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US State Department accuses Iran of supporting terrorism

Press TV – June 20, 2015

The US State Department has accused Iran of supporting international terrorist groups, claiming the country’s terrorist activities continue.

The department said in its annual report on Friday that Iran is supporting those militant groups fighting against the ISIL terrorist group in Iraq and Syria.

The report also said the Islamic Republic increased its military aid to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and Shia fighters in Iraq last year.

Washington alleges that Tehran is increasing its support for Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance movements.

This is while the report makes almost no mention of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, which are widely believed to be the main supporters of terrorists in the Middle East. The US itself stands accused of financing and arming militants in the region.

In an interview with Press TV on Friday, American political commentator Dr. Kevin Barrett said that the United States is the primary sponsor of the ISIL terrorists.

“It seems that they’re using a very self-serving definition of terrorism here and elsewhere,” he said.

“It’s ironic though that Iran has been bashed primarily for fighting against the people that this very report says are the world’s biggest terrorist threat and that would be ISIL and Takfiri terrorists,” Dr. Barrett added.

He also noted that Iran “has been the biggest single force fighting against that particular brand of terrorism that this report says it’s getting out of control.”

June 20, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel

By Robert Faurisson

Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is generally accepted as a witness to the Jewish “Holocaust,” and, more specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize because: [1]

These last years have seen, in the name of so-called “historical revisionism,” the elaboration of theses, especially in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself.

But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged gas chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of extermination? In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the gas chambers. [2] He does indeed say that the Germans executed Jews, but … by fire; by throwing them alive into flaming ditches, before the very eyes of the deportees! No less than that!

Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced to choose from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend the fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution lies. In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire lie was still alive in certain circles. This lie is the origin of the term Holocaust. Today there is no longer a single historian who believes that Jews were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water and of electrocution have also disappeared. Only the gas remains.

The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. [3] The lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. [4] The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets. [5]

The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is in a sense as old as war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which is a version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at Auschwitz there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one for babies. He writes: [6]

Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load — little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it — saw it with my own eyes … Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.)

A little farther on there was another ditch with gigantic flames where the victims suffered “slow agony in the flames.” Wiesel’s column was led by the Germans to within “three steps” of the ditch, then to “two steps.” “Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks.”

An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of his having met other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place in Ukraine where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel wrote: [7]

Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.

These words did not slip from their author in a moment of frenzy: first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times (but at least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words were translated into various languages, as is everything this author writes.

That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the result of a miracle. He says that: [8]

In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?

In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the “gratuitous lie” with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote: [9]

Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell the truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that of the concentration camp world — well designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginings — offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known others of them — authentic deportees — whose sick minds strove to go even beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said had happened to them. There have been publishers to print some of their imaginings, and more or less official compilations to use them, but publishers and compilers are absolutely inexcusable, since the most elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal the imposture.

Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names. But that is usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers that tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell us where. They agree that there are false “eyewitnesses,” but in general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing, fabricated the bestseller For Those I Loved.

Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written testimony. In reality it was a fabrication attributable, at least in part, to the novelist Gilles Perrault. [10] Marek Halter, for his part, published his La Mémoire d’Abraham in 1983; as he often does on radio, he talked there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. However, if we are to believe an article by Nicolas Beau that is quite favorable to Halter, [11] little Marek, about three years old, and his mother left Warsaw not in 1941 but in October of 1939, before the establishment of the ghetto there by the Germans. Halter’s book is supposed to have been actually written by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël Gurgan.

Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, [12] which won the 1980 prize of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). This nauseous best-seller is actually the work of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag, who did not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. [13] The source of the plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, another best-seller made up out of whole cloth and attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. [14]

Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic documents turns out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost writers: Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut Freitag, among others.

We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about Elie Wiesel today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel claims to be full of love for humanity. However, he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred. In his opinion: [15]

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy, virile hate — for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.

At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag took the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This would be, they said, “a great encouragement to all who are active in the process of reconciliation.” [16] That is what might be called “going from National Socialism to national masochism.”

Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he chose not a historian but a “histrion”: Elie Wiesel. Even the newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to refer to the histrionic trait that certain persons deplore in Wiesel:

Naturally, even among those who approve of the struggle of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic François Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of a tendency to change the Jewish sadness into “morbidity” or to become the high priest of a “planned management of the Holocaust.”

As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: “The devastating barb, ‘There is no business like SHOAH-business’ is, sad to say, a recognizable truth.” [17]

Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand. It is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the mad belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a policy of extermination, especially in so-called gas chambers. Serge Klarsfeld has admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas chambers have still not yet been published. He promises proofs. [18]

On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is finished. To tell the truth, that myth breathed its last breath several years ago at the Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond Aron and François Furet presided. What remains is to make this news known to the general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the highest importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the more the historians keep quiet.

But there are historians who dare to raise their voices against the lies and the hatred. That is the case with Michel de Boüard, wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of the Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to 1981, and a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview in 1986, he courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns out, there never was one. [19]

The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims of the Second World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees, demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and time-honored methods of historical criticism.

Summary

Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other “eyewitnesses.” He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald.

When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German “executioners,” or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet “liberators,” the two decided to leave with their German captors.

It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the testimony of the Holocaust “eyewitnesses” be subjected to rigorous scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.

Notes

  1. Le Monde, October 17, 1986. Front page.
  2. There is one single allusion, extremely vague and fleeting, on pages 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have conversations with God, says to Him: “But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they do? They pray before you!” (Night, New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface to that same book, François Mauriac mentioned “the gas chamber and the crematory” (p. 8). The four crucial pages of “testimony” by Elie Wiesel are reproduced in facsimile in: Pierre Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe, 1986), pp. 147-150. In the German-language edition of Night (Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa [Ullstein, 1962]), on 14 occasions the word “crematory” or “crematories” has been falsely given as “Gaskammer” (“gas chamber[s]”). In January of 1945, in anticipation of a Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was hospitalized in Birkenau (the “extermination camp”) after surgery on an infected foot. His doctor had recommended two weeks of rest and good food but, before his foot healed, the Russian takeover became imminent. Hospital patients were considered unfit for the long trip to the camps in Germany and Elie thus could have remained at Birkenau to await the Russians. Although his father had permission to stay with him as a hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it over and decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See also D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto, Canada], May 31, 1987, p. C4.)
  3. See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944.
  4. See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published in the IMT “blue series,” Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.
  5. See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4, and the UP report in the Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2.
  6. Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 93.
  7. Paroles d’étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 86.
  8. “Author, Teacher, Witness,” Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79.
  9. “Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944],” Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2.
  10. Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5.
  11. Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.
  12. Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback edition of 1984. (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
  13. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio, Parma (Italy): 1986. See also: C. Mattogno, “Auschwitz: A Case of Plagiarism,” The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24.
  14. Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by Fawcett Crest (New York).
  15. Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: “Appointment with Hate”), New York: Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.
  16. The Week in Germany (published in New York by the German government in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.
  17. “The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public,” Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316.
  18. VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.
  19. Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.

