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Israeli forces ‘detain Palestinian Legislative Council head’ at checkpoint

Ma’an – 19/01/2012

JERUSALEM – Israeli forces on Thursday detained the head of the Palestinian Legislative Council Aziz Dweik at a checkpoint near Jerusalem, witnesses said.

Israeli soldiers handcuffed and blindfolded Dweik and took him to an unknown destination, witnesses told Ma’an.

An Israeli military spokesman had no immediate comment on the report.

Some 23 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council are currently imprisoned in Israel, according to the prisoner rights group Addameer. Twenty of the elected officials are being held in administrative detention without charge or trial.

Almost 5,000 Palestinians, including 132 minors, are held in Israeli jails, a practice which violates international law.

January 19, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

NYPD to use body scanners in New York

Press TV – January 19, 2012

Adding a new weapon to their war on freedom, the head of the New York Police Department is working with the Pentagon to develop body scanners to be used throughout the city.

In a speech on Tuesday morning, New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced that the new gun-scan technology would be ‘capable of detecting concealed firearms’, Russia Today reported.

The high-tech radiation detector will operate as a mapping tool that can measure the energy emitted from a person’s body up to 16 feet and can pinpoint anything blocking it, like a gun.

According to Kelly, the scanners would be used in ‘reasonably suspicious circumstances’. However, the American Civil Liberties Union has already questioned the New York Police Department (NYPD) over what they say is an unnecessary precaution that raises more issues than it solves.

The detector will allow NYPD to run illegal searches on anyone walking the streets of the city and any suspicious detection can prompt the officers to search people for anything under their clothes.

“It’s worrisome. It implicates privacy, the right to walk down the street without being subjected to a virtual pat-down by the Police Department when you’re doing nothing wrong,” Donna Lieberman the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NUCLU) was reported as saying.

In the first quarter of 2011, more than 161,000 innocent New Yorkers were reportedly stopped and interrogated on the streets of the city leading to the assumption that NYPD are already going beyond the law by searching anyone they choose.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, the new devices could also be biologically harmful as the waves used by the scanners could ‘unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.’

January 19, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Web blackout ends: SOPA bleeding, but not dead

RT | 19 January, 2012

The Internet strike opposing the US anti-piracy bills SOPA/PIPA has ended. The webquake spearheaded by giants like Wikipedia, Reddid and Google led to key sponsors withdrawing their support for the acts. However, they are not dead, activists warn.

Massive opposition to the controversial legislation resulted in Congressmen and Senators swinging against the bills. Up to 18 Senators, of which seven were former co-sponsors, voiced their opposition to PIPA on Wednesday. On the SOPA side, at least two sponsors have dropped out, while Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer blacked out his website in support of the protest.

The protest was timed to coincide with a scheduled hearing in the House of Representatives on SOPA. However amid the online outrage, it was postponed, and the bill will now not be moved to the floor until legislators have reached a consensus.

The conflict, however, is far from being resolved. “SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows,” Wikipedia warns. PIPA is scheduled be put to a vote in the Senate on January 24, while SOPA sponsors plan to push the bill forward in February.

SOPA co-sponsor Lamar Smith dismissed the protest, saying Internet giants are using false allegations to stir up panic in the online community.

“When the opposition is based upon misinformation, I have confidence in the facts and confidence that the facts will ultimately prevail,” Smith said.

Wikipedia reports that 162 million people saw its blackout message and 8 million used its search tool to find their legislative representatives.

“You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet,” the website said in a statement, calling the protest extraordinary.

Google’s “Stop piracy, not liberty” petition scored 4.5 million supporters as of 4:30 pm ET, said Google spokesperson Christine Chen.

All in all at least 75,000 websites participated in the blackout, according to Fight for the Future foundation.

The protest action swept across the world wide web, with SOPA/PIPA-related topics trending throughout Wednesday on Twitter. Those were ranging from the dead-serious “SOPAstrike” to the humorous “factswithoutwikipedia” to the satirical “save porn.”

