Israeli plan to isolate four Palestinian villages from Bethlehem
Palestine Information Center – August 11, 2018
BETHLEHEM – The Israeli occupation government has embarked on carrying out a massive settlement project that will lead to the isolation of four Palestinian villages from Bethlehem in the West Bank as a prelude to annexing them as Israeli state land.
The new plan is aimed at turning the villages of Battir, Wadi Fukin, Nahalin and Husan, which are located in the west of Bethlehem province, into communities under Israel’s sovereignty after isolating them from Bethlehem.
The area where those villages are located is called locally Arqoub villages and there are about 20,000 Palestinian citizens living there.
According to the plan, Israel intends to expand Road 60 that lead to the illegal settlement of Beitar Illit, which was built on annexed land in Bethlehem, and connect it with roads between these villages to make this new expanded road available only for Jewish settlers.
On the ground, Israeli engineers and surveyors started to put up signs and numbers in the heart of Nahalin town to prepare for the plan.
2-minute video about mother and toddler killed in Gaza by Israeli forces
If Americans Knew
On August 9, 2018, Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killed Enas Khammash, 23, and her 18-month-old daughter Bayan. Enas was nine-months pregnant with another daughter, whom she had named Hayat, Arabic for “Life.”
U.S. news media paid little attention to these deaths, rarely even reporting their names.
Virtually all framed their news stories as Israel allegedly “responding” to Palestinian attacks, despite the fact that Israeli forces had first killed two Palestinians in the recent round of violence, and that Israeli forces have killed 172 Gazans in the past four+ months (including children, medics, women, journalists, etc), while Gazan resistance fighters have killed one Israeli (a soldier).
For a list of Palestinians and Israelis killed since 2000, see this Timeline.
For all If Americans Knew Timeline videos see this playlist.
Congress is currently voting on a $28 billion aid package to Israel, which the US media has also failed to inform Americans about. This is the largest such aid package in US history. Learn more here.
May, Hunt silent as UK’s best arms customer kills dozens of children in Yemen bus attack
RT | August 11, 2018
After a Saudi-led attack in Yemen killed and injured dozens of children, the public is again questioning London’s arms sales to Riyadh. Officials have kept silent, helped by the MSM which fails to question the UK’s involvement.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the body count from Thursday’s attack sits at 51, including 40 children. Seventy-nine others were also injured in the attack, 56 of whom were children. It is understood that the bus was bringing children home from a picnic when it was attacked.
According to figures compiled by the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the United Kingdom has supplied the Saudi government with approximately £5 billion (US$6.38 billion) worth of arms – weapons, fighter jets, and even air strike training – since the war in Yemen began in March 2015. The UK government sells more arms to Saudi Arabia than any other country in the world.
Spokesman for the Campaign Against Arms Trade Andrew Smith told RT that “UK fighter jets and bombs have played a central role in the ongoing destruction,” and called for a full investigation “into if UK arms have been used in this appalling bombing.”
Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt took to Twitter to say he was “deeply concerned by reports of yesterday’s attack in Sa’ada, Yemen resulting in tragic deaths of so many children.”
UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and the Foreign Office have issued no statements on the atrocities, and ignored RT when approached for comment. The prime minister’s office refused to accept a list of questions from an RT journalist, or provide an email address for other future queries. Neither the PM, Foreign Secretary, or Foreign Office have provided comment to the media on the Yemen bus attack.
Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry condemned the attacks, and lashed out at the Tory government for “arming and advising a Saudi air force that cannot tell or does not see the difference between a legitimate military target and a bus full of children.”
“It is five months to the day since the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia left London with the fawning praise of Theresa May ringing in his ears, and a renewed commitment from her government to supply the arms to support his disastrous military intervention in Yemen,” Thornberry said on Thursday.
“In those five months, while all sides in this conflict have continued to behave with a wilful disregard for human life, it is the Saudi-led coalition that has inflicted the bulk of civilian casualties… how many more children in Yemen need to be killed by Saudi air strikes or die from malnutrition, cholera or other diseases before Theresa May will stop supporting this catastrophic, murderous war, and start taking action to end it?”
Mainstream media in the United Kingdom have broadly failed to take UK PM Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt to task over the government’s hand in the brutal slaying of the 51 Yemenis killed in the attack. Those on social media, however, were quick to question why such a horrific bombing failed to make more headlines across the mainstream press.
