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Illegal Israeli PR in America: Declassified

By Grant Smith | Pulse Media | August 18, 2010

A huge trove of newly declassified documents subpoenaed during a 1962-1964 Senate investigation reveals how Israel’s lobby pitched, promoted, and paid to have content placed in America’s top news magazines with overseas funding. The Atlantic (and many others others) received hefty rewards for trumpeting Israel’s most vital – but damaging – PR initiatives across America.

The relevant documents are now online

Media strategies on display include:

Cover-ups: “The [Dimona] nuclear reactor story inspired comment from many sources; editorial writers, columnists, science writers and cartoonists. Most of the press seemed finally to accept the thesis that the reactor was being built for peaceful purposes and not for bombs.”

Payola: “The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country. We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories… Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who’s Who in America…Our Committee is now planning articles for the women’s magazines for the trade and business publications.”

Pressure: “It can be said that the press of the nation…has by and large shown sympathy and understanding of Israel’s position. There are, of course, exceptions, notably the Scripps-Howard chain where we still need to achieve a ‘break-through,’ the Pulliam chain (where some progress has been made) and some locally-owned papers.”

Ghost Writing: “We cannot pinpoint all that has already been accomplished by this Committee except to say that it has been responsible for the writing and placement of articles on Israel in some of America’s leading magazines….”

A defunct Dow Jones report noted “The Senate investigation closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go on…”

August 18, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Israeli settlers expand campaign to manipulate entries on Wikipedia

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – August 18, 2010

The internet’s open-source, user-edited encyclopedia called ‘Wikipedia’ has been targeted by Israeli governmental and non-governmental partisans who, since its inception, have attempted to manipulate its contents to promote a Zionist agenda. This week, Israeli settlers launched a course for right-wing Israelis interested in helping to manipulate the contents of entries in the online encyclopedia.

The course, held in Jerusalem, was organized by the Yesha Council of settlements and Israel Sheli, two groups which have been at the forefront of constructing Israeli-only settlements on illegally-seized Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Around 50 right-wingers, including media professionals who live in Israeli settlements, are participating in the course, which aims to teach not only how to manipulate the open structure and style of Wikipedia to push their far-right political agenda, but also how to do so undetected, in order to get into the administration of the site.

This is not the first time that right-wing Israelis have been exposed trying to manipulate Wikipedia. In 2005, 5 high-level editors were removed from their positions when they were discovered to be working for the right-wing Israeli group CAMERA to “surreptitiously coordinate editing by ideologically like-minded individuals”, an objective which was found to be at odds with the open nature of Wikipedia.

Despite the attempts by editors to keep the site, and the internet in general, open to all, private groups with political objectives continue to try to manipulate content.

Naftali Bennett, the director of the Yesha Council, says that he believes the internet must be ‘managed’, telling reporters, “The Internet is not managed well enough, and Israel’s position there is appalling. Take for example the Turkish flotilla [to Gaza]. During the first hours we were nowhere to be found. In those first hours millions of people typed the words Gaza-bound flotilla and read what was written on Wikipedia.”

The group plans to award a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor”, who is able to incorporate the most Zionist changes into Wikipedia over the next four years. The winner will receive a free trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.

August 18, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Beware the ‘progressive agenda’

By Charles Davis | False Dichotomy | July 29, 2010

Since taking office nearly 18 months ago, Barack Obama has failed to deliver on his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, has expanded the war in Afghanistan, has dropped cluster bombs on civilians in Yemen, has intensified a proxy war in Somalia and is currently seeking the authority to search every Americans e-mail and web history without so much as a warrant from a rubber-stamping intelligence court. In other words, he’s been successfully advancing the progressive agenda, or so liberal magazine The American Prospect tells me in a piece that notes the bulk of the professional bloggers and Democratic activists who attended the recent “Netroots Nation” conference in Las Vegas likewise believe our smooth-talking murderer-in-chief is a Pretty Swell Guy.

Take it away, Jamelle Bouie:

The Netroots Nation straw poll, conducted during the conference by Revolution Messaging, shows President Obama with an approval rating of 84 percent among the attending activists, journalists, and bloggers. Given the mostly somber mood of the conference, this is higher than I expected, but on reflection, I’m not too surprised. Among conference attendees, there didn’t seem to be much disagreement with the idea that Obama has been pretty successful in advancing a progressive agenda. While I’m sure there was plenty of disappointment over the lack of a public option in the Affordable Care Act, for example, I don’t think anyone challenged the notion that passing health care is a defining achievement for the administration.