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

Truth Tiptoeing through Antisemitism Minefield

By Vacy Vlazna | Palestine Chronicle | January 17, 2012

That an Australian Senate Complaints Committee will be holding a hearing in February on a complaint about the broadcaster SBS promoting antisemitism for its screening of Kosminsky’s The Promise is testimony to the egregious influence of the Zionist lobby in Australia.

The Promise dramatises the political upheaval in Palestine in the final period of the British Mandate and the Palestinian Nakba through the perspective of a British soldier and also the contemporary ongoing violence of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine through the perspective of his grand-daughter.

Peter Wertheim, the executive director of The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) wrote an epic 31 page complaint to the SBS Ombudsman maintaining it “promotes, endorses and reinforces demeaning stereotypes about Jews as a group.” He makes a hackneyed comparison to the Nazi film ‘Jud Suss’ and takes a clichéd jump to a fantastic conclusion –

“The ancient libel that holds all Jews throughout history to be collectively guilty of killing Jesus has been segued into the equally ludicrous proposition that all Jews are collectively guilty of the wanton shedding of innocent blood, a staple of contemporary Palestinian propaganda.”

Wertheim measures the series’ anti-Semitism from the standards of the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” developed by the EUMC in 2005 which extends the basic definition- that of the hatred and persecution of Jews – to the sanctioned deflection of any criticism of Israel i.e. “denying the Holocaust …. [and] lists ways in which attacking Israel could be antisemitic, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor, or applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”[Wikipedia ]

It is ironic that Holocaust denial has been criminalised in many European countries and in Israel, yet in Israel, where thousands of holocaust survivors reside, Nakba denial – the denial of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine with its destruction of over 500 villages and forced deportation under the Zionist transfer plan of over 750,000 indigenous Palestinians by Zionist militia (deemed terrorists by Britain)- is state policy.

In 2009, the Israeli Education Ministry ordered the removal of the word ‘Nakba’ from a school textbook for Arab children.

In March 2011, the Knesset passed the Nakba law: “The Nakba law, once implemented, will make it illegal for public bodies, or agencies that receive funding from the State of Israel, to claim that Israel should not be a Jewish state, and that the practices of the government are not democratic. Furthermore the commemoration of ‘Nakba Day,’ the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, following the Yishuv’s ethnic cleansing of the majority of indigenous Palestinians from what became Israel, has also been made illegal.”

This month the Israeli High Court rejected a petition against this controversial ‘Nakba Law’.

The flurry of complaints about the screening of The Promise, in Australia and in Britain, is yet another facet of the Zionist Nakba denial campaign.

On 21 April 2011, the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom dismissed similar complaints in a 10 page report defending The Promise as a “serious television drama, not presented as a historical re-creation which would not incite crime, harm or prejudice against Jews.”

The Promise is not antisemitic. Every enacted or alluded to historic event can be verified… the British attempts to stem Jewish immigration, the hanging of captured Jewish Irgun fighters and the demolition of their homes (a practise copied by Israel ); the Zionist Irgun terrorist attacks on the British forces  including The King David Hotel bombing and the massacre of the villagers of Deir Yassin, the forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians who still have no right of return….by historians such as in Israeli  Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Professor Adel Safty’s Might over Right.

In the drama’s 2005 setting, the suicide bombings by Palestinians, the Israeli refuseniks, the daily harassment of Palestinians by extremist colonists in Hebron, the demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli Occupation Forces, the solidarity of Palestinian and Israeli peace activists are well documented.

The Promise fulfils standards of historic truth within its fictional frame and confirms that in the Palestinian tragic narrative, the past and the present are in a vicious grip of death, violence and hasbara.

Wertheim’s treatise on Israel’s history has the imprimatur of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth. According to him the justification for a Jewish state was the attempts by Palestinian and Arab forces to prevent it.  Wertheim, unlike reasonable persons, does not consider that such opposition is valid to the imposed colonisation and partition of Palestinian land. Likewise, when in 1939, Isaac Steinberg proposed a Jewish colony in the Australian Kimberley region it was rejected by the Menzies government on the grounds that it ran contrary to ‘the ideal of one Australian family of peoples, devoid of foreign communities.’

