. The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand — all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the sword, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. Only the livestock and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the Lord that he had issued to Joshua. So Joshua burned Ai, and made it for ever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.” / 12

In another chapter of the book of Joshua, we read: / 13

“And Joshua took Makkedah on that day, and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword; he utterly destroyed every person in it; he left no one remaining. And he did to the king of Makkedah, as he had done to the king of Jericho.

“Then Joshua passed on from Makkedah, and all Israel with him, to Libnah, and fought against Libnah. The Lord gave it also and its king into the hand of Israel; and he struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left no one remaining in it; and he did to its king as he had done to the king of Jericho …

“So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon.”

Over the centuries there have, of course, been important changes in Jewish community attitudes and behavior. Jews today do not observe all the rules and commands laid down in their religious writings. For example, they do not put to death women caught in adultery, or kill anyone who works on the Sabbath, or put to death anyone who curses his father or mother. /14

All the same, the weight of tradition is a heavy one, especially when based on writings that are held to be sacred. Something of the attitude of separateness, chosenness and superiority laid out in the Hebrew scriptures persists to the present, and is manifest in policies of Israel, and of the organized Jewish community. /15

For some orthodox Jewish leaders, the “chosen people” is not just a superior or privileged group. They regard Jews and non-Jews as practically different species.

Rabbi Menachen Schneerson, the “Lubovitcher Rebbe” who headed the Chabad orthodox Jewish movement, and wielded great influence in Israel as well as in the US, explained: / 16

“The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression, `Let us differentiate.’ Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of `let us differentiate’ between totally different species. This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written, `And the strangers shall guard and feed your flocks’ (Isaiah 61:5). The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews …”

Rabbi Kook the Elder, another influential and much revered Jewish leader, expressed a similar view: “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” / 17

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, one of Israel’s most prominent and influential Jewish religious leaders, says that non-Jews (Goyim) exist only to serve Jews. “Goyim were born only to serve us,” said Rabbi Yosef during a sermon in October 2010. “Without that, they have no place in the world — only to serve the people of Israel.” /18

The view that Jews are a distinct people with a primary commitment to Israel and the Jewish community is forthrightly affirmed by Elliott Abrams, an American Jewish scholar who was President George W. Bush’s senior advisor for “global democratic strategy,” and in 2006 was a key advisor on Middle East affairs to the US Secretary of State. In his book Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America, /19  he writes: “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nations in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.” Judaism and the Jewish way of life,” writes Abrams, is not “entirely voluntary, for the Jew is born into a covenantal community with obligations to God.” Jews, he goes on, “are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people. Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies …”

The Jewish sense of alienation from, and abiding distrust of, non-Jews is also manifest in a remarkable essay published in 2002 in the Forward, the prominent Jewish community weekly. Entitled “We’re Right, the Whole World’s Wrong,” it is written by Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney and a member of the Jewish Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles. / 20 Rabbi Fischer is also national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is thus not an obscure or semi-literate scribbler, but rather an influential Jewish community figure. And this piece did not appear in some marginal periodical, but rather in what is perhaps the most literate and thoughtful Jewish weekly in America, and certainly one of the most influential.

In his essay, Rabbi Fischer tells readers: “If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history … Our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.” He goes on:

“We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and the Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettos and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century’s persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.

“Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate the half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what’s what. …

“We remember that the food they [Europeans] eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria… Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn’t change a thing, but after 25 centuries it’s nice to know.”

Time and again in history, Jews have wielded great power to further group interests that are separate from, and often contrary to, those of the non-Jewish populations among whom they live. This creates an inherently unjust and unstable situation that all too often has ended tragically in violent conflict between Jews and non-Jews.

In our age, the seemingly intractable Middle East conflict is more than just a problem of Zionism or politics, or a dispute over land. Israel’s often arrogant policies, and especially its inhumane treatment of non-Jews, have roots in centuries-old attitudes that are laid out in ancient Jewish religious writings.