I particularly like the last line: while sure the president didn’t actually deliver on his promise to enact a public option, much less the single-payer system desired by much of the liberal left, passing something and calling it “health care reform” was certainly an achievement, and shouldn’t we all be proud of that? Absent from the piece, you’ll of course notice, is any mention of all those dead foreigners that liberal cosmopolitans purportedly care about, which I guess might just indicate that they never really cared about them. A civilian killed by a Democratic president in an unjust landwar in Asia just doesn’t inflame a liberal’s passions as much as when it’s a nasty ‘ol Republican dropping the bombs.

Beyond just the sickening partisan morality of these activists, the Netroots poll also shows that the liberal lore that the Democratic rank-and-file are more willing to stand up to their politicians than their mouth-breathing Republican counterparts — carbon-copies, I say — is just that: Lore. Fiction. Bullshit. The Netroots liberals are just as impressed by the pomp and prestige of the presidency, are just as worshipful of authority and liable to join a creepy cult of personality, as any conservative.

What, too much? A bit unfair? Yeah, well: 84 percent.

August 18, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Israel should not keep its history behind lock and key

By Jonathan Cook | The National | August 17, 2010

History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.

That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.

The new 70-year disclosure rule is the government’s response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking through Israel’s courts to gain access to documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.

The state’s chief archivist says many of the documents “are not fit for public viewing” and raise doubts about Israel’s “adherence to international law”, while the government warns that greater transparency will “damage foreign relations”.

Quite what such phrases mean was illustrated by the findings of a recent investigation by an Israeli newspaper. Haaretz revisited the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel seized not only the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also a significant corner of Syria known as the Golan Heights, which Israel still refuses to relinquish.

The consensus in Israel is that the country’s right to hold on to the Golan is even stronger than its right to the West Bank. According to polls, an overwhelming majority of Israelis refuse to concede their little bit of annexed Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus.

This intransigence is not surprising. For decades, Israelis have been taught a grand narrative in which, having repelled an attack by Syrian forces, Israel then magnanimously allowed the civilian population of the Golan to live under its rule. That, say Israelis, is why the inhabitants of four Druze villages are still present there. The rest chose to leave on the instructions of Damascus.

One influential journalist writing at the time even insinuated anti-Semitism on the part of the civilians who departed: “Everyone fled, to the last man, before the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] arrived, out of fear of the ‘savage conqueror’ … Fools, why did they have to flee?”

However, a very different picture emerges from Haaretz’s interviews with the participants. These insiders say that all but 6,000 of the Golan’s 130,000 civilians were either terrorised or physically forced out, some of them long after the fighting finished. An army document reveals a plan to clear the area of the Syrian population, with only the exception of the Golan Druze, so as not to upset relations with the loyal Druze community inside Israel.

The army’s post-war tasks included flushing out thousands of farmers hiding in caves and woods to send them over the new border. Homes were looted before the army set about destroying all traces of 200 villages so that there would be nowhere left for the former inhabitants to return to. The first Jewish settlers sent to till the fields recalled seeing the dispossessed owners watching from afar.

The Haaretz investigation offers an account of methodical and wholesale ethnic cleansing that sits uncomfortably not only with the traditional Israeli story of 1967 but with the Israeli public’s idea that their army is the “most moral in the world”. That may explain why several prominent, though unnamed, Israeli historians admitted to Haaretz that they had learnt of this “alternative narrative” but did nothing to investigate or publicise it.

What is so intriguing about the newspaper’s version of the Golan’s capture is the degree to which it echoes the revised accounts of the 1948 war that have been written by later generations of Israeli historians. Three decades ago – in a more complacent era – Israel made available less sensitive documents from that period.

The new material was explosive enough. It undermined Israel’s traditional narrative of 1948, in which the Palestinians were said to have left voluntarily on the orders of the Arab leaders and in the expectation that the combined Arab armies would snuff out the fledging Jewish state in a bloodbath.

Instead, the documents suggested that heavily armed Jewish forces had expelled and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before the Jewish state had even been declared and a single Arab soldier had entered Palestine.

One document in particular, Plan Dalet, demonstrated the army’s intention to expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Its existence explains the ethnic cleansing of more than 80 per cent of Palestinians in the war, followed by a military campaign to destroy hundreds of villages to ensure the refugees never returned.