While Wertheim accuses Kosminsky of factual omission, he omits mentioning that Britain’s Balfour Declaration favouring the establishment of a Jewish homeland was illegal for it breached the terms of Mandate A which was the temporary administration of ex-Ottoman territories that “have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory” and equally that the United Nations had no legal mandate to partition foreign countries.

The Australian government and mainstream media, including SBS, though the ABC is worse, have shamefully capitulated to Zionist pressure to endorse a pro-Israel bias and the cynically fabricated antisemitic paranoia in Australia.

In 2010, the ABC withdrew its offer to acquire the pro-peace documentary, ‘ Hope in a Slingshot’ by Australian Inka Starfrace on the grounds of preserving its ‘commitment to impartiality’ which wasn’t a moral barrier to its screening of the duplicitous pro-Israeli propaganda ‘documentary’ Gaza – Collision Course (BBC’s Death in the Med) which presented Israel as the innocent victim of its own act of piracy and murder of 9 unarmed aid-workers on the Mavi Marmara flotilla. The ABC reckoned it ‘scrupulously balanced’ though eventually the BBC Trust Committee found three breaches – two related to accuracy, the other to impartiality.

Each victory of Zionist hasbara signifies that truth is abandoned and with it the Palestinian people are abandoned to systematic Israeli brutality which daily violates international law.

Hopefully the Senate Complaints Committee has the intelligence to throw out Wertheim’s absurd charge of antisemitism.

(Peter Wertheim’s letter can be found here)

– Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 and was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

January 18, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Pro-Israel University of California president denies Jewish students face “hostility” as Zionist complaints allege

By Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | January 17, 2012

University of California (UC) President Mark Yudof, an avowed supporter of Israel, has denied claims that Jewish students on several UC campuses face a climate of hostility that amounts to a violation of their civil rights, due to Palestine solidarity activism.

Zionist students and groups have lodged federal civil rights complaints at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz under Title VI of 1964 Civil Rights Act. Such complaints, as The Electronic Intifada has consistently reported, are part of a nationally-orchestrated strategy by pro-Israel groups to use the civil rights law to suppress Palestinian solidarity activism on college campuses.

The Forward reports today:

And at the University of California, where there are two outstanding Title VI complaints at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Santa Cruz, Yudof said that while he felt “good” about the extension of Title VI, it would be difficult to prove that the students and faculty in question faced a pervasive, hostile atmosphere. “These cases have to be carefully crafted with a fact pattern that is compelling. I don’t think in either of these cases these fact patterns exist,” he said. “I think it is about people engaged in abhorrent speech on our campuses. But I am skeptical at the end of the day that with those two instances we will be found to be in violation of Title VI.”

Yudof’s comments bolster a 12 January article by Noah Stern in J-Weekly, a San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community publication that states, “Even in the midst of high-profile Israel-related political activity, and contrary to popular belief, Jewish students at U.C. Berkeley do not feel threatened, under attack or marginalized.”

Censorship strategy by pro-Israel groups suffering setbacks

Yudof’s comments undermining the civil rights complaints, come just days after a similar complaint at Barnard College was thrown out by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the body charged with investigating.

And last month a judge in California threw out a separate lawsuit by students accusing UC Berkeley administrators of allowing an “anti-Semitic climate” to develop on campus, because the accusers had failed to support their claims.

Jewish college presidents and growing BDS movement

Yudof’s comments came in an extraordinary article in The Forward highlighting the dilemmas supposedly faced by Jewish presidents of US colleges:

As the debate about Israel rages on college campuses across America, there is one figure for whom the conversation takes on strikingly personal dimensions: the Jewish college president. About 20 Jewish men and women hold the highest positions at universities across the country, including campuses that have become hotbeds of political activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For these individuals, the role of president entails a constant balancing act between encouraging free speech on campus and honoring their personal, often supportive, views of Israel.

