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Where is all the Fukushima Radiation Going and Why Does It Matter

fairewinds.com | 5-2-2011

Fairewinds’ founder Maggie Gundersen talks with enviromental scientist Marco Kaltofen about radioactive fallout from Fukushima and how it affects people.

Arnie Gunderson is one of the best experts I have heard talking on this subject. Please Visit his website http://www.Fairewinds.com and donate.

Fairewinds is a non-profit organization.

http://www.fairewinds.com/content/how-did-general-electric-ge-mark-1-bwr-reactors-end-creating-such-world-wide-tragedy

May 3, 2011 Posted by | Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Arab Dissidents’ Strange Bedfellows

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | May 2, 2011

If it’s true that, as Shakespeare famously put it, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” then pro-democracy Arab dissidents must be very miserable indeed.

CyberDissidents.org is a project launched in 2008 by the Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies “to research and focus attention on the online activities of democracy advocates and dissidents in the Middle East, in the hope of empowering them at home and raising awareness of their plight abroad.” Until its demise in 2009, the Adelson Institute was located at the Shalem Center, a controversial research institute associated with right wing Zionist causes. Founded in 1994, the Shalem Center was initially funded by its current chairman, Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune. Lauder is also president of the Jewish National Fund, which promotes ethnic cleansing through planting forests on expropriated Palestinian land. The Adelson Institute was set up in 2007 with a $4.5 million grant from Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who, like Lauder, is a patron and confidante of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Under the direction of Natan Sharansky, the former Israeli minister who resigned his cabinet seat in 2005 in protest over Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan, the institute held a “Democracy and Security” conference in Prague in 2007. It brought together Israeli officials; their American neoconservative sympathizers with their favourite Middle Eastern dissidents in tow—most notably, Richard Perle’s Israel-admiring Syrian protégé Farid Ghadry; and the newly-installed Eastern European democrats swept to power in the wake of a wave of neocon-backed “color revolutions,” the latter group presumably serving to inspire the Arab and Iranian participants to emulate them.

One year later, Sharansky’s activist coordinator of democracy programs at the Adelson Institute, David Keyes, co-founded CyberDissidents.org and has served since then as its director. During his visit to the United States in 2009 to present the organization’s mission and progress to pro-Israeli policy-makers, activists and press, Keyes spent “significant time” with ardent Zionist academic Bernard Lewis, an advisory board member to the group during the first two years of its existence. Among his more notable contributions to the Arab world, Lewis introduced the concept of a “Clash of Civilizations” between Islam and Christendom, advocated the “Lebanonization” of the region, and was “perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq.”

Seemingly undeterred by its Israeli origins, prominent Middle Eastern pro-democracy activists have been recruited by the Adelson Institute’s project for Internet activists. On its advisory board are Egyptian dissident Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies and the Arab Organization for Human Rights and a board member of the Arab Democracy Foundation, who participated in the Prague conference; and Samer Abu Libdeh, the director of the Interaction Forum, an Amman-based civil society and democracy-promotion organization, and a senior fellow at the Center for Liberty in the Middle East (CLIME). Abu Libdeh also served as a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank created by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

On its website, CyberDissidents.org features provocative articles such as the one entitled “Shocking Videos, Photos, and Tweets from Syria,” which includes amateur videos, digital photographs and tweets from Daraa. It first appeared on The Daily Beast website, where David Keyes also blogs about the human rights abuses of practically every Middle Eastern regime, except the one occupying Palestine. Considering The Daily Beast’s insatiable appetite for Arab freedom, it’s worth noting that its creator Barry Diller, who also launched the Fox TV network, attended a 1983 Manhattan conclave convened to coordinate pro-Israeli political operations in the United States. Incidentally, fellow participant Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic, not noted for his love of Arabs, lambasted President Obama’s insufficiently enthusiastic support of the Libyan rebels as a “betrayal of the Arab revolution, of an Arab people and of Arab hope.”

Last April, David Keyes attended an event entitled “Cyber-Dissidents and Political Change” sponsored by the George W. Bush Institute. “Inspired by President and Mrs. Bush’s unwavering commitment to freedom for all people,” its website states, “the Bush Institute works to embolden dissidents and freedom advocates, creating a powerful network for moral support and education.” Keyes was one of the featured guests on a TV programme presented by the institute’s executive director, Jim Glassman, who as Bush’s Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy brought dissidents from around the world to New York for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements summit in 2008. The other guests were Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty president Jeffrey Gedmin, formerly a resident scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and a Project for a New American Century founding signatory; Christopher Walker, director of studies at Freedom House, home to indefatigable pro-Israel democracy promoters like Max Kampelman, Paula Dobriansky and Joshua Muravchik; and former Ha’aretz journalist Bari Weiss, The Wall Street Journal’s assistant editorial features editor with a soft spot for the world’s non-Palestinian dissidents.

