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Seoul Human Rights Film Festival cancels Israeli participation

Palestinian Information Center | April 3, 2016

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement has achieved another success after it managed to convince organizers of the Seoul Human Rights Film Festival to reject the participation of an Israeli film in the event.

Organizers of the festival sent a message to the producer of the Israeli film, “Third Person,” affirming that it canceled the participation of the film and would send back the registration fee.

“We have met with Palestinian activists and BDS activists and we discussed the participation of your film in the Seoul Human Rights Film Festival, which is an organization active in the field of human rights,” the message read.

“The topic of the film is very important, but we are working with anti-war organizations and thus we have decided to adopt the viewpoint of BDS,” it added.

Third Person is a film produced by an Israeli channel and about people who are intersex and living in Israel.

April 3, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli military destroys agricultural lands in Gaza

International Solidarity Movement | April 3, 2016

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Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine – At around 9am on Thursday, the 31st March, four Israeli bulldozers entered the Gaza Strip at El Fakhuri. They came in order to destroy agricultural lands located near the border, once again violating the indefinite truce that ended the 2014 Israeli aggression against Gaza.

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Meanwhile more than thirty tanks were located along the fence line, pointing at the Palestinian farmers who kept working on their lands despite the great risk that they face doing so.

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In less than a month the wheat harvest season will start. The families who own land near the border don’t know what will happen then, as no one seems to do anything to stop the systematic aggression. The wheat harvest is vital for the families ability to feed their children.

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April 3, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | 1 Comment

Spain – police issue 40,000 fines in just seven months with new gag laws

Spanish police arrest 40,000 in 7 months with new laws

By Graham Vanbergen | TruePublica | March 26, 2016

In 2012, there were nearly 15,000 demonstrations throughout Spain, amounting to around 40 per day. In 2013, there were 4,500 demonstrations in Madrid alone: an increase of 1,000 from the year before. Protest increased on a par with the continual disintegration of full employment and the implementation of severe austerity programmes accompanied with a lack of government transparency and accusations of corruption at the very highest level.

In April last year, Amnesty International (AI) was clearly getting concerned with how the authorities in Spain were dealing with peaceful public protest in Spain by saying:

“With threats of fines or threats of being beaten, the government is trying to stigmatise and criminalise people who are just practising their rights.”

Amnesty International investigated and discovered that although the vast majority of protesters were indeed peaceful, police treated the protests as riots and the people in them in the same manner as those who incited violence. In many cases, the police had used excessive force to confront protesters. AI’s report entitled Spain: Protests and the suffocating embrace of the law makes for sobering reading.

By June, Spain officially went police state with a series of “gag laws” that effectively criminalised peaceful public protest. Among the many new repressive stipulations was the implementation of €30,000-€600,000 fines for “unauthorised protests,” which can be combined for maximum effect with a €600-€300,000 fine for “disrupting public events.”

This awful set of authoritarian statutes arose from Spain’s position as a flashpoint for anti-austerity protests. The European Union did not want to see a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street movement gaining significant ground in its territorial fiefdom and has allowed breaches of internationally recognised human rights laws to be perpetrated right under its nose. Fines and mistreatment await anyone who refuses to recognise authority with the respect it’s forcibly requiring citizens to demonstrate.

The law also extended its anti-protest punishments to social media, where users can face similar fines for doing nothing more than encouraging or organizing a protest. Failing to present ID when commanded is another fine. And then there’s this:

Showing a “lack of respect” to those in uniform or failing to assist security forces in the prevention of public disturbances could result in an individual fine of between €600 and €30,000.

What could go wrong? The Spanish news outlet eldiario.es filed a request for information which revealed an alarming number of penalties and sanctions issued since the Gag Law, otherwise known as the Public Safety Act, was passed on July 1, 2015.

In the space between July 1st 2015, the date the new laws were enforced and January 28, 2016 police have grabbed the opportunity with both hands and sanctioned or fined 40,000 people for “disrespecting” law enforcement. Some of the numbers include; 6,217 for ‘disrespecting the police”, 3,700 for disobedience to authority and 2,027 for causing public disorder.