The suggestion that presidents face a dilemma simply because they are Jewish might be regarded – by some – as an anti-Semitic suggestion that they have a “dual loyalty.”

But the article highlights the enormous power that college presidents have to suppress or derail boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns on campuses and is a must-read:

For many college presidents, the movement to boycott, divest from and implement sanctions against Israel – commonly known as BDS – represented a red line: Presidents who were previously disinclined to speak out against anti-Israel activity on campus in the name of preserving open dialogue found themselves publicly opposing the movement.

Surrendering judgment to the US government

Yudof himself for example did all he could to halt efforts by students at his own universities:

In 2010, when U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Diego students introduced bills in their student governments calling for divestment from General Electric Co. and United Technologies – two companies that manufacture Israeli military gear – Yudof felt compelled to take a decisive step. That May, he issued a statement saying that the Board of Regents would not consider BDS, since it was the board’s policy to take up divestment only if America’s government said that the regime in question was committing genocide. But for Yudof, there was a secondary reason.

“I thought there was a double standard with Israel,” he said. “It was unimaginable. Other countries were given a pass, and they were going to enforce this boycott against a tiny country in the Middle East. In my judgment, but for it being the Jewish state, it would not be on their list for a boycott.”

It’s remarkable how established power so often works against progressive change and campaigns for universal rights and that Yudof would surrender any power of independent judgement and investigation – supposedly the role of a university – to government officials.

But it’s all the more remarkable that the Palestine solidarity movement – led by students – marches on despite all the forces determined to stop it.

January 17, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Decline ‘Friend’ Request: Social Media Meets 21st Century Statecraft

By Cyril Mychalejko | Upside Down World | 16 January 2012

A Senate report released in October 2011 urging the US government to expand the use of social media as a foreign policy tool in Latin America offers another warning for activists seduced by the idea of technology and social media as an indispensable tool for social change.

In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution… not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

The Dangers of Digital Diplomacy

The Senate report, “Latin American Governments Need to ‘Friend’ Social Media and Technology” was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State’s use of digital diplomacy.

“Despite Latin America’s broad social and economic progress, many countries in the region still face challenges to democracy similar to those recently seen in the Middle East,” wrote Lugar in the introduction to the report. “In the extreme cases, countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are led by authoritarian leaders who curtail civil and political freedoms.”

The report urges improving internet infrastructure in the region, along with expanding the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as essential in order to advance Washington’s foreign policy interests. This is also identified as a way to reassert Washington’s influence in a part of the world where it has been perceived to be waning since the Bush Administration and the subsequent rise of center-left governments in the region.

“In particular, the characteristics of Latin American social media use and engagement of connectivity resources…indicate that this area could be primed for substantial positive change in a manner similar in nature, if not in process, to that recently observed in the Middle East,” the report states.

The right-leaning journal Americas Quarterly praises this “smart idea” calling it “an innovative strategy to advance U.S. goals”, one of them being the need to “ramp up our data collection and research on the impact of social media and technology on fostering democracy in the region, particularly Venezuela.”

This all falls under what has been dubbed 21st Century Statecraft, the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate re-branding—swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy—a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism,” explains the New York Times in a July 2010 article.

Described as a “marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department,” Washington has turned to “Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s… to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development” abroad.

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” said Clinton in a speech on internet freedom in January 2010.

In August 2011 the Washington Post reported findings by the Lowy Institute for International Policy which show that U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr.

But Judith McHale, former under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, gave a more honest assessment in March 2011 of what’s driving the State Department’s new initiative, stripped of the flowery and misleading language of freedom and democracy.

“New media and connective technologies enhance our ability to listen… Social media provides new ways for us to keep our ear to the ground,” said McHale. “Of course, we are not interested in developing social media platforms for the sake of having them. We are interested in applying social media to promote our strategic objectives in the Americas.”