Dissidents who put their faith in such improbable champions of Arab freedom would do well to remember the words of Sheldon Adelson. Referring to a conversation he had with Iranian dissident Amir Abbas Fakhravar at the Prague conference, the Likudnik casino magnate reportedly said, “I like Fakhravar because he says that, if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic.” But when another Iranian pro-democracy activist disputed that assumption, Adelson candidly responded, “I really don’t care what happens to Iran. I am for Israel.”

Maidhc Ó Cathail has written extensively about Israel’s role in the Arab uprisings at The Passionate Attachment blog.

May 3, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Osama bin Bogeyman? ‘CIA getting rid of old asset’

RT interview with James Corbett | May 2, 2011

May 2, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Oppressing West Bank Palestinian Children

By Stephen Lendman | May 2, 2011

The Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations is a Beirut, Lebanon-based organization engaged in “strategic and futuristic studies on the Arab and Muslim worlds, (highlighting) the Palestinian issue.”

In spring 2010, it published a Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary Group (BPAPPG) study, including the widespread detention of Palestinian children titled, “Under Occupation: A Report on the West Bank,” discussed below.

Under military occupation, Palestinian children are treated like adults. Each year, about 700 are arrested, brutally interrogated, and prosecuted in military courts, denying them justice.

Since 2000 alone, over 7,000 have been brutalized. On January 31, 2011, 222 Palestinian children were imprisoned, 34 aged 12 – 15. Some at times are 10 or younger. At age 16, they’re considered adults in violation of international law.

Israel, in fact, brazenly repudiates children’s rights and welfare, treating them like adults, in violation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, its Principle 1 saying:

“Every child, without exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to (fundamental human and civil) rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family.”

They’re entitled to special protections and opportunities to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, and socially in a healthy normal way under conditions of freedom and dignity – including their right to life, an adequate standard of living, healthcare, education, leisure, safety and peace, what Israel denied them for over four decades.

Instead, they’re taken to military detention centers, harshly interrogated for days without access to lawyers or family members. In fact, parents and siblings rarely know where they’re held or whether they’re alive or dead.

Moreover, they’re mistreated, beaten, terrorized, usually tortured, hooded, denied food and water for prolonged periods as well as access to toilets and washing facilities, exposed to extreme heat and cold, painfully shackled, and deprived of sleep for several days, often in the shabeh position.

It consists of hands and legs bound to a small chair, at times from behind to a pipe affixed to the wall, painfully slanted forward, hooded with a filthy sack, and with loud music played nonstop through loudspeakers.

NGOs like the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Adalah and DCI-Palestine report widespread abuse. In 2009, a sample of 100 sworn affidavits revealed:

— 69% of them were beaten, kicked, slapped, or otherwise abused;

— 49% were threatened;

— 14% held in solitary confinement;

— 12% threatened with sexual assault, including rape; and

— 32% forced to sign confessions in Hebrew most don’t understand.

As a result, from 2001 – 2010, over 645 complaints were filed against Israeli Security Agency (ISA) interrogators, citing mistreatment and abuse. So far, no criminal investigations resulted, even for the most extreme cases.

Based solely on soldiers’ testimonies and coerced confessions, children are usually charged with stone-throwing, whether or not true. To assure lesser sentences and fines, usually two to six months confinement, 81% plead guilty. Otherwise, they’ll be remanded for extended periods, tried and convicted in kangaroo proceedings, nearly always siding against them.

Mahmoud K’s experience was typical, a 15-year old boy from Bethlehem. He was taken to court shackled hands and legs. Wrist restraints were only removed during proceedings, conducted in Hebrew (with translation by an Israeli soldier). Intimidating security guards filled the room.

Mahmoud pleaded not guilty to throwing a Molotov cocktail. He was detained four months prior to trial. Two other arrested boys signed confessions, naming him, retracted when they came to court. Both said they were abused, threatened and coerced to go along. The entire proceeding lasted an hour. It hardly mattered as guilty as charged nearly always follows.

Heading to school, another 16-year old youth was arrested for not having his ID card. Afterward, he was beaten, sent to Etzion detention camp, handcuffed, blindfolded, and beaten again brutally to get him to confess to stone-throwing and reveal names of other children with him at the time.

During interrogation, his head was immersed in cold water, then hot, then the toilet. Later moved to Adorim camp, he was again beaten, tortured, held in solitary confinement for 34 days, then on “restrictive order” at Telmond Prison, in violation of Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) stating:

“No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment….

No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily….

Every child deprived of liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect…. (and)

Every child deprived of his or her liberty shall have the right to prompt access to legal and other appropriate assistance….”

CRC also mandates detention as a last resort for the shortest possible time. Israel does it preemptively, repressively, and irresponsibly to harass, abuse, inflict bodily and emotional harm, torture or kill – legalized by authorities decades ago, including harming children with:

— bad food and unsafe water;

— poor healthcare or lack of it;

— bad sanitation and hygiene;

— insect infested cells;

— cramped and crowded conditions;

— inadequate air and light;

— insufficient clothing, blankets and other protections;

— no play or recreation;

— isolation from the outside world;

— no family visits;

— the absence of counselors and specialists;

— detention with adults, some violent;

— solitary confinement;

— verbal, physical and sexual abuse; and

— no education.