“Now the government is judge and jury on a number of violations that were previously in the hands of independent judges,” says Joaquin Bosch, spokesperson for Jueces por la Democracia (Judges for Democracy). Bosch’s critisisms continue – “Article 52 of the law states that the complaint of a police officer constitutes “sufficient evidentiary basis” to take legal action. “In the judicial field, the cop’s word is not enough, it has to be proven.”

Spain is one of the least violent countries in the world but other controversial articles of the law are extended to areas similar to that of totalitarian states. There are penalties just for refusing to provide identification, taking photos of police or other objects that could identify a member of the security forces or for obstructing authority in compliance with administrative or judicial decisions, including people who try to prevent an eviction, for example.

Amnesty International also stated that;

“The excessive use of force by Spanish police and plans to strengthen repressive legislation are a damning indictment of the Spanish government’s determination to crush peaceful protest. The police have repeatedly used batons and rubber bullets against demonstrators, injuring and maiming protestors and by-standers alike. The police act with complete impunity, while peaceful demonstrators and leaders of social movements are continually harassed, stigmatized, beaten, sometimes arrested to face criminal charges, imprisonment and fines.”

And as one peaceful protestor, Ester Quitana said after being hit in the face with a rubber bullet fired by the police – “Due to the impact of the rubber bullet, I have a deformed nasal septum, injuries in my mouth and my ear, and have lost sensation on the left side of my face. I am still under psychological treatment, my daily routine has been affected, as well as the way I am connected with people, how I am seen by them. I’ve been denied any kind of social benefits I have applied for.”

Maria, for protesting against budget cuts was ¢1,000 told AI “They want to destroy the leadership of the movements, and so are seeking out the spokespeople”.

Amnesty International also reports that those unfortunate to become detainees have been ill-treated when taken into police custody and that journalists and photographers covering demonstrations have also reported being the target of police violence. Cameras and equipment have been damaged by police to prevent the documenting of police violence.

Revenue from the sanctions since the new laws were enforced last July has now reached 18.3 million euros.

As the government itself has since recognised, demonstrators committed violence in less than one per cent of the rallies and protests.

In the meantime, the unelected bureaucrats of the European Union, of which Spain is a member state, have looked the other way as has the United Nations, both of whom promote as central to their existence the protection of human rights.

April 3, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Why the Western Elite Love Terror Attacks

By Steven MacMillan | The Analyst Report | March 26, 2016

Instilling fear in the minds of the public has been a powerful tool of social control since the dawn of human civilization. Today, it is clear that the Western elite are using fear and terror as a means of ushering in totalitarian control. The mainstream media has been force-feeding the Western public a steady diet of war, fear and terror since the neocons “new Pearl Harbor event” in 2001.

After the latest terror attack in Belgium, the media is playing its usual role of amplifying the incident beyond any rational comprehension. The majority of the public are caught up in the vortex of emotive propaganda and sensationalist rhetoric. Images of terror; horror; fear; and panic dominate the news landscape. The main message is that you should be afraid.

The only solution to latest crisis (in the eyes of the elite) is for even greater spying powers and totalitarian control. Hillary Clinton, the political prostitute par excellence, called for more surveillance and an expansion of the police state in response to the attacks in Belgium. Both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump support a further erosion of civil liberties and have called for increasing surveillance of Muslims (Trump even advocated torturing terror suspects).

Yet not one political figure has called for prosecuting CIA and other US officials for war crimes, after years of the West openly funding and arming terrorists in Syria. Accountability is what is needed, not authoritarianism.

Every terror attack produces the same response by the elite: more surveillance, more state power, more war, more barbarism and more control. It’s frankly boring. You know what the puppets are going to say prior to them opening their mouths. It was the same response after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, when David Cameron was pushing for greater surveillance powers in the UK and leading the charge for an insane ban on all encryption.