But as history has shown, Washington’s strategic interests are often antithetical to freedom and human rights. And it is naïve to think that the State Department would be conducting this form of diplomacy in “a principled and regime-neutral fashion,” as intellectual apologists like Anne-Marie Slaughter may profess. And in Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries are undoubtedly in Washington’s cross-hairs.

During a June 30, 2011 Senate hearing,“The State of Democracy in the Americas”, Senator Lugar asked Roberta Jacobson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere at the time, to name programs specifically targeting ALBA countries. Jackson noted in her answer that the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has programs that support media training in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador; these programs address the use and impact of social media, along with traditional topics such as independent journalism, investigative reporting, and overcoming self-censorship.”

All of these countries have democratically-elected governments, and while they all are struggling in varying ways to build stronger democratic institutions and to translate democratic rhetoric into functioning policy, Washington’s meddling in internal affairs through 21st Century Statecraft is dangerous for social movements and democratic activists.

The Social Networking Counterinsurgency

On February 3, the Senate held a hearing examining US intelligence agencies’ alleged lack of anticipation of the uprisings in Egypt. Afterwards, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, “said she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government,” The Washington Post reported. The CIA has a Open Source Center, where analysts based in a headquarters in an undisclosed location in Virginia, along with analysts working in U.S. Embassies (“to get a step closer to their subjects”) throughout the world monitor as many as millions of tweets per day, along with Facebook updates and other open source media outlets.

Wired Magazine reported in July that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Wired’s Adam Rawnsley points out:

“It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself… SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what.”

Furthermore, the military solicited contracts for the development of software to create fake Facebook personas, to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent,” the Raw Story reported in February. Private security contractor HB Gary has already been exposed for doing such a thing on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce as a way to “infiltrate left-leaning groups” in the country, as ThinkProgress revealed last year courtesy of 75,000 private company emails provided by the hactivst group Anonymous.

These strategies are particularly cynical given the following passage from Lugar’s Senate report:

collaborators of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently hacked the Twitter accounts of opposition activists. Staff strongly believes that this example indicates how policy needs to take into consideration the extent repressive governments will take to silence democratic voices using this technology.

What officials seem to be saying is: never-mind what happens in this country. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring “social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world” isn’t important. And while US corporations are selling surveillance systems to repressive regimes, that’s just the free-market supply and demand economics at work.

And even if, “What elevated the [Occupy Wall Street] activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media,” as Betty Yu, national organizer at the Center for Media Justice, wrote last month, these same tools can, and are, being used to monitor, undermine and co-opt these and similar movements.

So if Washington approaches Latin American governments with aid for internet infrastructure and training, citizens and governments should approach this as a very loaded Trojan Horse.

January 17, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

US Department of Education throws out Zionist group’s “civil rights” complaint against Barnard College

By Ali Abunimah – The Electronic Intifada – 01/14/2012

The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has dismissed a complaint against Barnard College – which is a partner of Columbia University – that a student was “steered” away from taking a class by Professor Joseph Massad because the student is Jewish.

The decision strikes a blow at a key strategy being utilized by Zionist organizations to use US civil rights legislation to smear and harass faculty who teach about Palestine or are critical of Israeli policies, and to censor Palestine solidarity activism on campuses.

The complaint alleged that Professor Rachel McDermott, Chair of the Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures Department at Barnard College, which is in New York City, had told an unnamed student not to take a class by Massad because she would be “uncomfortable” and to take another class instead.

The complaint was instigated by Kenneth L. Marcus, himself a former head of the OCR, who now leads a Zionist group called Institute for Jewish Community Research, and is a board member and legal adviser to the pro-Israel group Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

OCR finds no evidence to back complaint

An 11 January letter from OCR official Emily Frangos to Barnard College President Debora L. Spar reviewed the facts of the case and concluded:

Neither the complainant nor the Student provided, and OCR did not find, any evidence other than the Student’s assertions to contradict the Chair’s [Rachel McDermott] statements. Further, neither the complainant nor the Student provided, and OCR did not find, any other evidence to indicate that the Chair advised any other students of Jewish ancestry/ethnicity not to take a course with the Professor [Massad].