Against adults and children alike, including women and girls, nothing is too brutal or extreme. For example, one 15-year old said he was stripped naked, forced into an extremely painful position, then burned by lit cigarettes to make him confess.

Others are tortured to collaborate. A 10-year old said “They beat me on various parts of my body with plastic hoses. I had to have a surgical operation to have a platinum transplant in my arm. They kept me naked for a whole night, handcuffed and blindfolded; and I was not allowed to go to the toilet for two days!”

According to the Palestinian Prisoners Club, 95% of children are tortured, 85% to confess under duress and sign Hebrew documents they can’t read or understand.

Israel brazenly violates international law, including in how they treat young children. In fact, harassing, intimidating, threatening, cuffing, shackling, abusing, torturing and denying due process breaches Fourth Geneva, the UN Torture Convention, and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

They’re inviolable legal standards Israel doesn’t give a damn about when it comes to Palestinian Arabs. Why should they when international community leaders raise no accountability issues.

A Final Comment

In the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel’s March Newsletter, Mahd Bader, a human rights law attorney, headlined, “Secret Prison for UFOs,” saying:

Facility 1391 is Israel’s Guantanamo. Officially it doesn’t exist. Detainees aren’t told where they’re held. They’re kept in darkened cells, brutally interrogated, and denied outside contact. On January 11, 2011, Israel’s Supreme Court again “demonstrated its conservative nature with respect to human rights in general and the rights of weak population sectors in particular,” effectively approving the facility’s existence, its location still secret.

In fact, Israel is prohibited from having secret detention facilities. Those existing should be closed or revealed. Instead, the Court performed a “balancing act (with) legal hair-splitting and zigzagging. (It) chose to take the complex, meandering and superfluous road of ‘appropriate balance’ and, after examining the clashing interests and rights,” avoided respecting international and Israeli law.

As a result, it ruled that detainee rights and their families are indeed violated. “However, the infringement is proportional….since the State has suggested an arrangement (to) minimize it.” No details were published or consideration for how often authorities do what they please, freely violating Court decisions with impunity.

Nonetheless, the State agreed “not to hold in this facility citizens of Israel or residents of the occupied territory unless high military officials order it. Moreover, those detained will only be for a short time. Even though the Military Judge Advocate General and Ministry of Justice supervise the facility, many questions and problems remain unanswered.

Also consider “for whom is that unknown detention facility intended if the State” won’t use it for Israeli Arabs or Palestinians? Why is it needed and kept secret? How short is “very short,” and why does any court tolerate illegal practices? No satisfactory answers were provided.

Given today’s extremist Court and Knesset, especially regarding Muslims, offers more proof that “Israel is knowingly and surely sliding towards a dark and oppressive regime.”

Today Arabs are persecuted. Tomorrow others. Soon anyone resisting state authority, no matter how oppressive and lawless. Ahead, Bader sees what he calls a “Jewish phobiocraticstate,” targeting anyone within or outside the law.

~

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com

May 2, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Pakistan’s Boldness Reveals America’s Weakness

By Malou Innocent | The National Interest | April 29, 2011

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pakistan has urged Afghanistan to reject a long-term strategic partnership with the United States. This revelation, following a string of other troubling developments in the decade-long war, makes it abundantly clear that Pakistan’s growing assertiveness is linked directly to the widespread perception in Pakistan of American weakness in Afghanistan.

The story claims that at an April 16th meeting in Kabul, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai to rebuff America’s “Strategic Partnership Declaration,” a formal agreement that would allow American military bases in Afghanistan beyond 2014 for the purpose of training Afghan troops (apparently, preventing terrorist bases for al-Qaeda requires permanent bases for America). As if that disclosure was not enough to raise the hackles of Washington’s foreign policy elite, Gilani also told Karzai that America’s policy of trying to weaken the Taliban’s momentum while at the same time bringing them to the negotiating table made no sense, and that their countries must take “ownership” of the peace process.

Of course, rather than use this opportunity to reexamine the efficacy of a prolonged U.S. presence in the region, the question Beltway insiders are asking is why—oh why!—would leaders in Kabul and Islamabad collude against Washington?

The answer is simple: America’s ostensible clients—Afghanistan and Pakistan—lack confidence in their patron and seek more viable—and geographically contiguous—alternatives for security. Why wouldn’t they? Our presence has increased the level of anti-American radicalism that provides passive support for Islamist terrorism; in turn, insurgents have responded to what they perceive as a hostile occupation by reasserting their authority with more violence and bloodshed. This vicious cycle has led to a noticeable deterioration of security in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, put into perspective, Why would any Afghan or Pakistani leader willingly put the future of Central Asia into Washington’s hands?