Media pundit George Galloway got straight to the point. “Why isn’t the murder of dozens of children in #Yemen by #Saudi war-planes dropping UK and US bombs creating waves in the media today?”
Other Twitter users highlighted the US-UK government’s complicity in the Yemeni war as a potential reason for the lack of coverage from mainstream outlets: “the UK Govt is providing Saudi Arabia with training, intelligence, logistical support and weapons in their war in Yemen yet the BBC decided not to mention any of this in their report of yesterday’s massacre,” one user said, with another adding: “this is a real, verified #Yemen massacre by a US UK ally, and using US UK arms, it’s receiving almost no US UK front page coverage at all.”
Others who were outraged by the tragic slaughter of the Yemeni bus children, many of whom were under 10 years old, attacked the UK’s state-funded broadcaster, the BBC, for omitting the UK government’s complicity in their coverage.
Some jumped on a viral campaign calling out the BBC for alleged media bias and a lack of impartiality with the hashtag #BBCswitchoff. The campaign, organized to highlight the publicly funded broadcaster’s perceived bias against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, began at 6pm to coincide with the TV station’s news program. The Twittersphere soon jumped on board to spread their frustration with the lack of coverage from the UK’s state broadcaster.
Russia, China nearing alliance conditions
By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | August 10, 2018
The Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi is visiting Moscow on August 14-17 at the invitation of the secretary of the Russian national security council, Nikolai Patrushev to participate in the 14th round of Russian-Chinese consultations on strategic stability. The forthcoming event in Moscow will be closely watched since the two countries are fast nearing a situation of confronting a common ‘enemy’. This is a new experience for both since the halcyon days of the Sino-Soviet alliance in the 1950s.
The mainstream opinion has been that the Sino-Russian comprehensive partnership and cooperation is more the stuff of geopolitical signaling than a strategic alliance. The Western opinion has also been notably skeptical whether such partnership between Russia and China will be sustainable over time due to the growing asymmetry in the two countries’ comprehensive national power. Both premises may be getting outdated by the sheer force of developments.
Curiously, another body of opinion is steadily forming lately whether Russia and China could be actually on the verge of reaching alliance conditions in the rapidly changing global situation characterized by growing tensions in their respective relations with the United States. An essay in the Financial Times this week titled ‘China and Russia’s dangerous liaison’ authored by the daily’s Asia editor (who used to be the Beijing bureau chief previously), Jamil Anderlini, forcefully makes this point.
The writer argues that it is an intelligence blunder of historic proportions that the West is making by “dismissing the anti-western, anti-US alliance that is now forming between Moscow and Beijing.” Anderlini writes:
- This idea that Russia and China can never really be friends is just as wrong and dangerous as the cold war dogma that portrayed global communism as an unshakeable monolith… Their tightening embrace is as much about antipathy towards the US and the US-dominated global order as their rapidly growing common interests… Thanks to its continued rise and obvious ambition to supplant the US, China is a far bigger long-term challenge for America than Russia. No less a figure than Henry Kissinger – the architect of that reconciliation with China in 1972 – has reportedly counselled Donald Trump to pursue a “reverse Nixon-China strategy” by seeking to befriend Moscow and isolate Beijing.
However, the chances of a “reverse Nixon-China strategy” by the US are virtually zero. Even if President Trump is inclined in that direction, the ‘Deep State’ simply won’t allow him a free hand. It is after much effort that NATO has cast Russia in an ‘enemy’ image and anchored a whole new purposive agenda on that platform. Unshackling it can lead to the unraveling of the western alliance system itself. The New York Times today reported that the Washington establishment connived with the US’ NATO allies to present a fait accompli at the recent summit meeting of the alliance in Brussels.
In fact, the Trump administration has just announced plans to create a new Space Force as the sixth branch of its military to prepare for “the next battlefield” to counter Russia and China, which are “aggressively” working to develop anti-satellite capabilities. Announcing this at the Pentagon on August 9, US Vice-President Mike Pence said,
- China and Russia have been conducting highly sophisticated on-orbit activities that could enable them to maneuver their satellites into close proximity of ours, posing unprecedented new dangers to our space systems… We must have American dominance in space, and so we will.
President Trump promptly tweeted, “Space Force all the way!” And this comes soon after the announcement by Washington that it would impose extensive new sanctions against Moscow by August 22, including bans on a wide range of exports, by the end of the month as punishment for the alleged nerve agent attack on former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Britain in March. The State Department has further threatened another wave of sanctions in 3 months’ time, including a lowering of the diplomatic relations with Russia. Without doubt, within a month of the Helsinki summit, US-Russia relations are in free fall once again.
Moscow has strongly reacted. PM Dmitry Medvedev warned on Friday that tightening up of economic sanctions against Russia may be treated as a declaration of economic war, to which Russia will respond with all economic, political and other means possible.
Similarly, China and the US are embroiled in an escalating trade war. On Wednesday, Beijing unveiled a list of US$16 billion worth of American goods it plans to hit with tariffs. This is response to Washington’s announcement the previous day that it would impose 25 per cent tariffs on an equivalent value of Chinese exports. An editorial in the government-owned China Daily on Thursday flagged that “the possibility that the two countries are heading for a prolonged trade conflict has to be faced.”
Clearly, a closer coordination between Russia and China in a concerted strategy to push back at the US will be a key topic at the consultations in Moscow next week. The point is, the quasi-alliance between Russia and China cannot be belittled as ‘geopolitical signaling’ anymore. Just short of a formal military alliance, the two countries are intensifying their cooperation and coordination. In an unusual gesture, Moscow announced well in advance that President Vladimir Putin will be receiving Yang, signaling the high importance that the Kremlin attaches to the strategic consultations with China.
The bottom line is, despite the attempts by American analysts to create dissension in the Sino-Russian relations – by propagating that China poses demographic threat to the Russian Far East; that China is conspiring to militarily seize the Siberian Lebensraum; that China is overshadowing Russia in the Central Asian region, etc. –the attraction of China is only increasing in Moscow’s strategic calculus, thanks to China’s formidable economic firepower (with its nominal GDP set to overtake the Eurozone’s by the end of this year) and China’s rapidly developing technological sophistication.
Of course, Moscow realizes that no significant improvement in the Russian-American relations can be expected either so long as Trump remains in power. To be sure, new directions of Russia-China cooperation will be identified at the talks in Moscow. Read a commentary, here, by a leading Chinese pundit who envisions the Northern Sea Route (which is a key template of Moscow’s Arctic strategies) as an “important component” of China’s Belt and Road initiative, and could be considered as “part of an ambitious strategy to change China’s land and sea connections to Europe and the world.”
New US Anti-Russia Sanctions Made to Head Off Senate-Proposed Sanctions – Expert
Sputnik – August 11, 2018
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that the new sanctions the US plans to introduce might be treated as a declaration of economic war. Radio Sputnik discussed this in detail with independent political analyst Gilbert Doctorow.
Sputnik: What is your take on the statement made by the Russian prime minister? Can the sanctions lead to economic warfare between Moscow and Washington?
Gilbert Doctorow: There’s been a low-grade economic warfare going on for several years ever since the initial introduction of sanctions going back at least two years. The question is what is new here and we really don’t know. The markets reacted severely; the ruble fell drastically. Certain Russian shares like Aeroflot or Sberbank were beaten down five percent and more in the first reactions to the announcement of the United States. But the fact is that the real harm to the Russian economy is coming from the first sanctions. And for the greater sanctions scheduled three months after the introduction, after Russia has proven it is unable to take responsibility for the Skripal poisoning and face the consequences; we may assume that Russia will not admit to having taken part in something that it didn’t participate in. Both the initial sanctions and those that would come in place three months later have not been specified, so to speak about the severity of this particular action by the [US] administration is premature. Nonetheless, I do adhere to one interpretation of what is happening that makes some sense to me: namely, these new sanctions, with respect to the Skripal case, were introduced by the Trump administration to head off what had been described as draconian and genuinely nuclear button sanctions that members of the US Senate have intended to impose on Russia, from a bill introduced by (…) and those sanctions, which genuinely take you to very limits of economic warfare at the level of hostility that very often is jumping off point to armed conflicts, those sanctions would be prevented or sidelined by the more modest sanctions that are announced by the administration. This is the interpretation that I pass on; I think it makes a lot of sense. The level of US-Russian trade has never been very high and that is one of the reasons why it has always been a cheap and easy thing for the American Congress to do – to impose sanctions or otherwise limit Russia’s commercial and foreign policy possibilities in the world by unilateral US action. That always has been very cheap for the United States because the whole volume of bilateral trade has been minimal. The commercial interests of the US and Russia have never been matched in a way that Russia’s interests are matched with the EU and, more recently, with China. If these new sanctions fell on Russia absent any other trade developments or other foreign policy initiatives by the United States’ third parties then one could get very excited about it, but considering that Donald Trump has begun a very bitter trade war with China, with which it has at least $500 billion in trade, possibly to be held ransom to new tariffs up to 25 percent, these sanctions that the United States is considering imposing on Russia such as suspending Aeroflot flights, which only would put Aeroflot in the same status with Delta, since at the moment Aeroflot is the only surviving supervisor of direct air links, or somehow affecting the situation with Sberbank. When you consider the dollar value of these sanctions, they are incredibly small compared to what the United States is doing with China and is threatening to do with the EU in the tariff war. Therefore, you have to put the Russian situation in this broad context of US economic aggression against the rest of the world.
Sputnik: What’s your take on the situation generally?Gilbert Doctorow: It will very much depend on the November mid-term elections in the United States. What we are seeing now from the point of Mr. Trump’s enemies in the Senate, both enemies within his own party and enemies, most obviously, in the Democratic Party, is a scrambling for positions that these respective politicians will place before the electorate for the November elections. If Donald Trump loses control of both Houses of Congress then he will be impeached. If he loses control of one House then we will see a continuing fight between the executive and the legislative over policy towards Russia. Russia is really a political football in the US for the partisans who are playing out their antagonisms and reaching out the electorate to take or to retain control of Congress. The thing to watch is what happens in November. The Russian economy has been preparing for this type of activity for some time and I think that the Russian economy is quite resilient or will find its footing very quickly when the particulars are announced. The Russians have held back, they have been very restrained. I think the thing to look at is at what moment will Russia pull the plug on its delivery of rocket engines to the United States. That is, perhaps, the single most important countermeasure that Russia has to respond to draconian sanctions from the US. If in the current round of Russian countermeasures we don’t see any mention of these rocket engines then you can assume that whatever Mr. Medvedev is saying publically, the Russian government is not taking as a serious threat the America administration’s posturing.
Israeli minister urges assassination of Hamas leaders
Press TV – August 11, 2018
Israeli culture and sport minister has called for the assassination of the leaders of Hamas Palestinian resistance movement, stressing that Israel should reinstate its policy of targeted assassinations.
Miri Regev told a recent meeting of local leaders of Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip that the Palestinian resistance movement’s senior officials should “live in fear”.
“We must go back to the policy of targeted assassinations of leaders of this murderous terrorist group,” she added, referring to Hamas.
Other Israeli politicians likewise called on the Israeli leadership to come down harder on Hamas, which controls Gaza and has defended the enclave against three Israeli wars.
Leader of Israeli party Zionist Union Avi Gabbay, who was visiting the city of Sderot in the west of Negev Desert, was recently quoted by media as saying that Israel had “a strong army and weak politicians,” who would not intensify the regime’s aggression.
The current regime “doesn’t know how to deter a terrorist organization or to negotiate,” he added.
Israel has assassinated many Hamas figures over the past years.
Last March, it assassinated Mazen Fuqaha, one of the group’s senior figures, in Gaza. The victim was shot with four bullets to his head.
In 2010, Israel had itself embroiled in an international scandal when its operatives used false European and Australian passports to assassinate senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in the United Arab Emirates.
Oren Hazan, an Israeli lawmaker from Likud Party, also recently said, “We are not hitting Hamas hard enough for fear of an ongoing conflict, even though we are deep inside one”.
“If we would have hit them, they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to shoot 200 rockets in one day. So enough with the stories that we hit them hard. The public isn’t stupid, and neither is Hamas,” he added.
Besides staying prepared to take the territory under wholesale warfare, Israel regularly strikes Gaza, saying it needs to target Hamas.
Earlier in the week, Israeli raids on the coastal enclave killed three Palestinians who included a pregnant mother and a toddler.
Israel ramped up attacks on March 30, shortly after Gazans began weekly rallies near the territory’s fence in support of their right to return to their homeland.
The demonstrations and Israeli offensives especially hiked on May 14, the anniversary of the Nakba Day in 1948, when Israel claimed existence after a deadly war against Arab territories.
Nearly 160 Palestinians have been killed and some 17,500 others wounded during the Israeli military’s attacks targeting the March of Return protests, the Palestinian Health Ministry says.