The letter also points out that the student was not even eligible to take Massad’s class – a senior seminar – because she was a first-year. The letter adds that based on “insufficient evidence to support the complainant’s allegation” the case is deemed closed and “OCR will take no further action with respect to this allegation.”

Due to his intellectual work, Massad has been a frequent target of smears by Zionist groups who tried unsuccessfully to sabotage his tenure process at Columbia University. The University had earlier emphasized publicly that the complaint against Barnard “in no way involves Professor Joseph Massad.”

A set up? Student herself instigated conversation about possibly being “uncomfortable”

Barnard College had defended itself vigorously against the allegation, including a multi-page submission to the OCR, which contains Professor McDermott’s account of her meeting with the student:

According to Professor McDermott, the Student dropped in one day during her open office hours in January 2011. No prior appointment had been made. This was the usual procedure for Professor McDermott, as she does not schedule her office hours in advance. Professor McDermott recalls that the Student initiated a conversation about her interest in taking a course taught by Professor Massad at Columbia but expressed concern that she would feel uncomfortable in the class. Professor McDermott does not recall the name of the specific class being discussed or whether the Student provided the name. Professor McDermott recalls listening to the Student express her concerns and acknowledging that it was possible she might feel uncomfortable at times in the class. However, Professor McDermott is certain that she did not discourage the student from taking the course with Professor Massad.

McDermott’s account raises the question whether the student – who has not been named – had been coached to seek an encounter that could then be spun as the basis of a complaint, or had been encouraged to make the complaint afterwards.

While we can only speculate in this instance, The Electronic Intifada found evidence of the involvement of a student in a similar effort by the pro-Israel group StandWithUs which has been colluding with Israeli officials to lodge a complaint with OCR against Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington to suppress Palestine solidarity activism by students there.

Part of a well-organized strategy by Zionist groups to silence campuses

It is crucial to understand that the complaint against Barnard College is not an isolated incident, but rather part of a carefully laid out strategy masterminded by Kenneth Marcus to use US civil rights laws to allege that speech critical of Israel violates the civil rights of Jewish students by making them feel uncomfortable, unsafe or harassed.

It is also important to note that this strategy has not been universally embraced even among Jewish community and Zionist groups in the United States – indeed it has been condemned as an effort to “censor” free speech.

Last October, The Forward reported:

Simmering divisions within the Jewish community are expected to come to a head this month over efforts to use federal civil rights laws to sanction some forms of alleged anti-Israel activity on campus. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, American Jewry’s primary umbrella group for addressing domestic issues, will vote at its upcoming board meeting on a resolution that, in its current draft, cautions Jewish groups to guard against suppressing free speech and to invoke civil rights laws only after exhausting other measures.

“Lawsuits and threats of legal action should not be used to censor anti-Israel events, statements, and speakers in order to ‘protect’ Jewish students,” the draft resolution warns, “but rather for cases which evidence a systematic climate of fear and intimidation coupled with a failure of the university administration to respond with reasonable corrective measures.”

It is doubtful such objections or the OCR decision in the Barnard case will discourage Marcus from further abuse of US civil rights laws for blatantly political, anti-Palestinian and anti-free-speech purposes. Reacting to the OCR ruling, Marcus told The Columbia Spectator, “This is just the initial determination, so it is subject to appeal.”

OCR Decision Barnard

Barnard Submission to OCR

January 14, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Israeli soldiers raid office, home of detained journalist

Ma’an – 12/01/2012

NABLUS – Israeli military forces on Thursday confiscated computers, mobile phones and camera memory cards from the office and home of a Palestinian journalist.

Soldiers raided Amin Abu Warda’s office in Nablus at 3 a.m., his colleague Atef Doughlas told Ma’an, and confiscated several items, including a work computer and mobile phone.

Witnesses said Israeli forces also raided Abu Warda’s home and confiscated his personal mobile and laptop as well as his son’s mobile phone.

