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Living by the Gate From Hell

A portrait of nonviolent resistance in one Palestinian village

By Ellen Cantarow
December 9, 2009

Much is heard of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the story of the determined, long-term nonviolent resistance of many Palestinian villagers to the loss of their lands, striking as it may be, is seldom told. Here’s my report from just one village on the West Bank.

At no time since its 1967 West Bank occupation have Israel’s seizures of Palestinian land and water resources seemed as shocking as the ones attending its construction of “the wall,” begun in 2002. Vast, complex, and shifting in form, the wall appears most dramatically as 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the wall illegal, but Israel ignored the ruling. Now, it undulates through the West Bank for over 170 miles, clasping Israel’s major colonies and some minor ones in its embrace. The completed wall will incorporate more than 85 percent of the West Bank’s settler population, a de facto annexation by Israel of significant chunks of the territory it first occupied in 1967. This is the dream of Greater Israel rapidly turned into architecture. For the Palestinians, however, the wall means theft, separating many Palestinian cities and villages from their land and water.

Jayyous, with a population of 3,500, is one of those villages. It lies nestled in a mountainous northern West Bank landscape with the Palestinian city of Qalqilya just to its west. The scenery here remains one of the Mediterranean’s loveliest, a cross, let’s say, between Tuscany and parts of Yugoslavia. Greek and Roman ruins mark the village’s great age. This was one of the West Bank’s most fertile areas. Farming involving a lively variety of nut, citrus, and olive trees, as well as vegetables, flourished around Jayyous, drawing life from abundant underground wells. The aquifers beneath Jayyous and Qalqilya, in fact, constitute a West Bank treasure. Lands belonging to both the city and the village abut Israel’s pre-1967 border – the “Green Line.”

Before the wall’s advent, Qalqilya’s merchants and Israelis did regular business on either side of the border, while Jayyous’ farmers worked their land all the way up to the Green Line. Now, the monstrous, concrete version of the wall surrounds Qalqilya entirely, bringing to mind high-security prisons or ghettoes from other eras. Jayyous is segregated from most of its former land by the wall in what one could call its “barrier” form – a system of steel fences, razor wire, and patrol roads manned by Israeli soldiers.

Four thousand of the village’s olive and citrus trees were uprooted to make way for the wall. All the village’s wells and over 75 percent of the land are now sequestered behind the wall, isolated on its west – that is, “Israeli” – side. A small Israeli settler colony called Zufim sits amid Jayyous’ former wealth. Israeli plans are on the books to build up to 1,500 new housing units on the bounty confiscated from the village. The new units will destroy the only road over which Jayyous’ farmers can now travel to and from their land: there used to be six of these roads. Israel has already blocked five of them.

Sixty-five-year-old Sharif Omar Khalid, known more familiarly as Abu Azzam, has spent half his life struggling to preserve Jayyous’ land. In 1980, with other farmers representing villages throughout the West Bank, he founded the Land Defense Committee, one of 18 organizations that now make up the Stop the Wall campaign. Gifted with stubborn optimism, he counts as victory an Israeli Supreme Court decision in April 2006, which pushed the path of the wall back from the south side of the village. The decision returned 11 percent of Jayyous’ former land – 750 dunams of the 8,600 blocked by the barrier. (A dunam is a little over a quarter of an acre.)

The wall remains, as does one of its most essential parts: the “agricultural gate.” There are two of these on Jayyous’ land – one to the north; another to the south. Almost all of the village’s farmers are forced to use the north gate. Opened by Israeli soldiers for two 45-minute intervals at dawn and dusk, the gate blocks a patrol road manned by the Israelis.

But to get beyond the gate, across the patrol road, and from there to their farmland, Jayyous’ farmers need “visitors’ permits.” Since 2003, Israel has decreed that the villagers are only “visitors” on land they have worked for generations. Obtaining the permits is an excruciating obstacle course that only begins with proof of land ownership. Abu Azzam is one of the village’s major landowners; his title goes back several generations to the time when Jordan occupied the West Bank. Being a known activist, he was periodically denied his permit until the Israeli Supreme Court finally granted him a permanent permit noting that its bearer is a “security problem.” This produces extra problems for him in his daily odyssey to his fields and back.

The Gate From Hell

The first time I saw an “agricultural gate” was in 2004 outside the northern Palestinian village of Mas’ha. It was terrible to behold. Immense steel jaws painted a bright ochre-yellow creaked open, thanks to the Israeli Occupation Forces’ finest, for about 30 minutes at dawn and again at dusk. Between those two moments, it remained locked, leaving the local farmers with no possibility of returning home for lunch or emergencies, nor even for crop-irrigation at the appropriate time (after sundown).

Each opening of the Mas’ha gate permitted a lone farmer, Hani Amer – his home locked in on three sides by the wall and on the fourth by an Israeli settlement – to make sporadic trips to his fields. At both sides of the gate lay coils of razor wire snarled in front of a barrier ditch which stretched into the distance as far as we could see. Beyond this ditch, more razor wire. Then a “military road” meant for Israeli soldiers patrolling the boundaries of an Arab world considered burdensome to the Greater Israel.

Across the military road lay yet more razor wire and another ditch before Hani Amer could finally reach his fields.

To grasp what the gate really means, though, you’d have to stay, as I did, at least a night with a farmer in Jayyous at harvest time. You’d awaken with his wife and him at 5:30 a.m., drink a cup of strong Arabic coffee, eat bread spread with jam made from fruit he grows on the land remaining to him, and then go jolting down the white, rutted, stony road on his tractor. Finally, of course, you would wait with him in a gathering line of farmers at the gate.

Now watch, in the dawn of another day in the forty-second year of occupation, in front of this steel raptor out of some mad filmmaker’s imagination, as they all arrive: one on his tractor, another on a donkey laden with sacks and harvest tools, until finally a long line stands waiting. Note those ubiquitous coils of razor wire, and the ditches, and that military road, just one form of the endless wall that imprisons Palestine’s people. Watch as the soldiers turn languidly and unlock the gate, swinging its jaws wide to transform it, and the military road it bars, into a checkpoint for the brief morning opening.

