Clashes reported in Hebron over Israeli heritage decision
Ma’an – 22/02/2010
Hebron – Confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli forces were reported in Hebron on Monday, as public figures declare a general strike across the city, amidst growing anger at the Israeli cabinet’s decision to include two religious sites in the occupied West Bank, including Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque.
Protesters in the southern part of the city set tires alight, while in the city center, an Israeli military outpost at the entrance of Ash-Shuhada’ street, closed off to Palestinians, was pelted with stones. According to locals, Israeli soldiers used stun grenades against demonstrators.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said that about 100 Palestinians were rioting in the area, “hurling rocks in a violent and illegal riot.” One soldier was lightly injured as a result, she said.
Confrontations reportedly erupted near the Tariq Ibn Ziad school, between students and Israeli soldiers in the southern part of the city.
Students left schools early and rallied across the city calling for an intervention in the “Judaization of the Ibrahimi Mosque.”
Public figures react
In Yatta, south of Hebron, a strike was also called for. Governor of the city, Zahran Abu Qbeita denounced the Israeli decision to include both the Ibrahimi Mosque and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem on the Israeli heritage list, saying it violates Palestinians’ right to access holy sites and impedes efforts to restart the peace process.
The Mufti of Palestine Sheikh Muhammad Hussein said “the occupation has devoted all of its efforts to steal Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Palestinian cities to change their Arab and Islamic character to prove the country is Jewish.”
Minister of Waqf and Religious Affairs Mahmoud Habbash said the decision was an attack against Muslims across the world, humanity and civilization as a whole, and reiterated that it would have a negative impact on peace talks.
“This is an attempt to seize Palestinian cultural and religious symbols and use them to serve the Zionist scheme on Palestinian lands, aimed at obstructing the efforts of the Palestinian leadership and the international community to end the occupation and achieve peace in the region,” Habbash said.
In Hebron, Fatah further called for a general strike and condemned the action as an attempt to steal Palestinian heritage and culture. “This is a new crime in the occupation’s lexicon,” a party statement said, which called on Arab nations to break their silence.
The Israeli heritage site list
Following a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that two religious sites in the occupied West Bank would be among 150 Israeli heritage sites considered for renovation within his “Plan to Rehabilitate and Strengthen Israel’s National Heritage Infrastructures.”
The upgrade affects Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, known to Israelis as the Cave of the Patriachs, and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem.
Renovation projects are tipped to cost 400 million Israeli shekels (approximately 110 million US dollars).
‘An act of aggression against cultural and religious rights’
Palestinian Authority officials immediately condemned the initiative.
“This announcement is an act of aggression against the cultural and religious rights of the Palestinian people,” said Dr Hamdan Taha, director of the PA Tourism Ministry’s antiquities department, in a telephone interview.
“Instead of making use of heritage to promote peace, it is being used as a means to promote war,” Taha said, maintaining that the proposal’s timing could not be discounted: “This is clearly intended to obstruct the peace process.”
Also noting that the shrines in question are holy to many faiths, Taha insisted that Netanyahu’s plan to designate them as Israeli heritage sites “reflects an artificial history that solely serves Israel’s settlement policy.”
Cut the “ambiguity”, ambassador, or pack your bags
Challenging UK support for Israeli criminals
By Stuart Littlewood | 22 February 2010
Hey, Mr Foreign Secretary Miliband,
Let me tell you something. If I were the British foreign secretary there would be no more “friendly chats”. The Israeli ambassador would have 24 hours to find a cure for his “ambiguity” or pack his bags. How dare that lawless, racist regime smugly sit in its London offices and keep us guessing whether or not they have abused our sovereignty and hijacked our passport system?
Britain is far too cosy with the Israelis. Given their thieving, power-crazed ambitions in the Middle East (and beyond), how reliable is the intelligence they are said to share with us anyway?
Our government is riddled with Zionist sympathizers right up to the top. Our most important security bodies – the Intelligence and Security Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Defence Committee – are all chaired by Israel flag-wavers. Whose bright idea was that?
Blair and Brown are patrons of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that acquires stolen Palestinian lands and helps fund illegal settlements in the occupied territories. Are they mad?
When Labour bites the dust in the elections in May, we can expect no better from the Conservatives who are waiting in the wings, if the findings of Peter Oborne’s recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme are anything to go by. Cameron has declared himself a Zionist and is also a patron of the JNF, as are the Israeli ambassador and the Chief Rabbi. So there’ll be a seamless transfer of Zionist influence to our new government and business as usual with that pseudo-democracy (yes, you can drop the pretense; everyone knows Israel is an ethnocracy with apartheid knobs on).