Abu Warda has been held in Israeli detention since Dec. 28, 2011. The journalist is being held without charge and has not been allowed to speak with a lawyer.

An Israeli court issued a decision to extend his arrest until January 15, 2012.

Palestinian media freedom group MADA slammed the arrest, saying it “stands in direct contravention to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

The group said Thursday that Israeli forces had escalated violations against journalists in December, with six journalists injured by gas projectiles fired at demonstrations.

January 12, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

SOPA-Supporting News Outlets Aren’t Covering SOPA

By Dave Copeland | Read Write Web | January 6, 2012

MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC have dedicated no time to covering the Stop Online Piracy Act in their evening newscasts since Oct. 1, according to a report by Ben Dimiero of Media Matters For America.

CNN, meanwhile, has dedicated a single evening news segment to the issue. All of the companies covered in the report have either publicly supported SOPA or have parent companies that have done so.

Dimiero based his report on Lexis-Nexis searches which includes transcripts of nighttime newscasts.

Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), Time Warner (CNN) and Disney (ABC) are all listed as supporters of the bill. ABC and CBS are also listed as separate supporters of the bill.

SOPA would block access to sites accused of violating U.S. copyright laws. The measure has been called Draconian by opponents who say it would fundamentally change the free-flow of information across the Internet. Proponents, ranging from the NBA to Universal, say the measure is needed to block sites which flagrantly flaunt copyright laws and make content available for free without paying copyright owners.

Traditional media companies have been key players in lobbying for SOPA’s passage, with more than half of that funding coming from cable television providers, commercial TV and radio stations, and the entertainment industry. Opponents of the legislation have been developing apps to help voters track how their legislators stand on SOPA and how much they have received in campaign donations from SOPA-supporting entities.

January 9, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Homeland Security monitors journalists

RT | 07 January, 2012

Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what.

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms.

Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own definition of personal identifiable information, or PII, such data could consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.” Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC’s write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency.

Also included in the roster of those subjected to the spying are government officials, domestic or not, who make public statements, private sector employees that do the same and “persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest,” which to itself opens up the possibilities even wider.

The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn’t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses.

The development out of the DHS comes at the same time that U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady denied pleas from supporters of WikiLeaks who had tried to prevent account information pertaining to their Twitter accounts from being provided to federal prosecutors. Jacob Applebaum and other advocates of Julian Assange’s whistleblower site were fighting to keep the government from subpoenaing information on their personal accounts that were collected from Twitter.

Last month the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk Massachusetts District Attorney subpoenaed Twitter over details pertaining to recent tweets involving the Occupy Boston protests.

The website Fast Company reports that the intel collected by the Department of Homeland Security under the NOC Monitoring Initiative has been happening since as early as 2010 and the data is being shared with both private sector businesses and international third parties.

January 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Hamas: Israel detains party leader, son

Ma’an – January 5, 2012

JENIN – Israeli forces detained a Hamas leader and his son in the northern West Bank on Wednesday evening, party officials said.

Ali Abdulllah Khalil Abu Al-Rab, 50, and his 20-year-old son were returning from Ramallah to their home in Qabatiya, near Nablus, when they were apprehended by forces at the Zaatara crossing, the officials said.

Abu Al-Rab was jailed in Israel for 19 years before his release last year. His son is a student at the Arab American University in Jenin.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said she was looking into the report. She said eight people were detained across the West Bank overnight Wednesday.

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

National-Security Assassination of Americans in 1973

By Jacob G. Hornberger | January 4, 2011

A Chilean judge has indicted a retired U.S. Naval officer, Capt. Ray E. Davis, in the murder of two American citizens in Chile during the U.S.-supported Pinochet coup in 1973. The indictment indicates that the U.S. military and the CIA may have been responsible for the national-security assassination of two Americans several decades before the start of the war on terrorism.

The two Americans were journalists — 31-year-old Charles Horman and 24-year-old Frank Teruggi. During the Pinochet coup in 1973, both men were taken captive and executed in cold blood.