First and foremost, let us keep in mind America’s abysmal reputation in Pakistan. As one retired Pakistani general in Karachi told me, the perception in Pakistan is that America uses their country “like a condom.” Let us also remember that last November, after a sharp rise in the number of night raids and Afghan civilian casualties, President Karzai told the Washington Post, “The time has come to reduce military operations…to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life.”

Regardless of whether Pakistan gets its way, its impudence in pushing Afghanistan to abandon America exposes the real balance of power in the region. It is Pakistan, not the United States, that wields significant influence over Afghanistan’s major stakeholders. This includes old-guard mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Haqqani network and its connected affiliates, Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, and other militant heavyweights. This clash of strategic interests, not just between the United States and Pakistan but also among other competing regional powers, shows why Washington’s periodic troop surges, increased development aid, and Predator drone strikes have failed to translate into anything more than “fragile” and “reversible” gains on the ground. Such inhospitable conditions underscore the absurdity of the U.S.-led coalition’s Sisyphean nation-building project.

Rather than becoming a viable nation-state, Afghanistan will remain a bottomless pit for American credibility and resources. For this reason, U.S. leaders should not fall into the trap of refusing to withdraw from Afghanistan out of fear that the United States will appear weak. Prolonging our presence in Afghanistan is more likely to weaken the United States militarily and economically than would withdrawal.

May 1, 2011 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Reagan 1, Obama 4: Killing Gaddafi Children

By Mike E | Kasama | May 1, 2011

On April 15, 1986, Ronald Reagan launched a decapitation airstrike against the head of Libya’s government. The attacks failed to kill Gaddafi.

In the wave of attacks dozens of Libyans were killed, among them a young girl who was the adopted daughter of Libyan leader Gaddafi.

It was, at the time, considered an outrage and a barbarity — both that a major power sought to assassinate heads of state, and also that the casualties might include children in his household.

Now Reagan has been outdone.

The NATO attacks on Libya have shifted to a new attempt to assassinate Gaddafi attacking his homes — and now reportedly killing his youngest son Seif al-Arab, 29, and three of Gadhafi’s grandchildren, all younger than 12.

The layers of deceit and deniability are deep:

NATO claims it is only “protecting civilians” in keeping with a UN resolution. They claim they are only attacking military targets. The Obama administration is (in keeping with “multilateralist” imperialism) claiming to act with and through its allies. And so on.

But it is important to compare Obama here with his predecessors: He has continued the Guantanamo of Bush. He has continued the Iraq occupation. He has escalated the Afghanistan war — increasing the U.S. occupation forces and expanding it into Pakistan. He has greatly escalated the use of covert assassination (meaning U.S. death squads) around the world — killing targets and whoever is near them.

And now, they have taken up the practice of seeking to assassinate government leaders of other countries that they do not like. The very notion of “self-determination for nations” is removed from the table by their imperialist logic. And now Gaddafi’s grandchildren lie dead in the ruble.

May 1, 2011 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Librulz

By Charles Davis | False Dichotomy | April 28, 2011

Glenn Greenwald used to be a liberal favorite back when he was railing against the Bush administration, considered a progressive hero for his forceful defenses of civil liberties and attacks on the warfare state.

Guess what happened: Greenwald kept up his whole having-actual-principles shtick even after Barack Obama’s glorious ascent to power. And that’s a no-no.

Since January 2009, Greenwald has come under increasingly ludicrous attacks from Obama’s partisan fan club, the premise underlying most of the broadsides being that any critic of the president’s must be a secret Republican or, my favorite, in it for the fame and money (I’m still waiting for my check from the Koch brothers).

In a recent interview with Out Magazine, Greenwald really stepped in it, though, when he suggested he might be open to supporting someone for president who’s not a Democrat. In particular, he said some complimentary things about Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who, like Ron Paul, is campaigning for the Republican nomination on an anti-war, pro-drug legalization platform.

Now, as a non-voter I could perhaps criticize Greenwald for focusing a bit too much on electoral politics, which very rarely is a path toward real change; independent social movements, like the ones that pushed for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam war, seem to me much more effective. Instead of diverting time and resources into elections, I’d like to see more people organizing and their own communities and raising money not for politicians, but for health clinics and even alternative news organizations. But that, of course, is not what upsets Obama’s loyal fans.

In a piece much-circulated by that fan club, which by the reception from Democratic partisans I take it is supposed to be scathing, not satire, we are told Greenwald’s hypothetical support for Johnson constitutes an excommunicable offense. “Neither a Liberal Nor a Progressive,” blares the headline to the pieces, which gives a run-down of Johnson’s history as governor of slashing “taxes on the rich while cutting social services for the poor” (no one tell liberals about how that guy in the White House who just extended Bush’s tax cuts for the rich at the expense of social programs for the poor).

Given Johnson’s record — the accounting of which excludes that whole opposition to war and locking up hundreds of thousands of people for non-violent offenses stuff — we are told:

“You simply can’t consider yourself a progressive in any broadly accepted meaning of the term and thoughtfully and in an informed way support for president someone with the views and history of Gary Johnson.”