Notes

  1. Deuteronomy 7:6 and 14:2.
  2. Numbers 23:9; Exodus 33:16.
  3. Deuteronomy 28: 1, 10; 15: 6.
  4. Genesis 27: 28-29; Deuteronomy 6: 10-11.
  5. Isaiah 60: 10-14; Isaiah 61: 5-6.
  6. Joshua 24:13; Psalms 2:8.
  7. Deuteronomy 11: 23, 25: 2: 25.
  8. Deuteronomy 23:19-20.
  9. Deuteronomy 7: 2, 16.
  10. Esther 9:2, 5; Deut . 2:34.
  11. Deuteronomy 20: 10-14, 16-17.
  12. Joshua 8: 24-27.
  13. Joshua 10: 26-40
  14. Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22: 20-21 / Exodus 31: 15; Exodus 35: 2 / Exodus 21: 17; Leviticus 20: 9.
  15. Israel Shahak, a Jewish scholar who for years was a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, provides striking examples of this in modern-day Israel in his eye-opening book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, published first in 1994.
    ( http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/jewhis1.htm )
    (http://members.tripod.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_history.html)
  16. From the book by Schneerson, Gatherings of Conversations, published in 1965. Quoted in: Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism (London: 1999), pp. 59-60.
    ( http://www.mailstar.net/shahak2.html )
    (http://members.tripod.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_fundamentalism.html)
    Also cited by Jewish scholar Allan C. Brownfeld in his review published in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2000.
    ( http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0300/0003105.html )
  17. Quoted in: Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism (London: 1999), p. ix.
    ( http://www.mailstar.net/shahak2.html )
    (http://members.tripod.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_fundamentalism.html)
    Also cited by Jewish scholar Allan C. Brownfeld in his review published in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2000.
    ( http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0300/0003105.html )
  18. “Yosef: Gentiles exist only to serve Jews,” The Jerusalem Post (Israel), Oct. 18, 2010. (http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782)
  19. Elliott Abrams, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America (New York: 1997), pp. 30, 145, 181.
  20. Dov Fischer, “We’re Right, the Whole World’s Wrong,” Forward (New York), April 19, 2002, p. 11.
    ( http://rabbidov.com/American%20Jews/wererightworldwrong.htm )
    Some of Fischer’s remarks here are gross distortions of history. For example, his mention of “a century’s persecution of Soviet Jewry” is a breathtaking falsehood. For one thing, the entire Soviet period lasted 72 years, not 100. And during at least some of that period, above all during the first ten years of the Soviet era, Jews wielded tremendous, if not dominant power. Rabbi Fischer seems to have forgotten such figures as Leon Trotsky, com­mander in chief of the young Soviet state’s Red Army, Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, and Yakov Sverdlov, the first Soviet president. (See: M. Weber, “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s Early Soviet Regime,” The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1994. (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html )

Revised October 2010

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | 1 Comment

The Ringworm Children, testing of large radiation doses on humans.

“In fact, medical discourse was an important mediator of Orientalist ideas to the Jews of Palestine. Public medicine was one of the main fields of regular interaction between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews during the Mandate period, and this was reflected in the presence of Mizrahi Jews in this discourse. It often depicted members of various Mizrahi communities as variations on a single type – they were described as primitive, superstitious, ignorant, neglectful of their children, passive, lacking drive and the will to change – in general, as an essentially different type, physically and mentally, from the immigrants from Europe.” – Zionist eugenics, mixed marriage, and the creation of a ‘new Jewish type

Israel’s very own history of eugenics

Written by Jonathon Cook | The Blog from Nazareth | September 26, 2014

This hour-long documentary, the Ringworm Children, raises so many disturbing questions about Israel and its relationship with the US that one hardly knows where to begin.