As I waited and watched from Abu Azzam’s tractor this past October, I imagined the hillside on the other side of the road as it must have been decades ago, when I still reported regularly from the West Bank. The region’s steep hills were then punctuated by lines of drywall terracing that enclosed olive trees whose leaves billowed silver in the wind, and the darker greens of fruit trees and grapevines. The Greater Israel’s new, California-style urban sprawl, its cities that now ooze through the West Bank, were still part of an expansionist dream, not a burgeoning reality, and of course there was no wall, nor a “military road,” nor, of course, an agricultural gate.

Watch now, as each farmer with his donkey, his tractor, his work-tools, approaches the passage between the gaping steel jaws. Watch each as he moves into the military road, brings his donkey to a halt, dismounts, and offers his ID card to a stout, impassive Israeli soldier. Flanked by two other soldiers, he, in turn, calls a control tower rising in the distance and in Hebrew recites each bearer’s name and ID numbers. Take in the stoicism, the resignation, the endurance of these farmers as they accept the indignity of all this because there is no other choice. Think that they are trying to do one simple thing: harvest their olives.

But first each must move into the road, stand with head bowed or eyes averted as his fate is determined for this day, and then, if he’s approved, move forward. Beyond lie more ditches at the other side of the road, more razor wire, and – at last – something that masquerades as freedom but isn’t. The farmer is now permitted to climb the hill in his vehicle. Beyond its crest he may reach his fields, for whose sake he has endured this daily torment.

And now, consider the Israeli settlers and soldiers, whose absolute rule, running the gamut from control over this gate through vigilantism against villagers like those in Jayyous, make a nightmare of this simple thing, the olive harvest. Settlers from Zufim actually uprooted olive trees in Jayyous in 2004. Some were carted away for sale in Israel; sewage from the colony has destroyed others.

A week after my stay, according to the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, Jewish settlers elsewhere in the northern West Bank “clashed with Palestinians picking olives.” The settlers called the farmers trying to bring in their crops a “security” threat because they “could gather intelligence and launch attacks from the olive groves.”

Elsewhere in the area that same week, Israeli security forces stood by as settlers entered a Palestinian village “to hold a brief rally” against the harvest. (Israel’s army is now dominated from top to bottom by ultra-religious-expansionist settlers, which makes a mockery of the “settler-soldier” distinction.) Meanwhile, near an Israeli “outpost” settlement called Adi Ad, settlers “uprooted dozens of olive trees.” As I write, similar alarums reach me by e-mail daily.

Several times since October the Israeli army has imposed curfews on Jayyous – collective punishment for the weekly anti-wall demonstrations staged by village youth here. Most of the time the curfews have been levied after the farmers were already in their fields and haven’t interrupted the harvest. But they have punished the rest of Jayyous. Collective punishment – reprisals against all for the actions of a few – is illegal under the 1949 Fourth Geneva convention.

Keeping Going

“A state gone mad,” observed Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh when, a day after visiting Jayyous, I described the scene at the gate. This particular barrier of steel, these particular patient farmers, those particular soldiers enforcing Israel’s banality of evil – they offer but a taste of the insane ingenuity that is the still-developing Greater Israel. A Dutch filmmaker who had interviewed some West Bank Jewish settlers, related this little exchange to Shehadeh: “What is your dream?” she asked one of the settlers. “My dream,” he replied, “is that my grandchildren will say someday, ‘Here, they say that once upon a time there were Arabs.’”

The evening before we all arose to go to the gate, Abu Azzam took a German visitor and me to see the local olive press where he and other farmers unload each day’s harvest. The sight of Jayyous’ olives moving up a conveyor belt and into the press, finally to emerge as a stream of oil bottled in large plastic containers, was joyous. Children ran and slid about on the slick floor, laughing; their parents dipped bread for them in the delicious, freshly pressed oil. What human madness would inflict constant torment on such peaceful labor?

Later, Abu Azzam told me stories about his life as an activist, his marriage, and his children. Jailed by Jordan for belonging to the Communist Party and later by Israel for his attempts to preserve the village land, he says he can’t imagine anything but keeping going. “I have no other choice” is the way he puts it, with a shrug and a smile.

He recalled the moment back in October 2003 as the wall was being built, when an Israeli official tried to buy off the Jayyous activists by offering them 650 permits which would have allowed that many farmers to access their land. But the Land Defense Committee made “a team decision” not to use them. Accepting the permits would have meant recognizing the validity of the wall and the whole system of dispossession that went with it. Israeli soldiers closed the gate; it was the height of the olive, guava, and clementine harvests. Abu Azzam and other farmers cut gaps in the barrier and crept through to work their fields “without a tractor, without horses, without carriages, without anything. Only our bodies.”

More arrests followed. The farmers made a decision to stay on their land and not return to the village. “My wife was very angry,” Abu Azzam recalls. “She called me on Oct. 21 asking me, ‘Are we divorced? Are we separated?’ I said, ‘I’m resisting.’ ‘Resisting? Can you see one box of guavas, cucumbers, or tomatoes?’ ‘Enough, to be on the land is resistance,’ I said.”

Since 2003 Abu Azzam and other Jayyous farmers have continued their obdurate odyssey to their lands. This determination to keep farming on the 3,250 dunams – of an original 8,050 – that the villagers still have, rather than live elsewhere in the West Bank or abroad is itself resistance. In Palestine, this “just staying” is called samid. It means “the steadfast,” “the persevering,” and eloquently expresses the oldest form of Palestinian nonviolent resistance.

“You have so many problems,” I said to Abu Azzam. “Would you ever leave?” He smiled at me indulgently. “All our life is a problem. I don’t want to be a new refugee. I am against the emigration that took place through the Israelis.”

Since 2008, Jayyous’ young people have staged weekly demonstrations against the wall. One of their leaders – Mohammed Othman – was arrested by Israeli authorities this past fall when he returned from a speaking tour in Norway. He is still in jail under indefinite administrative detention.

Jayyousi leaders have also written to high officials in Norway and Dubai imploring them to divest from companies owned by the Uzbekistan-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. In doing so, Jayyous joins growing international revulsion at, and refusal to deal with, Leviev’s companies. Their reach is vast and diverse, extending to Angola’s diamond mines, New York real estate, and Israeli settlements in whose planning and building (including Zufim) they are heavily involved. Last March, Ha’aretz’s Barak Ravid reported that the British embassy in Tel Aviv “stopped negotiations to lease a floor in Africa-Israel’s Kirya Tower because of the [Leviev-owned] company’s involvement in settlement construction.” Oxfam has severed ties with him for the same reason.

