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Why Hate Gilad Atzmon Pt. 2: “He’s WRONG!” (Or Is He?)

By Kevin Barret | Veterans Today | March 13, 2012

Last Thursday’s essay “Why Hate Gilad Atzmon?” has been bouncing around the internet. (The title currently gets 780,000 Google hits).

In that piece I suggested that the anti-Atzmon brigade is defending sacred boundaries against Atzmon’s fearless questioning. The two taboo questions are:

Is the whole notion of a Jewish state in Palestine (i.e., Zionism) legitimate and/or feasible? (The obvious answer, of course, is NO.)

Second question:

To what extent has Jewish identity politics contributed to the disaster of Zionism? (The obvious answer, of course, is “to a considerable extent.”)

“Don’t even go there!” they scream. Atzmon goes there. So they lynch him.

The truth hurts.

That’s my take, anyway. But not everyone agrees with me. I have received quite a few anti-Atzmon emails. They all make the same argument: Atzmon is wrong about X, Y, or Z, and therefore he is dangerous, a racist, a dangerous racist, and so on.

First, I would like to point out to these people that Atzmon has a right to be wrong. Since nobody is arguing that Atzmon is offering wrong facts – just wrong opinions, interpretations and orientations on very complex issues – his critics ought to be working harder to explain why he is wrong, rather than calling him names and organizing boycotts and smear campaigns on the basis of perfectly innocent quotes violently and misleadingly ripped from their contexts.

Second, it isn’t at all clear that Atzmon is wrong. What IS clear is that many of his opponents are.

Take the charge that Atzmon is an “essentialist.”

To call someone an “essentialist” (in the bad sense) is to argue that they prematurely end a discussion by fallaciously citing the “essence” of something.

For example, if someone argued that the reason African-American communities often have high crime rates is that “black people tend to be criminals, that’s just their nature” that person would be making a fallacious argument by falsely impugning an unchangeable “essence” to black people. And that person could plausibly be charged with bigotry. The logical fallacy involved is called “circular reasoning”: Black neighborhoods have higher crime rate, therefore black people are more likely to be criminals, because they’re the ones in the black neighborhoods, where crime rates are higher, ad infinitum. The problem with this argument is that it prematurely ends an inquiry into the real reason why crime rates are what they are; it short-circuits a more thoughtful investigation of the historical and cultural factors that have produced the phenomenon under investigation.

Now if Atzmon were to say “It is just the essence of Jewish nature to be greedy and violent, and that explains the rape of Palestine – end of story, and don’t bore me with historical and cultural explanations,” he would be an essentialist in the bad sense.

But that is not what he says. On the contrary, it is Atzmon who is opening a thoughtful discussion of the historical and cultural factors behind Zionism. And it is his opponents who want to prematurely shut down the inquiry by ruling that discussion off-limits. As Gilad puts it, the two-staters will only go back as far as 1967. One-staters go back to 1948, or maybe the Balfour declaration of 1917. Gilad wants to keep going, right back through the 19th century and beyond.

It is actually his opponents who are the essentialists. They believe that the essence of Jewishness is always either positive or neutral. Any discussion of Jewish culture or identity that brings up anything that is negatively-valued violates their sacred notion of the essence of Jewishness as innocence and victimhood. Atzmon wants to talk about empirical historical reality, which bears little resemblance to the essentialist construct. So they shout him down, desperate to end the discussion before it starts. You’d almost think they have something to hide.

Ironically, most of those wailing that Atzmon is slandering the Jews are themselves slandering Atzmon. They call him a racist, with no evidence to back up that charge. (Atzmon’s critique of Jewish identity-politics and Jewish culture in general has absolutely nothing whatsoever do do with race, as he himself always makes abundantly clear, in part by pointing out that Jews are not a race.)

Let’s look at some of the charges against Gilad that have appeared in my in-box. They usually involve taking a quote and lying about it – I mean, misconstruing it.

Atzmon quote: “The remarkable fact is they [ all Jews–not Zionists] don’t understand why the world is beginning to stand against them in the same way they didn’t understand why the Europeans stood against them in the 1930s. Instead of asking why we are hated they continue to toss accusations on others.”

The writer claims that Atzmon is “blaming the Jews for the Holocaust.” That’s just not true. The quote, in its context, doesn’t say that. It addresses an empirical historical reality (Europe in the 1930s, the world today) that is much larger than “the Holocaust.” And once again, Gilad is the honest thinker while his opponents are the essentialists. For the essentialists, the essence of Jewishness is 100% pure victimhood, end of discussion: Not a single Jew on earth – including, for example, the Rothschilds and their big bankster friends who screwed Germany in World War I in exchange for Palestine – bears one iota of responsibility for the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany! (Just like the top neocons, of whom around 90% are Jewish and fanatical Zionists, bear not one iota of responsibility for the 9/11 wars against Israel’s enemies.)

If you are an honest historian and cultural analyst, whenever there is a conflict between two groups, you look at it from the point of view of various parties in both groups, and emerge with a more or less nuanced, multi-viewpoint, holistic picture. Gilad compares this to analyzing the problems that arise in the life of a couple. Should we take the word of one or the other party that he or she is 100% right, and the other 100% wrong? Or should we talk to both parties and try to take both perspectives into consideration?

If you an essentialist/mythologist, nourished on Old Testament exceptionalism and chosen-ness (like Americans in general, not just Jews) you may instead imagine that it is the essence of the good guys in your historical narrative to be good, and the essence of the bad guys to be bad. Jews good, Germans bad; ergo, US and Allies good, Axis bad. End of sacred story.

This is the essentialist myth that Americans and Westerners have accepted in place of real history. And it is this myth, more than any other, that is responsible for what William Blum calls “the American holocaust”: The massacre of uncounted millions, and the ruined lives of uncounted tens of millions more, by the CIA, the US military, and their allies since World War II. Taken together with Zionist atrocities against Palestine and their spill-over into widespread Middle East violence, and the WWII atrocities of the Allies against people in the Axis countries, and it should be clear to any sane and moderately well-informed person that the “good guys” who won World War II have committed vastly more mass-murder, vastly more atrocities, vastly greater crimes against the human body and spirit than the Nazis ever did. In short, as Philip K. Dick suggested in The Man in the High Castle, it was the real “Nazis” who WON World War II. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Only this realization will stop the Zio-American holocaust that continues today and threatens to explode into World War III.