Ethnic cleansing is the common theme of both these Israeli conquests. A deeper probe of the archives will almost certainly reveal in greater detail how and why these “cleansing” campaigns were carried out – which is precisely why Mr Netanyahu and others want the archives to remain locked.

But full disclosure of these myth-shattering documents may be the precondition for peace. Certainly, more of these revelations offer the best hope of shocking Israeli public opinion out of its self-righteous opposition to meaningful concessions, either to Syria or the Palestinians.

It is also a necessary first step in challenging Israel’s continuing attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, as has occurred in the last few weeks against the Bedouin in both the Jordan Valley and the Negev, where villages are being razed and families forced to leave again.

Genuine peacemakers should be demanding that the doors to the archives be thrown open immediately. The motives of those who wish to keep them locked should be clear to all.

Jonathan Cook is The National’s correspondent in Nazareth. His latest book is Disappearing Palestine



August 17, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

New Zealand’s NIWA sued over climate data adjustments

August 16, 2010 by Anthony Watts

NIWA is being sued by the NZ Climate Coalition, mainly due to the differences in data in this graph:

Niwa sued over data accuracy

The country’s state-owned weather and atmospheric research body is being taken to court in a challenge over the accuracy of its data used to calculate global warming.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition said it had lodged papers with the High Court asking the court to invalidate the official temperatures record of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa).

The lobby of climate sceptics and ACT Party have long criticised Niwa over its temperature data, which Niwa says is mainstream science and not controversial, and the raw data publicly available.

The coalition said the New Zealand Temperature Records (NZTR) were the historical base of NIWA’s advice to the Government on issues relating to climate change.

Coalition spokesman Bryan Leyland said many scientists believed although the earth had been warming for 150 years, it had not heated as much as Government archives claimed.

He said the New Zealand Meteorological Service had shown no warming during the past century but Niwa had adjusted its records to show a warming trend of 1degC. The warming figure was high and almost 50 percent above the global average, said Mr Leyland.

”Twentieth-century temperature records are now being challenged all around the world” said Bryan Leyland, spokesman for the NZCSET. “But I think we are the first country where the issues are to be placed squarely before an independent judicial forum.”
“Many scientists believe that, although the earth has been in a natural warming phase for the past 150 years, it has not heated as much as Government archives claim. The precise trend figure is extremely important, as it forms the sole basis of the claim that human activities are the dominant cause of the warming.

“The New Zealand Met Service record shows no warming during the last century, but NIWA has adopted a series of invariably downward adjustments in the period prior to World War 2. Because these move the old temperature records downwards, the 7SS NZTR shows a huge bounce-back of over 1°C in the first half of the century” said Mr. Leyland. “Although this is out of line with dozens of other records, and has been the subject of sustained questioning by both the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and the ACT party, NIWA refuses to accept that there are serious problems with the adjustments. In fact, no one has been able to explain exactly how they were arrived at.”

The Court proceedings also allege bias and unethical conduct on the part of NIWA’s National Climate Centre. These are based partly on NIWA allegedly delegating the NZTR decision to a former employee, James Salinger, knowing that he had a vested interest in an untested theory put forward in his own 1981 thesis. NIWA also knew that the data and calculations for that theory had been lost, and, thus could not be replicated.

The Court will be asked to rule that NIWA has refused to repudiate the current NZTR in order to avoid political embarrassment, and feared loss of public confidence in the objectivity of its scientists. The proceedings were filed and served this week, and NIWA has up to a month to respond.

Full story here:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4026330/Niwa-sued-over-data-accuracy

August 17, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

A Beautiful Gift from the BBC

By Ken O’Keefe | Pulse Media | August 17, 2010

If you haven’t seen it, look for BBC Panorama’s “Death in the Med” program online (Part One, Part Two), you will be treated to first class propaganda as only the BBC can deliver.

I am one of the passengers/witnesses interviewed for this program and I am very much aware of BBC’s role in justifying war and covering up Israeli crimes. I am in no way naive about this; to the contrary my motivation for the interview lay largely in the all too likely opportunity to expose the BBC. A relevant job considering the BBC’s role in the slaughter of over one million Iraqi’s, a direct role by virtue of the war they justified. BBC from start to present, justifying Iraq, a massive war crime and crime against humanity based entirely on lies (propagated intensely by the BBC). The British Broadcasting Corporation, synonymous with millions of orphans and refugees and countless lives destroyed in Iraq, beating the drums of war without pause, the ultimate prostitutes of propaganda.

With this understanding I solicited an agreement with the BBC producers, in return for my interview the program would include the fact that we disarmed, captured and ultimately released three Israeli commandos (after giving them medical attention no less). That was the deal, a deal I made with an audio recorder in service.

And yes the poor Israeli commandos were beaten, just as any invader in any capable persons home would be beaten. I take no issue with that fact.

But truth be told, the commandos we captured should thank us for their lives. I ask the Israeli’s, British and American people specifically, if your home was invaded, your family being murdered, would you be willing to disarm, completely control, and then set a murderer of your family free?

You can lie to yourself if you like, bury that head right down deep in the sand, but that ship was our home, and we were all brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles, united, a family, engaged in a most righteous cause, with the vast majority of the planet behind us. The primary beneficiary of our mission, over 800,000 innocent children.

For those lost in a pit of ignorance and indoctrination, those currently stripped of all reason, absent of conscience, duped and hoodwinked, I know you very well because I was once you, a US Marine robot volunteering to kill or be killed. I see my past self in the Zionist who has no capacity at this moment to think, for in that state it is all about regurgitation, independent thought is but a possibility. For you I maintain no hate, for nobody actually, rather it is pity, pity for you that you sacrifice the greatest gift of all, the gift of humanity.

And so it is that the BBC, absent of integrity, contemptuous of humanity, attempts in this program to turn disarmed, helpless Israeli commandos into heroic self-rescuing commandos who managed to Superman their way out of a circle of well over 100 very motivated men whose brothers lay murdered with multiple gunshot wounds. That is what we call a bald-faced lie. Big time lie, in your face lie, you in the audience are a bunch of drooling idiots lie.

Returning from the Zionist alternate universe, we held in our power the fate of three boy commandos who may well have been murderers on that night. Think about that, under these circumstances, we let them go. That is what we call preserving life.

It is not that BBC does not know the truth, there are literally hundreds of witnesses and overflowing facts to reveal it; it is simply BBC’s slavish duty to produce a Zionist storyline of illusions and deceptions. And the story goes that we are the aggressors, “terrorists”, “extremists” and killers. Only in this context can the poor Israeli commandos be victims. How is it possible to dominate and control commandos simply to let them go if we are killers? Answer, it isn’t. And that is precisely why Panorama blatantly lied.

Ah but the irony, the kind of irony that always provides me a smile from the inside out, the irony of these lies being big, beautiful gifts. In all sincerity, thank you BBC.

The BBC says there is doubt as to who fired first. There is no doubt at all who shot who and when to the hundreds of us on the Mavi Marmara and other ships. The Israelis have said we shot at them, well where are their gunshot wounds? And even if you have gunshot wounds, how do we know you did not shoot yourselves? Exactly like you did in “Operation Cast Lead”?

Returning once again from the Zionist alternate universe, the Israeli military attacked in international waters and murdered within the first five minutes of the attack. The attack resulting in scores of gunshot wounds and death in rapid succession. Blood spilling all over the ship. In that environment I took possession of a 9mm pistol that I removed from one of the commandos… and I emptied it of the (real) bullets. Other weapons were seized by other brothers and thrown into the sea, one of which was an assault rifle. Yet when others and myself had the power to end life, and believe me it was as simple as release the safety, point, shoot, over. Instead we preserved life, by taking those weapons away from established killers, we prevented them from killing more. We literally saved our lives and their lives. That is what we call cold, hard facts.

We could have taken out at least three of them, but we did not. Nope, we let them go.

The BBC mentions that we were in international waters at the very end of the story, as if this were an insignificant fact. The fact that Israel stole all the footage that it could, footage that undoubtedly shows them firing 4 bullets to the head of the 19-year-old American passenger, Furkan Dogan. No problem. Executing people at close range, no worries. The fact that the blockade itself is illegal, nah, don’t mention that. 800,000 plus children in Gaza, malnourished, anemic, traumatised… not important.

I would need to review this program many times over to identify every poisoned tactic that the BBC employed in order to do what they do so well, justify murder and war.

Nevertheless BBC’s perversion of the truth will elevate the cause of justice immensely, delegitimizing itself in such grand fashion was indeed a great big gift.

Hats off to ya BBC!

Ken O’Keefe is Managing Director of Aloha Palestine and blogs here. He was on board the Mavi Marmara.