On Sept. 9, 2009, a month before my arrival, the Israeli Supreme Court handed down a new ruling moving the route of the wall again and returning an additional 2,448 dunams to Jayyous. “Because of your efforts?” I asked Azzam.

“It is because of Jayyous,” he replied. “It is a group struggle.”

Ellen Cantarow, a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications, and was anthologized by the South End Press. This essay is part of a series on Palestinian nonviolent resistance, “Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape.”

Note: Another of Cantarow’s Palestinian portraits can be read by clicking here. A comprehensive UN account of Israel’s wall can be found by clicking here [.pdf].

Copyright 2009 Ellen Cantarow – Source

December 9, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Amira Hass: Two state solution died in 1993

Israel has made settlers of all its citizens

By Amira Hass, Haaretz
December 9, 2009

Would any of the settlers who opposed the Civil Administration inspectors this week be living in the territories had the governments of Israel not established and encouraged them? Would the Gush Katif evacuees have moved to mobile homes in Ariel in the expectation of spacious permanent housing had the government clearly declared that this was forbidden – because the settlements will be evacuated in the near future for a peace agreement – and that evacuation-compensation money would not be paid to anyone who moves to the West Bank?

Do the settlers clashing with the forces of law and order not know that those who have committed crimes – from racist threats and blocking roads, to wholesale cutting down of trees, arson and beating and murdering Palestinians – have not been investigated or have been forgiven and forgotten with a wink?

The settlers’ feeling of betrayal is natural. Haven’t the state and its institutions taught us that the settler is superior to everyone else?

Yes. The settler, in fact, is us.

The freeze orders will not change what exists now: an elite state for Jews and a sub-space for Palestinians – truncated, cut up, asphyxiated.

The distinction in the mind nowadays between the state of Israel and the settlers is artificial.

So is the distinction between the bad and the good, the violent and the law-abiding, the residents of the Migron outpost and the residents of Etzion Bloc settlements and the territories that have been annexed to Jerusalem, or those who live to the West of the separation fence.

Those who laud the freeze orders are thinking about relations with the United States.

The subordinated and occupied do not factor into their calculations. And indeed the land that was stolen from them in Beit Jala (for the benefit of Gilo) is like the land of Qalqilyah that Alfei Menashe coveted and is coveting.

The legitimacy of the settlement blocs exists only in the Israeli consensus. In reality, it is these blocs and Ma’aleh Adumim that are destroying the chance of a fair peace, because they and their separated roads are laying the groundwork for a crippled Palestinian political entity.

There is a lot of ingratitude in the media assault on the settlers, who have been manning barricades for the sake of a reality from which many Israelis are benefiting and accept as natural.

Had the governments of Israel been interested in containing the Golem they had created on time, they would not have cynically exploited the Oslo agreement to accelerate building and lure more and more Israelis with settlers’ benefits.

Former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would have evacuated the Hebron and Kiryat Arba settlers after the massacre Baruch Goldstein committed in the Tomb of the Patriarchs / Ibrahimi Mosque.

His government and subsequent governments would not have strangled Bethlehem with the Tunnels Road and with the “moderate” settlement of Efrat that snakes and twists along the hills.

They would have prepared the public for a just scenario by which to bring all the settlers back home and would have apologized for having lured them to transgression.

However, in 1993 we missed a one-time opportunity to develop as an entity, the aim of which is not territorial expansion at the expense of another people – who were prepared for very painful concessions for the sake of its independence and for the sake of peace.

We missed an opportunity to expel the deed of disposession from our state’s institutional and mental chromosomes.

It is no wonder the setters are saying there is no difference between Kibbutz Baram and Psagot, between Givat Shaul and Alon Moreh.

Precisely in the shadow of diplomatic negotiations, Israel chose a policy of accelerated settlement in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

It is expelling Palestinian inhabitants from their homes there by various methods.

In this way, Israel is drawing a straight line between Kiryat Shmona and Beit El, between Tel Aviv and Givat Ze’ev. It has made settlers of us all.

December 9, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Big Oil Behind Copenhagen Climate Scam

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
December 7, 2009

The big irony behind top globalists descending on Copenhagen in luxury private jets and stretch limos is not just the fact that their own behavior completely contradicts their self-righteous hyperbole about CO2 emissions, but that their propaganda is vehemently supported by the very same big oil interests they accuse climate skeptics of pandering to.

Probably one of the most flagrant examples of climate cronyism to emerge from the climategate scandal were emails in which CRU scientists, the body that provides much of the foundational global warming data for the UN IPCC, discuss how they conducted meetings with Shell Oil in order to enlist them as a “strategic partner” while getting them to bankroll pro-man made global warming research.

The emails reveal that the CRU was also trying to get money from oil giants British Petroleum and Exxon-Mobil, under its former identity as Esso.

“Now who is the shill for Big Oil again?” asks Anthony Watts. “Next time somebody brings up that ridiculous argument about skeptics, show them this.”

A  “Copenhagen Communiqué” put out by leaders of over 500 global corporations in advance of this week’s summit calls for drastic measures on behalf of developed countries to “de-carbonise their economies” – a move that would completely devastate living standards and lead to gargantuan levels of unemployment.

The communiqué also demands that a global carbon tax be implemented via a carbon trading system. Bear in mind that the very people calling for such a system are the same people who will benefit from it to the tune of billions, as we shall explore later.

The statement calls for, “Measures to deliver a robust global greenhouse gas emissions market in order to provide the most effective, efficient and equitable emission reductions. It would be comprised of a growing series of national or regional “cap-and-trade” markets linked together, in which the “caps” are brought down in line with the targets that have been adopted for emission reduction.”

The document also states that CO2 emissions need to be reduced by a staggering 50-85% by 2050, a process that would return humanity to a near stone age level of development.

And who are the radicals calling for such severe measures in the name of fighting the evil life giving gas that humans exhale and plants breathe? Greenpeace? Al Gore?

Namely – James Smith, chairman of UK Shell Oil, Tony Hayward, Group Chief Executive, British Petroleum, along with hundreds of other global corporate giants, many of whom are directly tied in with big oil, and central banks who, far from bankrolling climate change skeptics, are directly invested in the scam of human-induced global warming.

A common charge leveled against global warming skeptics is that they are on the payroll of transnational oil companies, when in fact the opposite is true, oil companies are amongst the biggest promoters of climate change propaganda, emphasized recently by Exxon Mobil’s call for a global carbon tax.