In the 1950s, waves of new immigrants swept into Israel. To the dismay of the country’s Ashkenazi leaders (those originating from Europe and the US), the great majority were from Arab countries. Levi Eshkol, a later prime minister, expressed a common sentiment when he called them “human rubbish”. Israel, deprived of “good-quality” Jews, was being forced to bring to its shores Arab Jews, seen as just as primitive and dirty as the Palestinians whom Israel had recently succeeded in ethnically cleansing.

Into this deeply racist atmosphere stepped Dr Chaim Sheba, a eugenicist, who believed that the Arabs Jews were bringing along with them diseases that threatened the Ashkenazi Jews. His obsession was ringworm, an innocuous childhood disease that affects the scalp. He went to the US, collected old military X-ray equipment and zapped tens of thousands of these children’s heads with potentially lethal doses of radiation. The survivors tell of their horrifying experiences during and after the treatment, and of the brothers and sisters they lost at a young age.

But this isn’t just a history lesson exploring an unusual aspect of Israel’s racist underpinnings. The documentary exposes a massive cover-up by the state: many of the children’s medical files – long thought to have been lost – were actually held by one of the doctors involved. Even after this disclosure, the state has continued to refuse the victims access to the files, despite the fact that such access may be vital in helping them receive the correct life-saving treatment, as well as proper compensation.

The final shocking twist is the discovery that all these experiments cost the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s terms – in fact, more than Israel’s entire annual budget at the time. How could Israel have afforded it?

The documentary suggests persuasively that the US, with its own long fascination with eugenics, most likely sub-contracted these experiments to Israel as a way to bypass the increasing domestic legal impediments it faced. The US presumably footed the huge bill.

There are a couple of troubling omissions in the documentary itself. The first is that Dr Sheba did not carry out these experiments on Arab Jews only. He also exposed many Palestinian children in Israel to the same huge doses, for the same racist reasons.

The other is that Dr Sheba is still venerated to this day in Israel and has one of the country’s most famous hospitals, the Chaim Sheba Medical Center, named after him. As the documentary makes clear, there was plenty of evidence by the 1950s of the extremely dangerous effects of radiation on humans. What Dr Sheba did was a form of genocide. That he is still honoured in Israel is, to my mind, no different from Germany naming a hospital in Berlin the Josef Mengele Medical Center.

But keeping Dr Sheba’s reputation unblemished is, I suspect, important to those who wish to prevent other, even more unseemly skeletons being unearthed over this affair.

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 2 Comments

False flag scandal rocks Turkey

By Dr. Kevin Barrett | Press TV | March 30, 2014

Did Turkish leaders plot a false flag attack designed to trigger a Turkish invasion of Syria?

According to USA Today, “An audio recording leaked on YouTube appears to reveal that top Turkey officials were plotting to fake an attack against their own country…” The recording features Turkish Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan saying: “I’ll make up a cause of war by ordering a missile attack on Turkey.”

The Turkish government has confirmed the recording’s authenticity, according to the BBC, which quoted Turkish President Erdogan: “They even leaked a national security meeting. This is villainous, this is dishonesty. … Who are you serving by doing audio surveillance of such an important meeting?” The Turkish government immediately blocked Youtube in an apparent effort to stop the story from spreading.

The leaked tape reveals top Turkish leaders including intelligence chief Fidan, Army official Yasar Guler, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Foreign Ministry official Feridun Sinirlioglu discussing how to attack their own country to create a pretext for invading Syria. They discuss sending Turkish military units into Syria to fire missiles at Turkey, and even staging a false-flag attack on the tomb of Turkish hero Suleyman Shah. They also expressed hope that their false-flag deceptions might convince NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Syria – a euphemism for the kind of massive aerial bombardment NATO used to overthrow the government of Libya.

The false flag scandal is the latest crisis to rock Erdogan’s government, which has been locked in a power struggle with CIA-backed cleric Fethullah Gulen. Turkish sources say Gulen’s organization, which dominates the Turkish National Police, probably recorded and leaked the false-flag tape with CIA assistance.