About the Author

Robert Faurisson, born in 1929, has for years been regarded as Europe’s leading Holocaust revisionist scholar.

He was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and served as associate professor at the University of Lyon in France from 1974 until 1990. He is a recognized specialist of text and document analysis. After years of private research and study, Dr. Faurisson first made public his skeptical views about the Holocaust extermination story in articles published in 1978 in the French daily Le Monde. His writings on the Holocaust issue have appeared in several books and numerous scholarly articles.

#2002

This item was originally issued, in French, in 1986. The first US publication in English by the Institute for Historical Review was in 1987 or 1988.

June 19, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Timeless or most popular | | 5 Comments

The Arrogance and Hypocrisy of the United States

TURNER_Bombers

By Robert Fantina | Aletho News | June 19, 2015

From its earliest days, the United States has been an imperial power, taking what it wants from whoever has it, killing those who get in its way. Even prior to its establishment as a nation, it abused the welcoming friendship of the natives, seeing them as less than human and, therefore, expendable.

Once it threw off the yoke of Great Britain, who saw the colonies as sources of revenue, the new nation saw the Native Americans as impediments to its growth. The ugly concept of Manifest Destiny was introduced early by journalist John O’Sullivan, and embraced by an ambitious and blood-thirsty nation. Mr. O’Sullivan said that the mission of the United States was “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Further, he claimed that ‘Until every acre of the North American continent is occupied by citizens of the United States, the foundation of the future empire will not have been laid.” By the time this was written, that goal had been thwarted by Canada, but Mexico was not to be so fortunate. Shortly thereafter, the Mexican territory of Texas was annexed by the U.S.

The Monroe Doctrine, introduced in the same generation as Manifest Destiny, warned European countries not to interfere in North America, at the risk of U.S. intervention. The U.S., of course, saw all of North American as England previously saw its North American colonies, simply as a source of revenue, which included cheap labor. Such lucrative opportunities must not be taken by Europe.

With increasing wealth and power came increasing lust for more of the same. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, an unabashed imperialist, was desperate to make the U.S. a world power. Once the battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, Mr. Roosevelt rushed to silence the legitimate theory that this had been due to spontaneous combustion resulting from the positioning of the magazine by the coal bunkers. No, for Mr. Roosevelt, this was an opportunity to show Spain that the U.S. will not be trifled with, proof positive of Spain’s brutal actions, and sufficient reason to declare war; thus, the Spanish-American War began. This resulted in the annexation of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines by the U.S. This spawned the Philippine-American War; the Filipino people, for some reason that escaped anyone in U.S. governance, were not willing to surrender their country to the U.S. So, with the unspeakable violence and inhumane actions with which it came to be identified, the U.S. crushed the Filipino people.

When the U.S. entered World War I, it was its first foray into a European conflict. In 1917, at least six ships either owned by the U.S., or carrying U.S. citizens, were sunk. While this caused outrage in the U.S., it was the business community that was most concerned. By 1917, U.S. financiers had lent the Allies at least $2.3 billion. U.S. economic expansion depended on an Allied victory, so war was inevitable to ensure it. Towards the end of the war, even President Woodrow Wilson, who led the U.S. into the war, and thus presided over the deaths of 117,000 Americans, admitted that the war was waged for commercial purposes, and not for some lofty ideals of freedom. Said he: “Why, my fellow-citizens, is there any man here, or any woman – let me say, is there any child here – who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? This war, in its inception, was a commercial and industrial war.”

Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the U.S. found beneficial the model it had previously successfully used to enter or start wars, to escalate hostilities with Vietnam. The U.S. had long ago decreed Communism as the great threat to civilization, and with the Communist North of Vietnam attempting to reunite with the U.S.-puppet-run South, the U.S. needed to act. In order to increase the number of U.S. soldiers sent to that beleaguered nation, an excuse had to be found. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was really a non-incident, was the excuse this time.

The staging area for the U.S. Seventh Fleet was the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, 1964, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was on an espionage mission when it was fired on by North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats. The Maddox, with supporting air power, fired back, sinking one North Vietnamese boat.

Two evenings later, the Maddox and another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, were again in the gulf. The Maddox’s instruments indicated that the ship was under attack, or had been attacked. The captain began an immediate retaliatory strike. Both ships began firing in to the night. However, officials on the ships later determined that they were shooting at ‘ghost images’ on their radar. The evidence indicated that they had not, in fact, been attacked.

Regardless of this, the incident was presented to the world, and more importantly, to the U.S. Congress, as an act of aggression against the United States. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, empowering the president to take any and all means necessary to repel this ‘aggression,’ quickly passed Congress.

Eleven years later, with over 55,000 U.S. soldiers and at least 2,000,000 Vietnamese men, women and children dead, the last U.S. soldiers and administrators fled Saigon as the Vietcong swept through. U.S. hubris has been defeated.

The U.S. public relations organization works overtime to foster the myth of the country as a beacon of peace and freedom. Yet its demands that other nations adhere to some lofty standard of respect for human rights cannot withstand any close scrutiny. The U.S. has used its veto power at the United Nations at least 40 times to protect Israel, a nation that can only be described as apartheid, from any consequences of its barbaric practices. Its own cities are not safe for young, unarmed African-American men, who are shot and killed by white police officers in epidemic proportions. It is rare for any of the officers pulling the trigger to be indicted, let alone convicted of these racist crimes.

The U.S. condemned Syria for allegedly using chemical weapons, but finances all of Israel’s weaponry, including its chemical weapons, used routinely against the Palestinians. ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) has been condemned, legitimately, for beheading its prisoners, but the U.S. has full diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, which uses public beheading as a means of execution, and has used that method over 80 times this year alone. Should ISIL ever establish a relatively stable government on oil-rich lands, its barbaric practices will also be overlooked.

Over half of U.S. senators are millionaires, and they increase taxes on the middle class and poor as they reduce taxes for the rich. The government condemns the deaths of innocent people in war-torn countries, as it sends drones around the world that kill thousands of innocent people. The government demands a military ‘defense’ budget larger than that of the eight next largest international military budgets combined, depriving schools of much-needed revenue as it strengthens its deadly war machine, yet those other countries are not plagued with constant attacks and invasions, despite their much-smaller military budgets.

In the U.S., there is a separate justice system for the wealthy, with bankers confessing to felonies paying small fines, while poverty-stricken people caught with small amounts of marijuana spend years in prison. Wealthy pedophiles are sentenced to small fines and a few months in prison.

Poor and middle-class students who want to attend U.S. colleges and universities can borrow money from the government at an interest rate of 4.66%. Banks borrow money from the government at an interest rate of 0.75%. And if the bank fails, the U.S. government will rescue it. If a former student declares bankruptcy, his/her student loan is not absolved.

When in desperation a young person enlists in the military, he/she may find themselves killing men, woman and children that pose no threat to them. Then, on returning home, not only is the tuition program offered to veterans minimal, good luck to them in trying to get assistance for post-traumatic stress disorder. Over 50% of veterans will experience homelessness at some point after their time in the military, and they have higher-than-average rates of suicide, substance abuse, divorce and domestic violence. The U.S. government is happy to send them off to war, but is not interested in them when they return, broken and bruised. They have served their corporate purpose, and can now be discarded.

This is life in the much-touted ‘land of opportunity’, the ‘home of the free and the brave’. Yes, opportunity abounds for the rich, but for the poor and those who are struggling to maintain a middle-class standard, things are not so rosy. But ask the common man or woman on any U.S. street what they believe to be the greatest country in the world, and their hearts will swell pride and their eyes become moist as they proclaim it to be the U.S.A. And the U.S. public relations effort scores another victory, while the blind lemmings fall off the cliff.

June 19, 2015 Posted by | Militarism | , | 4 Comments

Bolivia’s New Oil Discovery Triples Reserves

teleSUR | June 19, 2015

Bolivia has tripled its oil reserves, President Evo Morales announced Thursday, after state-owned energy company YPFB made a significant oil discovery in the eastern department of Santa Cruz.

“This oil reserve marks the first new discovery in 23 years. This is an example of the positive outcomes from nationalization. With this reserve we now have 44 million barrels of oil reserves,” announced Morales.

During his speech, the Bolivian leader went on to criticize foreign nongovernmental organizations that aim to obstruct natural resource exploration projects. “It is unacceptable to me that there are NGOs and foundations operating under the pretext of defending the indigenous movement. I want to make it clear that NGOs and foundations that obstruct natural resource exploration must leave Bolivia,” Morales stated.

According to company officials, YPFB is planning to invest a total of US$3 billion in Bolivia from 2015-2019 towards oil exploration projects.

Due to increased revenues from gas and oil exports, the Bolivian government has since 2006 dramatically increased social spending in the area of health, education, pensions, and poverty alleviation programs by 45 percent.

June 19, 2015 Posted by | Economics | , | 1 Comment

JVP, Alison Weir And the Hatred of the White

By Gilad Atzmon | June 18, 2015

A month ago, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) issued a call for a Herem (excommunication, Hebrew) against the remarkable activist and writer Alison Weir. The call was distributed internally amongst JVP’s chapter leaders and was leaked to me by a few JVP dissenters. The publication of the call led to a massive surge of resentment towards JVP within the dissident movement. JVP was compelled to explain their move.

The call for Herem is deeply rooted in Jewish culture. Throughout their history, Jews have called for the expulsion of some of their most articulate and sophisticated minds. Spinoza, and Uriel Da Costa are famous examples. Christ, another dissent voice, found himself nailed to the cross for advising his people to love their neighbours. Though Rabbinical Jews rarely call for a herem, contemporary so-called ‘liberal’ Jews are obsessed with that ugly, primitive medieval ritual. Since I immersed myself in solidarity matters two decades ago, I have been witness to the relentless chasing, harassing and slandering of every Jew who crossed the 100 IQ barrier. First it was Israel Shamir, then Paul Eisen, and then Norman Finkelstein who dared speak the truth about the Jewish Left and BDS operating as a secret society (cult). Consistent with their Jewish heritage, ‘progressive’ Jews like to employ a ‘Sabbos Goy’, a gentile who is willing to surrender to their whims. The liberal Jews at JVP have used Ali Abunimah as their favourite ‘partner’. He has apparently been happy to provide his Palestinian voice to issue the Palestinian stamp. Although rabbinical Jews employ the Herem solely against Jews, liberal Jews, fuelled by peculiar sense of righteousness, extended the Herem to include some ‘Goyim’. For years they have attempted to excommunicate me (an ex-Jew). They chased Free Gaza Founder Greta Berlin. Currently their target is Alison Weir and, in a surprising move, the American people whom JVP has outrageously dubbed a racist collective.

A rapidly growing number of activists and commentators see JVP and the Jewish liberal attitude as a corrosive, yet dominant, element within the solidarity movement. The publication of the leaked JVP’s call for herem against Alison Weir drew a lot of negative attention. JVP and its Executive Director Rebecca Vilkomerson could have easily saved what was left of their reputations by issuing an apology and perhaps vowing not to engage in herem tactics. But such a humane and reconciliatory approach would be totally foreign to the culture JVP succumbs to. For JVP to word such a statement would mean an engagement in genuine self-reflection, pretty much thinking the unthinkable. It just wasn’t going to happen. Instead JVP offered another clumsy and lousy attempt to ‘justify’ its primitive call for a herem. Lacking elementary imagination, this progressive synagogue re-cycled its banal Judeo-centric diatribe. JVP’s new statement achieved little except to offer another view into tribal morbidity. Their statement has nothing to do with peace or the Palestinians but is, instead, an embarrassing manifestation of goy hatred and anti white inclinations. They reveal, yet again that liberal Jews are not the solution. They are, actually, the core of the problem.

In their new diatribe against Weir, JVP’s board informs us that they have chosen not to work with her because their central tenet is “opposition to racism and oppression in all its forms, and she (Weir) has consistently chosen to stay silent when given the opportunity to challenge bigotry,” which they find “repugnant.”

It is amusing to find out that the people who are operating within a racially Jewish exclusive club are preaching against ‘racism.’ Yet, what was Weir’s crime exactly? Apparently, Weir has been ‘a friendly guest’ of ‘white supremacist’ Clay Douglas on his hate radio show, “the Free American.”