UPDATE:
Demonstration against ‘Death on the Med’ :: Location: BBC Television Centre, London :: Date: Sunday, 22 August 2010 :: Time 13:00

August 17, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Billions of dollars promised for Haiti fail to materialize

By Isabel Macdonald – The Star – August 16, 2010

Nearly seven months after a devastating earthquake killed upwards of 250,000 people in Haiti, UN special envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton told Associated Press on Aug. 6 that international donors have yet to make good on their promises of billions of dollars to help the country rebuild.

Haiti’s rebuilding could cost $14 billion, according to a recent Inter-American Development Bank study. Yet only “five countries — Brazil, Norway, Australia, Colombia and Estonia — have so far provided $506 million, less than 10 per cent of the $5.3 billion pledged for Haiti at a March donors’ conference,” according to an Aug. 6 AP article.

Today, dozens of leading academics, authors and activists from around the world proposed a bold solution to this desperate financial shortfall.

Why not reimburse Haiti for the illegitimate “independence debt” it paid France?

In an open letter to French president Nicolas Sarkozy published today in the French national daily newspaper Liberation, 90 leading academics, authors, journalists and human rights activists from around the world urged the French government to pay Haiti back for the 90 million gold francs Haitians were forced to pay as a price for their independence.

There are “powerful arguments in favour of the restitution of the French debt,” as Harvard medical professor Paul Farmer (who was recently appointed deputy UN special envoy to Haiti) pointed out in his testimony at the 2003 hearings in France on the independence debt.

This historic payment was patently illegitimate, and, on several different scores, it was also illegal, according to a 2009 paper produced by the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.

Prior to independence, St. Dominique — the country that is now Haiti — was France’s most profitable colony, thanks in no small part to its particularly brutal system of slavery. In 1791, the slaves revolted, and in 1804, after defeating Napoleon’s armies, founded the world’s first black republic.

Following Haiti’s independence, former French slave owners submitted detailed tabulations of their losses to the French government, with line items for each of “their” slaves that had been “lost” with Haitian independence. In 1825, French King Charles X demanded that Haiti pay an “independence debt” to compensate former colonists for the slaves who won their freedom in the Haitian revolution. With warships stationed along the Haitian coast backing up the French demand, France insisted that Haiti pay its former colonizer 150 million gold francs — 10 times the fledgling black nation’s total annual revenues.

Under threat of a French military invasion that aimed at the re-enslavement of the population, the Haitian government had little choice but to agree to pay. Haiti’s government was also forced to finance the debt through loans from a single French bank, which capitalized on its monopoly by gouging Haiti with exorbitant interest rates and fees.

The original sum of the indemnity was subsequently reduced, but Haiti still disbursed 90 million gold francs to France. This second price the French exacted for the independence Haitians had won in battle was, even in 1825, not lawful. When the original indemnity was imposed by the French king, the slave trade was technically illegal; such a transaction exchanging cash for human lives valued as slave labour represented a gross violation of both French and international laws.

And Haiti was still paying off this “independence debt” in 1947 — 140 years after the abolition of the slave trade and 85 years after the emancipation proclamation.

A lawsuit launched by the Haitian government to recuperate these extorted funds was aborted prematurely in 2004, with the French-backed overthrow of the government that had the temerity to point out that France “extorted this money from Haiti by force and . . . should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary health care, water systems and roads.”

The French government was similarly quick to suppress a Yes Men-style prank announcement last Bastille Day pledging that France would repay Haiti. On July 15 — one day after the hoax — a spokesperson for the French ministry told Agence France Presse that the French government was pursuing possible legal action.

August 16, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Explaining Murder: Israeli Hasbara in Full Swing


President Obama of course is in on the scam too
By Richard Lightbown | Palestine Chronicle | August 13,2010

The hasbara industry is in full swing at the moment as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government pulls out all the stops to create a smokescreen to cover its crimes.  Leading from the front Mr Netanyahu sat in front of the Turkel Commission for four hours on Monday, although anyone hoping to hear anything of interest would have been disappointed. Mr Netanyahu only spoke in front of the public for ninety minutes of that time during which he regaled the committee with complaints about Hamas, Sderot and Gilad Shalit. He told the committee that Israel had a right to search for weapons on board the flotilla. (Israel has since announced that it found no weapons for Hamas. Did nine people really have to die so that Israel could confirm the certification the flotilla already had?) He further told them that there was no humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a result of the blockade it was just a ‘bogus rationale […] to break the blockade’. So there we are. The International Committee of the Red Cross was lying on 14 June when it said:

“The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligation under international humanitarian law.”