And:

“By saying he might support Gary Johnson, Glenn Greenwald has now demonstrated that he is a narrowly-focused advocate who cares about only a few issues, and is not a liberal or progressive with a broad sense of the common good.”

As the post makes clear, though, one can still be a “liberal or a progressive with a broad sense of the common good” if you support a guy who blows up little children with cluster bombs, as Barack Obama has in Yemen. You can still be a liberal or progressive in good standing if you support a man who has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Pakistani civilians with flying death robots. And you can still be a liberal if you back a guy who has shown not the slighest inclination to reform, much less do away with, a war on drugs that has led to 2.3 million Americans being placed in cages, the vast majority minorities.

That the president has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan, ordered more drone strikes in Pakistan than his predecessor did in eight years, and launched another war in Libya without so much as getting a rubber stamp from Congress is of no concern to the good party-line liberal. The president, after all, is a Democrat.

If that’s what it really means to be a liberal or a progressive — supporting empire and mass incarceration or, even worse in my opinion, pretending neither exist — Greenwald might be happy to learn he’s not one.

April 30, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Palestinian identity under attack in Israel

By Mya Guarnieri | Ma’an | April 29, 2011

Earlier in April, the Israeli Ministry of Education decided to add a question about the Holocaust to the matriculation exam of Arab students.

Because the state has banned any study of the Nakba– going so far as to strike the word from the textbooks– the move has drawn sharp criticism in Israel’s Palestinian community.

The Abraham Fund — a joint Jewish-Arab organization that advocates for equality within in Israel — remarked that, “It is important that Arab students learn about the Holocaust and understand the history and pain of the Jewish people… At the same time, it is important that Jewish students learn about the history of the Palestinian minority in Israel, especially those aspects tied to the state of Israel and her existence.”

Sawsan Zaher is a Palestinian who was born and raised in Israel. An attorney at Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Zaher recalls that she did not learn about the Nakba until she studied it on her own, in her early twenties.

“I finished high school without being able to study Palestinian history–about what was here before 1948, about the nakba.”

“And if the parents [of Palestinian students] aren’t political?” she adds. “That’s it.”

The decision to add a question about the Holocaust comes in the wake of the “Nakba Law,” which was passed by the Knesset last month.

The new legislation states that municipalities, public institutions, or organizations that receive public funds will be fined for marking the Nakba or expressing feelings of mourning about Israel’s establishment.

The law was slammed by both Jewish and Arab members of Knesset. “On this day, the thought police is being established in Israel,” Isaac Herzog of the right-wing Labor party said.

Both the Nakba Law and the change to the matriculation exam come just months after a principal of a public school in Yafo, the historically Arab city that was annexed by the Tel Aviv municipality in 1950, forbade students from speaking Arabic.

About half of the school’s students are Palestinian citizens of Israel. While all classes are taught in Hebrew, the principal’s decision forbade Palestinian students from speaking Arabic amongst themselves.

Russian-speaking students, however, are allowed to use their mother tongue.

April 30, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

How about banning Israeli politicians for supporting terrorism?

By David Samel | Mondoweiss | April 29, 2011

Israeli leaders have condemned the nascent Palestinian reconciliation, considering the possible participation of Hamas members in any government to be unacceptable because of the party’s history of terrorism. To the great surprise of no one, American politicians have been competing for press attention to parrot the same line. What if Palestinian leaders, and our own Congress, did likewise, and demanded that Israel bar from elective office any member of a political party with a history of engaging in or supporting terrorism?

Of course, a full recital of Israeli attacks on civilians would fill a multi-volume treatise, but let’s content ourselves with a thumbnail sketch. First, consider Labor, the most liberal/left of Israel’s major parties. Anyone who supported the great peacemaker and Nobel laureate Yitzhak Rabin would be barred.

Rabin proudly boasted that as a young army officer in July, 1948, he executed Ben-Gurion’s order to ethnically cleanse the villages of Lydda and Ramle, forcing tens of thousands to march many miles in stifling summer heat to areas Israel did not (yet) claim as its own territory. A significant number did not survive. In 1987-88, as Defense Minister, Rabin ordered his troops to break the bones of children caught hurling stones toward well-protected soldiers who were defending Israel’s “right” to violate international law. In 1993, as Prime Minister, Rabin launched Operation Accountability, indiscriminately bombing civilians in southern Lebanon with the intent of killing enough of them to cause hundreds of thousands to flee northward in panic to send a signal to the Lebanese government.

Co-Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, as Prime Minister in 1996, implemented a very similar operation, Grapes of Wrath. As long time leaders of the Labor Party, Rabin and Peres’s history of attacking civilians disqualifies all of their supporters from public office.

What about Kadima? The party was founded by Ariel Sharon, who commanded the 1953 massacre of scores of innocent civilians in the Jordanian village of Qibya (on the orders of the god-like Ben-Gurion). In 1982, Sharon, as Defense Minister, personally commanded Israeli troops on their rampage through Lebanon, slaughtering up to 20,000 civilians, apparently setting the Israeli record for personal responsibility for mass murder. His role in smiling benignly on the Sabra/Shattila massacres was merely bloody icing on his blood-soaked cake.