We know that NSA spying has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, and everything to do with controlling the domestic population. In the words of the high-level NSA whistleblower, William Binney: “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”

We know that Western intelligence agencies and their regional allies were instrumental in supporting the rise of ISIS (and other terror groups), by funding and arming these factions in a failed attempt to topple al-Assad. In the words of the former US military intelligence chief, Michael T. Flynn, the Obama administration took the “willful decision” to support the rise of these radical forces.

The criminal Western elite have no intention of winning the ‘war on terror,’ as the ‘war on terror’ was always designed to be perennial. The elite create the terror groups because without the faux ‘war on terror,’ the surveillance state loses the entire pretext on which it was built.

For any totalitarian elite, it is essential that “a state of war should exist,” as Orwell wrote in 1984:

“It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist… The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable situation of survival” (2008 edition: p.200 & p.201).

As the elite create a perpetual state of war, chaos, fear and terror, the people of the West increasingly allow more power to be concentrated in the hands of the ‘superclass.’ If the Western public continues to be duped into believing that this phony ‘war on terror’ is real, the elite will use this as a pretext to completely destroy civil liberties and any semblance of freedom in the West.

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

April 3, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Hillary as President would be Catastrophic for the US and the World

By Steven MacMillan | New Eastern Outlook | April 3, 2016

Beholden to special interests; complicit in US war crimes across the globe; held top secret information on an unsecured home server; incessantly lies (like most politicians); and is married to a man who has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault: the fact that Hillary Clinton is even remotely capable of becoming President of the US is symptomatic of how corrupt and screwed up the US political system actually is.

Puppet on a String

Clinton is the walking, talking definition of a political prostitute, completely controlled by special interests, Israel and the shadow establishment. Since the beginning of 2013, Clinton has received at least $21.7 million for 92 speeches she has given to private organizations and groups. This includes $225,000 from Morgan Stanley; $225,000 from Deutsche Bank; $225,000 from Bank of America; and $675,000 from the Goldman Sachs Group (for three separate speeches). George Soros, the investor, billionaire and regime change extraordinaire, has also put millions into Clinton’s campaign.

Hillary is controlled by the parallel US government, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In 2009, she revealed her relationship with the CFR when she addressed the council at their newly opened outpost in Washington D.C.:

“I have been often to the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”

A look at the corporate membership of the council reveals the level of power vested in such a small amount of hands, with approximately 200 of the most influential corporate players belonging to the group, including: Exxon Mobil Corporation; Goldman Sachs Group; JPMorgan Chase; BP plc; Barclays; IBM; Google Inc; Facebook; Lockheed Martin; Raytheon; Pfizer; Merck & Co; Deutsche Bank AG; Shell Oil Company; and Soros Fund Management.

War Criminal in Chief

Hillary is complicit in numerous crimes and atrocities perpetuated by the US when she was Secretary of State from January, 2009 to February, 2013. One of the most notable examples of this was the belligerent war in Libya in 2011. Clinton played a pivotal role in the NATO intervention which led to the toppling of the Libyan leader, Muammar al- Qaddafi, the destabilization of the country and the exacerbation of “humanitarian suffering.”  

As Alan J. Kuperman, an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, wrote in his 2013 policy brief for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, titled:Lessons from Libya: How not to Intervene:

“NATO’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold, and its death toll at least seven-fold, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If Libya was a ‘model intervention,’ then it was a model of failure.” 

NATO has been repeatedly accused of committing war crimes in Libya, but as we know, there is no accountability for Western imperialism. Many have accused NATO of deliberately bombing civilian targets, including Libya’s water infrastructure. To Hillary (the war hawk) Clinton however, the intervention in Libya was a triumph. She famously remarked that “we came, we saw, he died” (before demonically laughing). 

Arming Al-Qaeda

Clinton was also the Secretary of State during the 2012 Benghazi attack, when militants attacked a US compound in Benghazi, Libya, and a CIA facility nearby, killing four US personnel, including US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens. The failure to protect the compound has been widely written about, but the real story is what the compound was actually involved in. Numerous journalists – including Seymour Hersh – have reported that the compound was a key outpost for a covert operation that involved shipping weapons from Libya to the Syrian rebels who were fighting against Bashar al-Assad. Many reports have accused the US and their allies of covertly sending heavy weapons from the North African country to Syria.