Or when in 2008 the same august institution said 70% of the Gazan population suffers from food insecurity.

That Judge Turkel allowed him to drone on in this way bodes ill for the end result. As though nine dead (and it could yet turn to eleven), fifty-five injured and the rest of the 700 people abducted, abused, humiliated and subjected to cruel and sadistic behaviour was not important enough for the committee to concentrate on.

But that, as always, is the name of the game. Only Israeli victim hood is of any consequence. Nine Israeli hoods got a legal beating. That’s important. Nothing else matters. So we’ve had Prof Ruth Lapidoth prostituting herself on 12 July by cherry picking the San Remo Manual to make it all seem right. She told us Gaza is a state because the Israel Supreme Court said so. Does she recognize no higher authority on international law? There was no mention of course that San Remo takes six articles to explain that any maritime attack should be solely against military targets for the purpose of gaining a military advantage. That precautions must be taken to ensure that civilians are not harmed. That merchant vessels are civilian objects. That vessels engaged in humanitarian missions are exempt from attack. Article 102 states absolutely, that a blockade is prohibited if the damage to the civilian population is excessive in relation to the military advantage of the blockade. Article 103 allows the right of passage, subject to search (but not murder) if the civilian population is inadequately provided with food and other objects essential for its survival. Article 119 declares that a neutral merchant vessel may be diverted ‘with its consent’. Article 124 encourages certification (exactly as the flotilla had done) to avoid the necessity for visit and search. None of this gets a mention in the professor’s assessment. Mr Netanyahu behaves as though it does not exist.

President Obama of course is in on the scam too. Refusing to condemn Israel on 31 May until he knew the facts, he is now doing his best to see that they are not revealed. Thus the UN Human Rights Commission’s Fact Finding Mission is now deemed surplus to requirements. Never mind that it is chaired by a judge who served on the International Criminal Court, or that it includes the former Chief Prosecutor of the UN backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, who has extensive experience on human rights, war crimes and terrorism. This is a committee eminently qualified to investigate the facts so it is being sidelined and told it is irrelevant by Susan Rice, who was speaking as though she owned the United Nations. Just for the record China and Russia voted for this commission, France and Britain abstained, and the other permanent member of the Security Council, without a veto at the UNHRC, could only vote against. The late Charles Wheeler, a redoubtable BBC journalist, once observed that American presidents get worse and worse. Sadly we don’t seem to have reached the nadir yet.

So what is the invertebrate in the White House trying to palm us off with instead? A committee chaired by a law professor who was prime minister of New Zealand for thirteen months, and representative to the International Whaling Commission. Alongside him will be a man whose period of rule in Columbia was strongly criticised for its abuses of human rights, democracy and the rule of law; and whose main arms supplier was the state of Israel. This Panel will receive reports from Israel and Turkey. But it will not be able to subpoena witnesses (and Mr Netanyahu has made it clear that it will not be able to subpoena anyone from the IDF). Neither will it venture out of New York (to go to Iskenderun for example to look over the three Turkish ships that have been released).

So we must hope that Sir Geoffrey Palmer is his own man, and that he is a man of courage and imagination. We must hope that he is a man able to appreciate that it was not self defence to shoot Cevdet Kiliclar through the forehead from a helicopter before a single Israeli had even started to descend from a helicopter or disembark from a zodiac. (Mr Kiliclar was taking a photograph at the time of his assassination.) Let us hope that Sir Geoffrey will ask for proof of the Israeli allegation that their commandos were shot at, and that he will wonder why the infra red footage from the helicopters have not picked up the flashes from the passenger’s guns. Come to that, why have we seen so little of the enormous amount of footage that Israel stole from press and passengers on the flotilla?

But even the Israeli film footage provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can be quite revealing. Take a look at the arms cache that Israel made such a fuss about. I have counted the following:

• about 16 kitchen knives,
• three pocket knives,
• fifteen pickaxe handles,
• about twenty lengths of metal bar,
• two ring spanners,
• one pipe wrench,
• four small hammers,
• two sledge hammers,
• four fire axes,
• one paint roller handle,
• ten disc-cutter discs,
• two round files in handles,
• a short length of cord and
• two kaffiyehs.

(There was no blood on any of these ‘weapons’.) This is hardly the equipment prepared by a well-organized terrorist cell that had readied itself to face one of the elite units in the Israel Defence Forces.

Also take a close look at the Israeli infrared film taken from the sea towards the Mavi Marmara.  The film unfortunately starts after Mr Kiliclar has been shot dead and other passengers have also been injured and maybe killed. Look close and you can see the pistols being thrown over the side after the commandos are disarmed. Look closely too at the last frame of the infrared footage. There at the side of the ship is a commando with a pistol raised ready to fire. Mostly likely this is a Glock pistol with a magazine holding 17 rounds which can be fired as fast as the trigger can be pulled. Now do you understand why the film stops there? The next sequence shows a small bottle of mace-like self-defence spray, and then a small folding saw with a single 5cm long blade. Yet look behind this primitive weaponry and there inside the door to the bridge lounges a commando with what looks like a submachine gun.

The Israeli military said it would do whatever was necessary to stop the flotilla. When it got to the Mavi Marmara the commandos first tried to board at the stern from zodiacs. They were unable to do this principally because of the fire hoses trained on them, although there were a lot of things like plates and tomatoes thrown at them too. In fact they never did board the ship from this point until after the bridge had been taken and the ship surrendered. The next move, almost certainly with the full authority of Admiral Marom, was to fire live ammunition onto the upper decks from more than one of the four helicopters, and this was probably sniper fire to begin with. Only then did the commandos start to fast rope onto the deck. But even then the defence did not crumble and the first rope was tied up by the defenders and then abandoned so that the commandos only used one rope and were picked off as they came down. It looks pretty brutal on the film (which is why we are allowed to see it). But if they did not disable those commandos quickly the men on that upper deck were going to get shot, and shortly afterwards this is exactly what happened. However it was a close thing. Perhaps if they had tied up both ropes they may have prevented the landing. And then what: what was Israel’s next line of attack, bearing in mind that they had warships and submarines in the near vicinity? If the boarding had failed would the IDF have sunk the ship? One thing is for sure, that would have took a lot of ingenuity for Mr Netanyahu and Prof Lapidoth to explain. It would have needed a lot of excuses from Mr Obama too.

August 14, 2010 Posted by | Deception | Leave a comment

Israel releases snippets of video in bogus attempt to implicate MK Zoabi

12 August 2010 | Middle East Monitor | Dr. Hanan Chehata

Passengers on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza have asked the Israeli authorities repeatedly for the return of their belongings and the release of the video footage they shot during the Jewish state’s attack on their boat, the Mavi Marmara, on 31st May. The Israeli assault took place over 10 weeks ago and yet it is only now that the authorities have released a 2 minutes 40 seconds video clip; but why now and why have the Israelis selected those couple of minutes from all of the hours of confiscated footage that they still have in their possession?

The Israeli authorities claim that the clip shows Knesset Member Haneen Zoabi in the presence of men from the charity group IHH armed with clubs, contradicting her claim that she did not see any flotilla members holding weapons. As a result of this video, there is now a call to investigate Ms Zoabi for her part in the violence that unfolded on board the Marmara.

However, in releasing this footage it looks as if the Israelis have shot themselves in the foot once again, because the film actually shows Israeli soldiers in a far worse light than Haneen Zoabi. In fact, it goes some way towards corroborating her version of events.

In the first of three short clips, Ms Zoabi is on screen for less than 10 seconds and she is simply in the distance walking towards the camera from the far side of the deck. There are more than 30 people milling around, only one of whom is shown for approximately six seconds holding what looks like a broomstick handle. The rest are tying on life jackets, filming the Israeli boats that are surrounding them and simply looking out to sea. At no point is Ms Zoabi seen anywhere near anyone with any kind of weapon.

In the second clip Ms Zoabi is standing in a stairwell. Blood from the victims shot by the Israeli commandos is already forming into pools on the floor of the landing a few steps up from where she stands; first aid is being administered to one of the wounded. In the stairwell she is surrounded by humanitarian flotilla members wearing orange life jackets, several with hand-held cameras. On the section of the staircase directly above where she is standing – completely out of her line of sight – are three men holding what, again, look like broomstick handles. No weapons are in sight and once again it is clear that at no point is Ms Zoabi even in the visual proximity of anyone with a “weapon” even as flimsy as a broomstick.

In the third and final clip, Haneen Zoabi is in conversation with two armed Israeli soldiers. She is calm and confident but in no way aggressive at all. She is speaking in Hebrew but it is understood that she was trying to communicate to the soldiers that the wounded man in question did not want to be transferred to an Israeli hospital. Given the fact that he had just been shot by Israeli soldiers and nine colleagues had just been murdered by those same soldiers it is understandable that Ms Zoabi would do her best to ask the soldiers to let him be transferred somewhere other than Israel for medical attention! This does not contradict her claim that she later helped to facilitate the transfer of patients to get urgently needed medical treatment.

There are no guns, no knives, no clubs nor any other kind of weapon being held by anyone in this clip apart from, of course, those carried by Israeli soldiers, who are in full combat gear with their faces covered having a conversation with Ms Zoabi. Next to her is a man with a stethoscope around his neck while several men are lying on chairs, clearly having been wounded in the Israeli assault.

The content of the video, all two minutes and forty seconds of it, does not implicate Haneen Zoabi in the slightest. It actually supports her assertions about the events that unfolded. Claims by newspapers such as Jpost which state that the “video proves Zoabi knew activists [were] armed” are laughable. It does no such thing, so why release the footage? It’s simple; it serves as a diversion. Haneen Zoabi has made it clear that she believes the release of this footage at this particular time to be an effort to divert attention from the investigation into the flotilla assault that is now taking place; more specifically, that its release was timed to coincide with the IDF Chief of Staff giving his testimony. It is no more than that.

Calls to investigate her are welcomed by Haneen Zoabi because, as she has said before, neither she nor any of the other passengers on board the Mavi Marmara have anything to hide. But the Israeli army must have lots to cover up, as is clear from its consistent refusal to release all of the stolen footage or to let its soldiers be questioned during the investigation, and the curt refusal to co-operate with a fair and objective international enquiry into Israel’s murder of nine human rights activists in international waters.

August 13, 2010 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | Leave a comment

BBC to issue correction on rice yields story

Yet another catastrophic AGW alarmist scare without basis in fact

August 12, 2010 by Anthony Watts

From: Richard Black
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 7:01 AM
To: Anthony Watts
Subject: RE: Your article on rice yields

Dear Anthony,

Thanks for your email. You are correct – I am mistaken – a correction will be made to the news story shortly.

Best regards,
Richard Black

…my letter follows

From: Anthony Watts
Sent: 11 August 2010 00:51
To: Richard Black; Richard Black-Internet
Subject: Your article on rice yields
Importance: High
Dear Mr. Black,

I’m writing as a courtesy to advise you that I believe your article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10918591

Which says “Yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years in some locations.”

…is in error.

The actual press release says ”Rising temperatures during the past 25 years have already cut the yield growth rate by 10-20 percent in several locations.”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-08/uoc–htt080610.php

It is not the gross yield that has supposedly fallen, but the rate of increase in the yield.

Further, I have a graph from the International Rice Research Institute which supports this and demonstrates that gross rice yields are still increasing in Asia:

http://beta.irri.org/test/j15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=393&Itemid=100104

I think it’s just a simple interpretive error on how you read the press release, but it does have large consequences for how the story is interpreted by readers. Here in Northern California, one of the largest rice growing areas of the world, a call to our local Rice Association confirmed this. A correction might be in order.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best Regards,
Anthony Watts

August 12, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri urges UN probe of Israel

Press TV – August 12, 2010

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has called for a UN probe into the alleged Israeli role in the assassination of his father in 2005. Hariri’s call for the probe came after Hezbollah said that Israel has been behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The Lebanese premier said evidence presented earlier this week by Hezbollah’s Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah implicating Israel in the assassination of Hariri was “important and very sensitive”, Lebanese daily As-Safir reported.

At a press conference in Beirut on Monday night, Nasrallah presented video materials, captured by Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), as well as recorded confessions by Israeli fifth columnists, substantiating that the February 14, 2005 assassination of the former premier in the capital Beirut was carried out on orders from Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv had to call the witnesses, which could turn up in Hezbollah’s evidence, the prime minister said, adding that he would consider the regime “guilty” otherwise.

“It is important for me to know the truth, both as the prime minister and as the son of the slain,” he said. Hariri has also reportedly talked about the revelations to Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Azizi and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The United Nations tribunal, probing the assassination, reportedly will announce its findings by the end of the year.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, has received Nasrallah’s evidence, the newspaper wrote.

August 12, 2010 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, War Crimes | Leave a comment

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