According to Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, the cap and trade nightmare being primed for passage in the Senate doesn’t go far enough – Tillerson wants a direct tax on carbon dioxide emissions, essentially a tax on breathing since we all exhale this life-giving gas.

In a speech earlier this year, Tillerson brazenly called out the cap and trade agenda for what it was, an effort to impose a carbon tax camouflaged only by a slick sales pitch and deceptive rhetoric.

“It is easier and more politically expedient to support a cap-and-trade approach, because the public will never figure out where it is hitting them,” said Tillerson. “They will just know they hurt somewhere in their pocketbook,” he added, pointing out that he disagreed with this convoluted method of introducing a carbon tax, arguing instead that it would be more successful to openly propose a straight carbon tax.

Tillerson firmly expressed Exxon’s support for climate change alarmists in stating, “I firmly believe it is not too late for Congress to consider a carbon tax as the better policy approach for addressing the risks of climate change.”

Exxon’s push for a carbon tax was subsequently restated by its vice president for public affairs Ken Cohen, who told a conference call that he wants a climate policy that creates “certainty and predictability, which is why we advocate a carbon tax.”

Exxon Mobil and their ilk are not concerned about a carbon tax eating into their profits because they know they won’t have to pay it – the tab will be picked up by the ignorant taxpayer at the fuel pump at an inflated cost which if anything will hand the transnational oil cartels an even bigger cut.

Ideologically, Al Gore and Exxon Mobil are on exactly the same page – the only difference between the oil companies and global warming alarmists is the squabble over who will get to sink their teeth into the taxpayer and reap the dividends of the climate change scam.

Whereas parasites like Al Gore and Maurice Strong, the people who own the very carbon trading systems they claim will save the earth from CO2 emissions, want to enrich themselves to the tune of billions under a cap and trade scheme where they take a percentage of each transaction, the oil companies want to bypass this completely by simply imposing a direct CO2 tax. The consequence for the taxpayer under either scenario will be exactly the same, and the profits under both schemes would go towards filling the coffers of the global government that will enforce the whole scam.

Emphasizing again that oil companies are firmly behind the idea of man-made climate change and the introduction of a CO2 tax, in 2007 the Trilateral Commission, one of the three pillars of the new world order in alliance with Bilderberg and the CFR, met in near secrecy to formulate policy on how best they could exploit global warming fearmongering to ratchet up taxes and control over how westerners live their lives.

At the confab, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger and chairman of British Petroleum Peter Sutherland, gave a speech to his elitist cohorts in which he issued a “Universal battle cry arose for the world to address “global warming” with a single voice.”

Echoing this sentiment was General Lord Guthrie, director of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, member of the House of Lords and former chief of the Defense Staff in London, who urged the Trilateral power-brokers to “Address the global climate crisis with a single voice, and impose rules that apply worldwide.” Rules that no doubt will benefit the Rothschild family empire due to their personal ownership of a huge chunk of the carbon trading market.

Allegations that skeptics of the man-made explanation behind global warming are somehow doing the bidding of the elite are laughable in the face of the fact that Rothschild operatives and the very chairman of British Petroleum are the ones orchestrating an elitist plan to exploit global warming fears in order to achieve political objectives.

During the 2007 meeting, elitists along with oil industry kingpins called for imposing a $1 dollar per gallon tax at the fuel pump under the justification of fighting pollution and climate change.

Globalists love global warming. Oil industry kingpins, Bilderbergers and Rothschild minions have all put their weight behind it. This is a fraud conceived, nurtured and promulgated by elites, and to castigate individuals for merely questioning the motives behind climate change fearmongering by accusing them of being mouthpieces for the establishment is a complete reversal of the truth.

Claims by climate change alarmists that “deniers” are all funded by oil companies is yet another crudely contrived hoax. In reality, oil companies are the most vocal proponents of man-made climate change and the most aggressive in pushing to tax CO2 emissions.

December 7, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Deception, Economics, Environmentalism | Leave a comment

What the U.S. Elite Really Thinks About Israel

Surprising Results of CFR Survey

By JEFFREY BLANKFORT
December 7, 2009
The Council on Foreign Relations is always near the top of the Left’s list of bogeymen that stand accused of pulling the strings of US foreign policy. It is right up there with the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, right? Wrong. If that was the case,  those arguing that US support for Israel is based on it being a “strategic asset”  will have a hard time explaining a Pew Research Center survey on America’s Place in the World, taken of 642 CFR members between October 2 and November 16. The Pew poll  not only reveals that the overwhelming majority, two-thirds of the members of this elite foreign policy institution, believes that the United States has gone overboard in favoring Israel, it doesn’t consider Israel to have have much importance to the US in the first place.

What can be concluded from the answers to questions that dealt with the Israel-Palestine conflict is that the general public forms its opinions from what it hears and reads in the mainstream media which are largely biased towards Israel while CFR members have greater access to as well as interest in obtaining more accurate information and are less susceptible to pro-Israel propaganda. That apparently not a single US newspaper saw fit to report on the opinions of CFR members, under those circumstances, is not surprising. The evidence:

(1) That on a list of countries that will be the “more important as America’s allies and partners” in the future, just 4 per cent included Israel which placed it in a tie with South Korea and far behinf China, 58 per cent, India, 55 per cent, Brazil,37 per cent, the EU, 19 per cent, Russia, 17 per cent, Japan, 16 per cent, the UK and Turkey, 10 per cent, Germany, 9 per cent, Mexico, 8 per cent, Canada, Indonesia, Australia and France at 5 per cent. CFR voters were allowed to make up to seven selections.(Q19)

(2) When asked which countries would be less important to the US, Israel, at 9 per cent  was behind 22 countries including Canada and Mexico and in the region Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.(Q20)

(3) What was particularly revealing is that “in the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians,” only 26 per cent of the CFR sided with Israel, compared with 51 per cent of 2000 members of the general public who were polled over the same period. While but 16 per cent of CFR members sided with the Palestinians compared to 12 per cent of the public, 41 per cent of the CFRers sided with “both equally” as opposed to 4 per cent of the public. Supporting neither was 12 per cent of the CFR and 14 per cent of the public. (Q33)