But – as is commonly said in reference to the “good Germans” under Hitler – it is so much easier to just pretend it isn’t happening, and go along with the essentialist, exceptionalist assumption that your people are the good guys. And when someone like Niemoller or Atzmon comes along to challenge you, shout him down without giving him a fair hearing.

The confused individual who falsely charges Atzmon with blaming Jews for the Holocaust also calls Atzmon a racist:

“This is the essence of racism. Not that Jews like many before them have become corrupted by power. But that there is something pathological about Jewish culture–it must be their culture since he repudiates genetic explanations–that led them to become Zionists.”

Sorry, that is NOT “the essence of racism.” Racism offers biological explanations. Cultural explanations are THE OPPOSITE of racism!

Calling Atzmon “a racist” when you don’t even know what racism is… well, to say that this is inviting a defamation lawsuit is putting it mildly.

This person is trying to rule out any kind of investigation of cultural factors that led Jews to become Zionists. This is idiotic on its face. So in an attempt to prevent anyone, himself included, from actually thinking, he starts in with the mendacious insults: “Racist! Anti-Semite!”

Let’s get this straight: Nobody in his or her right mind has ever tried to prevent any discussion or investigation of cultural factors in history. Was there something in Protestant culture that led to the Industrial Revolution? Max Weber says yes – and he doesn’t give a good goddamn whether you feel he’s insulting Protestants (or Catholics) by investigating their respective cultures. Is there something in the culture of Muslim Saudi elites that is contributing to religious tensions in the region? Hell, yes – their hypocritical tolerance of wildly un-Islamic behavior for themselves, while imposing harsh restrictions on others. Is there something in Muslim culture that has slowed “economic progress” in Islamic countries? Sure, there are plenty of things, ranging from stopping to pray five times a day, to prohibitions against any kind of dealing involving interest, to culturally-accepted nepotism, to cultural preferences for working as an independent operator rather than a member of a corporate team.

Atzmon’s critics are wildly irrational in calling him a racist, and claiming that nobody should ever investigate cultural forces in history (the bread and butter of cultural historians). The dozens of people signing a statement to this effect – a statement containing blatantly false and defamatory assertions about Atzmon – might as well be signing a statement reading “I am an ignorant idiot.”

What these folks should be doing is reading Atzmon’s work carefully and holistically, and then, if they find that Atzmon is mistaken in his analysis of the way Jewish identity politics is a factor in Zionism, they should correct him. For once we’ve admitted that cultural critique is perfectly legitimate, we must add that not all cultural critiques are equal: It can be done badly, or well. Sure, some of Gilad’s statements about Jewish identity politics are tendentious or overly broad. And since his main focus is explaining the horrors of Zionism, he naturally talks more about negative cultural tropes than positive ones. (Personally I think that the positives in Jewish culture outweigh the negatives; but the positives, such as humor, education, bagels with lox and cream cheese and a thin slice of onion, etc. don’t explain what’s been done to Palestine.)

The irrational Atzmon critic continues:

As long as Zionism is conveyed as a colonial project, Jews, as a people, should be seen as ordinary people. They are no different from the French and the English, they just happen to run their deadly colonial project in a different time.”

Obviously this cannot be taken at face value. The French and the English are not identical, nor were their colonial projects. One thing I learned from postgraduate work in African Studies is that the French and English colonial projects differed wildly in accordance with the very different cultural peculiarities of the two nations. For example: The French, holding a monolithically statist and egalitarian ideology in keeping with their culture, did their best to grant the natives the status of honorary Frenchmen; and being slightly less racist than the British, they were more likely to intermarry with the colonized peoples.

So what is this dramatic, doth-protest-too-much insistence that “the Jews are ordinary people, just like the French and British” trying to hide?

The answer comes in the same sentence: The “deadly colonial project” of the Jews is happening at a “different time” from that of the French and English.

Let’s be specific: All other colonial projects – especially settler-colonial projects – are dead. They have passed on, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet their Maker; stiff, bereft of life, they rest in peace. If the Israelis hadn’t nailed Occupied Palestine to its perch, they would all be pushing up daisies.

The age of colonialism ended in about 1960; the process mostly happened within a few years, and was essentially complete within three decades. South Africa, the second-to-last settler colony, officially decolonized itself around 1990.

So what is it about Israel that allows it to persist as a fanatical, murderous settler-colony, vastly nastier than apartheid South Africa or French Algeria, in a post-colonial world?

Gilad Atzmon says that to answer that question, we need to take a very close, critical look at Jewish culture in general and Jewish identity politics in particular.

If there is a reasonable argument to the contrary, I would like to hear it.

But I don’t think there is.

I think it will be people following the trail Gilad blazed – people who discover that the persistence of a very peculiar and very nasty settler-colony in Palestine is largely due to the peculiarities of Jewish identity politics – who will, by ripping the mask off Zionism show what it really is, shame the world in general and the Jewish community in particular into shutting down their settler colony in Occupied Palestine.

Currently, the sacred taboos and one-sided myths that surround this issue are protecting Zionism. Blast those taboos to smithereens, and the Wall will come down.

Like Joshua at the battle of Jerico, Gilad is heroically blasting the Wall – the wall that stops us from thinking as well as the Apartheid Wall in Occupied Palestine – with his saxophone as well as his pen.

One day the Wall will crumble.

And Gilad will be playing at the celebration.

Hope to see you there.

Insha’allah.

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March 13, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

DARPA’s Director Quits to Take Executive Slot at Google

By Shepard Ambellas | The Intel Hub | March 13, 2012

The world is a mysterious place.