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission reports that your “true friend” Israel has a nuclear arsenal numbering in the hundreds, possibly larger than our own. It has a plutonium production reactor and reprocessing facility, and possibly a uranium enrichment capability.
You’ll also know that Israel is the only state in the region not to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, nor has it signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Nevertheless, the rogue regime and its stooges screech their eagerness to obliterate Iran and involve us in their dirty work, even though the Islamic state as yet has no nuclear capability – unless Tehran managed to get its hands on one of the warheads rumoured to have been mislaid by the US. Is that why everyone is wetting their pants?
Back to the extra-judicial assassination in Dubai. Given all the amazing intelligence we’re supposed to receive from our “trusted allies”, any foreign secretary worth his salt would at least know if and how Britain was implicated in the crime, which, according to Sunday Times, was OK’d by your good buddy the Israeli prime minister.
Or are you seriously telling us you haven’t a clue?
Talking of atrocities, you know perfectly well that we are solemnly obligated – and rightly so – to seek and prosecute all who have allegedly committed war crimes. Your enthusiasm for changing the law of universal jurisdiction and turning the UK into a safe house for Israeli psychopaths to freely walk the streets of London, makes our country and particularly yourself a laughing stock in the civilized world.
Yes, we’ve been well and truly stitched up at government level. But here at street level we’re not so stupid.
The Seven Laws of Noah
By Ben White | Pulse Media | February 21, 2010
In a recent post on Israel’s PR campaign, Tali Shapiro mentioned an article “about something called the “Jewish Values Lobby” trying to get employers in Zefed to force “Arab” (Palestinians don’t exist in NRG) workers to sign a statement, where they’ll keep the Seven Laws of Noah, as a prerequisite to their employment.”
Here’s more on that story, courtesy of a translated item from Maariv.
Do Arab workers in businesses in Tzefat and the surrounding area need to fulfill commandments from the Tanach? This is the opinion of activists from the “Jewish Values Lobby,” who are starting a campaign to persuade employers to ask their workers to sign a religious statement according to which they will undertake to observe the Seven Noachide Laws. These include prohibitions against eating parts of a live animal, serving idols, desecrating Hashem’s name, immorality, robbery, and violence.
This initiative, which is expected to take Israeli Arabs by storm, was officially launched today. Lobbyists will visit businesses in Tzefat and the surrounding communities, which employ hundreds of Arabs living nearby, and they will ask them to sign their employees on a commitment to observe the Seven Noachide Laws.
“I hereby sign that I will undertake to observe the Seven Noachide Laws and declare my faithfulness to the Jewish nation according to Jewish values,” it is written in the statement. “I know that if I am caught violating any one of these laws, my employer will be allowed to fire me with no prior notice nor compensation.”
The Jewish Values Lobby explained that this campaign does not contradict a directive from one of the Jewish leaders of the generation from two years ago against employing Arab workers in public places. “We recommend that people don’t employ Arab workers,” a spokesman from the lobby explained. “But unfortunately, there are many Jews who employ Arabs in their stores, so we decided to deal with reality.”
David Brooks’s dilemma (and ours)
By Scott McConnel | February 21, 2010
Consider one of David Brooks’ dilemmas. In last Friday’s Times he wrote a pretty good column about the contemporary American power elite. As he described it, sixty and more years ago, blue blood WASPs ran America’s financial institutions and foreign policy (something of a simplification, but let it pass), ethnic bosses ran the cities, and engaging working class drunks filed the newspaper stories. Now those critical sectors are run and staffed by the meritocracy, people who did well on the bubble tests and went on to succeed at elite universities. We have, Brooks explains, “opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of every other group. “
Then he acknowledges the new regime isn’t working out as well as expected. None of these major institutions is now doing its job adequately, and the country knows it. We need, Brooks concludes, to reevaluate our definitions of merit, and leadership because “very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.” This is true, and for a newspaper column, a profound observation.
But there is a salient body of fact that Brooks elides, and therein lies a tale. While opportunities have opened up for women and all the non-Wasp groups Brooks mentioned, all groups have not rushed with equal force into the breach. If one takes, for example, the issue of Mideast diplomacy, it has been noted recently that most of the country’s important Mideast diplomats are Jews, most of writers covering the Israel-Palestine conflict for the New York Times are Jewish, as are two of three of the president’s top political advisers. Dig in a different direction, and one finds a similar kind of thing, as observed on this site, of the financial players engaged in selecting the next senator from New York.
There is no need to exaggerate the phenomenon, and indeed a need not to—outside of New York, there are plenty of rich Protestant power brokers, the South is important politically and Jews are seldom influential there, etc. But to say the least, the collapse of the WASP ascendancy has not been equally rewarding to all of the groups Brooks cites at the top of his column. Indeed for some of them, like Catholics, that collapse has probably coincided with a net reduction in cultural and political influence.