Why is the CIA destabilizing Turkey and sabotaging Erdogan, who has been obeying Western orders by helping the NATO-Saudi-Zionist war on Syria?

The CIA and its Zionist partners are concerned by Turkey’s trajectory towards becoming a powerful, prosperous, independent Islamic democracy. An increasingly powerful and independent Turkey would no longer be a reliable US-NATO client state. And it would not continue to kowtow to Israel.

Turkey’s stirrings toward independence were already visible in 2003 when the Turkish parliament refused to cooperate with the US war on Iraq. They were even more visible in May 2010, when the Israeli massacre of peaceful protestors aboard the Mavi Marmara triggered a strong Turkish reaction including the threat to go to war against Israel by using the Turkish Navy to end the genocidal blockade of Gaza. That was when the CIA ordered its asset Gulen to start destabilizing Erdogan, who has been struggling for his political life ever since.

If the West can keep Turkey weak, it can continue to dominate that strategically crucial country. So it is employing a divide-and-conquer strategy by splitting Turkey’s democratic Islamic movement between CIA stooge Gulen and the slightly more independent Erdogan.

By exposing the Turkish false-flag plot, the CIA-Gulen crowd is risking significant blowback. First, the Turkish public may react less by turning against Erdogan than by demanding an end to Turkish support for the war on Syria. If Erdogan were to announce that he was taking full responsibility for the scandal and then fire the malefactors – as President John F. Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 – he might survive unscathed… especially if he used the incident as an excuse to end Turkey’s unpopular involvement in the Syrian war and restore the “no problems with neighbors” policy that served Turkey so well.

Another source of potential blowback is the spread of the false flag meme. The CIA and its Israeli friends are the world’s worst false flag culprits. If the people of the world ever wake up and understand that national leaders routinely attack their own countries as a pretext for going to war, the top echelon of leaders in the US and Israel will spend the rest of their lives in prison for their crimes against humanity on September 11th, 2001.

The Zionists and Operation Mockingbird agents who dominate the American mainstream media are terrified that Americans will learn about false flag attacks. So they have blacked out the Turkish false flag story in order to suppress false flag awareness among the American people.

The USA Today article quoted above is the only major US media story that mentions the Turkish false-flag plot. According to Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars.com, the mainstream US and European media (with the sole exception of USA Today ) has conspired to cover up the Turkish false flag plot. Watson notes that Reuters, a European wire service owned by the Rothschilds, along with the BBC and all of the top American mainstream outlets including CNN, the Washington Post, and the LA Times suppressed the false flag plot from their coverage. Instead, they obfuscated the false flag plotting – the heart of the Turkish scandal – with polite euphemisms or even outright lies. For example, the Rothschilds’ Reuters story claimed the Turks were plotting to “secure the tomb of Suleyman Shah” rather than conduct a false-flag attack on it.

The New York Times – the flagship publication of America’s Zionist elite – also played down the false flag story. The Times did report that the Turkish tape included discussions of “a plot to establish a justification for military strikes in Syria. One option that is said to have been discussed was orchestrating an attack on the Tomb of Suleyman Shah…” But the New York Times coverage did not mention the term “false flag” nor did it clearly lay out the nature of the plot. The Times characterized the tape as suggesting “that Turkey was looking to provoke an attack to justify a Turkish military operation.” That, of course, is a lie. The Turkish leaders were not looking to provoke an attack; they were looking to carry out the attack themselves.

But the New York Times, and the rest of the Mockingbird media, is afraid to inform its audience that national leaders routinely conspire to attack their own nations. If the American people discovered false flags, they might learn about Operation Northwoods – a 1962 plan signed off on by every member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to mass murder Americans in phony terrorist attacks in order to provoke war with Cuba. They might learn about Operation Gladio – a Cold War era program of false flag bombings and shootings in Europe conducted by US military assets and attributed to “leftists.” And, worst of all, they might learn the truth about 9/11.