Regina Dugan, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is quitting her Pentagon funded post at the agency — trading it for a ‘senior executive’ position with internet giant Google.

It makes you wonder just how big and powerful Google is getting, and what are they actually into.

According to Donald Melanson;

 The company (Google) has just reported $8.58 billion in gross revenue for the first quarter of 2011, which represents a 27 percent increase over the first quarter of last year, but is actually a bit less than analysts were expecting. That figure also doesn’t include the company’s so-called traffic acquisition costs, however, which totaled $2.04 billion for the quarter and bring the company’s actual revenue down to “just” $6.54 billion. Net income for the quarter was $2.3 billion, which represents a more modest gain from $1.96 billion in the first quarter of 2010. Also cutting into profits quite a bit was Google’s operating expenses, which were up a hefty 33 percent to $2.8 billion — a sizable chunk of which went to the nearly 2,000 new employees the company hired during the quarter.

That’s a pretty hefty take, must be nice.

A Wired excerpt reads;

Dugan’s emphasis on cybersecurity and next-generation manufacturing earned her strong support from the White House, winning her praise from the President and maintaining the agency’s budget even during a period of relative austerity at the Pentagon. Her push into crowdsourcing and outreach to the hacker community were eye-openers in the often-closed world of military R&D. Dugan also won over some military commanders by diverting some of her research cash from long-term, blue-sky projects to immediate battlefield concerns.

“There is a time and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at Darpa,” she told a congressional panel in March 2011 (.pdf). “Darpa is not the place of dreamlike musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and hopes. Darpa is a place of doing.” For an agency that spent millions of dollars on shape-shifting robots, Mach 20 missiles, and mind-controlled limbs, it was something of a revolutionary statement.

The shift was only one of the reasons why Dugan was a highly polarizing figure within her agency, and in the larger defense research community. The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) is alsoactively investigating hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of contracts that Darpa gave out to RedX Defense — a bomb-detection firm that Dugan co-founded, and still partially owns. A separate audit is examining a sample of the 2,000 other research contracts Darpa has signed during Dugan’s tenure, to “determine the adequacy of Darpa’s selection, award, and administration of contracts and grants,” according to a military memorandum.

Results of the Inspector General’s work haven’t been released and, according to her spokesman, the work had “no impact” on Dugan’s decision,  “The only reason she decided to leave the Pentagon was the allure of working at Google.”

So what will Dugan really be working on for Google? Only time will tell.

March 13, 2012 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid?

View video here. Or here.

Suppressing free and open discussion on any subject is as bad as telling lies, and knowingly suppressing the truth is the biggest lie of all, because it is based, not on a mistake or a genuine error, but on a deliberate intention to deceive. Having been tortured, Rudolf Höss, who was the commander of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, almost certainly lied to save the lives of his wife and children. Even if torture and duress cannot be proven, the overwhelming reason for recognizing the utter falsity of the Höss confession is that the gassing method he described was not scientifically plausible. Yet Höss’s conviction has stood, by inference, as a testament to the cruelty of Germans in general, since he was tried at Nuremberg, in 1947, and subsequently hanged on April 16th, 1947, in Poland.

With great respect for those who have tried—though harassed, punished, fined, imprisoned and otherwise abused—to tell it like it really was: Arthur R. Butz, Robert Faurisson, Paul Grubach, Gerd Honsik, David Irving, Kevin Käther, Nicholas Kollerstrom, Fred Leuchter, Horst Mahler, Ingrid Rimland, Germar Rudolf, Bradley Smith, Sylvia Stolz, Fredrick Töbin, Ernst Zündel and many others. General References:

http://www.whale.to/b/rudolf_hoess.html http://fathersmanifesto.net/hoess.htm http://www.answers.com/topic/bernard-baruch#ixzz1EIP9oT5c http://www.white-history.com/hwr61.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Zionist_Organization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp http://remember.org/Facts.aft.tri.nur.html http://www.rense.com/general68/hoss.htm http://www.zundelsite.org/debate/006_jam.html http://www.holocausthandbooks.com/ http://www.ihr.org/main/leaflets.shtml Rudolf Höss http://www.codoh.com/trials/triHöss.html Charles F. Wennerstrum http://www.iowacourtsonline.org/wfdata/frame1773-1463/pressrel68.asp Robert Faurisson: Höss torture. http://www.rense.com/general68/hoss.htm Transfer Agreement Book http://www.stockmaven.com/transfer_B5.htm Japanese internment http://archive.vancouver.wsu.edu/crbeha/ja/ja.htm Palestine Mandate http://www.mideastweb.org/mandate.htm Agreement to bring America into WWI http://separateduntoholiness.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/the-rothschild-1901-191… At Basle I founded the Jewish state http://www.npr.org/news/specials/mideast/history/history1.html Claim: Auschwitz II-Birkenau, more than 20,000 people could be gassed and cremated each day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp Cremation specialistsdisagree http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/auschwitz.shtml Stephen F Pinter: No gas chambers in German camps http://www.real-debt-elimination.com/real_freedom/Propaganda/nature_and_condi… “Not one case of death by poison gas was found.” http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20070406.htm http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/libcamps.shtml Interesting video: Israeli Minister “We always use the anti-Semitism trick or bring up the Holocaust” 14 August, 2002 Shulamit Aloni http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW3a1bw5XlE

More videos by Anthony Lawson: http://www.youtube.com/user/alawson911

March 11, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Canada’s Zionist lobby exposed in new book

By Andrew Stevens | The Electronic Intifada | 9 March 2012

In the summer of 2009, an academic conference co-sponsored by York University and Queen’s University proceeded without incident at the Glendon College Campus in Toronto, Ontario. Leading up to the event, however, York officials anticipated demonstrations and campaigns aimed at halting graduate contributions to the university.

One expects academic events to be intellectually stimulating, but rarely is a gathering of scholars in Canada cause for investigation by high-ranking government officials. In this case, the conference touched upon the new third rail of political and academic conversation in the country.

Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace was the theme of one conference sponsored as part of York University’s fiftieth anniversary celebration (U50). What the conference proposed to accomplish was a critical reading of Israel’s history, with the aim of working towards viable political resolutions to more than fifty years of occupation and war. Very quickly, the conference became an international target of lobby groups that aimed to have the event stopped.

Dangerous precedent

The Conservative government’s decision to intervene and put pressure on the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to review its funding of the conference set a dangerous precedent. This controversy is the topic of No Debate: The Israel Lobby and Free Speech at Canadian Universities, by Jon Thompson, a retired professor at the University of New Brunswick.

No Debate provides an exceptional account of how the Israel lobby and its supporters in the government attempted to silence free speech. As Thompson’s book reveals, this was an unprecedented assault on academic freedom and the first incident of political intervention into the academic funding agency since its establishment in 1978. No Debate is based on a report of an investigation commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers that looked into attempts by the government to withdraw SSHRC’s financial support for the conference.

Within weeks of York announcing its U50 schedule, Zionist organizations like B’Nai Brith, the Jewish Defense League, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and the Canadian Jewish Congress pushed to have York withdraw its sponsorship. The conference was denounced in the press through op-ed pieces and full-page advertisements in leading Canadian papers. Senior York administrators, including President Mamdouh Shoukri, received a deluge of emails and phone calls. Through public records and freedom of information requests, Thompson catalogues the sea of correspondence between York officials, scholars and lobby groups that played a role in this sad affair.

Groundless accusations

As early as 4 October, 2008, the Jewish Defense League threatened to bring pressure on York to cancel the conference. The JDL also appealed to the federal government by making an argument that the conference presented ideas that were “contrary to official government policy” in Canada.

Despite groundless accusations against the conference organizers and keynote speakers, several York administrators met representatives from Israel lobby groups. What came from these meetings, Thompson shows, was particularly shameful. David DeWitt, then an associate vice-president at the university, suggested that the conference organizers swap the majority of the confirmed speakers for other, “worthy” contributors recommended by the very groups who sought to stop the event altogether.

DeWitt went so far as to say that the speakers were “tarnished by ideology and polemic.” That was an interesting charge, considering that DeWitt considered himself an “academic colleague” of Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, an individual who set out to publicly smear the names of conference speakers and organizers.

Spokespeople for the Israel lobby groups, and even scholars at York, accused conference speakers, such as The Electronic Intifada’s co-founder Ali Abunimah, of not possessing adequate credentials to participate in an academic debate. Even Jewish Israelis, like David Kretzmer of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who is a well-known human rights advocate and legal scholar, were targeted as being ideologically biased.

Ironically, this same chorus of opponents called for invitations to be extended to the likes of Liberal member of Parliament Bob Rae and former Liberal government minister Irvin Cotler to speak instead — neither of whom, to be sure, could be considered academic experts in this particular field, nor could they be expected to provide a sober and unbiased account of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Not a Jewish lobby

What No Debate offers is a comprehensive and historically grounded examination of academic freedom in theory and in practice. Thompson’s book also charts the rise of the Israel lobby and the threat this coalition poses to open discussion and academic freedom in the United States and, increasingly, Canada.

The author is clear that this is not a Jewish lobby, but a coterie of religious and secular groups that seek to undermine and silence any debate about Israel’s colonial history. Working in concert with a Conservative government that has, according to Thompson, been “eroding Canadian democracy in a variety of ways since 2006,” the Israel lobby is particularly dangerous to the fabric of free, scholarly inquiry and public debate.

In the case of the conference jointly sponsored by York and Queen’s, however, the lobby was not successful in its goals. In fact, the Canadian government’s attempt to force SSHRC’s hand was met with stiff, nation-wide resistance. Thompson concludes that the agency did not bend to the government’s wishes and its call for a second peer review.

No Debate is an important book for many reasons. For activists and scholars that stand in solidarity with Palestinian human rights to those who believe that academic freedoms everywhere need to be defended and expanded, Thompson’s book provides a politically potent and engaging read.

Andrew Stevens is co-host of Rank and File Radio, a weekly program about labor and unions in Canada that airs on CFRC 101.9FM. Andrew interviewed No Debate author Jon Thompson about the book in February. Archives of the program can be found at www.cfrc.ca and www.radio4all.net.

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March 9, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Strangling Civil Liberties, One Twist at a Time

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | March 7, 2012

There is a constituency for the right to assemble and protest in this country, but it appears as if that constituency has very little representation in the U.S. Congress. The Senate unanimously passed a law that has significant ramifications for the Occupy movement or anyone else that wants to exercise their First Amendment rights. H.R. 347 is also known as the Trespass Bill. Only three members of the House voted against it, all of them Republicans, including presidential contender Ron Paul. None of the major civil liberties organizations raised a fuss, either, but the silence will surely come back to haunt us.

The bill makes it a federal crime punishable by a year in prison for “trespassing” on places where someone under protection of the Secret Service is also present, and up to ten years if a weapon is involved, or someone is seriously injured. The restrictions cover not just the president, but also presidential candidates and foreign dignitaries and heads of state. The new version of the law makes protesters subject to felony prosecution even if they were unaware that people protected by the Secret Service were in the area. Rather than demonstrators freely congregating to protest the presence of their least favored presidential politicians, or to loudly demand that visiting foreign leaders go back home, would-be protesters would be best-advised by their lawyers to stay as far away as possible or face a long stretch in prison. Surely, that stands the right to peacefully assemble on its head.