(4) That the CFR has not had a major hand in making US Israel-Palestine policy nor is it in agreement with those who did is strikingly revealed by the response of its members when asked their opinion of US Middle East policies. The problem, according to 67 per cent of CFR members (as compared to 30 per cent of the public) is that the US favored Israeli too much, while only 2 per cent (as opposed to 15 per cent of the public) believed that US policy overly favored the Palestinians.. Twenty-four percent of the CFR believed US policy “struck the right balance” as did 29 per cent of the public. (Q34)

(5) The overwhelming majority of CFR members, 69 per cent, think that Pres.Obama is “striking the right balance” between the Israelis and Palestinians as compared with a slim majority, 51 per cent of the public. Thirteen percent of the CFR believes that Obama is “favoring Israel too much,” as compared with 7 per cent of the public, while 12 per cent thinks he is siding with the Palestinians, a position taken by 16 per cent of the public. (Q35)

Regarding Iran, one detects the same gap between the CFR and the public. Whereas a 64 per cent-34 per cent majority of the polled CFR members see Iran as a major threat to US interests, compared with a 72-20 per cent per cent  majority of the public, only 33 per cent of the CFR  would support an attack on Iran should it get a nuclear weapon as contrasted  with 63 per cent of the public. (Q7) […]

The entire Pew survey can be viewed here:
http://people-press.org/reports/questionnaires/569.pdf

Jeffrey Blankfort is a long-time pro-Palestinian activist and a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He an be contacted at jblankfort@earthlink.net

Source

December 7, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Honduran Elections Exposed

Video Documentary
Real News Network
December 7, 2009

December 7, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Is President Obama an Enemy of the Jews?

By Sami Jamil Jadallah • Dec 7th, 2009 at 9:31 

obama aipac

Even before he was elected president, Barack Obama faced relentless and vicious attacks of mainstream American Jewish organizations and leadership with claims of being Muslim in secret, of lacking the born American credential among many other claims, including being anti-Israel even though as a senator he was one of the most ardent supporters of Israel and always voted in favor of Israel on all bills drafted by AIPAC and passed by the US Senate.

I think it is necessary here to inform the readers that the Jewish community and leadership of Chicago were the early sponsors and mentors for then local politician Obama, with Penny Pritzker of the “Hyatt Hotels” as key supporters together with Joan Harris-Leading the well known Chicago philanthropists, Lestor Crown of the Jewish Federation, David Axelrod who managed Obama’s win of the White House to the president’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, the son of an Israeli member of the Jewish terrorist group “Irgun”, in addition to key support from Hollywood moguls the likes of Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffery Katzenberg, and not withstanding the testimony of Alon Pinkas of the Jerusalem Post  “Obama’s voting record on issues pertaining to Israel is impeccable” to be seconded by Haaretz US correspondent Shmuel Rosner “Obama supports Israel, period”.

This attack continued after his election and recently this attack became more and more vicious after his speech in Cairo and after his demands  (which he quickly withdrew and retreated from) that Israel freeze its programs of settlements building in Palestinian occupied territories.  Such attacks are spearheaded by senior members of Netanyahu’s Likud party and their supporters and influential and powerful sponsors in the in the United States among mainstream Jewish leadership and organizations, whose power and influence go beyond formulations of US foreign policy and goes to domestic issues through the stranglehold they have over members of Congress.

Israel officials like Minister Limor Livnat labeled Obama’s administration as “terrible”, with Yossi Naim head of the Beit Aryeh regional council threatening Obama with his declaration ”I announce to you Obama: You won’t be able to stop us”.  With many leading Israeli and American Jewish leaders charging that Obama by his calls for freezing Israeli settlements is promoting “ethnic cleansing of Jews and jeopardizing Israeli security”. It seems Israeli security is built on land theft.

The Jewish settlers’ leadership and their political and financial sponsors within mainstream American Jewish community and in Congress are spearheading the anti-Obama campaign.  An American Jewish leadership and community that is never grateful to the United States for half of century of political, military, financial and legal support that enabled Israel to commit the kinds of crimes it is committing on a daily basis since the ‘67 War, committing war crimes in Gaza and in Lebanon, with the use of cluster and phosphorous bombs on civilian targets and using American-supplied weapons to bomb and kill civilian targets, with the United States providing the Veto power that so far has enabled Israel to get away with murder and violations of international and humanitarian laws.

Not only does the United States provide political and legal cover for Israeli crimes, it also allows and in fact supports the illegal settlements and criminal settlers through tax exemptions of American Jewish organizations, groups, individuals even synagogues that fund the criminal and terrorist activities of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and in East Jerusalem.  One of the key Israeli organizations that receives US tax exempt funds is “The Task Force to Save the Nation and the Land” which gave cash awards of NIS 20,000 to each Israeli soldier who lifted signs that read, ”The Shimshon Battalion does not evict from Homesh” a month ago at the Western Wall, gave NIS 1,800 to solider Tzach Kortz for shooting a Palestinian near Kiryat Arba and that gives NIS 1,000 each day to every soldier who publicly demonstrates their opposition to Israeli evacuations from the West Bank, gives NIS 1,000 for each day soldiers spend in military prisons for disobeying orders of military commanders that comes to dealing with Jewish settlers. The list goes on and on with hundreds of American Jewish groups, rich and powerful business leaders supporting the Israeli Jewish settlers’ movements and the crimes and terror they commit on a daily basis against the people of Al-Khalil/Hebron, against Palestinian towns and villages burning and uprooting centuries-old olive trees, poisoning water wells and killing of livestock, not to mention killing and murdering of Palestinian villagers.  This is in contrast to the microscopic scrutiny that mosques, Muslim and Arab charities are subjected to on a daily basis from US law enforcement agencies.

The failure of the United States government to enforce its laws related to export of and use of American weapons against civilian targets and its failure to look into and revoke the tax exemption statutes of many of the American Jewish organizations that actively support and fund Jewish terrorism in Palestinian territories shows that President Obama is not an enemy of the Jews but a very good friend of Israel and its criminal policies in the Occupied Territories, otherwise he could order his attorney general to look into and investigate funding of Jewish settlers’ groups and organizations, perhaps issue executive orders that revoke tax exemption status of American Jewish organizations that fund and sponsor Jewish terrorism.

However all of that support by the Obama’s administration is never enough to satisfy power and political greed of the American Jewish leadership and community. They have succeeded in derailing the nomination of Chaz Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council citing his “anti-Israeli leanings” and now are after former senator Chuck Hagel as President Obama’s intelligence aid and his lack of being pro-Israel. It seems and in the words of Natsha Mozgovaya writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Every appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community”.  That is the way it is in the United States, what really counts are Israel and the American Jewish community and the hell with the United States and its national and security interests. The litmus tests of public service in the United States is not loyalty to the US or long-term service but loyalty to Israel and its supporters in the United States, supporters and sponsors who corrupted our election laws and financing, corrupted both the executive and Legislative branch and are now on the way to corrupting the judicial branch and perhaps undermining and corrupting the soul of our nation’s strength; the United States Constitution.

Source

December 7, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

All I want for Christmas is an end to apartheid – Top ten brands to boycott

December 6, 2009

Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid

While there are many Israeli and multinational companies that benefit from apartheid, we put together this list to highlight ten specific companies to target. Many of these produce goods in such a way that directly harms Palestinians — exploiting labor, developing technology for military operations, or supplying equipment for illegal settlements. Many are also the targets of boycotts for other reasons, like harming the environment and labor violations.

  1. AHAVA
    This brand’s cosmetics are produced using salt, minerals, and mud from the Dead Sea — natural resources that are excavated from the occupied West Bank. The products themselves are manufactured in the illegal Israeli settlement Mitzpe Shalem. AHAVA is the target of CODEPINK’s “Stolen Beauty” campaign.
  2. Delta Galil Industries
    Israel’s largest textiles manufacturer provides clothing and underwear for such popular brands as Gap, J-Crew, J.C. Penny, Calvin Klein, Playtex, Victoria’s Secret (see #10) and many others. Its founder and chairman Dov Lautman is a close associate of former Israeli President Ehud Barak. It has also been condemned by Sweatshop Watch for its exploitation of labor in other countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey.
  3. Motorola
    While many of us know this brand for its stylish cellphones, did you know that it also develops and manufactures bomb fuses and missile guidance systems? Motorola components are also used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) and in communications and surveillance systems used in settlements, checkpoints, and along the 490 mile apartheid wall. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has launched the “Hang Up on Motorola” campaign.
  4. L’Oreal / The Body Shop
    This cosmetics and perfume company is known for its investments and manufacturing activities in Israel, including production in Migdal Haemek, the “Silicon Valley” of Israel built on the land of Palestinian village Al-Mujaydil, which was ethnically cleansed in 1948. In 1998, a representative of L’Oreal was given the Jubilee Award by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for strengthening the Israeli economy.
  5. Dorot Garlic and Herbs
    These frozen herbs that are sold at Trader Joe’s are shipped halfway around the world when they could easily be purchased locally. Trader Joe’s also sells Israeli Cous Cous and Pastures of Eden feta cheese that are made in Israel. QUIT, South Bay Mobilization, and other groups have targeted Trader Joe’s with a “Don’t Buy into Apartheid” campaign.
  6. Estee Lauder
    This company’s chairman Ronald Lauder is also the chairman of the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-governmental organization that was established in 1901 to acquire Palestinian land and is connected to the continued building of illegal settlements. Estee Lauder’s popular brands include Clinique, MAC, Origins, Bumble & Bumble, Aveda, fragrance lines for top designers, and many others. They have been the target of QUIT’s “Estee Slaughter Killer Products” campaign.
  7. Intel
    This technology company that manufactures computer processors and other hardware components employs thousands of Israelis and has exports from Israel totaling over $1 billion per year. They are one of Israel’s oldest foreign supporters, having established their first development center outside of the US in 1974 in Haifa. Al-Awda (the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition) has urged action against Intel for building a facility on the land of former village Iraq Al Manshiya, which was cleansed in 1949.
  8. Sabra
    This brand of hummus, baba ghanoush and other foods is co-owned by Israel’s second-largest food company The Strauss Group and Pepsico. On the “Corporate Responsibility” section of its website, The Strauss Group boasts of its relationship to the Israeli Army, offering food products and political support.
  9. Sara Lee
    Sara Lee holds a 30% stake in Delta Galil (see #2) and is the world’s largest clothing manufacturer, which owns or is affiliated with such brands as Hanes, Playtex, Champion, Leggs, Sara Lee Bakery, Ball Park hotdogs, Wonderbra, and many others. Similar to L’Oreal (see #4), a representative of Sara Lee received the Jubilee Award from Netanyahu for its commitment to business with Israel.
  10. Victoria’s Secret
    Most of Victoria’s Secret’s bras are produced by Delta Galil (see #2), and much of the cotton is also grown in Israel on confiscated Palestinian land. Victoria’s Secret has also been the target of labor rights’ groups for sourcing products from companies with labor violations, and by environmental groups for their unsustainable use of paper in producing their catalogues. That’s not sexy!

Remember, it’s also important to let these companies — and the stores that sell them — know that we will not support them as long as they support Israeli apartheid!

Source

December 7, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

Bedouins in Israel denied elections

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

  • December 07. 2009 12:53AM UAE

Bedouins have to live in makeshift housing without electricity or water because the Israeli authorities do not officially recognise their communities in the Negrev desert. Ariel Schalit / AP

NAZARETH, ISRAEL // About 35,000 Bedouin residents of Israel’s southern Negev have been denied the right to hold their first local council election after the Israeli parliament passed a law at the last minute to cancel this month’s ballot.

The new law gives the government the power to postpone elections to the regional council, known as Abu Basma, until the interior ministry deems the local Bedouin ready to run their own affairs.

Legal and human rights groups say the move is an unprecedented violation of Israel’s constitutional principles. Taleb a-Sana, a Bedouin member of Israel’s parliament, has written to its speaker warning that “it is not possible to have democracy without elections”.

The vote in Abu Basma was scheduled to take place six years after the council was established under the transitional authority of a panel of mostly Jewish officials appointed by the interior ministry.

Critics say the government changed the law specifically to avoid bolstering the position of the Bedouin residents, who are engaged in a legal battle with the state for the return of ancestral lands confiscated decades ago.

“The Bedouin have a claim on a large area of the Negev and the government wants someone ruling the council who is on its side until the case is settled to the state’s advantage,” said Thabet Abu Ras, who was head of an empowerment scheme for Abu Basma’s residents until 2007.

The residents of Abu Basma are among 90,000 Bedouin in the Negev desert who have been denied any local representation since Israel’s founding in 1948. For most of that time the state has refused to recognise any of their villages.

According to officials, the Bedouin are living illegally on state land and must move to a handful of locations in the Negev approved by the government.

Bedouin leaders counter that their villages predate Israel’s creation and that the approved locales are so tightly confined that they cannot maintain their traditional pastoral way of life.

Israel has faced mounting criticism for its treatment of the 45 so-called “unrecognised villages”, which are denied all public services, including electricity and water. The inhabitants are invariably forced to live in tents or tin shacks because concrete homes are subject to demolition.

Instead, since the 1970s Israel has established a half dozen “townships”, to which the Bedouin in the unrecognised villages were expected to relocate. But the townships, whose rates of unemployment and poverty are the highest in the country, have attracted only half of the Negev’s 180,000 Bedouin, mostly those without any claim to land.

In what many Bedouin hoped was a change of tack, however, the government of Ariel Sharon launched a plan in 2003 to begin a process of recognising nine of the larger villages, home to 35,000 Bedouin.

They were grouped into a new regional council called Abu Basma, with the goal of encouraging the inhabitants of the other unrecognised villages to move into its jurisdiction.

Under the regional councils law, the interior ministry was allowed to appoint a panel of officials to oversee local services for four years while the residents prepared to run the authority themselves, said Gil Gan-Mor, a lawyer with the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).

He added that the interior ministry then sought, under extraordinary powers, two year-long extensions. But shortly before the deadline for staging elections was reached this month, the government pushed through an amendment to postpone elections indefinitely.

“The aim is to continue controlling the lives of the Bedouin, treating them as though they cannot look after themselves.”

ACRI and another group, Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority, will challenge the law in the Supreme Court next month.

Alaa Mahajneh, a lawyer with Adalah, said the regional council’s current panel was dominated by Jewish officials and headed by Amram Kalaji, a former director general of the interior ministry identified with the right-wing Orthodox religious party Shas.

Mr Abu Ras, a geography professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, said it was impossible to separate the postponement of the elections from the wider issue of Bedouin land claims.

Abu Basma is the only one of 47 regional councils in Israel that does not have territorial continuity, he said. “The council’s jurisdiction is restricted to the built-up area of each village and does not include the lands between the villages or the surrounding land. Despite the Bedouin way of life, Abu Basma has not been allocated any agricultural areas.”

He added that the chief concern of Israeli officials, although unspoken, was that the Abu Basma region was the only territorial buffer between the West Bank and Gaza. “If there is a Palestinian state, Israel does not want the Bedouin controlling lands that connect those two Palestinian territories. It would rather the Bedouin were concentrated in as small a space as possible.”

According to Nili Baruch, an Israeli planner, Abu Basma has been starved of land compared to its Jewish counterparts. Its jurisdiction extends to only 3,400 hectares, making it the most densely populated regional council in the country.

By contrast, the 10 other regional councils in Israel’s south – home to a total of 45,000 Jews – have jurisdiction over a vast swath of rural land, nearly 1.2 million hectares.

Yeela Ranaan, a lecturer at Sapir College in Sderot and spokeswoman for the Regional Council for the Unrecognised Villages, an unofficial Bedouin advocacy group, said the creation of Abu Basma had been a “partial victory”.

Recognition meant those homes of Bedouin living in the centre of the villages were no longer under threat of destruction, roads could be paved, and schools opened, she said. But the planning process in all the villages was stalled and land claims were not being addressed.

The Bedouin’s land dispute with the government is more than 80,000 hectares. Mr Abu Ras said he believed the government hoped to force an evacuation of all the unrecognised villages over the next three years, forcing the inhabitants into the already confined areas available to Abu Basma.

Tal Rabina, a spokesman for Abu Basma council, said the criticism that Bedouin rights had been violated by the law change reflected a “political agenda”.

“At this stage, when there are still many disputes between villages and families, most of the residents prefer that someone outside the community makes decisions. The current leadership brings a great deal of experience and professionalism to the task.”

foreign.desk@thenational.ae

December 7, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

Exit polls predict landslide victory for Morales

Press TV – December 7, 2009 01:23:31 GMT
Exit polls predict that Evo Morales (C) has won 61 percent of the vote in the Bolivian presidential election.

Three exit polls predict that Bolivian President Evo Morales has won a landslide re-election victory with an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote.

His main rival, Manfred Reyes Villa, the candidate of the Progress Plan Party, trailed with around 23 percent of the vote in Sunday’s presidential election.

The exit polls conducted by private TV networks ATB, Uno, and PAT indicate that Morales has a 38 percentage point lead over his closest challenger.

The victory would give him a second term as president and authority to push on with leftist reforms that already include limiting the size of landholdings, nationalizing the energy and telecommunications sectors, and empowering downtrodden indigenous communities.

Morales’ Movement for Socialism will also take control of the Senate, which was the last bastion of the opposition, according to the exit polls.

As per Bolivian law, the winner should garner more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a second round and can also win if he takes 40 percent and holds a 10-point lead.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

Yahoo Sells User’s Private Email Contents to U.S. Agencies

Mathaba
December 5, 2009

Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides to “law enforcement” and spy agencies has leaked onto the web.

After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked an FOIA Freedom of Information release of its “law enforcement and intelligence price list”, someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo company’s spying guide to the whistleblower web site Cryptome.org.

The 17-page guide, which Yahoo has tried to suppress via legal letters to the Cryptome.org site run by freedom of information champion John Young, describes Yahoo’s policies on keeping the data of Yahoo Email and Yahoo Groups users, as well as the surveillance and spying capabilities it can give to the U.S. government and its agencies.

The Yahoo document is a price list for these spying services and has already resulted in many people closing down their accounts in protest. However, closing a Yahoo account is not as easy as one might expect: users have reported great difficulty in finding the link to delete their account, and, Yahoo will still keep data for another 90 days.

If you ask Yahoo! to delete your Yahoo! account, in most cases your account will be deactivated and then deleted from our user registration database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.

Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases.

Many government leaders and officials around Africa, Asia and Latin America are known by Mathaba to widely be using Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail in spite of these Email services being hosted on U.S. computers and the ease that gives the hosts to access their data.. Mathaba has also long been aware of a great many business people, politicians and even Presidents who use the “free” web-based email services of Yahoo for their Email communications, thus making it easy for the U.S. and its owners to spy on them with negligible cost.

Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and Internet service providers.

But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have been stupid enough to try to issue a “DMCA takedown notice” to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document.