Brooks avoids mentioning this, as do virtually all writers. The reason is obvious: nearly any analysis, indeed any mention, of Jewish power is overburdened with sensitive historical associations. Unspecified but ominous reference to this history is the main polemical weapon Leon Wieseltier uses in his effort to take down Andrew Sullivan for his writing on Israel and Palestine. Some of Sullivan’s arguments, Wieseltier asserts “have a sordid history”; Sullivan is one of those who proclaim “without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea that Jews control Washington”; Sullivan adopts an explanation which “has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.” No need then to examine the truth or the untruth of Sullivan’s argument, a vague allusion to history suffices. Criticism of Israel is tied to the modern history of European anti-semitism, and to an extensive bibliography of generally tendentious books about Jewish power, from Alphonse de Toussenel’s Les Juifs, Rois de L’Epoch (published in 1845) forward. Of course this discourse was an auxiliary to the holocaust. About this Wieseltier (and the countless others who polemicize in this manner) are correct: discussions of Jewish power have sometimes had terrible consequences.
But where does that leave 21st century Americans? One example is the case of David Brooks, who clearly knows what he leaving out of his column about the American power elite. Brooks is Jewish, and a Zionist, and in no danger of being labeled an anti-Semite by Leon Wieseltier or anyone else. But still he is hesitant; presumably because he doesn’t want to write something that either might encourage anti-Semitism, or (more likely considering his readership) enhance public understanding of the Israel lobby. At least the first of these motives is commendable. But the reticence has a consequence: when Brooks writes a column about the American power elite and its weaknesses, he needs to avoid one of the essential aspects of his subject. That can’t really be satisfactory to him, or to his readers. It’s a dilemma with no obvious solution to it.
‘Netanyahu authorized Dubai assassination’
Press TV – February 21, 2010
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly authorized the assassination of senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh early January in Tel Aviv.
According to a report published by Times Online Netanyahu held a meeting with Mossad chief Meir Dagan in early January inside the briefing room of the headquarters of the spy agency where “some members of a hit squad” were also present.
Citing Mossad sources, the report said “as the man who gives final authorization for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.”
Sources said Mossad had received intelligence that the Hamas commander was planning a Dubai trip and they started preparing for an operation to assassinate him.
“The team had already rehearsed, using a hotel in Tel Aviv as a training ground without alerting its owners,” according to the report.
Thanks to Dubai’s extensive system of CCTV cameras, the work of the assassination team was revealed.
Dubai police released the identities of 11 people carrying European passports, including six Britons, three Irish and two French and German, who allegedly were Mossad agents carrying fake European documents.
Interpol has issued “red notices” for the 11 suspects to help find and arrest them anywhere in its 188 member countries.
Dubai police also threatened earlier to arrest Netanyahu, if it determined that Mossad was behind the assassination.
Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do
By Paul Craig Roberts | February 18, 2010
Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.
Wall Street’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.
As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.
Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up the Social Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had put Social Security in the black for the foreseeable future by establishing a schedule for future Social Security payroll tax increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll tax increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social Security revenues that could be used to finance other government spending, thus reducing the budget deficit. They sold it to President Reagan as “putting Social Security on a sound basis.”
Along the way Americans were told that the surplus revenues were going into a special Social Security trust fund at the U.S. Treasury. But what is in the fund is Treasury IOUs for the spent revenues. When the “trust funds” are needed to pay Social Security benefits, the Treasury will have to sell more debt in order to redeem the IOUs.
Social Security was mugged again during the Clinton administration when the Boskin Commission jimmied the Consumer Price Index in order to reduce the inflation adjustments that Social Security recipients receive, thus diverting money from Social Security retirees to other uses.
We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we can’t afford; an “unfunded liability.” This is a lie. Social Security is funded with an earmarked tax. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. It is a pay-as-you-go system in which the taxes paid by those working fund those who are retired.
Currently these systems are not in deficit. The problem is that government is using earmarked revenues for other purposes. Indeed, since the 1980s Social Security revenues have been used to fund general government. Today Social Security revenues are being used to fund trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street and to fund the Bush/Obama wars of aggression against Muslims.
Having diverted Social Security revenues to war and Wall Street, Paulson says there is no alternative but to take the promised benefits away from those who have paid for them.
Republicans have extraordinary animosity toward the poor. In an effort to talk retirees out of their support systems, Republicans frequently describe Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and “unsustainable.” They ought to know. The phony trust fund, which they set up to hide the fact that Wall Street and the Pentagon are running off with Social Security revenues, is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security itself has been with us since the 1930s and has yet to wreck our lives and budget. But it only took Hank Paulson’s derivative Ponzi scheme and its bailout a few years to inflict irreparable damage on our lives and budget.