For decades, the CIA, playing the innocent, denied any involvement in the murders.

Then, in 1999 a declassified State Department document revealed that the CIA had, in fact, played some unidentified role in at least Horman’s murder.

What role? We don’t know. Ever since the revelation of that State Department document, the CIA has remained mum on the case, obviously taking the position that secrecy and cover-up is the best policy.

By the same token, despite the fact that the State Department document clearly furnished sufficient cause to impanel a federal grand jury to investigate the CIA’s role in the murders, the Justice Department under both Republican and Democratic regimes has steadfastly failed and refused to do so.

At the same time, Congress has failed and refused to open an investigation into the murders, in the process subpoenaing CIA officials to testify what exactly the CIA’s role was in the murders, the identity of the CIA officials who participated in the murders, and whether President Richard Nixon or other high U.S. officials ordered the hit to be made on the two Americans.

Horman’s murder was the subject of the movie “Missing,” starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

The Chilean indictment of a retired U.S. military officer brings a new dimension to the case — the confluence of the two branches of the U.S. national security state — the military and the CIA — to allegedly bring about the murder of two American journalists, on grounds of national security.

What did Horman and Teruggi supposedly do to justify being taken out? The allegation is that during the coup, Horman acquired evidence documenting the U.S. government’s complicity in the coup. Therefore, the argument goes, by acquiring such information Horman became an immediate threat to the national security of the United States.

Moreover, the fact that Horman and Teruggi were leftists, liberals, or socialists who were supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende might have also constituted evidence of their being a grave threat to the national security of the United States during the Cold War.

The Chilean indictment of Davis alleges that he gave Horman a ride from the U.S. military installation in Valparaiso, where Horman allegedly acquired the information showing U.S. complicity in the coup, to Horman’s apartment in Santiago.

After that, Horman was picked up by Pinochet’s national-security goons, taken away, and executed.

While no one except the CIA, and possibly the U.S. military, knows exactly what the CIA role was in the murder, the allegation is that the CIA and the military signaled Pinochet that they wanted Horman (and possibly Teruggi) executed but without any evidence pointing to U.S. complicity in the murders.

One ironic twist to this saga involves the murder of a Chilean citizen by the Pinochet regime, on grounds of national security. During his brutal dictatorship, Pinochet sent a national-security hit team to Washington, D.C., where it murdered Orlando Letelier, who had served in the Allende government, on the streets of Washington, D.C. Even though the person who orchestrated the murder, a man named Michael Townley, ultimately got a sweetheart plea deal, no doubt because he had been an agent of the CIA, at least the Justice Department treated the hit as a murder rather than a legitimate assassination by the Pinochet regime to protect Chile’s national security.

On the other hand, however, the U.S. government has never treated the executions of Charles Horman and Michael Teruggi in the same way. Apparently, the notion has been that once the U.S. national security state decides that someone is a threat to national security, including an American, it has the legal authority to eliminate such a threat through assassination.

Equally important, the presumption seems to be that the final judge of what constitutes a sufficient threat to national security to justify an assassination of an American or anyone else lies with the national-security state itself, either through the CIA making the determination itself or by following orders of the president.

All of this, of course, is sheer nonsense. There is clear evidence indicating that two Americans have been murdered by agents of the U.S. national security state. This is not a case where the victims are alleged to have played an “operational role” in attacking the United States or even releasing classified information embarrassing to the U.S. government. The very worst thing Horman and Teruggi allegedly did was acquire information from military sources indicating U.S. government complicity in a regime-change operation in a foreign country and of being liberals, leftists, or socialists.

Since when do such things justify the national-security assassination of American citizens by either the U.S. military or the CIA?

There is no statue of limitations on murder. The U.S. government, including the Justice Department and the Congress, owe it to the American people, including the families of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, to open official investigations into the murders of these two young men and to bring to justice every U.S. official who participated in such murders.

If Chileans aren’t scared to confront the truth, why should Americans be?

January 5, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

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