Without even addressing the horrid labels that JVP and liberal Jews often attribute to others (gentiles), I wonder whether JVP would have the same reaction if Weir appeared on Israeli TV. Israeli TV is suffocated with Jewish supremacy and racism. Of course, the answer is NO – JVP has yet to call for a Herem against a single activist for appearing on Israeli TV or any other Jewish supremacist outlet. I guess that in the eyes of ‘liberal’ Jews at JVP & Co., Jewish racism is somehow kosherish.

“Clay Douglas,” according to JVP, “is concerned primarily with the survival of the White race and sees malign Jewish influence everywhere.” To start with, ‘seeing Jewish influence everywhere’ has now become mainstream news and for good reason. Furthermore, if it is bad for a white person to be primarily concerned with the survival of his ‘race,’ should we apply the same ethical standard to all identities and sectarian activism? Would JVP also denounce a lesbian activist for caring primarily for her sisters and their libidinal and cultural survival?  Would JVP denounce Jews who primarily care about the survival of their ‘race’? I guess that within their liberal tribal mindset, universal ethics evaporate wherever the ‘White’ appears. I admit that I am puzzled by this brutal tribal animosity towards Whiteness, particularly the vile language that some Jewish progressive ‘peace’ activists use. If JVP truly believes in diversity, shouldn’t it include Clay Douglas in its phantasmic multi layered society? Seemingly ‘White’ people are unwelcome within the imaginary Jewish liberal ‘diverse’ universe. What a shame, some of my best friends are white. In the mirror I look pretty white, almost as white as Rebecca Vilkomerson and her junta of progressive Rabbis.

Apparently the JVP are really upset with Weir because back in “August 25, 2010”, Weir  “was silent when Douglas invoked the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.  Now the real picture begins to emerge. In the eyes of JVP’s rabbinical board, unlike Ali Abunimah, Weir has refused to operate as a Sabbos Goy. Her sin is venal: rather than fighting for Judea, Weir is an American patriot devoted to the education of the American people.

While reading the JVP pamphlet I asked myself what is the principle that makes one call for equality ‘kosher’ and another call for equality a ‘racist’ and ‘chauvinist’ crime?  JVP fails to provide any guidance. Perhaps this bunch of progressive Jews believes that their hatred of Whites will make them into a popular movement. Possibly, they believe that anti White politics is good for Palestine. I wonder whether the JVP grasps that such a belligerent approach may backfire? Following the mass outrage over JVP’s conduct, some people have already completely disassociated from cliques that are formed by or connected with any Jewish organisation or politics.

Complete disregard for logic is by now entrenched in JVP thinking. Towards the end of the statement, JVP comments  “Weir and IAK have a fundamental political framing that the U.S. is not implicated in the same racist and white supremacist structures as Israel.” One would assume that, if true, this view attributed to Weir and IAK should be discussed and examined in scholarly manner. Apparently not in the JVP’s synagogue -“this ‘tail wags the dog’ theory is a form of chauvinistic nationalism that absolves American interest in perpetuating injustice–not just in Israel but in other regions around the world.”   It would take a lot of imagination to grasp why the JVP regards arguing that the U.S. is  ‘not implicated in the same racist and white supremacist structures as Israel’ is ‘chauvinistic’ and ‘nationalist.’

Surprising argument given that JVP attempts to define the discussion of Jewish racism and the Jewishness of Israel provide proof that JVP is itself a Jewish chauvinist, supremacist apparatus dedicated to the concealment of the roots of the conflict in Palestine. In fact, the JVP is far worse than Israel and ultra Zionists – while Zionists manifest their Jewish symptom proudly, the ‘liberal’ Jewish ‘allies’ at JVP invest all their time and energy in suppressing discussion of that very dangerous symptom.

JVP is clearly desperate to prove that that IAK and Weir are immersed in supremacy. They quote the IAK webpage:  “[Alison Weir] founded an organization to be directed by Americans without personal or family ties to the region who would research and actively disseminate accurate information to the American public.”

JVP deduces from this innocuous statement that “according to Weir and If Americans Knew, only non-Arab, non-Muslim, non-Palestinian, and non-Jewish voices can be trusted to speak the truth, based solely on their ethnic or religious identity.” In psychoanalytical terms this is called projection. JVP attribute their own exclusivist, chauvinist and racist symptoms to Weir and IAK. It is the board of JVP that is made up of Jews only. No Arabs, No Palestinians, No Muslims, let alone White Goyim are racially qualified to be part of the leadership of this disgusting collective. Even the Israeli Knesset has as its 3rd biggest party an Arab party and is more diverse and pluralist than JVP’s Knesset.

Apparently their mental segregation causes these ‘liberal’ Jews to fail to recognise that Weir and IAK are driven by a true inclination towards justice. In order to produce an impartial reading of the conflict, Weir formed an organisation of people less inclined to prejudge the situation because they are not somehow tied to the region, spiritually or physically. This is what people out of the Jewish ghetto do sometimes when they are interested in forming a genuine and truthful judgment. They require that the parties not have a stake in the conflict. JVP interpreted IAK statements as racist only because JVP itself is bounded to Jewish racist thinking.

It is sad that JVP missed a great opportunity to amend its ways. Instead of presenting an exemplary case of humanist universal virtues devoted to pluralism and diversity, they responded with a spectacularly gruesome manifestation of Jewish bad behaviour. “Despite her support for Palestinian rights, Weir ultimately does a disservice to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.” Jews are claiming the exclusive right to tell others what is good for those who are oppressed by their own Jewish State.

June 19, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

MoD confirms Britain is arming Saudi Arabia in Yemen conflict

RT | June 19, 2015

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has confirmed it is providing technical support and arming Saudi Arabia in its ongoing war against Yemen, RT has learned.

An MoD spokesperson said the UK’s assistance to Saudi Arabia includes providing “precision guided weapons,” but added the British government had been assured they will be used in compliance with international law.

Anti-arms trade campaigners condemned Britain’s support for the Gulf monarchy, claiming the UK cares more about arms sales than human rights and democracy.

RT contacted the MoD to ask if British weapons are being used in Saudi airstrikes on Yemen and if the UK is providing assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.

An MoD spokesperson replied: “The UK is not participating directly in Saudi military operations. We are providing support to the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces and as part of pre-existing arrangements are providing precision guided weapons to assist the Saudi Air Force.

“The use of these weapons is a matter for the Saudis but we are assured that they will be used in compliance with international law.”

The MoD’s response confirms suspicions held by anti-arms trade campaigners that Britain is providing support for a war that top Yemeni academics based in the West have branded “illegal.”

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) said: “The Saudi bombing has created a humanitarian catastrophe and now we know the UK weapons have contributed to it.”