Then there’s Likud, whose founding members included Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, unapologetic and unashamed practitioners of terrorism for many decades, rewarded for their efforts with election to the highest office in the land.

How long must we wait before we hear Gary Ackerman or Ileana Ros-Lehtinen articulate their actual position, which is that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East that is free to elect terrorists? If Israel were to implement the same standards of disqualification-for-terrorism on its own politicians that it demands of the Palestinians, there would be virtually no one left to run the government.

Wait a minute, what about MK’s Ahmed Tibi and Hanin Zouabi?

April 29, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Thousands of Israelis hold Jewish ceremony in Salfit village

Ma’an – 29/04/2011

TEL AVIV — Thousands of Israelis, escorted by the Israeli army, entered the village of Kifl Haris in the northern West Bank Thursday night to pray at the site revered by Jews as the tomb of the Joshua, Israeli media reported.

To mark the anniversary of his death, mass prayer services were held in the Salfit district Palestinian village at midnight, in a ceremony organized by settler groups.

Israeli news site Ynet said an Orthodox Jewish man who bought a nargila pipe from a Palestinian shop in the village, was greeted by angry shouts from Israelis, saying “don’t buy in Arab shops.”

Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger addressed the worshipers, calling for greater access to Jewish religious sites, and urging settlers to coordinate their visits with the Israeli army, following the death of an Israeli settler on Sunday after a group of Jewish worshipers snuck into Nablus without coordinating with Palestinian or Israeli security.

“Every Jew has a right to visit Joseph’s Tomb but it must be coordinated with the security forces. Take great care of your souls,” Metzger was quoted saying by Ynet.

“I call on government ministers to allow more people to enter the site, not just once a month, especially as this is stipulated in all the agreements.”

Settler leader Gershon Mesika held up Joshua as an example to Israelis, Ynet reported, saying “Sever the hand of any person who lifts it against a Jew. Our leaders must learn from Joshua’s power and decisive way.”

Israel’s Minister of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein and four Knesset members attended the ceremony, which was for the first time marked as a official state event, the far-right Israeli news agency Artuz Sheva reported.

The agency quoted MK Danny Danon drawing on the story of Joshua, saying “We are standing by the tomb of Joshua son of Nun, conqueror of the land. We do not need to fear the word ‘conquer’ — there is no shame in conquering the land.”

April 29, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Trying ‘Shock and Awe’ in Libya

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | April 27, 2011

Having laughed off Libyan government peace feelers, Official Washington is now beating the drum for a new round of “shock and awe” bombings and close-combat air strikes to “finish the job” of ousting Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Typically, this Washington debate is being framed as a series of choices for President Barack Obama and NATO: one, abandon the current campaign of air strikes and let Gaddafi prevail; two, continue the conflict at its current pace and accept a stalemate; or three, commit more military resources to “win.”

The neoconservative-dominated opinion circles of Washington are almost unanimous in their determination to push Obama and NATO to adopt option three. It is a consensus not seen since almost all these same Serious People supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which started off with the “shock and awe” bombing that was supposed to solve everything.

Left out of today’s Libyan debate is any consideration of building on the African Union’s proposal for a ceasefire and a transition to democracy with Gaddafi on the sidelines. Gaddafi’s embattled regime agreed to those terms, but the plan was spurned by anti-Gaddafi rebels and doesn’t even rate a mention when the “options” are listed in the Big Media.

Besides taking a page from Bush’s “shock and awe” playbook, the Smart Talk in Washington also suggests modeling “regime change” in Libya after NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Those NATO strikes against the capital of Belgrade inflicted hundreds of civilian deaths, with estimates ranging from about 500 to more than 1,200, including the killing of 16 people working at the Serb TV station.

NATO generals justified their bombing of Serb TV on the premise that “enemy propaganda” is a legitimate target in wartime, even if the station’s personnel were unarmed and defenseless. Since then, the intentional targeting of civilian TV and radio stations has become part of Western military doctrine when trying to overthrow Arab and Third World regimes.

The Serbian model is now being applied to Libya with the blessings of senior military officials who participated in that campaign. For instance, Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded U.S. Air Force units over Serbia, told the New York Times that bombing high-profile institutional sites in Belgrade proved more effective than the destruction of Serbian tanks and other military targets.

“It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic’s own people began to turn on him,” Jumper said.

Now, Jumper said a similar approach is being pursued in Libya. This week, NATO planes bombed Libya’s capital of Tripoli briefly knocking Libyan TV off the air and blasting Gaddafi’s personal residence (although NATO insisted that the raid wasn’t an assassination attempt, wink-wink).

In other words, the anti-Serb air campaign, which was estimated to kill four Serb civilians for every Serb soldier slain, is now becoming the model for NATO’s military strategy in Libya.

Contradicting a Mandate

One might think the application of the Serbian model to Libya would raise red flags in the U.S. news media since it suggests that NATO may end up killing large numbers of civilians under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

However, led by the Washington Post and the New York Times, major U.S. news outlets have ignored this obvious contradiction. Instead, there’s a renewed excitement over the prospect of a new “shock and awe” bombing of an “enemy” country that’s been stripped of its air defenses.

In influential U.S. opinion circles, it’s pro-war propaganda all the time. Indeed, the New York Times seems to publish only editorials and essays favoring an expanded conflict.

Dominating the Times op-ed page on Tuesday was a call from retired Army Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik to “finish the job” in Libya.

Dubik, who served in the Iraq War and is now a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, framed the debate in a way to make escalation and victory the only “responsible” choice. He also projected a long-term U.S. and NATO presence in Libya after Gaddafi’s defeat.

“If Colonel Qaddafi falls, the United States and NATO will have a responsibility to help shape the postwar order, including providing security to prevent a liberated Libya from sinking into chaos,” Dubik wrote. “Washington must start planning and preparing for this complex and expensive contingency and muster the substantial political will required to see it through.”

In other words, we’re looking at another U.S./NATO occupation of a “liberated” Arab or Muslim country.

What’s also clear from the U.S. news coverage is that the Times editors and other opinion-shapers are engaged in Dubik’s important first step, building the “political will” for this new war and future occupation by excluding any serious questions about the wisdom of the desired course.

The Times on Wednesday published another pro-war op-ed – focusing on Gaddafi’s supposed failure to provide quality milk to his countrymen. Meanwhile, there has been zero reexamination of a key rationale for U.S. participation in the war, Gaddafi’s alleged guilt in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

“The blood of Americans is on [Gaddafi’s] hands because he was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103,” declared Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, after a recent trip to rebel-held Benghazi during which McCain joined the call for a larger U.S. military role.

The Times and other leading U.S. news outlets also treat Libya’s guilt as a flat fact, but the case actually remains murky.

In 2001, a Scottish court did convict Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi for the bombing which killed 270 people. But the judgment appears to have been more a political compromise than an act of justice. One of the judges told Dartmouth government professor Dirk Vandewalle about “enormous pressure put on the court to get a conviction.”

Megrahi’s conviction assuaged the understandable human desire to see someone punished for such a heinous crime, albeit a possibly innocent man.

Reopening a Terror Case

In 2007, after the testimony of a key government witness was discredited, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to reconsider the conviction as a grave miscarriage of justice. However, that review was proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities released Megrahi on humanitarian grounds, after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Megrahi dropped his appeal in order to gain the early release, but that doesn’t mean he was guilty. He has continued to assert his innocence and an objective press corps would reflect the doubts regarding his conviction.

The Scottish court’s purported reason for finding Megrahi guilty – while acquitting his co-defendant Lamin Khalifa Fhimah – was the testimony of Toni Gauci, owner of a clothing store in Malta who allegedly sold Megrahi a shirt, the remnants of which were found with the shards of the suitcase that contained the bomb.

The rest of the case rested on a theory that Megrahi put the luggage on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to a connecting flight to London, where it was transferred onto Pan Am 103 bound for New York, a decidedly unlikely way to undertake an act of terrorism given all the random variables involved.

Megrahi would have had to assume that three separate airport security systems – at Malta, Frankfort and London – would fail to give any serious scrutiny to an unaccompanied suitcase or to detect the bomb despite security officials being on the lookout for just such a threat.

As historian William Blum recounted in a Consortiumnews.com article after Megrahi’s 2001 conviction, “The case for the suitcase’s hypothetical travels must also deal with the fact that, according to Air Malta, all the documented luggage on KM180 was collected by passengers in Frankfurt and did not continue in transit to London, and that two Pan Am on-duty officials in Frankfurt testified that no unaccompanied luggage was introduced onto Pan Am 103A, the feeder flight to London.”

There also were problems with Gauci’s belated identification of Megrahi as the shirt-buyer a decade after the fact. Gauci had made contradictory IDs and had earlier given a physical description that didn’t match Megrahi. Gauci reportedly received a $2 million reward for his testimony and then moved to Australia, where he went into retirement.

In 2007, the Scottish review panel decided to reconsider Megrahi’s conviction after concluding that Gauci’s testimony was unbelievable. And without Gauci’s testimony, the case against Megrahi was virtually the same as the case against his co-defendant who was acquitted.

However, after Megrahi’s conviction in 2001, more international pressure was put on Libya, which was then regarded as the archetypal “rogue” state. Indeed, it was to get onerous economic sanctions lifted that Libya took “responsibility” for the Pan Am attack and paid reparations to the victims’ families even as Libyan officials continued to deny guilt.

Yet, despite these doubts about the Pan Am 103 case, the U.S. news media continues to treat Libya’s guilt as a flat fact.

A Defector Questioned

Earlier this month, there was some excitement over the possibility that Gaddafi would be fingered as the Pan Am 103 mastermind by a high-level defector, former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa, who was believed to be in charge of Libyan intelligence in 1988.

Moussa Koussa was questioned by Scottish authorities but apparently shed little new light on the case and was allowed to go free after the interview. Very quickly the press interest over Moussa Koussa faded away.

Yet, as the clamor now builds in Official Washington for an escalation of U.S. participation in the war – and as the Pan Am 103 case is cited over and over as justification – there has been no serious reexamination of the mystery, only the repetition of Libya’s assumed guilt.

Looking across the landscape of the U.S. news media, it is hard to find any major voice suggesting peace negotiations with Gaddafi’s government or even advocating that the sincerity of its acceptance of the African Union’s plan for a cease-fire and democratic reforms should be put to the test.

Instead, virtually all the talking heads are armchair warriors, with the neoconservative editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times again leading the way by condemning Obama’s decision to minimize U.S. military participation.

“If his real aim were to plunge NATO into a political crisis, or to exhaust the air forces and military budgets of Britain and France — which are doing most of the bombing — this would be a brilliant strategy. As it is, it is impossible to understand,” the Post wrote on April 17:.

“Mr. Obama appears less intent on ousting Mr. Gaddafi or ensuring NATO’s success than in proving an ideological point — that the United States need not take the lead in a military operation that does not involve vital U.S. interests.

“How else to explain his decision to deny NATO the two most effective ground attack airplanes in the world — the AC-130 and A-10 Warthog — which exist only in the U.S. Air Force and which were attacking Mr. Gaddafi’s tanks and artillery until April 4?”

The New York Times has been equally adamant about seeing the AC-130s and A-10 Warthogs put back into action mowing down Libyan troops loyal to Gaddafi. “Mr. Obama should authorize [the ground-attack planes] to fly again under NATO command,” the Times declared on April 14, reiterating a demand that the editors had made just a week earlier.

Yet, if NATO’s real goal is to minimize civilian casualties, Western countries might want to think twice about taking sides in what is shaping up as an ugly tribal war. They might even give peace a chance, rather than replay the civilian bombings in Belgrade or the “shock and awe” over Iraq.

April 29, 2011 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Iran rejects Louvre Museum claims

Press TV – April 28, 2011

Iran’s National Museum has rejected claims made by France’s Louvre Museum about the lack of an agreement on holding exhibitions in Tehran and Paris.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the National Museum of Iran said that a cultural agreement was signed between Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization (ICHTO) and the Louvre Museum on October 31, 2004, under which the two museums were supposed to hold exhibitions in the Iranian and French capitals.

The agreement, which is in English, Persian and French, has clearly stated that the two museums can exchange experts and cooperate in research and educational activities, IRNA reported.

According to the third article of the agreement, the Iranian and French museums agreed to hold exhibitions in Tehran and Paris.

Iran kept its promise and held two exhibitions at the Louvre, one showcasing objects from the Safavid era and the other introducing the ancient Persian Civilization.

The French side, however, has not shown any commitment to the promises it made.

The statement also says that the agreement between the two museums expires at the end of June this year and that the Iranian side will no longer cooperate with the Louvre Museum.

Iran announced earlier in April that it had severed all ties with the Louvre Museum because the French art center had not shown any commitment to the promises it made.

Head of ICHTO Hamid Baqaei had warned Louvre officials in January that Iran would only wait until the beginning of the Persian New Year (March 21, 2011) for them to give an exact date for their exhibition in Iran and the artifacts they would send to the country.

This is not the first time that Iran has encountered such a problem with international museums.

In February 2010, Tehran severed ties with the British Museum as it had not sent the Cyrus Cylinder for an exhibition in Iran as promised.

In April 2010, the ICHTO demanded USD 300,000 in compensation for the delay by the British Museum.

The Achaemenid relic was finally displayed at the National Museum of Iran last September after being escorted by a delegation headed by Keeper of the Middle East collections of the British Museum John Curtis to the exhibition site where it was displayed for the first time in 40 years.

The Cyrus Cylinder was initially sent to Iran for a four-month exhibition ending on January 10, 2011, but the event was extended until the end of Nowruz (Persian New Year) holidays.

Iran also won in appeals court concerning a collection of Persepolis tablets which was loaned to Chicago University to be studied in 1937.

Although some of the tablets have been returned to Iran, the dispute broke out when an American Federal Judge ordered the tablets to be confiscated and auctioned in order to compensate the Israeli victims of the 1997 al-Quds (Jerusalem) bombing.

A US federal appeals court overturned the lower court order in March 2011, recognizing the 2,500-year-old relics as part of Iran’s cultural heritage.

The 41-page document at the seventh appeals court admitted that the former order was “seriously flawed.”

The tablets, which were discovered by the archeology team of the University of Chicago in 1933, bear cuneiform inscriptions recording administrative details of the Persian Empire from about 500 BCE.

April 28, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

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