Years ago with stagflation defeated and a rising stock market, I favored privatizing Social Security as a way of creating a funded retirement system and producing greater savings and larger incomes for retirees. At that time Wall Street was interested, not for my reasons, but in order to collect the fees from managing the funds.
Had Social Security been privatized, I doubt that Wall Street would have been permitted to deregulate the financial system. Too much would have been at stake.
After the latest crisis brought on by Wall Street’s dishonesty and greed, trusting Wall Street to manage anyone’s old age pension requires a leap of faith that no intelligent person can make.
Wall Street has got away with its raid on the public treasury. Now, pockets full, it wants to pay for the heist by curtailing Social Security and Medicare. Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after the elderly’s old age security.
Social Security, formerly an untouchable “third rail of politics,” is now “unsustainable,” while the real unsustainables–a pre-1929 unregulated financial system and open-ended multi-trillion dollar Global War Against Terror–are the new untouchables. This transformation signals the complete capture of American democracy by an oligarchy of special interests.
Related article
- Austerity, Obama-Style (alethonews.wordpress.com)
How Israel’s Lobby Challenges Rule of Law in America [Video]
Press TV – February 17, 2010
This week the Iranian satellite television channel PressTV is broadcasting a 25 minute interview with IRmep director Grant F. Smith about the Israel lobby’s history of challenges to rule of law and governance in the United States. “Autograph” with Susan Modaress reviews key findings from the book “Spy Trade
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
The full video of this program may also be downloaded and viewed with the Windows Media Player at:
http://217.218.67.244:8181/getfile?file=program/Autograph/0208_ATG.wmv
or online with the MS Silverlight plug-in at:
http://www.presstv.com/programs/detail.aspx?sectionid=3510529
Audio MP3 files are available at:
http://www.IRmep.org/mp3/02082010PressTV_lo.mp3 (AM quality)
http://www.IRmep.org/mp3/02082010PressTV.mp3 (FM stereo quality)
US-NATO Aggression to ‘Win Hearts and Minds’
Civilian deaths are merely political setbacks, say ‘independent’ news media.
By Dan Alba | February 14, 2010
Anyone aspiring to write or edit textbooks for the Department of Education should study U.S. news-wire reports. Rarely will you see imperial aggression being so expertly spun into peaceful liberation within the context of U.S. exceptionalism.
Take for example a February 13, Associated Press report, “US troops fight, then work to win hearts and minds,” where the editor mourns the mission:
[I]n the revised U.S. war strategy, the fight against the insurgents is as important as winning the allegiance and confidence of Afghan citizens. For American soldiers here, their days are often a mix of winning hearts and minds and fighting a determined enemy.
How many of those “determined enemies” are actually “insurgents“?
How many are lawfully defending themselves and their property from the foreign invaders, whose “key goal is to prop up Haji Zair, who was appointed as the Marjah governor but hasn’t been able to actually travel there, let alone set up residence”? [Jason Ditz, “US to Launch Massive Helmand Offensive ‘Within Days,'” AntiWar.com, 2/3/10.]
Readers are told that the invaded inhabitants are threatened only by the local resistance:
It’s a tall order in a Taliban-controlled area where some villagers are scared to take money from the Americans. . . .
The conversation with a farmer seemed positive at first. But it was ultimately inconclusive — an illustration, perhaps, of the difficulty of winning over civilians who know the Taliban are a longterm presence, and that the Americans will eventually leave. . . .
“A lot of guys are unwilling to do anything,” he said. “They’re worried about the Taliban.”
But how many are offended by the aggressive invasion and political bribery of the foreign occupiers? How many non-aggressive villagers are being terrorized by the effects of the U.S.-NATO mission?
Silly questions, of course, considering the mission’s obvious righteousness:
Repairing the irrigation canals is an important step toward reviving agriculture in the area. And the Americans were offering hard cash for anyone willing to work.
In other words: American taxpayer dollars, hard at work, forcing non-aggressive self-determining people to live under the absolute authority of an empire-made national government.
But according to the empire and the “independent” news media, such is the proper way to “win hearts and minds.”
Besides, who would argue against creating jobs and “reviving” the economy?
Moreover, who would bite the hand that “cleaned and bandaged the injured finger of an elderly man at the farmhouse”? [para. 17]
Only insurgents and Taliban, and the folks who would shower the foreign invaders with affection if not for their existential fear of their own families and neighbors.
– – – – –
In a follow-up report, readers learn that 12 Afghan civilians were killed by those innocuous foreign invaders.