“These weapons have not just given military support to the bombardment, they have also provided a strong political support and underlined the closeness between the UK and Saudi governments.”

“With the destruction of Yemen and the intensifying crackdown on dissent in Saudi Arabia, the UK government is sending the message that human rights and democracy are less important than arms sales,” he added.

CAAT said the “precision guided weapons” used by the Saudi Air Force are likely to be Eurofighter Typhoons or Tornado jets.

Saudi Arabia has spent an estimated £2.5 billion upgrading its fleet of 73 Tornados as part of a deal negotiated with UK-based arms manufacturers BAE Systems.

Saudi Arabia and the UK have long had close dealings in the arms trade. Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest customer for weapons and the UK is the Gulf nation’s single biggest supplier, according to CAAT. … Full article

 

June 19, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

What the United States Did to Vietnam

By BRETT MORRIS | CounterPunch | June 19, 2015

The insidious effort to whitewash the US war on Vietnam continues. The official “Vietnam War Commemoration” run by the Pentagon refuses to recognize the war for what it was: an act of aggression that decimated three countries, killed and wounded millions of people, blocked democracy and development, littered the countryside with millions of unexploded bombs (which kill and wound people to this day), and poisoned the food supply with chemical warfare (causing deformities and birth defects).

We should not let these crimes go unheard of, or allow propagandists to spin them into events that were mere “accidents.” The US destruction of Vietnam was a deliberate act.

A healthy antidote to the silence/propaganda of US aggression against Vietnam would be to pay a visit to Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), as I have recently done. Ironically accused by propagandists in the United States of being a “one-sided” museum filled with “propaganda,” the museum offers a much more accurate depiction of the US war against Vietnam than anything you’ll find in US history textbooks or popular culture.

Crucial to understanding the US war against Vietnam is knowing that it was a war against democracy and self-determination. Ho Chi Minh begged the United States to support Vietnam’s efforts to gain independence from France. An admirer of the American Revolution, Ho Chi Minh quoted the US Declaration of Independence in Vietnam’s own Declaration:

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence in the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

Of course, the United States wholly backed France’s efforts to reconquer Vietnam. When France failed, the United States took up the task, engaging in a war of aggression, or what is called the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” in the words of Nuremberg Tribunal.

The United States did everything possible to block the will of the Vietnamese people. The US-backed dictator of South Vietnam blocked elections in 1956 to prevent Ho Chi Minh from coming to power (Dwight D. Eisenhower estimated that up to 80 percent of Vietnamese would have supported Ho Chi Minh in an election during the First Indochina War).

tigercages

“Tiger cages” used to hold prisoners.

Since the Vietnamese continued to resist the US-imposed dictatorship in South Vietnam, the United States invaded Vietnam in the early 1960s, beginning a devastating campaign of bombings, atrocities, chemical warfare, and torture, leading to the deaths of 3.8 million people, according to a study published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

According to Nick Turse in Kill Anything That Moves:

[T]he stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some “bad apples,” however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process—such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam. … [T]hey were no aberration. Rather, they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.

Turse’s investigations of US war crimes (spurred by his discovery of the Pentagon’s Vietnam War Crimes Working Group) lend credence to the various displays and photographs one will find in the museum.

One example is a sewer pipe present at the Thanh Phong massacre, used by three children to hide in before being killed by future Senator Bob Kerrey and his cohorts (ten other civilians also died).

sewerpipe

Thanh Phong sewer pipe.

More deadly than the daily atrocities, however, were the bombings. According to historian Howard Zinn, the United States dropped 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam by the end of the war. Many of these bombs did not explode, and continue to kill people today when farmers accidently plow over them, children pick them up thinking they are toys, or scrap metal hunters looking to earn a small amount of change collect them.

Perhaps the most horrifying exhibit one will encounter in the museum displays the effects of Agent Orange. The United States sprayed roughly 20 million gallons of herbicides on the Vietnamese countryside. According to the Vietnamese Red Cross in 2002, one million people have disabilities or other health problems as a result of Agent Orange, including 100,000 disabled children.

unforgiveablecrimes

Unforgivable crimes.

You’ll rarely see such images or hear such facts in the United States—the myth of the United States being “exceptional” must continue being shoved down US citizens’ throats, so that new wars and imperialistic campaigns can be waged. Next time a politician calls for another war or “humanitarian intervention,” just remember what the United States did to Vietnam.

Brett S. Morris is a freelance writer, journalist, photographer, and author. He has traveled the world, documenting current events and the legacy of US foreign policy. His latest book is 21 Lies They Tell You About American Foreign Policy. He can be reached on Twitter and Facebook

 

June 19, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | 3 Comments

Why are journalists surprised that Israel kills children?

By Amena Saleem | Palestine Journal | June 17, 2015

There was nothing surprising about Israel finding itself not culpable for the killing of four boys on a Gaza beach in July last year, as it did in a military judgment released a few days ago. Israel’s investigations into its own crimes aren’t known for delivering guilty verdicts.

What was interesting, however, was the reaction of some mainstream journalists — journalists who felt they had a vested interest in this case because they had witnessed the strikes which killed the four boys from the Baker family as they played football one afternoon during Israel’s 51-day assault on Gaza.

Articles by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian and Robert Tait in The Daily Telegraph give off a sense of disbelief and indignation that the investigation by the Israeli army into the attack cleared all personnel involved and declared the incident “a tragic accident.”

Both these journalists, and Paul Mason in his blog for Channel 4 News, describe how their own observations, both during and after the attack, refute Israel’s allegations that it was targeting Palestinian fighters.

But the sense that there has been a miscarriage of justice by a reputable organization, rather than an outright cover-up by a rogue army, remains.

Struck in error?

This journalistic respect for Israel’s army is highlighted in Tait’s article, as he writes that the slaughter of the boys was “surely an indication that something had gone badly wrong in Israel’s military procedures for such a deadly strike to have been aimed at what were clearly children.”

By which he indicates his belief, shared by many mainstream journalists, that, unlike the killing of the Baker boys, the rest of Israel’s military procedures in Gaza last summer were not acts of indiscriminate slaughter.

Bombardments which leveled homes, mosques and entire neighborhoods, massacring whoever was in the vicinity, babies and children included, weren’t, according to Tait’s reasoning, deliberate acts of terror, but acceptable military activity.

The BBC, true to form, goes one step further in the esteem in which it holds the Israeli army. Its online article into Israel’s findings does nothing but quote chunks from the Israeli army report and is headlined “Gaza beach attack: Israel ‘struck boys in error.’”