Even more ominously, the new law allows the Department of Homeland Security to designate whole areas as part of a so-called National Security Event Zone, off limits to protest. The United National Anti-War Coalition and others that are planning to demonstrate at the meeting of NATO nations, in Chicago, in late May, will almost certainly be confronted with, not only Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s aggressive protest containment policies, but a Homeland Security declaration putting large areas under a federal protective bubble, with even more serious criminal consequences. In the real, often chaotic whirl of mass outdoor protest, with police pushing crowds from place to place, and protesters trying to make themselves heard, large numbers of demonstrators could find themselves in a federal no-go zone. Under the old rules, the harshest penalties could be imposed only on those who “willfully” crossed into a National Security Event Zone. The new Trespass Bill omits the word “willfully,” so that anyone who is caught “trespassing” in the Zone, whether they knew it was restricted or not, is liable for felony prosecution. This brings to mind the mass arrests of Occupy demonstrators on Brooklyn Bridge, last year. Many in the crowd thought they were being escorted across the bridge by police, and were not willfully trespassing. Under the federal bill, lack of willfulness is no excuse.

What is more disturbing than the potential Bill of Rights-eroding aspects of the legislation, is the Congress’s cavalier attitude towards civil liberties. There was no debate. The only No votes came from Tea Party Republicans. Democrats behaved as if nothing important was happening, just as when President Bill Clinton first came up with the idea National Security Event Zones – where the public, by law, has nothing to say.

Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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March 7, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

WAFA: Israeli Forces Commit 25 Violations Against Journalists in February

By Ghassan Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | March 05, 2012

The Palestinian News and Information Agency, WAFA, issued a report on Monday documenting the violations committed by Israeli forces against Palestinian journalists during February 2012.

The report stated 11 journalists were injured during the 25 violations. The majority of injuries were a direct result of the military firing tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets. 11 other cases of detention and arrests by Israeli troops against journalists were documented by WAFA.

WAFA noted in its report that the Israeli military attacked three Palestinian Media companies during the month of February. During the incident Israeli troops stormed the offices of WATAN TV,and AL Qudes Educational TV in Ramallah. On 29th February staff working there were detained, computers were taken along with broadcast equipment leaving the two stations off-air.

According to the Report most injuries journalists sustained happened while they were covering anti wall protests in West Bank villages. Soldiers used tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets against unarmed civilians. The report noted that Israeli soldiers deliberately opened fire during these protests at journalists, clearly violating international law.

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March 5, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

The haunting of Daniel Pipes

By Franklin Lamb | AL Manar | March 3, 2012

Beirut – Daniel Pipes, the anti-Arab Islamophobe is reportedly spooked these days. “Actually he has become an almost terrified man”, so says a colleagues at Pipes Islamophobic Middle East Forum and the MaCartyesque Campus Watch Organization.

MEF was founded by Pipes in 1986 and also the witch hunting, anti-Arab, McCartyesque, Campus Watch in 2001. CW’s function is to hound and intimidate faculty and students at colleges who are critical of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Pipes and CW create “dossiers” on professors, students and university administrations thought hostile to Israel. Under civic pressure from Americans who opposed his tactics and insisted on having their own names added to his personal “terrorist list,” Pipes withdrew his dossiers from the CW website but he still circulates them to scores of “select and executive subscribers” and other hate groups in order to get the word out about academics and others who support Palestine or criticize Israel.

Pipes’ increasingly exposed racist views are carried by journals like the National Review as well as pro-Zionist Islamophobic internet outlets. In 1990 Pipes wrote in the NR that “Western societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene…All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

Having briefly written anti-Muslim screeds for Rudy Giuliani’s failed White House quest in 2008, Pipes claims he liked the job and seeks to do the same for Mitt Romney (Pipes has labeled Mormonism “a cult”) or even Rick Santorum ( Pipes has referred to Rick as “one of those kook dispensationalist Christians”). Daniel told a copy editor at the Washington Times who edited his recent WT article noted below, that he would prefer to work for Newt Gingrich if he gets the nomination since they share the same views of Palestinians as “an invented people”.

The two also agree on moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem, increasing aid to Israel, and the inevitable necessity of transferring most of the remaining Palestinians out of “Eretz Israel” in order to stop once and for all the demographic and existential threat and pressure for a one state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict which Pipes and Gingrich consider, if not reversed soon will lead to the collapse of Israel.

Pipes makes his fears plain to readers in his recent 2012 Republican presidential candidates “application for a position as Middle East adviser” which he launched in the Washington Times on 2/21/12 but which was first presented in occupied Jerusalem at a recent MEF seminar.

Pipes chooses the low hanging fruit of the underfunded and over stretched UNRWA to target Palestinian refugees and to promote himself and his thesis. But even from the sarcastic title of his article, “Eventually, All Humans Will Be Palestine Refugees!” to his bizarre conclusions, Pipes demonstrates a preference for Arab bashing over truth. Pipes maintains that UNRWA has conspiratorially inflated the number of Palestinian refugees by including the children of the original nearly 800,000 (UNWRA uses a lower 750,000 figure who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and adding Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1967. Both groups absolutely should be included on Palestinian refugee’s lists since they are also victims of the original and continuing ethnic cleansing.

Pipes writes: “In contrast all other refugee populations have diminished in number as people “settle down” or die.

By Palestinians “settling down” one guesses Pipes means sardine canned into squalid refugee camps while Jews from Brooklyn or anywhere else can live on their lands and move into new housing financed partly from US taxes and enjoy swimming pools while nearby Palestinian orchards and crops are destroyed by drought, bulldozers or psychotic settlers.

Pipes laments to WT readers that the second thing that should have happened is that “almost all of the real 1948 refugees should have died by now” but for sure the last one will be dead in a few years. Instead, Pipes warns that rather than disappearing as they were supposed to “the Palestine refugee population has dramatically grown over time.” Pipes, claiming to be a historian, calls this apparently unanticipated unwillingness of the Palestinian refugees to forget their country and al Nakab a “bizarre historical phenomenon.”

Considering his “application-article” title about All Humans being Palestinians Refugees, Pipes is well aware that many Human Rights organizations, when it comes to the right and responsibility to resist the Zionist occupation of Palestine and to liberate their stolen land and homes, we are indeed all Palestinians.

We are all Palestinians because all people of good will who seek justice and the full right of return for those who were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba Palestinian holocaust identify with those brutally ethnically cleansed over the past 64 years.

Until Palestine is liberated and its refugees return, as Nelson Mandala has repeatedly instructed us, none of us is truly free. We are all Palestinians as we increasingly support international law’s rejection of any settlement or any colonist on any part of occupied Palestine.

What haunts Pipes also is Ben Gurion’s failed boast to fellow Zionist terrorists in Palestine during the Nakba. The Palestinian holocaust which saw the ethnic cleansing of 531 villages in Palestine by more than 62,000 well armed troops, many WW II veterans predictably decimated the approximately 2,500 Palestinian defenders scattered, approximately 25-30 per village across Palestine who were at a hopeless military disadvantage with largely Ottoman era rusting rifles and very little ammunition.

Given the above noted reality, the Zionist leaders worked arduously so that roughly one-half of the villages and approximately 50% of the population would not be discovered by the west and Ben Gurion’s words that “in any event, the old will die and the young will forget” were more than wishful thinking. Pipes and his associates in the Israel First culture have realized that not only was Ben Gurion fundamentally mistaken, but also that the 19th Century Zionists fundamentally erred in their calculations and hasbara.

Pipes basis for panic appears straight out of Edgar Allen Poe’s Novel “The Tell Tale Heart” where Poe’s character committed a savage crime and then was haunted because the evidence of this crime could not be hidden. The victim’s heart kept beating louder and louder and would not stop informing the World of the crime. Try as he might, the evil perpetrator could not get the heart to stop proving the crime and it drove the criminal more deeply into suicidal insanity.

In some aspects, Poe’s telltale heart appears a microcosm of the 19th Century Zionist colonial crimes which continue to this day in Palestine. The current efforts being made by Israel Firsters like Pipes include keeping Palestinian refugees invisible. They were to be erased by now but instead the global community and younger generations are increasingly taking up their cause and joining the BDS movement and other non-violent campaigns against their Zionist occupiers.

Pipes argues in his Washington Times article, “Were the Palestine refugee status a healthy one this infinite expansion would hardly matter. But the status has destructive implications for Israel which suffers from the “depredations” of a category of persons whose lives are truncated and distorted by an impossible dream of return to their great-grandparents’ houses; and the “refugees” themselves, whose status implies a culture of dependency, grievance, rage, and futility.” Pipes continues: “All other refugees from the World War II era (including my own parents ) have been long settled (ed; but not all on stolen Palestinian land) and the Palestine refugee status has already endured too long and needs to be narrowed down to actual refugees before it does further damage to Israel.”

Pipes and his ilk, which appear to tally on a daily basis the Nakba refugees and their families are horrified that Palestinian victims have refused to die off or forget the Nakba crimes committed against their families while at the same time the global community is beginning to support the Palestinians right to return.

Even many American taxpayers, long intimidated by Zionist hasbara and fears of being labeled “anti-Semitic” or “self-hating Jews” but who have long opposed Israel’s occupation of the political power centers in Washington DC, are outing themselves. Increasingly they are calling publicly for their government to break with Israel and its intensely promoted and sometimes engineered US wars in the region, and bring our troops home, heal and repair America while reclaiming American values.

This last remaining 19th Century colonial enterprise, which brutally implanted Israel in the heart of Palestine, has created more than six million refugees each of whom has the separate, personal, and inalienable right and responsibility to return home.

One remarkable quality of the Palestinian refugees which Pipes keeps from his readers, is that in the main they, unlike the European colonists who continue to ethnically cleanse them from their homes, may be willing to share their lands with any Jew who will agree to live as equals in a democratic one person one-vote governed country without religious preferences or a foreign “chosen colonial people” imposing an Apartheid regime.

~

Franklin Lamb in doing research in Libya and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmal.com
He is the author of The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon. Dr. Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut Board Member, The Sabra Shatila Foundation and the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Beirut-Washington DC, Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp.

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March 3, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Goodbye, First Amendment: ‘Trespass Bill’ will make protest illegal

RT | February 29, 2012

Just when you thought the government couldn’t ruin the First Amendment any further: The House of Representatives approved a bill on Monday that outlaws protests in instances where some government officials are nearby, whether or not you even know it.

The US House of Representatives voted 388-to-3 in favor of H.R. 347 late Monday, a bill which is being dubbed the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. In the bill, Congress officially makes it illegal to trespass on the grounds of the White House, which, on the surface, seems not just harmless and necessary, but somewhat shocking that such a rule isn’t already on the books. The wording in the bill, however, extends to allow the government to go after much more than tourists that transverse the wrought iron White House fence.

Under the act, the government is also given the power to bring charges against Americans engaged in political protest anywhere in the country.

Under current law, White House trespassers are prosecuted under a local ordinance, a Washington, DC legislation that can bring misdemeanor charges for anyone trying too get close to the president without authorization. Under H.R. 347, a federal law will formally be applied to such instances, but will also allow the government to bring charges to protesters, demonstrators and activists at political events and other outings across America.

The new legislation allows prosecutors to charge anyone who enters a building without permission or with the intent to disrupt a government function with a federal offense if Secret Service is on the scene, but the law stretches to include not just the president’s palatial Pennsylvania Avenue home. Under the law, any building or grounds where the president is visiting — even temporarily — is covered, as is any building or grounds “restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.”

It’s not just the president who would be spared from protesters, either.

Covered under the bill is any person protected by the Secret Service. Although such protection isn’t extended to just everybody, making it a federal offense to even accidentally disrupt an event attended by a person with such status essentially crushes whatever currently remains of the right to assemble and peacefully protest.

Hours after the act passed, presidential candidate Rick Santorum was granted Secret Service protection. For the American protester, this indeed means that glitter-bombing the former Pennsylvania senator is officially a very big no-no, but it doesn’t stop with just him. Santorum’s coverage under the Secret Service began on Tuesday, but fellow GOP hopeful Mitt Romney has already been receiving such security. A campaign aide who asked not to be identified confirmed last week to CBS News that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has sought Secret Service protection as well. Even former contender Herman Cain received the armed protection treatment when he was still in the running for the Republican Party nod.

In the text of the act, the law is allowed to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered any area where someone — rather it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney — will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct “within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises. Under that verbiage, that means a peaceful protest outside a candidate’s concession speech would be a federal offense, but those occurrences covered as “special events of national significance” don’t just stop there, either. And neither does the list of covered persons that receive protection.

Outside of the current presidential race, the Secret Service is responsible for guarding an array of politicians, even those from outside America. George W Bush is granted protection until ten years after his administration ended, or 2019, and every living president before him is eligible for life-time, federally funded coverage. Visiting heads of state are extended an offer too, and the events sanctioned as those of national significance — a decision that is left up to the US Department of Homeland Security — extends to more than the obvious. While presidential inaugurations and meeting of foreign dignitaries are awarded the title, nearly three dozen events in all have been considered a National Special Security Event (NSSE) since the term was created under President Clinton. Among past events on the DHS-sanctioned NSSE list are Super Bowl XXXVI, the funerals of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, most State of the Union addresses and the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

With Secret Service protection awarded to visiting dignitaries, this also means, for instance, that the federal government could consider a demonstration against any foreign president on American soil as a violation of federal law, as long as it could be considered disruptive to whatever function is occurring.

When thousands of protesters are expected to descend on Chicago this spring for the 2012 G8 and NATO summits, they will also be approaching the grounds of a National Special Security Event. That means disruptive activity, to whichever court has to consider it, will be a federal offense under the act.

And don’t forget if you intend on fighting such charges, you might not be able to rely on evidence of your own. In the state of Illinois, videotaping the police, under current law, brings criminal charges. Don’t fret. It’s not like the country will really try to enforce it — right?

On the bright side, does this mean that the law could apply to law enforcement officers reprimanded for using excessive force on protesters at political events? Probably. Of course, some fear that the act is being created just to keep those demonstrations from ever occurring, and given the vague language on par with the loose definition of a “terrorist” under the NDAA, if passed this act is expected to do a lot more harm to the First Amendment than good.

United States Representative Justin Amash (MI-03) was one of only three lawmakers to vote against the act when it appeared in the House late Monday. Explaining his take on the act through his official Facebook account on Tuesday, Rep. Amash writes, “The bill expands current law to make it a crime to enter or remain in an area where an official is visiting even if the person does not know it’s illegal to be in that area and has no reason to suspect it’s illegal.”

“Some government officials may need extraordinary protection to ensure their safety. But criminalizing legitimate First Amendment activity — even if that activity is annoying to those government officials — violates our rights,” adds the representative.

Now that the act has overwhelmingly made it through the House, the next set of hands to sift through its pages could very well be President Barack Obama’s; the US Senate had already passed the bill back on February 6. Less than two months ago, the president approved the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, essentially suspending habeas corpus for American citizens. Could the next order out of the Executive Branch be revoking some of the Bill of Rights? Only if you consider the part about being able to assemble a staple of the First Amendment, really. Don’t worry, though. Obama was, after all, a constitutional law professor. When he signed the NDAA on December 31, he accompanied his signature with a signing statement that let Americans know that, just because he authorized the indefinite detention of Americans didn’t mean he thought it was right.

Should President Obama suspend the right to assemble, Americans might expect another apology to accompany it in which the commander-in-chief condemns the very act he authorizes. If you disagree with such a decision, however, don’t take it to the White House. Sixteen-hundred Pennsylvania Avenue and the vicinity is, of course, covered under this act.

February 29, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Israel raids Ramallah TV stations

Ma’an – 29/02/2012

RAMALLAH – Israeli forces raided two Palestinian television networks early Wednesday in Ramallah and briefly detained four employees, journalists said.

Soldiers confiscated computers used by editors and reporters in Watan TV’s newsroom and general offices as well as administrative and financial files, the network said.

Troops also raided Al-Quds Educational TV in Al-Bireh and confiscated its broadcasting equipment, the head of its TV department Haroun Abu Irreh told Ma’an.

“This attack is nothing but piracy under a policy of systematic attack targeting Palestinian media organizations and journalists,” Watan TV said in a statement.

The network “deplores this aggressive behavior against an efficient and effective media organization,” and said it will restore the stolen equipment and transmitters and to try to resume broadcasts.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said soldiers were accompanying an operation by the country’s communications ministry, which had determined that the networks were broadcasting illegally.

They had been asked to cease their broadcasting “which significantly interrupts other legal broadcasting stations,” an army spokeswoman told Ma’an. “During the operation and in accordance with law, the communications ministry confiscated several transmitters.”

“Illegal broadcasting interfered with aircraft communication, which is very, very dangerous.”

Abu Irreh of Al-Quds Educational TV called the events of Wednesday morning “harassment to media and education stations and a way to shut the mouths of media and reporters.”

Palestinian lawmaker Mustafa Barghouti condemned the raids in a statement.

“This act is not only a violation of human rights and humanitarian law,” he said, “but also a breach of the agreements that forbid the Israeli military forces from entering or carrying out operations” in Area A.

“We will campaign worldwide to repel the Israeli aggression,” he said.

Watan TV identified the four employees who were detained as head of production Abdul Rahman Thaher, correspondent Hamza Salaymeh, graphics expert Ibrahim Milhim and broadcaster Ahmad Zaki.

They were released after several hours, the network said.

February 29, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Homeland Security Dept. Pays General Dynamics to Scour Internet for Criticism of its Policies

AllGov | February 27, 2012
Department of Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been paying a defense contractor $11.4 million to monitor social media websites and other Internet communications to find criticisms of the department’s policies and actions.

A government watchdog organization, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), obtained hundreds of documents from DHS through the Freedom of Information Act and found details of the arrangement with General Dynamics. The company was contracted to monitor the Web for “reports that reflect adversely on DHS,” including sub-agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In testimony submitted to the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, Ginger McCall, director of EPIC’s Open Government Project, stated that “the agency is monitoring constantly, under very broad search terms, and is not limiting that monitoring to events or activities related to natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or manmade disasters….The DHS has no legal authority to engage in this monitoring.”