In the 28-paragraph February 14 release, “NATO rockets miss target, kill 12 Afghan civilians,” six paragraphs are pertinent to the headline; four of which analyze the civilian deaths as merely a political setback. To wit:
The civilian deaths were a blow to NATO and the Afghan government’s attempts to win the allegiance of Afghans and get them to turn away from the insurgents. . . .
Karzai ordered an investigation into who fired the rocket. Before the offensive began on Saturday, Karzai pleaded with Afghan and foreign military leaders to be “seriously careful for the safety of civilians.”
In other words, the killing of civilians is not an immoral or illicit act that reflects badly on the policy in general. No. Quite the opposite is true: the remaining 22 paragraphs mourn the dangers to the U.S.-NATO invader-occupiers, whose stated intentions — “providing some building for the people there, better security, better economic opportunity, better governance, more of an Afghan face” — are taken as Gospel.
Christian Right kidnappers
Nicole Colson reports on the accusations against missionaries who were arrested after trying to take Haitian children out of the country–and the media’s tolerant attitude.
February 17, 2010
“HELP US…That’s the message I would give to Mr. Obama and the State Department. Start helping us.”
You might think that was the plea of a Haitian citizen following the devastating earthquake in January. But no, those words came from Carla Thompson–one of a group of 10 U.S. missionaries arrested by Haitian authorities on January 29, accused of trying to kidnap 33 Haitian children and take them across the border into the Dominican Republic.
At least 22 of the supposed “orphans” were found to have at least one parent still alive in Haiti.
The 10 missionaries are mostly from a Baptist church based in Idaho. Following the earthquake, the group apparently set out with a trailer full of children’s clothes and a vow to help Haiti’s orphans “find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ.” The group’s creepy leader, Laura Silsby, told reporters: “God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that. Our hearts were in the right place.”
But Silsby at least knew that the missionaries were flouting the law. In a letter to the United Nations, Anne-Christine d’Adesky, a writer and human rights activist, said she met with Silsby on January 24 in a hotel in the Dominican Republic. Silsby allegedly told d’Adesky that her authorization to pick up Haitian orphans and bring them into the Dominican Republic came from an unnamed Dominican official.
“I informed her that this would be regarded as illegal, even with some ‘Dominican’ minister authorizing, since the children are Haitian,” d’Adesky wrote, adding that she directed Silsby to UN agencies dealing with orphans and adoptions in the country.
D’Adesky told the Wall Street Journal that Silsby responded: “We have been sent by the Lord to rescue these children, and if it’s in the Lord’s plan, we will be successful.”
Silsby’s personal motives may not have been so noble. Back home in Idaho, she faces a string of lawsuits for allegedly failing to pay employees of her Web site shopping business. MSNBC noted that “the $358,000 house at which she founded her nonprofit religious group, New Life Children’s Refuge, was foreclosed upon in December.” Which raises the question of whether Silsby thought she might have profited from arranging for Haitian children to be adopted by people in the U.S.
The other people with Silsby on her “mission,” including at least two teenagers, may have been victims of their own arrogance and stupidity–but that doesn’t excuse their crime. On the contrary, there’s something stomach-turning about using a tragedy like the earthquake in Haiti to promote religious beliefs. (Right-wing Christians aren’t the only ones guilty–the Church of Scientology flew in volunteers after the quake to “minister” to Haitians.)
In the case of Silsby’s group, the Eastside Baptist Church Web site laid out the missionaries’ plans for a “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission.” According to the itinerary for January 23, the group would “Drive bus from Santo Domingo into Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then return to the D.R.”
The group apparently planned to take the children to a hotel in the Dominican Republic, where they would live until a permanent orphanage was constructed. According to the New York Times, the Web site said the group would “strive” to “provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation,” which subsidizes adoptions “for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.”
There’s no evidence that the missionaries were in any way prepared to care for the children they planned to “gather” from the streets–it’s unknown whether any spoke Haitian Kreyol or had any familiarity with the country’s culture or legal system.
Even in the best of times, international adoptions can be fraught with corruption and difficult questions about the rights of birth parents. Those questions are especially complicated when the adoptive parents are white and wealthy, and the birth parents and children are poor and people of color. Closed adoptions, where all ties are cut between children and their birth parents, are especially prone to abuses.
In Haiti, it seems that the desperate parents contacted by the missionaries weren’t told that their children might one day be adopted. Instead, they were told the children would be cared for and schooled in the Dominican Republic–and that they could visit one another. “If someone offers to take my children to a paradise,” a mother told the New York Times, “am I supposed to say no?”