There is no attempt to critically analyze the report’s conclusions, as Tait, Beaumont and Mason all did for their respective news organizations, and no Palestinian comment.

Instead, the BBC simply provides a platform for Israel’s self-exonerating report to be aired, free from the inconvenience of journalistic scrutiny.

And it ends, of course, in typical BBC fashion, by giving Israel’s excuse for attacking Gaza last July and August — “to put an end to rocket-fire and remove the threat of attacks by militants tunneling under the border” — with no mention of the Palestinian reality of occupation, siege and resistance.

Damage limitation

It is this high regard in which many mainstream journalists hold the Israeli army which explains, perhaps, their shock that its soldiers could deliberately target children and then their disbelief that its commanders could dub that deliberate targeting an accident.

The question then is, why are mainstream journalists so easily taken in by Israeli propaganda, appearing to believe Israel’s refrain that it has “the most moral army in the world?”

The truth they ignore, and consequently fail to convey to their audiences, is that Israel kills Palestinians at will and with impunity.

Its army only announces investigations into a killing or killings on the rare occasion that Western journalists or politicians become agitated about Palestinian life being taken — usually because the killing has been caught on camera and can’t be hidden.

Those same journalists seem unware of the reality that an Israeli announcement of an “independent investigation” is nothing more than a damage limitation exercise, an exercise in “public relations” to quieten the critics, and that the word “independent” is meaningless in these cases.

It is meaningless because the outcome of an Israeli investigation into Israeli crimes will almost exclusively be a finding of Israeli innocence. There is nothing independent about the process, and it shouldn’t be reported as such.

Wake up to reality

The military’s absolution of blame for the slaughter of the Baker boys wasn’t a one-off, as the resultant mainstream reporting seemed to suggest. It was part of a pattern which will be repeated over and over until the occupation ends.

Israel is a colonial power. It will kill whoever it has to (Palestinians, >US activists, British media workers, Turkish humanitarians, UN staff) to make its colonial goals a reality. And it will lie, cover up and propagandize in exactly the same way that all colonial powers did in centuries past to get away with its crimes.

Mainstream media journalists need to wake up to these facts. They need to be sharper, more intelligent and more astute in the way they cover Israel and the occupation. They need to read and understand history, especially European colonial history, and they need to embrace, rather than dismiss, context in their reporting.

Israel didn’t just kill those four young boys last summer. Its warplanes, warships and tanks wiped out 89 entire Palestinian families, wiped out 504 Palestinian children at an average rate of 10 a day, wiped out a total of more than 2,200 Palestinians.

Its politicians and military should be tried for all these crimes. And they should be tried in a properly independent manner — or as independently as the world allows — at the International Criminal Court. This is what the mainstream media should be clamoring for. Not expressing polite surprise that an “independent” Israeli inquiry acquitted Israel of deliberately slaying four little Palestinian boys who dared to play football in Gaza.

June 19, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

By Definition, An Aggressor Cannot Act in Defense

By Robert Barsocchini | Empire Slayer | June 17, 2015

The statement that Israel has the right to defend itself against Palestine is similar to the statement that if, say, the US annexed, occupied, and started building illegal settlements in Cuba (the parts the US isn’t already illegally occupying and using as a torture camp, Guantanamo), then the US would have the right to “defend” itself against Cubans acting in retaliation to US aggression.

Everyone aside from blind fundamentalists and/or the hopelessly corrupt would laugh at the notion that in such a situation, US action against resistant Cubans would be “defense”. Likewise, the world laughs at the idea that Israel can “defend” itself against the vastly more outgunned Palestinians resisting Israeli aggression.

International law reflects the common sense dynamics of this situation, which any child could easily understand and naturally grasp.

Georgetown International Law professor Noura Erakat explains the relevant rules:

… where an occupation already is in place, the right to initiate militarized force in response to an armed attack, as opposed to police force to restore order, is not a remedy available to the occupying state.

… the right of self-defense in international law is, by definition since 1967, not available to Israel with respect to its dealings with real or perceived threats emanating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip population.

An occupying power cannot justify military force as self-defense in territory for which it is responsible as the occupant.

However, people exploiting weaker groups try to deny elementary common sense and rewrite rules to defend what they are doing, and/or make themselves feel better about their awful acts. For example, the Spanish inquisition made little rules for itself regarding its torture subjects, such as that they were not supposed to bleed. Thus, the Inquisition, instead of say using thumbscrews (a Euro favorite), would burn people alive, as this, they ludicrously argued, did not make people bleed and thus made the Inquisition perpetrators moral and law-abiding, at least in their warped and self-serving minds. (Also, they would make people bleed through various torture methods, anyway, and just ignore their own rules.)

Naturally, this is what Israel, the US, and all corrupt, nasty power-centers do. Erakat explains how Israel plays these games with International Law:

[Israel tries to get around International Law by saying it does] not occupy [the Palestinian territories] within the meaning of international law. The UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly, as well as the Israeli High Court of Justice have roundly rejected the Israeli government’s position. 

In its 2012 session, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination described current conditions following decades of occupation and attendant repression as tantamount to Apartheid.

[The International Court of Justice rules that “Article 51 of the Charter [the right to self defense] has no relevance” to Israel’s assaults and massacres against the territories it illegally occupies and colonizes.]

… Israel is distorting/reinterpreting international law to justify its use of militarized force in order to protect its colonial authority…

In doing this, Israel:

… forces the people of the Gaza Strip to face one of the most powerful militaries in the world without the benefit either of its own military, or of any realistic means to acquire the means todefend itself.

If Israel were concerned about small matters like honor, it would help or allow Gazans to acquire guided weapons for self-defense. However, the Israeli state prefers to use its civilian population as a human shield (a tactic constantly used by Israel) to absorb the few unguided rockets that make it into populated Israeli areas, rather than have guided rockets hit designated Israeli military installations, which are enmeshed throughout Israeli civilian society.

Erakat concludes that, since the Israeli state’s behavior is an “affront to the international humanitarian legal order”, “the onus to resist this shift and to preserve protection for civilians rests upon the shoulders of citizens, organizations, and mass movements who can influence their governments enforce international law. There is no alternative to political mobilization to shape state behavior.”

…

The next question is whether the Palestinians have the right to use arms to resist illegal Israeli occupation, annexation, settlement, and aggression.