The CIA, by destabilizing Turkey through leaking its leaders’ false flag plots, is playing with fire.

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ecuador does not recognize Ukraine’s ‘illegitimate’ govt – Correa

RT | March 30, 2014

Ecuador has said it will not deal with the coup-appointed government in Kiev and has called for fair elections. President Rafael Correa declared he would only negotiate with a “legitimate government” that represents the will of the Ukrainian people.

In his weekly address to the Ecuadorian people, Correa explained why Ecuador had abstained from the UN General Assembly vote Thursday that passed a resolution condemning Crimea’s union with Russia.

“We will not fall for a farce, we will only deal with a legitimate government,” said Correa, adding that Ecuador does not recognize the current government that is the product of a coup d’état. To win the support of Ecuador, Ukraine should hold democratic elections and establish a legitimate government chosen by the Ukrainian people, Correa said.

Moscow has also decried the coup-appointed government that came to power in Kiev at the end of February following weeks of bloody protests in the Ukrainian capital’s Independence Square.

“The current government is the product of devious machinations, to put to it mildly, clearly supported by hypocritical rhetoric from the West,” Correa said.

On Crimea’s decision to become a part of Russia and break from Ukraine, he said the region was “historically Russian,” but the Crimean referendum “does not change the constitution.”

With this in mind, Correa explained that Ecuador could not accept the stance of the Ukrainian government – which he described as an extension of the United States – or Moscow’s position until Crimea’s status had been clarified.

Ecuador, along with 58 other nations, abstained from a UN General Assembly vote Thursday that condemned Crimea’s referendum to join Russia as “illegal.” The resolution was supported by 100 nations, while 11 opposed it.

Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe all voted against the resolution.

Unlike UN Security Council resolutions, a General Assembly resolution is not legally binding.

Russia condemned the UN assembly vote as “confrontational” and undermining the referendum and the right to self-determination of the Crimean people. The initiative for Crimea to reunite with Russia came from the Crimean people themselves, not from Moscow, said Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin.

Russia also previously vetoed a Security Council resolution that said the Crimean referendum to join Russia would have “no validity” in an emergency session held the day before Crimea headed to the polls.

On March 16, an overwhelming majority of Crimean residents voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation, in the wake of bloody protests in Kiev that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich.

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia’s Lukoil starts output from giant Iraq oil field

Press TV – March 29, 2014

Russia’s oil giant, Lukoil, has begun pumping crude oil from one of the world’s largest undeveloped oil fields in southern Iraq, as the Arab country works to bolster its oil exports.

During a Saturday ceremony to inaugurate the West Qurna-2 field in Iraq’s southern city of Basra, Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi said crude production at the massive oil field is expected to reach some 400,000 barrels per day (bpd), from an initial 120,000 bpd.

The Iraqi minister further expressed hope that the country’s oil output could possibly reach four million bpd by the end of this year.

“This is a historic and great accomplishment that would enable the government to implement its development programs by increasing its revenues,” added Luaibi.

Lukoil Chief Executive Vagit Alekperov also hailed the launch of West Qurna-2 as “strategically important” for the Russian company, which is the principal firm developing the enormous West Qurna-2 field.

The inauguration of West Qurna-2 will allow Russia’s second oil producer to more than double its overseas crude output.

Earlier in the day, Dhiya Jaafar, the head of Iraq’s South Oil Company, said oil exports from southern Iraq have averaged 2.48 million bpd so far this month and would rise to 2.65 million following the inauguration of West Qurna-2.

West Qurna-2, with an estimated 14 million barrels of recoverable reserves, is the second biggest untapped oil field after Rumaila in southern Iraq.

Iraq is dependent on oil exports for government revenue and is working to boost its oil sales. The Arab country has proven reserves of 143.1 billion barrels of oil as well as 3.2 trillion cubic meters of gas.

Baghdad seeks to increase its crude production capacity to nine million bpd by 2017.

March 29, 2014 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 2 Comments