As adoption expert David Smolin of Cumberland Law School commented in the New York Times:
The risks are very high that children with families would be “adopted” into families in the United States, based on the pretense that they are “orphans.” We know from past history that those children most likely would never be returned to their original families, even if those original families were able to find them and sought their return.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
IN SPITE of the fact that the missionaries are accused on strong evidence of kidnapping and child trafficking, the U.S. media has positively fawned over them–stopping just short of portraying them as the victims.
In one story after another, the missionaries have been allowed to plead their innocence–and even complain that the Obama administration has not done enough to help them. Typical was the Today show, which described the “frustrating few days” in jail for people “who insist they had only the best intentions.”
Imagine the level of sympathy in the media if the disaster had been, say, a hurricane in South Florida, and a group of Black missionaries, or perhaps Muslims, from another country came to “rescue” white children in the U.S.–with “only the best intentions.”
One writer for the right-wing National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez, even stooped to citing a Human Rights Watch report detailing the deplorable conditions in Haiti’s prisons–as if the American missionaries have been suffering like an ordinary prisoners. On the contrary, the alleged kidnappers have been giving access to the media, were allowed to speak to relatives via satellite phone, have a large legal team of American lawyers standing by and were allowed to receive food and other supplies from other missionaries.
That’s a far cry from conditions a couple hundred miles to the west, at the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay prison camp. As Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, referring to one of the missionaries, Jim Allen, singled out by right wingers:
Why would National Review–which endorses far worse abuses when perpetrated on Muslims convicted of nothing–take up the cause of an accused child smuggler and possible child trafficker, and suddenly find such grave concern over detainee conditions?…Because, as a Christian, Allen is deemed by National Review to deserve basic human rights, unlike the Muslim detainees whose (far worse) abuse they have long supported…
The very same people who have been demanding for years that Muslims be imprisoned for life, tortured and killed with no trials or charges of any kind suddenly become extremely sensitive to the nuances of due process and humane detention conditions. They start sounding like Amnesty International civil liberties extremists–the minute it’s a Christian, rather than a Muslim, who is subjected to such treatment.
PACBI: Intellectual responsibility and the voice of the colonized
Statement, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 17 February 2010
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has recently encountered a number of projects that while intending to empower the colonized Palestinians, in essence end up undermining their will and choice of method of struggle for freedom, justice and self-determination. The publication of a new book entitled The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories belongs to this category. The book project represents a classic example of how the collective voice of the colonized is ignored in the production of a scholarly work supposed to empower them.
While it is crucial for scholars in relevant fields to expose and analyze the colonial situation in Palestine, this academic imperative should not imply that one overlooks how scholarship engages this colonialism. That is, this book, as a collaboration of various scholars — Israeli and non-Israeli contributors — was completed with support from the Van Leer Institute. In other words, through working under the aegis of the Van Leer Institute, this project has cooperated with one of the very institutions that PACBI and an overwhelming majority of Palestinian academics and intellectuals have called for boycotting. As such, the research project which led to the production of the volume violates the criteria of the academic and cultural boycott as set by PACBI and widely endorsed in Palestinian civil society, including by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) and University Teachers’ Association in Palestine (UTA).
Contrary to the claims of some left-wing Israeli academics that the Van Leer institute is an incubator for cutting-edge critical thinking and oppositional politics, the institute is firmly planted in the prevailing Zionist consensus and is part and parcel of the structures of oppression and domination. It subscribes to the “vision of Israel as both a homeland for the Jewish people and a democratic society, predicated on justice, fairness and equality for all its residents,” ignoring the oxymoron presented by this inherently exclusionary vision — a “Jewish State” of necessity discriminates against its “non-Jewish” citizens. The Van Leer Institute receives financial support from other Israeli universities and state institutions that are subject to boycott. Among its financial contributors and institutional “friends” are the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University; the Edelstein Center at the Hebrew University; the Israel Ministry of Science; the National Insurance Institute, Israel; and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Furthermore, Van Leer, like all other Israeli academic institutions, has never taken a stance against Israel’s policies of occupation and racial discrimination, nor against the recent war of aggression on Gaza or the ongoing illegal siege of 1.5 million Palestinians there. The Van Leer is, therefore, an institution with strong links to establishment institutions in Israel. As such, it is complicit in maintaining and entrenching Israel’s regime of occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people.
Though intellectual projects may aim to rigorously articulate the complex matrix of control that exists in Palestine, the intellectual process has a fundamental ethical and political component. As such, it is incumbent upon all scholars to realize that any collaboration which brings together Israeli and international academics (Arabs or otherwise) under the auspices of Israeli institutions is counterproductive to fighting Israeli colonial oppression, and is therefore subject to boycott.
A project involving only Israeli academics, on the other hand, receiving support from an Israeli academic institution, may be seen as a justifiable exercise of a right or an entitlement by Israeli scholars as tax payers and, as a result, may not per se be boycottable.
As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement gains momentum globally, an increasing number of voices are emerging in support of this strategy as the most effective, nonviolent route to bring about change towards justice and durable peace based on international law and universal principles of human rights. The endorsement by various artists and academics of specific boycott actions in the past few years is welcome and well-known. It is the responsibility of the boycott supporters to understand the broadly-accepted boycott criteria and guidelines upon which this boycott is based and adhere to it, rather than attempting to invent or suggest idiosyncratic criteria of their own, as the latter would undermine the Palestinian guiding reference for the global boycott campaign against Israel.
It is crucial to emphasize that the BDS movement derives its principles from both the demands of the Palestinian BDS Call, signed by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in July 2005, and, in the academic and cultural fields, from the Palestinian Call for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, issued a year earlier in July 2004. Together, the BDS and PACBI Calls represent the most authoritative and widely-supported strategic statements to have emerged from Palestine in decades; all major political parties, labor, student and women groups, and organizations representing Palestinian refugees all over the world have endorsed and supported these calls. Both calls underline the prevailing Palestinian belief that the most effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian people is direct action aimed at bringing an end to Israel’s colonial and apartheid regime, just as the apartheid regime in South Africa was abolished, by isolating Israel internationally through boycotts and sanctions, forcing it to comply with international law and respect Palestinian rights.
Since the formulation of these calls, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on defining the principles of the boycott movement. Rooted in universal values and principles, the BDS Call categorically rejects all forms of racism, racial discrimination and colonial oppression. PACBI has also translated the principles enshrined in its Call into practical guidelines for implementing the international academic and cultural boycott of Israel. However intellectually challenging and avant-garde some projects may be, by being oblivious to the Palestinian-articulated boycott criteria they in effect work against the internationally-embraced Palestinian struggle for justice.
‘An attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada’
Peter Kent, Toronto
Photo credit Scarborough – Guildwood Conservative Association
By Steven Chase | Globe and Mail | February 16, 2010
Junior Foreign Affairs minister Peter Kent is suggesting Canada stands ready to throw its full military weight behind Israel, telling a Toronto publication that “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.”
His office says Mr. Kent, the minister of state for Foreign Affairs of the Americas, was merely “paraphrasing” what Stephen Harper has said in the past regarding Israel.
“It’s not too far from what the [Prime Minister] has said,” Norm McIntosh, Mr. Kent’s chief of staff, told The Globe.
But the junior minister’s statement would appear to be evidence that the Harper government is shifting to an ever more solidly pro-Israel stance.
Mr. McIntosh declined to confirm whether this means that Canada would automatically declare war on an aggressor that attacked Israel.
In an interview published in Shalom Life, dated Feb. 12, Mr. Kent said: “Prime Minister Harper has made it quite clear for some time now and has regularly stated that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.”
Mr. McIntosh pointed to Mr. Harper’s statements from May, 2008, marking the 60th anniversary of Israel, where the Prime Minister said: “Our government believes that those who threaten Israel also threaten Canada, because, as the last world war showed, hate-fuelled bigotry against some is ultimately a threat to us all, and must be resisted wherever it may lurk.”
“In this ongoing battle, Canada stands side-by-side with the State of Israel, our friend and ally in the democratic family of nations,” Mr. Harper said. “We have stood with Israel even when it has not been popular to do so, and we will continue to stand with Israel, just as I have always said we would.”
EU biofuels significantly harming food production in developing countries
EU biofuels 10% targets cause millions of peope to go hungry and increase food prices and landlessness, says report
John Vidal | The Guardian | February 15, 2010
EU companies have taken millions of acres of land out of food production in Africa, central America and Asia to grow biofuels for transport, according to development campaigners. The consequences of European biofuel targets, said the report by ActionAid, could be up to 100 million more hungry people, increased food prices and landlessness.
The report says the 2008 decision by EU countries to obtain 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020 is proving disastrous for poor countries. Developing countries are expected to grow nearly two-thirds of the jatropha, sugar cane and palm oil crops that are mostly used for biofuels.
“To meet the EU 10% target, the total land area directly required to grow industrial biofuels in developing countries could reach 17.5m hectares, over half the size of Italy. Additional land will also be required in developed nations, displacing food and animal feed crops onto land in new areas, often in developing countries,” says the report.
Biofuels are estimated by the IMF to have been responsible for 20-30% of the global food price spike in 2008 when 125m tonnes of cereals were diverted into biofuel production. The amount of biofuels in Europe’s car fuels is expected to quadruple in the next decade.