If we return to our US-occupying-Cuba metaphor, the common sense/fairness answer is obviously yes, of course. And again, the only reason many US citizens do not answer yes immediately to the question of whether Palestinians are allowed to use force to defend themselves against Israel’s armed aggression is that US citizens utterly lack exposure to information representative of common sense and world opinion. What they are exposed to represents opinion and “reporting” heavily biased in favor of the US-backed aggressors, in ways that range from obvious to subtle and subconscious, from natural ethnocentrism to intentional insidiousness.

But again, international law, when we look at it, represents the common-sense interpretation of the situation at which any child would arrive.

Middle East scholars LeVine and Hajjar explain that Palestinians are not prohibited:

… from taking up arms to resist occupation.

Additional Protocol I established people’s right to use armed force to resist foreign occupation as well as colonial domination and to fight against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination. This Protocol was promulgated for the purpose of injecting IHL standards into asymmetric wars (between states and non-state groups).

Israel has refused to sign this Protocol (as has the US) and does not recognise the right of non-state groups to fight for those specified causes, even if they were to abide by the laws of war. Nevertheless, the lawfulness of the use of armed force is not contingent on the status of the adversaries but rather on whether those who fight do so in accordance with the principles of IHL (International Humanitarian Law) enumerated above [and, as Dr. Norman Finkelstein and others note, on whether a group under attack has the option or ability to retaliate within the technical bounds of IHL – ie, do Palestinians have guided, and thus legal, projectiles to use as a deterrent? They do not. Do they therefore lack the right to retaliate in the most effective ways they can?].

Further, as I have noted, the mostly symbolic and ineffective Palestinian projectile attacks – which have killed about 30 people in their entire history – are not only launched under illegal Israeli occupation, but also mainly “in retaliation for prior indiscriminate Israeli killings of Gazan civilians“, doubling both the illegality of Israeli action and the right to self defense of the Palestinians.

Examples of Israeli double-war crimes (occupation combined with further military assault/aggression) that have elicited defensive retaliation from Palestine include:

… the November 5 [2012] killing of a 23-year-old mentally disabled man who strayed too close to the border fence, and at least one boy killed while playing football five days later. Two other Palestinians who rushed to the latter scene to help the victims were themselves immediately killed by three more shells fired by Israeli forces [in 2012, and similar attacks by the Israeli occupier in 2014 that spurred retaliatory rocket firing, as Israel concedes.]

[In 2012, for example, Israeli] attacks prompted a retaliatory strike by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which launched an anti-tank missile at an army jeep near the border, wounding four soldiers. That attack by a group not under the operational control of Hamas in turn triggered the targeting of Jabari and the all-out assault on Gaza by Israel.

The second factor that undercuts the self-defence rationale is that Jabari was involved in negotiating an Egyptian-brokered comprehensive, long-term cease-fire with Israel when he was assassinated. In a November 17 New York Times op-ed, Israeli academic Gershon Baskin (who was a mediator in these negotiations) declared that Jabari had been given a near-final version of the agreement hours before he was killed.

… the immediate causes of the most violent wave of rocket fire were precisely the indiscriminate killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces and the assassination of the official who was engaged in negotiations to permanently curtail such rocket attacks. Moreover, Israeli officials had to know and anticipate that killing Jabari would precipitate a violent Palestinian response, raising serious questions about their moral and political responsibility for the ensuing violence.

The circumstances noted above are exactly similar to Israel’s 2014 massacre in Israeli-occupied Gaza, which began with Israeli killings of Gazans, including killing children on video, against the background of an imminent agreement between Hamas and the West Bank leadership, with US and EU approval.  This enraged Israel due to the prospect of another “Palestinian peace offensive”, which might mitigate Israel’s ability to continue illegally colonizing territory outside its legal and internationally recognized borders.

Indeed, Israel’s assaults on occupied refugee camps such as Gaza, “must be judged against a reality which, although vehemently rejected by Israeli officials … enjoys an overwhelming international consensus: Namely, that the entirety of the territories captured by Israel in 1967 remain occupied according to international law.”

The professors sum up:

Put simply, an occupying state has no legal right to wage a full-scale military war against an occupied population. Rather, the occupying state is legally obligated to protect the rights and prioritise the interests of this population, something Israel has manifestly not done in any part of the Occupied Territories.

The occupying power has rights, too, including the right to maintain order and to take steps to ensure for its own security. But in a context of occupation, these options are limited to police actions and at most use of small arms to address an immediate threat, not full-scale war.

Israel practices “continual deployment of large-scale, indiscriminate force against people and space of Gaza – and, equally important, the West Bank as well…”

These acts constitute “not merely the context for war crimes but for crimes against humanity and, because of their clearly aggressive nature, a crime against peace.”

Like all aggressive criminal actors, Israel would prefer to meet no resistance, and thus naturally insists that the Palestinians do not have “any right to use force, even in self-defence”.  Such desperate claims give “important insight into how Israel interprets the law to project the legality of policies and practices it wishes to pursue.”

…

Recognized as the most important and authoritative moral voice on the issue of resistance to tyranny, Mahatma Gandhi spoke specifically on the issue of Israeli tyranny against Palestine, and said,

[Israelis] can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs … nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

Also see: The Hateful Likud [Israeli ruling organization] Charter Calls for the Destruction of Any Palestine State 

@_DirtyTruths

June 18, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Bush-era officials can be sued for abuse of 9/11 detainees – court

RT | June 18, 2015

A federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit against former Justice Department and law enforcement officials for violating the rights of men perceived as Arab or Muslim who were rounded up after 9/11 and held for months, sometimes in solitary confinement.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Bush-era heads of the Department of Justice, FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), can be sued for violating the constitutional rights of 762 men, described as “out-of-status aliens” because they either overstayed their visas or worked without permits.

The case, known as Turkmen v. Ashcroft, was filed in 2002 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). It names as defendants the former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI Director Robert Mueller and former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service James Ziglar. The CCR is also suing the officials in charge of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, and the Passaic County Jail in Paterson, New Jersey, where the plaintiffs were being held for anywhere from three to eight months.

A federal court dismissed the case in 2013, after concluding there was no evidence the officials had any “intent to punish” the plaintiffs. However, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling that the Justice Department officials were not entitled to “qualified immunity,” and that the confinement conditions of the immigrants were actually established with “punitive intent.”

“We believe, then, that the challenged conditions—keeping detainees in their cells for twenty‐three hours a day, constructively denying them recreation and exposing them to the elements, strip searching them whenever they were removed from or returned to their cells, denying them sleep by bright lights—were not reasonably related to a legitimate goal, but rather were punitive and unconstitutional,” judges Rosemary Pooler and Richard Wesley wrote in the majority opinion.