We estimate Yahoo stands a near-zero chance of success given that Young has thousands of intelligence and other leaked documents on his site and in the past decade has yet to remove a single document upon legal threats, the same 10-year track record held by Mathaba on documents on British Intelligence in spite of having computers seized and properties raided.

Mathaba is now also hosting the Yahoo leaked document on its servers around the world, and the cat is long out of the bag with the original document having been downloaded and distributed by many already.

When John Young was asked if there was anything he wouldn’t reveal on his site — a fault in the President’s Secret Service detail, for instance — he said, “Well, I’m actually looking for that information right now”, much to the chagrin of those who believe that the U.S. government and its hopelessly corrupt agencies should have a right to suppress information from the public.

The Compliance Guide reveals, as has been known to Mathaba prior to the leak via our own sources, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash folder.

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, the photo sharing and storage site which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

Chats conducted through the company’s Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahoo’s server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however. Yahoo does not save the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.

Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holder’s friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them.

Young responded to Yahoo’s takedown request with a defiant note:

I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahoo’s copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome.

Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahoo’s contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees.

Note: Yahoo’s exclamation point is surely trademarked so omitted here.

The company responded that a copyright notice is optional for works created after March 1, 1989 and repeated its demand for removal on Thursday. For now, the document remains on the Cryptome site.

Threat Level reported Tuesday that muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian had asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to provide him with a copy of the pricing list supplied by telecoms and internet service providers for the surveillance services they offer government agencies. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that the information was proprietary and that the companies would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo wrote in its objection letter that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company added.

The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other U.S. “social networking” sites are at minimum providing information in similar fashion to U.S. agencies, and in some cases  have also received substantial funding by U.S. government related entities as a most efficient and cost-effective means of spying on their users around the world.

— Includes extensive reporting by Wired.com‘s Kim Zetter

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Climategate Investigator Is Member Of Vehemently Pro-Man Made Global Warming Organization

Paul Joseph Watson
Propaganda Matrix
December 4, 2009

A civil servant who is a member of one of the most vehemently pro man-made global warming advocacy organizations in Europe which also has direct ties to the IPCC has been handed the job of whitewashing the investigation into the University of East Anglia, while absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science.

Meanwhile, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has ludicrously announced that it will conduct its own investigation into the climategate scandal, despite the fact that the suspects involved have intimate ties to the IPCC, with one of the primary scientists accused of manipulating climate data being a lead author of the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports.

“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading body for assessing climate change science,” reports the Daily Mail.

IPCC chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri told the BBC the claims were serious and he wanted them investigated.

“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,’ he said.”

“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”

Having the IPCC investigate climategate would be like Ken Lay heading up the Enron enquiry.

One of the primary climategate suspects, Kevin Trenberth, is a lead IPCC author, having been influential in crafting the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports.

Professor Phil Jones, who infamously wrote of the need to “hide the decline” in global warming, is also a primary IPCC contributor, having been in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports.

In addition, another climategate suspect, Michael Mann, was the creator of the debunked “hockey stick” graph, which was “Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher than they are today.”

There is little pretense about the fact that the UN will merely absolve its own scientists of blame, the larger scam is the notion that civil servant Sir (Alastair) Muir Russell, who has been picked to head the investigation into East Anglia University, after an earlier trial balloon to have the inquiry headed by warmist advocate Lord Rees was shot down, is impartial, when he is a member of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, a vehemently pro-man made global warming organization.

“As a measure of how out of touch UEA is, they apparently have little idea that the title “former civil servant” does not inspire much confidence from skeptics, since it has been “civil servants” who have been blocking access to the data and procedures all along,” writes Anthony Watts.

Russell has pitched himself as someone with “no links to either the university or the climate science community,” yet he is firmly a member of the academic establishment, being the former Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow.

Russell is the quintessential establishment lackey, having been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2001.

There’s little doubt that Russell is an establishment insider who has been tasked with whitewashing the whole affair. He is a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an offshoot of the same organization that Lord Rees is a part of. The Royal Society of Edinburgh “provides annual grants totaling over half a million pounds for research” in Scottish universities, a sizeable portion of which goes to research attempting to validify claims about man-made global warming.

The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.

This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.

A February 2009 response to the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill outlines the organization’s staunch advocacy for the hypothesis of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.

Earlier this year, The Royal Society of Edinburgh elected Professor Peter Smith to become one of its members. Smith just happens to be the Convening Lead Author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. He has also been a lead author for numerous other IPCC reports over the past thirteen years.

How can a proud member of an organization that is aggressively pushing measures to cut CO2 in the name of halting alleged man-made global warming, while also having a direct relationship with the UN IPCC, bill himself as being totally impartial and unconnected to climate science?

The climategate scandal has grown wings and taken flight. This is a scandal within a scandal, the notion that the very crooks caught manipulating data can appoint their own allies to “investigate” their wrongdoing and think nothing of it, while claiming that such individuals are impartial and independent, is beyond belief.

The only real investigation of climategate has to occur at the congressional or parliamentary level, preferably both, and it has to be completely open and transparent – not sneakily wrapped up behind closed doors by organizations like the IPCC and members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, both of whom have a massive stake in protecting and upholding the entire climate change fraud.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Deception | Leave a comment

SOFA agreement heralds US troop and missile deployment in Poland

December 4, 2009

WARSAW (AFP) – The United States and Poland have drawn up an accord regulating the stationing of US troops in Poland, the defence ministry said Friday, opening the way for the deployment of US Patriot missiles.

The accord was given the final backing of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk Friday and will be signed in Warsaw next Thursday, ministry spokesman Robert Rochowicz told AFP.

“Talks on the accord to allow a US military presence in our country have been concluded with success,” he said.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) is a pre-requisite to setting up a US ground-to-air missile base in Poland. US officials say deployment should start in 2010.

During an October visit to Warsaw by US Vice President Joe Biden, Tusk said his country was ready to join a new US anti-missile system in central Europe.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said the United States wants to deploy SM-3 missiles in Poland and the neighbouring Czech Republic in 2015.

Gates’ announcement came after President Barack Obama scrapped a plan agreed in 2008 to install a controversial anti-missile shield system in the two countries.

The shield, promoted by president George W. Bush when he was in office, had angered Russia which considered it a threat to Russian security.

The Patriots and SM-3s are part of the new system proposed by the United States.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

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