The report attributes the massive growth in biofuel production to generous subsidies. It estimates that the EU biofuel industry has already received €4.4bn (£3.82bn) in incentives, subsidies and tax relief and that this could triple to over €13.7bn if the EU meets its 2020 target.
The greatest support to the industry is exemption from excise duties. Duty at the pump is 20 pence less per litre compared to conventional fuels although this exemption due to end in 2010, a change which supermarket Morrisons cited last week as the reason for dropping one of its biodiesel blends. In 2009, the duty on low- sulphur petrol and diesel in the UK was 54.19 pence per litre; for biodiesel and ethanol it was 34.19 pence per litre.
“Biofuels are driving a global human tragedy. Local food prices have already risen massively. As biofuel production gains pace, this can only accelerate,” said report author Tim Rice. He added that biofuels are not even an answer to climate change: “Most biofuels are worse than the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace.” . Large scale biofuel plantations can increase carbon dioxide emissions, either directly by cutting down forests or ploughing up other carbon rich habitats, or indirectly by forcing farmers to move into these areas. Separately, the UK Nuffield Council on Bioethics is currently consulting on the ethics of biofuels – how to ensure a new generation of biofuels don’t increase greenhouse gas emissions and take food from the poor to fuel cars.
The ActionAid report says Europe is just one region now greatly increasing the amount of biofuels in transport fuel. Analysis of US farm data last month by the Earth Policy Institute in Washington showed that one-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars. The grain grown to produce the fuel in the US in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels.
If all global biofuel government targets are met, says ActionAid, food prices could rise by up to an additional 76% by 2020 with an extra 600 million extra people going hungry – six times as much as European policies alone.
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From the Archives
How Bill Gates Premeditated COVID Vaccine Injury Censorship
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 30, 2021
In 2000, everything about Bill Gates’ public persona changed. He morphed from a hardnosed and ruthless technology monopolizer into a soft, fuzzy and incredibly generous philanthropist when he and his wife launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.1
It was a public relations coup. May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department, in collaboration with 20 state attorneys, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.2 At that time, the company was 23 years old and was ruling the personal computer market. The Seattle Times described the fallout from the antitrust lawsuit:3
“The company barely escaped being split up after it was ruled an unlawful monopolist in 2000 for using its stranglehold on the PC market with its Windows operating system to cripple competitors, such as Netscape’s Navigator Web browser.”
How would the world be different today if the company had been split? Yale law professor George Priest described the antitrust lawsuit as “one of the most important antitrust cases of its generation.”4 In 2002, a court settlement placed restrictions on Microsoft to curb some of its practices for five years.
It was later extended twice and then expired May 12, 2011. The lawsuit had a dramatic effect on “the emergence of an entirely new field called IP (intellectual property) antitrust,” Iowa law professor Herbert Hovenkamp told the Seattle Times.5
Later, large sums donated from the foundation made the news multiple times, including $9.5 million to GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines), a second $7.5 million to GAVI and $6.8 million to the World Health Organization in 2017.6
By June 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, the Gates Foundation’s donations totaled 45% of WHO’s funding from nongovernmental sources.7 Once mainstream media’s attention was no longer on Gates’ antitrust activities and focused on the philanthropist actions of the foundation, Gates publicly turned his attention to vaccinating the world, long before COVID-19.8
Event 201: A Preplanned Pandemic
In a deep dive into the Gates Foundation’s charitable donations, The Nation found there were $250 million in grants to companies where the foundation held corporate stocks, including Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sanofi and Medtronic. The money was directed at supporting projects “like developing new drugs and health monitoring systems and creating mobile banking services.”9 … continue
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- Liberation From War
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- When a Train Ticket Costs Your Passport: The Eurail Breach and the Digital ID Problem
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- Court Forces German Chancellor Merz to Open Files on 300 “Insult the Chancellor” Cases
- ‘Territorial Theft With Better Branding’: Israel Keeps Advancing Its ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza
- If Americans Knew
- Six Months into Gaza Ceasefire, Setting the Record Straight About Aid
- ‘Silent suffering’: Why children in Gaza are losing their ability to speak
- In Gaza, 17,000 infections linked to rodents and external parasites – Daily Update
- Lobby group taking journalists on propaganda tours of Israel
- The Shattered Figure of Jesus Is Not an Exception. It’s a Pattern
- Israel’s idea of ceasefire includes killing 21 in one day – Daily Update
- Christians in Israel and Palestine, past and present
- Israel eager to restart Iran war, Gaza genocide – Daily Update
- Meet the Top “Content” Producers Linked to Canary Mission
- Lebanese Journalist Amal Khalil Bombed and Left to Die by Israel
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
Aletho News 