McCall added: “This has a profound effect on free speech online if you feel like a government law enforcement agency—particularly the Department of Homeland Security, which is supposed to look for terrorists—is monitoring your criticism, your dissent, of the government.”

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February 27, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel issues third consecutive detention order against prisoner of conscience Ahmad Qatamesh

By Maureen Clare Murphy – The Electronic Intifada – 02/27/2012

The Palestinian prisoners advocacy group Addameer announced on Twitter yesterday that Israel had renewed administrative detention orders against Palestinian writer Ahmad Qatamesh for an additional six months. This is the third consecutive administrative detention order issued against Qatamesh.

The Palestinian writer and academic has been held without charge since 21 April 2011, when Israeli soldiers raided his family’s home, holding his family members hostage at gunpoint until Qatamesh, who was not home at the time, surrendered himself.

Ahmad’s daughter, Hanin Ahmad Qatamesh, described in harrowing detail how Israeli soldiers raided her family’s home in the middle of the night, searching for her father, in an article for The Electronic Intifada.

Ahmad Qatamesh’s wife Suha Barghouti, a human rights activist, told The Electronic Intifada: “It’s so clear that he is there [in Israeli prison] because of his ideas and political activism. He is a prisoner of conscience and he is there because of political reasons.” […]

News of Israel’s renewal of the detention orders against Qatamesh comes on the heels of a historic hunger strike made by Palestinian administrative detainee Khader Adnan. Adnan waged a 66-day-long strike to protest his being detained without charge. He ended his strike after Israel agreed to not renew his detention orders and release Adnan on 17 April.

Another Palestinian administrative detainee, Hana al-Shalabi, is entering her twelfth day of hunger strike. Like Adnan, this is not the first time Israel has arrested her and held her without charge or trial; she was arrested in September 2009 and subjected to solitary confinement, abuse and sexual harassment, according to an Addameer profile of al-Shalabi. A military court hearing confirming the administrative detention order against al-Shalabi is due to be held later today, according to Addameer.

There are more than 300 Palestinians currently being held without charge or trial under administrative detention orders, including at least twenty out of 132 members of the elected Palestinian Legislative Council.

Suha Barghouti and Ahmad Qatamesh (photo courtesy of Suha Barghouti)

Take action

Addameer has a toolkit for activists to put pressure on Israel to release Qatamesh, and encourages supporters to write to Qatamesh in prison (Ahmad Qatamesh, Ofer Prison, Givat Zeev, PO Box 3007, via Israel).

Addameer also has a profile of Qatamesh which includes information on how Israel had previously been held in administrative detention for five and a half years, and the impact that his imprisonment has had on his family:

Ahmad was first arrested in 1992 in front of his three-year-old daughter. Following his arrest, he was detained for more than a year – during which time he was tortured – before being placed in administrative detention in October 1993, despite the Military Judge ordering his release. Ahmad’s detention orders were repeatedly renewed for the next five and a half years, despite a lack of evidence purported against him. Due to pressure from international campaigns, Ahmad was finally released in 1998, becoming one of the longest-serving administrative detainees held without charge in Israeli prison. His memoir, I shall not wear your tarboosh [fez], accounts his experiences of being tortured while in detention.

AHMAD’S FAMILY

Ahmad’s extensive detention and arrests have been extremely difficult for his wife, Suha, a board member of Addameer and the Palestine Red Crescent Society, and his daughter, Haneen, a university student at the American University in Cairo. Suha recalls of his most recent arrest, “A few days ago, when they arrested my husband, I found out that there are very deep marks on my daughter’s spirit. She was three years old at that moment [when they arrested her father in 1992], and the marks are still there. When the soldiers told her that [they] arrested her father again, she almost collapsed.” Suha and Haneen hoped that Ahmad would be released before Haneen’s graduation in January. The event was very important to Ahmad, particularly because he feels as though he was not able to watch his daughter grow up for much of her childhood.

More than ten years after he was released from his previous detention, it had not occurred to Ahmad’s wife Suha that they might have to suffer through the same ordeal once again. The torment of his arrest is made even worse by the uncertainty of administrative detention and not being able to prepare for his release, as the family is already all-too-familiar with the prison authorities’ practice of renewing administrative detention orders every six months. She condemns his imprisonment as a prisoner of conscience, arrested for his ideas and political activism, and calls on the international community to continue to assert pressure on his behalf.

–

Administrative detention is a procedure that allows the Israeli military to hold detainees indefinitely on secret evidence without charging them or allowing them to stand trial. In the occupied Palestinian West Bank, the Israeli army is authorized to issue administrative detention orders against Palestinian civilians on the basis of Military Order 1651. This order empowers military commanders to detain an individual for up to six month renewable periods if they have “reasonable grounds to presume that the security of the area or public security require the detention.” On or just before the expiry date, the detention order is frequently renewed. This process can be continued indefinitely.

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February 27, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

UK to spy on all online communications

Press TV – February 19, 2012

The British government is to exert more control over the public by storing the details of British people’s communications including every phone call, text message and email.

The British government will order phone companies and broadband providers to record the details of all phone calls, text messages, and emails and restore the data for one year, reported the Telegraph on Saturday.

Britain’s new spy plans will also target social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter as the details of direct messages communicated between the users are to be recorded.

The change in the social media has been a concern for the British government at times of crisis such as the unprecedented unrest which swept across the country in August last year.

Exerting more control over British public’s communication via social media is a preventative measure taken by the British government to spy on people and limit their access to the means of communication.

The Telegraph revealed that Britain’s Home Office has been engaged in negotiations with internet providers for two months.

The spy plans have been drawn up by the country’s intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 in collaboration with the GCHQ, Britain’s secretive agency of intelligence experts.

Big Brother Watch, a campaign group defending individual privacy and civil liberties, described the British government’s decision as “shameful” saying, “Britain is already one of the most spied on countries off-line,” online spying on the British public would be another invasion on their privacy.

February 19, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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