Pooler and Wesley said the government officials presumed that “all out‐of‐status Arabs or Muslims were potential terrorists until proven otherwise,” and justified the detentions on national security grounds.

The lawsuit claims the mass detentions were part of the FBI’s “hold-until-cleared policy,” holding the men described as “potential recruits” for Al-Qaeda solely because of their Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian origin. Of the eight current plaintiffs, six are Muslim, one is Hindu, and one is Buddhist.

“It might well be that national security concerns motivated the defendants to take action, but that is of little solace to those who felt the brunt of that decision,” the two judges wrote.

“We are thrilled with the court’s ruling,” said CCR attorney Rachel Meeropol. “The court took this opportunity to remind the nation that the rule of law and the rights of human beings, whether citizens or not, must not be sacrificed in the face of national security hysteria.”

Benamar Benatta, one of the plaintiffs, said he was “delighted” by the ruling. Cleared for release on November 14, 2001, Benatta remained in solitary confinement until April 30 the following year. … Full article

June 18, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kiev’s Moves Against Transnistria Are Anti-Ukrainian

Not content to merely blockade and shell its citizens in Donbass post-Maidan Ukraine is now also looking to squeeze ethnic Ukrainians in Transnistria

Transnistria president Yevgeny Shevchuk is one of Transnistria’s 160,000 ethnic Ukrainians
By Marko Marjanović | Russia Insider | June 10, 2015

Transnistria (or Pridnestrovie – “land along the Dniester”) is the spiritual predecessor of Novorossiya. It is a small, de facto independent, state taking up a strip of land along the left bank of the mighty Dniester river. The territory in question is internationally recognized as being part of Moldova but has a Slavic majority.

Transnistrian independence is a result of a joint Russian-Ukrainian uprising in the 1990s.

As Soviet Union dissolved the Slavic left-bank of the former Moldavian SSR sought independence, especially since Moldova was being shaken by a movement that sought the unification of this Romanian-speaking country with Romania.

For Slavs on Dniester’s left-bank this would have meant leading the existence of a tiny minority among 25 million Romanian speakers, and furthermore would have meant returning under the rule of their former occupiers – during WWII Romania occupied a chunk of southern Ukraine and was not well-remembered among the Slav populace. As one would expect they were not too thrilled about the prospect.

Indeed, Pridnestrovie’s inclusion into Moldovan SSR was highly artificial in the first place.

In the interwar period the Soviet Union lay claim on the historic region of Bessarabia on the right bank of the Dniester which had been part of Russian Empire but was inhabited by a Romanin majority and was at this time part or Romania. To enhance its claim the Soviets dreamt up a “Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic” out of southern Ukraine along the border with Romania on the Dniester and maintained that this “Moldavia” properly extends to cover the entire Romanian region of Bessarabia.

In 1940 under Stalin the Soviets fulfilled their ambition and after seizing Bessarabia formed a highly dubious “Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic” out of this majority ethnic Romanian territory and the Ukrainian left-bank Dniester. Essentially, exactly in the same way that inclusion of Romanina-majority Bessarabia into the (Slav-majority) Soviet Union was artificial and forced, so was the inclusion of Slav-majority left-bank Dniester into the Moldavian SSSR.

In 1992 when Slavs of Transnistria who are an equal mix of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians rebelled, Ukrainians and Russians recognized the validity of their cause. Volunteers from both Russia and Ukraine flocked to help in their fight.

What is particularly interesting is that volunteers included both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists. Among the Ukrainian volunteers one could find members of the ultra nationalist UNA-UNSO – which is the oldest and the largest of the groups which today forms the Ukrainian Right Sector coalition.

In other words, back in 1992 Ukrainians, including extreme anti-Russian nationalists, were convinced Transnistria deserved to be helped and that it was wrong to demand of ethnic Ukrainians there to submit to rule from the other side of the Dniester (or even from Bucharest in Romania) that they experienced as alien.

(However, the decisive role in the conflict was not played by such volunteers but by the remnants of the Soviet Army in the region which put itself between the warring sides and deterred attempts of the stronger Moldavian/Romanian side to resolve the matter by force. Russian peacekeepers in the region today are a continuation of this force.)

In the mean time much has changed. Today Transnistrians complain (1,2,3) that Ukraine is working with Moldovans to exert pressure against them and get them to submit to Moldova. This pressure consists of a military build up along the Ukrainian-Transnistrian border, a blockade against Russian peacekeepers in Transnistria, making it hard for Transnistrians with Russian passports to travel, and making it difficult for Transnistria to export goods except through Moldovan customs.

Kiev has justified these moves by essentially painting Transnistria as Putin’s military colony. This is highly dubious since Transnistria is very much a geostrategic liability. It is tiny (population of 0.5 million), landlocked, borders only Moldova and Ukraine and covers a thin strip of land – which is therefore highly vulnerable. It may have some value as leverage in relation to Moldova, but it is the case that Moldova itself is a small (population of 3 million), impoverished and landlocked country of little to no strategic significance itself. The reality is that Moscow sees its presence in Transnistria as a moral and possibly political, but not military, asset.

The real reason why Kiev feels the need to denounce Transnistria is because the enclave is in so many ways the antithesis of post-Maidan Ukraine. Culturally and politically it is far closer to Crimea and Donbass than what Ukraine is moving towards. … Full article

June 18, 2015 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Global conflict cost world $14.3 trillion in 2014: Report

Press TV | June 18, 2015

The cost of global war in the year 2014 reached $14.3 trillion, or 13.4 percent of the global gross domestic product, a report by the Institute for Economics and Peace says.

Last year, the cost of global conflict equaled the combined economies of Britain, Germany, France, Brazil, Canada, and Spain, according to a recent report by the Australia-based group.

The statistics mark a 15.3-percent spike in the cost of conflicts since 2008 when the financial impact was recorded as $12.4 trillion, the report notes.

“Large increases in costs are due to the increases in deaths from internal conflict, increases for IDP (internally displaced person) and refugee support, and GDP losses from conflict, with the latter accounting for 38 percent of the increase since 2008,” the report stated.

Since 2008, the cost of supporting IDPs and refugees has increased by 267 percent and the number of people forced to relocate by war has reached its highest since the Second World War, the report noted.

It also described the Middle East and North Africa as the most violent regions in the world and Europe as the most peaceful, adding that Saudi Arabia’s ongoing aggression against Yemen has dragged down the overall outlook for the Middle East.

According to the report, Syria, which has been gripped by deadly unrest since March 2011, was world’s least peaceful country, followed by Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic.

June 18, 2015 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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