A formerly classified document released by Judicial Watch from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reveals that the White House was at least aware of arms shipments from Libya to Syria, although the document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons (parts of the document are redacted however):

“Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles… The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm]” (DIA Doc).

Clinton was a strong supporter of the ludicrous and nefarious strategy of arming the Syrian rebels, even though US military intelligence was reporting in August 2012 that: “The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [(al-Qaeda in Iraq)], are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” In 2015, Clinton also called for the creation of a no-fly zone in Syria, which as we saw in Libya, would result in the US bombing the Syrian army in a bid to oust al-Assad.

It’s impossible to document Hillary’s crimes without briefly discussing the allegations made against her husband, Bill Clinton. It’s highly ironic that Hillary’s platform for President is largely based on her (supposed) support for women’s rights, yet her husband has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault – Capitol Hill Blue documented some of these allegations. In 1998, Bill even paid Paula Jones $850,000 in an out-of-court settlement to drop a sexual harassment lawsuit against him. Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill of raping her in 1978, also accused Hillary of threatening her if she spoke out.

It’s hard to think of any political figure that has been plagued by so many scandals in recent years. If Hillary is installed as President by the shadow elite, it will not just be catastrophic for the US, but for the entire globe as well.

April 3, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | 2 Comments

UN ‘Turned Blind Eye’ to Horrible Sexual Assaults by Its Peacekeepers

Sputnik – 03.04.2016

Over 100 girls from a province in the Central African Republic claim they were sexually abused by UN peacekeepers, the AIDS-Free World’s campaign Code Blue reported. Co-founder of Code Blue Paula Donovan told Radio Sputnik that the reports are just the tip of the iceberg.

According to Donovan, the United Nations has been deliberately concealing the information about sex crimes committed by peacekeepers for the sake of its reputation, leaving ‘thousands’ of victims without hope.

“The United Nations by being so slow and so secretive and so careful about their reputation, they’re actually culpable in these crimes,” she argued.

Donovan said that documents in the recent case were leaked to her organization by an insider, and that the data they received included correspondence and notes from meetings that imply that the victims were interviewed two weeks before the information was released and that the UN was notified but — for unknown reasons — never informed the civilian population or the governments involved.

“Despite the fact that the Secretary General is saying that he is going to be more transparent, that just doesn’t ring true when he holds back this information and his staff holds back this information for such a long time,” Donovan said.

She accused the UN of creating a culture of impunity where the perpetrators never come to justice and are being released back to the community like there was no crime.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said earlier that the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was “shocked to the core” over the allegations.

“Why in the world would Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon respond to these latest allegations with ‘shock’?” Donovan wondered. “It doesn’t shock any of us who’s been following these stories for the past ten years.”

She asserted that accusations by girls from the Central African Republic, which include such horrible abuses as forced bestiality, are the tip of the iceberg. In fact, UN peacekeepers commit similar crimes in other countries like Liberia or Democratic Republic of Congo, and there are not even hundreds but “thousands” of women and girls who say that “their only interaction with the United Nations has been transactional sex or forced sex by peacekeepers”.

There’s documented evidence of that happening over the past two decades, Donovan claims, and expert teams sent by the Secretary General to assess the situation informed superiors about ‘low morale’ in peacekeeping missions, but the issue was silenced and nothing was done to help the victims and persecute the criminals.

“We’re reading about the Central African Republic because the media… has been shining a spotlight on that one country, and this is indicative of what we would here from other peacekeeping countries if the attention were turned in that direction,” Donavan said.

Dujarric said last week that a UN team was sent to gather data regarding recently reported allegations of sexual assault and exploitation by UN and non-UN forces as well as civilians in Kemo prefecture in past two years.

April 3, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment