Reason this link violates the right to be forgotten:
This link is inappropriate. It compiles stories making many distorted claims about my political views. Political views are a particularly sensitive form of personal data. The stories are written by men who disagree with me, and they are assembled for the purpose of making money for a website, a purpose that cannot outweigh my interest in controlling the presentation of sensitive data about myself.
Baker’s certainly not hoping for Techdirt’s posts on him to be de-listed (although I imagine he’d indulge in a chuckle or two if they went down). He’s mocking the ridiculousness of the “right to be forgotten” ruling Google is now attempting to comply with. He has submitted other requests as well over such things as outdated photos and “inaccurate” statements as the kickoff to an informal “hack” of a bad law.
I feel bad for Google, which is stuck trying to administer this preposterous ruling. But that shouldn’t prevent us from showing quite concretely how preposterous it is.
I propose a contest. Let’s all ask for takedowns. The person who makes the most outrageous (and successful) takedown request will win a “worst abuse of privacy law” prize, otherwise known as a Privy.
Stewart’s takedown request targeting Techdirt is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it does highlight the sort of abuse that should be expected when government bodies attempt to force the internet to bend to their will. Granting a “right to be forgotten” pretty much ensures that a majority of the requests will be no more legitimate than Baker’s.
Multiple advocates for the law have compared it with the infamous DMCA takedown notice, something that has also been routinely abused. But at least the DMCA takedown carries with it the (almost never enforced) charge of perjury for issuing bogus takedowns. The RTBF form simply asks for a copy of the submitter’s identification. There’s nothing in it to discourage abuse of the system. If you don’t like something someone has said about you on the web, just fill out a webform.
While we at Techdirt disagree with most of what Stewart Baker says, at least his position on privacy remains consistent. His “Privys” — an “award” given to the worst or most hypocritical abuser of privacy laws — have generally been awarded to worthy recipients, usually people who tend to think these laws exist to save them from their own embarrassments.
A request has been made to remove one or more links from a search page under European “right to be forgotten” rules, following Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos, Mario Costeja Gonzalez.
The body of the post contains nothing but the word “TEST” but this seems to indicate that an attempt will be made to publish takedown attempts. At this point, it’s impossible to say how much information will be redacted, or if the European Commission will even allow this sort of transparency. Google is also toying with appending messages to the bottom of search results pages indicating that link(s) may have been removed due to “RTBF” requests. If this works like DMCA requests do, then a link to Chilling Effects database will be provided. These measures won’t necessarily deter abuse, but they will make it much easier to track.
When Colorado legalized recreational marijuana, critics of the idea warned it would lead to more crime throughout the state. But the impact has been just the opposite so far in the state’s largest city, which has seen violent crime go down.
Crime data for Denver, the hub of legal pot sales in the state, shows murders, assaults, rapes, burglaries and other violent crimes declined during the first three months of the year, compared with the same period for 2013.
Homicides went down from 17 to 8 (a 53% drop), automobile break-ins from 2,317 to 1,477 (down 36%) and sexual assaults from 110 to 95 (down 14%). Overall, violent and property crimes dropped more than 10% from last year to this year during the first quarter.
Two types of property crime did go up—arson from 20 incidents to 47 (a 135% jump) and larceny from 2,133 to 2,287 (up 7%).
Meanwhile, marijuana sales across the state increased during the first three months of 2014, from $14 million to $19 million, according to Vox. “For all three months, Denver County made up about half that revenue,” German Lopez reported, noting the city is host to nearly 60% of Colorado’s licensed retail pot stores. Disappointed opponents of legal marijuana pointed out that there has been no connection shown between the drop in the crime rate and the increase in marijuana sales.
Some opponents say the criminal effect of decriminalizing marijuana won’t be felt for several years. “This is a great opportunity for us to find out what happens when you legalize a substance like marijuana,” Tom Gorman, director of Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, told Vox before the police statistics came out. “Just wait and watch what happens in these labs, and then you can make a decision based on data and facts and not rhetoric.”
Yesterday morning on the 8th June, Israeli police forces raided the village of Iqrit (located on the northern tip of Israel, within eyesight of Lebanon). The police uprooted trees, destroyed and confiscated all the personal belongings of Palestinian activists present in the village. Furthermore they beat and violently arrested 3 Palestinian men who were present in the village at the time. The 3 arrested are: Walla Sbait, Nidal Khoury and Jeries Khiatt. They were taken to the police station in Nahariyya, where they were kept in detention over night.
Today at 8:30 AM the three detainees were brought before the Kiryat Gat Magistrates’ Court, following a police request for an extension of their detention. The police have charged the detainees with trespassing the land owned by the ILA, obstructing the work of public officials, assaulting a public employee and endangering public order.
The court ruled that Nidal Khoury is kept in detention until Wednesday 11th of June. Walaa Sbeit and Jeries Khiatt was sentenced house arrest until Sunday 15th of June and they are not allowed to go back to Iqrit for 60 days.
As the season of Advent approached in November 1948, the Israeli military forced residents of Iqrit and the neighboring village of Kufr Bir’im —all citizens of the newly created state of Israel— to leave their homes near the northern border with Lebanon because of military operations in the area. The Israeli forces made a promise to the inhabitants, that they could return to their homes after 15 days. The people of Iqrit are still waiting. In July 1951, the Israeli High Court ruled that the people of Iqrit and Kufr Bir’im had the right to return to their homes. The military refused to comply, and on Christmas Eve 1951 blew up all houses in both villages.
Shortly thereafter, all village lands were confiscated by the state and has been rented out to the nearby Kibbutz for their cows to graze until this day. Since then, decades of demonstrations and legal appeals for the villagers’ right to return have seen a string of favorable decisions by courts and commissions that have resulted only in more broken promises and unenforced rulings.In the 1970s, the government had granted use of the cemetery —allowing only the dead to return to Iqrit after they lived and died in exile at Kufr Yasif, Rameh, Haifa or other places. The original villagers and their descendants —now around 1,500 people scattered across northern Israel— are allowed only to hold services in the church and bury their dead in the cemetery. Every first Saturday of the month there has been a mass held at the village church and every year a summer camp has been organised on the hillside. In August 2012 the third generation reclaimed their village.
Around 20 descendants from Iqrit took the initiative to begin resurrecting the village despite the village’s legal limbo. The activists make sure that the village is constantly inhabited, sleeping in tents, under the stars or in rooms attached to the church. The group consists of university students, factory and restaurant workers, and teachers.
Their attempts to construct or plant anything in the village have been met with immediate demolition by the Israeli authorities. But over time, they’ve been able to add a few amenities, including solar panels on the church roof, determined to bring back life to Iqrit.
Iqrit’s 80 homes are long gone, but the activists goal is to rebuild Iqrit for the villagers-in-exile, refusing only to return to their home in coffins, but alive. The activists have returned to the area and are discussing on how to proceed with their campaign, determined not to be intimidated by Israeli forces and their harassment.
The major organizations that comprise the Israel Lobby are well known: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and Christians United For Israel (CUFI). All are well known, benefiting from large budgets and staffs. They are extremely effective, having excellent access to politicians and the media to promote their points of view, and are, as a group, regular visitors to the White House. AIPAC is without doubt the most powerful lobby in the United States that is focused on a foreign policy issue.
The institutional Israel boosters are in turn backed by a cluster of think tanks and institutes that spout a relentlessly pro-Likud line. They include Foundation for Defense of Democracies, The Emergency Committee for Israel, The American Enterprise Institute, The Hudson Institute, Brookings and The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A recent op-ed at The National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) “Why Israel Fears Containment of a Nuclear Iran,” written by two Israelis with government ties, illustrates to what extent spokesmen for Tel Aviv have access to the media across the political spectrum to make their points while contrary views rarely surface. It would be difficult to imagine a similar piece appearing advancing Iranian views on Israel, for example, and one might well question whose “National Interest” is being promoted by providing a platform to current or former foreign government officials.
And backing the think tanks up are the enablers in the media who suppress stories critical of Israel and consistently editorialize supporting policies favored by Tel Aviv. Israeli Ambassadors, uniquely, regularly write op-eds for publications like the Washington Post and The New York Times. Prominent among the consistently pro-Israel media are the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch publications in general and magazines like Mortimer Zuckerman owned US News and World Report, but it would be fair to say that nearly all mainstream media outlets are to some extent wary of offending Israel and its backers.
But as Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt noted in their groundbreaking expose of the Israel Lobby, the lobbying effort extends well beyond the organizational level to include friends of Israel who labor assiduously and voluntarily at state and local levels as well as at universities and from within professional organizations to maintain a positive viewpoint on Israel while promoting a negative narrative regarding its increasing number of critics. Most recently they have been focused on halting the growth of BDS, “boycott, divestment, and sanctions,” particularly in attempts to use “Lawfare” to make such activity illegal when it singles out Israel.
Israel’s friends quite rightly see Congress as their major ally in keeping the United States Israel-friendly, so much so that Pat Buchanan once dubbed America’s legislative body as “Israeli occupied territory.” And so it remains with legislation favorable to Israel passing by unanimous consent voice votes or grossly lopsided margins when a tally actually takes place. The White House too is into the charade that Israel is a major US ally and friend, in spite of mounting evidence that Tel Aviv consistently spies on Washington, is not interested in any peace process with the Palestinians and works against genuine American interests.
I have recently obtained a handout memo relating to a congressional race in Virginia that illustrates how the process works at the political entry level. Congressman Jim Moran has announced that he will not seek reelection in the heavily Democratic district that encompasses Alexandria Virginia. Moran has fallen afoul of the pro-Israel establishment by telling attendees at a 2003 antiwar forum, “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.” He added that Jewish leaders were “influential enough” to change the course of US policy. Moran inevitably apologized for those remarks, but the damage was done and he was considered to be unreliable on the issue of Israel, a view reflected in the handout which quotes Debbie Linick, Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, asserting that Moran had been “lacking the nuances of understanding the peace process. It is crucial that the next representative from the 8th District be a strong supporter of Israel.”
The handout described a Jewish Community Relations Council Political Forum for the 8th District that was to be held on May 18th in Alexandria at the Council’s Early Childhood Learning Center. All prospective candidates for the 8th District were invited to participate to present their positions on various issues of interest to those attending. The access to the event was by paid tickets only, presumably to permit screening to control the make-up of the audience. The handout again quotes Linick as stating that “all area synagogues will be asked to participate” even if they were not in the voting district.
The memo suggests that someone at the forum might ask every candidate to publish his or her signed Israel Position paper, which AIPAC “requires” all candidates for office to personally sign. It also recommends that signs be placed on the street outside demanding release of the paper and notes that if there should happen to be demonstrators present they will not be allowed to block the entrance, which is behind the building on private property.
The Northern Virginia Council might well be more than usually politically active and is unlikely to have a counterpart in most congressional districts, but the handout reveals how AIPAC has an impact on all viable congressional candidates, often before they are even nominated. Once nominated, candidates go through a vetting process in which they meet with an AIPAC official and are asked to write and sign a position paper on Israel, if they have not already done so. Many of the papers are subsequently highlighted on the AIPAC website.
Few if any candidates refuse to cooperate because to do so would mean that AIPAC and its friends would find and fund an opponent and use their media access to distort the politician’s record. This type of blackballing most recently occurred in the case of Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina, who was on the receiving end of a vicious and well-funded campaign because he is an anti-war candidate strongly opposed by the pro-Israel establishment.
To be sure Americans have a constitutional right to both demand to know and challenge the views of those running for office but the important thing to note here is that the discussion is not about healthcare, immigration or government programs – it is rather about unconditional support for the policies of a foreign country. I can think of no other advocacy group in the United States that is comparable to the Israel Lobby in terms of its promotion of positions that are demonstrably not beneficial to the United States with the only possible exception being the prominent Cubans in Congress who vet candidates based on their willingness to continue to punish the regime in Havana. The Cubans, unlike the Israel Firsters, have, however, only regional impact, mostly concentrated in Florida, though it is interesting to note that they – Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart, Joe Garcia and Robert Menendez – are also all passionate supporters of Israel.
Americans really have little choice when it comes to Congress and Israel as anyone who refuses to cooperate with AIPAC is unlikely to find himself in the running, but there should at least be some awareness of what happens routinely to prospective candidates to insure conformity with the Lobby’s viewpoint. If unconditional loyalty to a foreign country is a sine qua non for election to congress perhaps there should be some discussion of what that is likely to mean and the promoters of such policies should be held accountable when they produce a bad result, as they did in Iraq and are promising to do vis-a-vis Iran. It is one thing to be all for Israel due to cultural or familial affinity or even as an abstraction but it is quite another to persist in that view when it does genuine harm to the United States, regarding which a case certainly can and has already been made.
I toured the recently opened 9/11 Museum last night. There is quite a bit to report. The size and scale of the building and many sections are actually impressive. One can see how the general public will be very taken by the entire presentation, and therefore, take what they see as truth.
However, if the original intent of the museum was to pay homage to those who perished, the exhibits are far off the mark. Instead, the creators have co-opted the tragedy to substantiate the official narrative. The museum just solidifies the shock & awe of the events of 9/11, and gives the public a visual and auditory experience that will be firmly etched in their memory far into the future.
There are exhibits on each of the towers. There are photos of their original construction. There were sections of steel columns, elevator parts, and parts of the foundation. There were displays of personal items of those who perished. There were many audio recordings with slide shows being projected of pictures of victims, survivors, and onlookers in a state of terror. There are film clips, and transcripts of conversations from that day. There is an ambulance and a fire truck, which show the damage from the debris. There are videos of the towers on fire. There are even photos of people jumping. Then there are even large videos of the demolition of each tower. But by the time people view these, they’ve been thoroughly distracted and emotionally overcome by the magnitude of the horror people experienced that day, so they cannot recognize the implications of the disintegration and free-fall of 110 stories of steel-framed structures.
There is a section on Osama Bin Laden, the alleged hijackers, Kaleed Sheikh Mohammed, and Al Qaeda. There were two film clips of hijackers passing through the airports. However, the one from Dulles has no time stamp and I think the only other one is actually taken from Portland, ME, not Logan Airport. Nevertheless, people viewing this display were shown exactly who the official narrative wants the blame to be attributed to.
To my surprise, there was even a small section on the public’s questioning of the events. This included photos of people calling for investigations, protestors claiming 9/11 was an inside job, and the cover of Popular Mechanics which supposedly debunked all those “conspiracy theories”. At least the museum planners can attempt to say they were thorough in addressing all of the “focus groups”. But this small section did nothing to go into the broad scope of alternative research based on science and journalistic analysis. If only they had a copy of “The New Pearl Harbor” by David Ray Griffin next to a copy of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses“.
Then, of course, there were quilts, photos, and artifacts that good hearted Americans created in tribute to those who suffered and died. There were photos and statements about how we all came together and rose above the tragedy because we’re resilient and won’t be defeated. After all, we have to keep up our “American exceptionalism”. The framers of the official account took an unspeakable tragedy and turned it into a cause for patriotism.
There was a digital presentation showing the flight paths. There where photos of Shanksville and the Pentagon. But by now you may be noticing there’s a glaring omission to this report. There is nothing on WTC7!I still can’t believe it when the museum covers so much of everything else.
To add further weight to this proposition, just think how the truth about WTC7 actually changes the meaning of everything in the museum! Just think how the entire official narrative caves in on itself. It boggles the mind…
The alternative flyer by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is an essential educational tool. The cover looks similar to the official pamphlet, except it says “9/11 Reality: Welcome to the other story about 9/11.” This is the Visitor Guide For Truth Seekers. With the thousands of people visiting the 9/11 Memorial and 9/11 Museum daily, distributing these flyers is a huge opportunity to open the eyes of the public. This is our chance to counter the deliberate distortion of history. I urge us all to meet the challenge.
(sf911truth editor’s note: The headline above was in response to a June 5, 2014 article in Newsweek called “The 9/11 Museum’s Biggest Oversight: The World Trade Center’s Neighborhood“, written by Alexander Nazaryan, which laments the museum’s oversight of including any mention of the historical arabic roots of the part of New York City where the museum now resides. However, we think the oversight of mentioning WTC Building 7, a 47-story tall building that suddenly collapses at free fall speed on 9/11, even though it wasn’t hit by a plane, is the more egregious example of the museum omitting evidence, especially evidence that could lead to people questioning the official narrative.)
The Israeli Supreme court has recently ruled that there is no such thing as an “Israeli” recognized by the legal system of the State of Israel. You can be classified as a Jew, an Arab, a Druze, a foreign visitor, but nobody is “Israeli.” Just a short while ago the Knesset created a new status, “Christian.” So now a Palestinian Christian, who had previously been classified as merely an “Arab,” can now not be an Arab but a Christian and be accorded some rights that are currently denied to regular Palestinians, who are classified as Arabs. Israel has never wanted to give any credence to the fact that there ever was a place called Palestine that had people in it.
But now it has definitely been ruled that there is no common ground, no catch-all status of “Israeli.” Therefore, Israeli citizenship is an empty category. It does not resemble any idea of “citizenship” that we as citizens of the USA, or Canadian, or Mexican citizens can recognize. In Israel citizenship is meaningless and “Nationality” is everything (if you can get past the idea that a religion is also a nationality…I wonder if someone presenting a Unitarian Church passport would get through customs.)
This all makes sense if you are running a caste system in which the Nationality/Religion “Jewish” gets full rights and others get less, or no rights at all. This is what Israel is. It is not a modern Western style democracy that just happens to have a “discrimination” problem, or to have by accident acquired extra territory with some undesirable people on it.
In the news media when someone quotes an “Israeli” source, or a government representative they always mean “Jewish,” but they never say “a Jewish government source has said…” But according to the Supreme Court of the State of Israel (I don’t want to say “Jewish Supreme Court”) Israelis don’t exist. The leaders of the State of Israel are always thumping their chests proclaiming “we are the Jews!” “We are the only Jewish state in the world and we represent all the Jews of the world.”
But if some critic were to say, ” I don’t like what the Jews are doing in the West Bank.” The reaction would be, “Anti-Semite!!! Jew hater.” Well…maybe this isn’t an important point. After all, whenever someone says, “I don’t like what the Israelis are doing in the West Bank,” the response is “Anti-Semite! Jew hater!”
Many of us who support human rights for Palestinians have encountered retorts from defenders of Israeli Apartheid who say, “there are no Palestinians, they don’t exist.” This is a popular line. A lot of people who think they are clever, worldly and liberal like to say this (like ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg). Think about it though. There are over 5 million Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (about the same as the number of Jews living there). they are Arabs (native speakers of Arabic) whose ancestors have lived in a place known as Palestine at least since the 5th century BC (as attested to by Herodotus, who started the genre of History writing) and certainly longer than that.
For the Zionists to deny their nationality is to deny their right to exist..or to exist within the lands that the Jews of Israel claim as their exclusive property. This is an eliminationist, ethnic cleansing, rabid xenophobic point of view. There is no left, right or center here, just push them out. Get rid of them.
So now Israelis don’t exist and Palestinians don’t exist. Leaders of the state of Israel are always wailing about an “existential threat” to Israel presented by… everyone and everything. BDS, halting settlement construction, protest marches, African refugees (officially called “infiltrators”), you name it.
But how can there be an existential threat to non-existing Israelis from Palestinians who also don’t exist? Jean Paul Sartre seemed to corner the nothingness market with his tome “Being and Nothingness.” But now he’s been outdone.
The Irish government is under pressure to order an inquiry into a recently uncovered mass grave for almost 800 children who died at a Catholic Church facility for unwed mothers and their children. Most of the bodies were dumped in a sewage tank.
The mass, unmarked grave in the town of Tuan, western Ireland, was unveiled by a local historian, Catherine Corless, who was gathering information on the mother-and-baby home which functioned there in the first half of the 20th century, run by the Bon Secours order of nuns.
Back then, unmarried pregnant women were ostracized by conservative Irish society and sent away to special church-run institutions, where mothers often had to engage in unpaid hard labor, while their children were taken away from them to be either adopted or raised in orphanages.
The burial place appeared to be one for the children who died at the facility.
“I was dismayed to find that in fact the number of children who died in the Home during its existence 1925-1961 numbered nearly 800,” Corless wrote on Facebook, commenting on her research. “I now have all those children’s names, date of death, and age at death, which will be recorded into a special book.”
Locals first learned of the mass burials in the 1970s. By that time the home for mothers and babies had been closed and the area turned in a residential one. Two boys accidentally broke apart the concrete slab over the mass grave and discovered little skeletons there. The place was then sealed again, but still remained unmarked for decades.
Corless is now engaged in a fundraising effort to get the place marked with a monument bearing all of the 769 names of the dead children. She says they died of malnutrition and neglect. A sewage tank served as a graveyard.
“If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless told the Irish Mail. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”
“Harrowing details” as Children’s Minister Charlie Flanagan put it, of burial arrangements for children at the church-run institutions, have led to calls for an inquiry into what happened decades ago.
“Many of the revelations are deeply disturbing and a shocking reminder of a darker past in Ireland when our children were not cherished as they should have been,” Flanagan said in a statement cited by Reuters. A government report on the scandal is expected by the end of June.
Labor senator Lorraine Higgins has called for the Catholic Church to reveal more details of the incident.
“Now is the time for the church authorities to tell us where the rest of the bodies are,” Higgins said, The Irish Times reported. “We need to know how many died in each of these homes throughout the country. We need details about each one of these children and where their resting places are.”
The Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, said that the diocese was not running the home. He told the order of nuns who did that it must co-operate with any inquiry into the discovery.
“Regardless of the time lapse involved, this is a matter of great public concern which ought to be acted upon urgently,” Neary said.
Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, told The Irish Examiner he would support exhumation of the children’s bodies if necessary for the investigation.
It’s not the first time that the Catholic Church in Ireland has found itself under fire over inhuman practices in its institutions in the past.
A year ago the Irish government agreed to pay up 58 million euros ($75 million) in compensation to hundreds of women, who were forced to work at the notorious Magdalene Laundries, also run by the Catholic Church. A teenage girl or young woman could be sent to the laundries just over suspicions that her behavior could be contrary to the Church’s conservative morals. The inmates at the institutions, run by Catholic nuns, were forced to do physically demanding work while living in prison-like conditions.
As Detroit, Michigan grapples with bankruptcy, requiring at least $1 billion in aid, it is probably not alone. “More U.S. cities could be heading towards bankruptcy”, said Richard Ravitch, a former Lieutenant-Governor of New York, who was instrumental in helping New York City navigate through its financial woes in the 1970s.
So with Detroit, once the world leader in automobile manufacturing, now on its deathbed, and other major U.S. cities selling off their buildings to pay current expenses, it may be informative to look at how the Federal government is spending U.S tax dollars.
Half a planet away is the glittering city of Tel Aviv. One wonders why that city can be so successful, while U.S. cities are dying. Could it be the $9 million dollars the U.S. gives to Israel, every single day of the year, more in foreign aid than the United States give to all other countries combined?
One might reasonably ask what Detroit could do with $9 million dollars a day. That city is trying to cobble together $1 billion to stay afloat this year; Israel is getting more three times that much from U.S. taxpayers, every year.
‘But’, the august, so-called representatives of the U.S. citizenry will proclaim, ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, a major ally of the U.S., and therefore must be supported’. Really? One wonders why this ally not only refuses to cooperate with the U.S.’s hapless and insincere efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, but actually spits in the face of the U.S., as it accepts $9 million a day. When the joke of peace talks is announced, with the U.S. saying neither side should do anything to jeopardize them, Israel announces more illegal settlements. When the United Nations proposes condemning increased settlement-building, which the U.S. has stated it believes to be in violation of international law, Israel knows it can rely on the U.S. to veto any such resolution. When the U.S. hypocritically decries the human rights abuses so prevalent around the world, Israel knows that it is exempt from any such condemnation, if it only brutally abuses Palestinians.
Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. Looking at one incident from the administration of President Ronald Reagan indicates Israel’s sure knowledge that it can do as it pleases, with no repercussions from the U.S.
In 1988, Mr. Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, crafted a plan that he hoped would resolve some ongoing, underlying issues between Palestine and Israel. His three point plan was as follows:
1) The convening of an international conference;
2) A six-month negotiating period that would bring about an interim phase for Palestinian self-determination for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and
3) A date of December, 1988 for the start of talks between Israel and Palestine for the final resolution of the conflict.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir immediately rejected this plan, claiming, incredibly, that it did nothing to forward the cause of peace. In response, the U.S. issued a new memorandum, emphasizing economic and security agreements with Israel, and accelerating the delivery of seventy-five F-16 fighter jets. This, ostensibly, was to encourage Israel to accept the peace plan proposals. Yet Israel did not yield. An Israeli journalist commented that the message received was: “One may say no to America and still get a bonus.” And thus it has been for generations.
The reason for this is hardly a mystery. The Israeli lobby, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), funnels millions of dollars into the election and re-election campaigns of candidates and elected officials who are willing to jump as high as AIPAC demands. And it seems there is no height to which these worthies will not jump for the almighty dollar. In return, they send a fortune to Israel every year, defend its horrific human rights abuses, and ignore international laws, laws the U.S. has signed on to. And when Palestinians are occasionally able to gather supplies sufficient to send an ineffective rocket into Israel, the U.S. condones and finances the carpet-bombing of the beleaguered Gaza Strip.
Never mind that much of Detroit looks like it has annoyed Israel, and been victim of its bombs. Ignore the spiraling, out-of-control crime rate, the poverty, poor educational standards, failing infrastructure and despair that are so much a part of that once great city. Rather, fawn over Israel, send it vast amounts of money that could be going to assist the taxpayers who provide it, and accept those checks into campaign coffers from grateful Zionists.
The Palestinians have just sworn in a new unity government (why the media insists on saying that Hamas ‘seized control’ of the Gaza Strip in 2006, when it was democratically elected, is a mystery to this writer), and Israel is in panic mode. There now exists the possibility that Palestine will petition the International Criminal Court for redress from Israel’s many horrific crimes. Israel, with complete U.S. support, has successfully resisted every effort by the international community to investigate allegations of human rights abuses. The time may be approaching when it can hide no longer.
And what of that? As Israel becomes increasingly isolated in the world community, due at least partly to the success of the ‘Boycott, Divest and Sanction’ (BDS) campaign, including commercial, academic and entertainment boycotts, will not the U.S. always be there to come to the financial rescue? As more and more U.S. cities decay, as the educational level of U.S. schools falls further and further behind other industrialized nations, leaving a citizenry ill-prepared to work in the global economy, as the number of those living in poverty grows, what is all that, when AIPAC pulls the puppets’ strings?
A generation ago, when the U.S. first began moon exploration, with the goal of landing a person on the moon, some critics said that the vast amounts of money that that would cost could be better used on this planet. Today, as the U.S. bows and scrapes at the unholy altar of AIPAC, mightn’t the same argument be used? When U.S. citizens are in deep poverty, living in unsafe, decaying cities, is it a stretch of the imagination to think that U.S. tax dollars should go first to assisting them?
There remain, in isolated pockets of the U.S., people who believe that the United States is a democracy, with voters electing people to represent them, who will act in their best interests. When the tax burden falls mainly on the dwindling middle class, and the taxes they pay go not to assist the communities in which they live, but to support and uphold a barbaric apartheid regime, the time for the putting to bed of that myth has long since passed.
Detroit and countless other U.S. cities will continue to struggle to survive, as tax revenues are sent to a nation that holds the U.S. in complete contempt. But politicians will continue to have unlimited funds for their election campaigns, so business will remain as usual.
“A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.”—John Salter
How many children, old people, and law-abiding citizens have to be injured, terrorized or killed before we call a halt to the growing rash of police violence that is wracking the country? How many family pets have to be gunned down in cold blood by marauding SWAT teams before we declare such tactics off limits? And how many communities have to be transformed into military outposts, complete with heavily armed police, military tanks, and “safety” checkpoints before we draw that line in the sand that says “not in our town”?
The latest incident comes out of Atlanta, Georgia, where a SWAT team, attempting to execute a no-knock drug warrant in the middle of the night, launched a flash bang grenade into the targeted home, only to have it land in a crib where a 19-month-old baby lay sleeping. The grenade exploded in the baby’s face, burning his face, lacerating his chest, and leaving him paralyzed. He is currently in the hospital in a medically induced coma.
If this were the first instance of police overkill, if it were even the fifth, there might be hope of reforming our system of law enforcement. But what happened to this baby, whose life will never be the same, has become par for the course in a society that glorifies violence, turns a blind eye to government wrongdoing, and sanctions any act by law enforcement, no matter how misguided or wrong. Indeed, as I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this state-sponsored violence is a necessary ingredient in any totalitarian regime to ensure a compliant, cowed and fearful populace.
Thus, each time we as a rational, reasoning, free-minded people fail to be outraged by government wrongdoing—whether it’s the SWAT team raids that go awry, the senseless shootings of unarmed citizens, the stockpiling of military weapons and ammunition by government agencies (including small-town police), the unapologetic misuse of our taxpayer dollars for graft and pork, the incarceration of our fellow citizens in forced labor prisons, etc.—we become accomplices in bringing about our own downfall.
There’s certainly no shortage of things to be outraged about, starting with this dangerous mindset that has come to dominate law enforcement and the courts that protecting the lives and safety of police officers (of all stripes) is more important than the lives and safety of the citizenry. This is true even if it means that greater numbers of innocent civilians will get hurt or killed (police kill roughly five times more often than they are killed), police might become laws unto themselves, and the Constitution will be sidestepped, or worse disregarded, at every turn.
For example, where was the outrage when a Minnesota SWAT team raided the wrong house in the middle of the night, handcuffed the three young children, held the mother on the floor at gunpoint, shot the family dog, and then “forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead and bloody pet for more than an hour” while they searched the home?
Or what about the SWAT team that drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard, surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house, then when Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held him at bay with rifles? Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped in the flame-filled house, and the county was ordered to pay $2.6 million to Serrato’s family. It turns out the father of four had done nothing wrong; the SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved in a shooting. Even so, the police admitted no wrongdoing.
And then there was the police officer who tripped and “accidentally” shot and killed Eurie Stamps, who had been forced to the floor of his home at gunpoint while a SWAT team attempted to execute a search warrant against his stepson. Equally outrageous was the recent four-hour SWAT team raid on a California high school, where students were locked down in classrooms, forced to urinate in overturned desks and generally terrorized by heavily armed, masked gunmen searching for possible weapons that were never found.
The problem with all of these incidents, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a war zone.”
This battlefield mindset has so corrupted our law enforcement agencies that the most routine tasks, such as serving a search warrant—intended to uncover evidence of a suspected crime—becomes a death warrant for the alleged “suspect,” his family members and his pets once a SWAT team, trained to kill, is involved.
Unfortunately, SWAT teams are no longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. For example, police in both Baltimore and Dallas have used SWAT teams to bust up poker games. A Connecticut SWAT team was sent into a bar that was believed to be serving alcohol to underage individuals. In Arizona, a SWAT team was used to break up an alleged cockfighting ring. An Atlanta SWAT team raided a music studio, allegedly out of a concern that it might have been involved in illegal music piracy.
Yet the tension inherent in most civilian-police encounters these days can’t be blamed exclusively on law enforcement’s growing reliance on SWAT teams. It goes far deeper, to a transformation in the way police view themselves and their line of duty. Specifically, what we’re dealing with today is a skewed shoot-to-kill mindset in which police, trained to view themselves as warriors or soldiers in a war, whether against drugs, or terror, or crime, must “get” the bad guys—i.e., anyone who is a potential target—before the bad guys get them. The result is a spike in the number of incidents in which police shoot first, and ask questions later.
Who could forget what happened to 13-year-old Andy Lopez? The teenager was shot seven times and killed after two sheriff’s deputies, a mere 20 feet away, saw him carrying a toy BB gun in public.
Then there was the time two Cleveland police officers mistook the sounds of a backfiring car for gunfire and immediately began pursuing the car and its two occupants. Within 20 minutes, more than 60 police cars, some unmarked, and 115 officers had joined the pursuit, which ended in a middle school parking lot with more than 140 bullets fired by police in less than 30 seconds. The “suspects”—dead from countless bullet wounds—were unarmed.
Miriam Carey’s family still can’t get past the shock of her death. Police in Washington, DC, shot and killed the 34-year-old woman after she collided with a barrier leading to the White House, then fled when pursued by a phalanx of gun-wielding police and cop cars. Carey’s 1-year-old daughter was in the backseat. Seventeen gun shots later, Carey was dead and her toddler motherless.
Just as troubling as this “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset is what investigative journalist Katie Rucke uncovered about how police are being trained to use force without hesitation and report their shootings in such a way as to legally justify a shot. Rucke reports the findings of one concerned citizen, “Jack,” who went undercover in order to attend 24 hours of law enforcement training classes organized by the private, for-profit law enforcement training organization Calibre Press.
“Jack says it was troubling to witness hundreds of SWAT team officers and supervisors who seemed unfazed by being instructed to not hesitate when it comes to using excessive, and even deadly, force,” writes Rucke. “‘From my personal experience, these trainers consistently promote more aggression and criticize hesitation to use force,’ Jack said. ‘They argue that the risk of making a mistake is worth it to absolutely minimize risk to the officer. And they teach officers how to use the law to minimize legal repercussions in almost any scenario. All this is, of course, done behind the scenes, with no oversight from police administrators, much less the public.’”
Rucke continues:
According to the learning materials, … there isn’t time for logic and analysis, encouraging officers to fire multiple rounds at subjects because “two shots rarely stops ‘em,” and outlines seven reasons why “excessive use of force” is a myth. Other lessons Jack learned from the “Anatomy of Force Incidents” training in January include a need to over-analyze one’s environment for deadly threats by using one’s imagination to create “targets of the day” who could be “reasonably” shot, to view racial profiling as a legitimate policing technique, even if the person is a child, pregnant woman or elderly person, and to use the law to one’s advantage to avoid culpability.
What we’re dealing with is what author Kristian Williams describes as the dual myths of heroism and danger: “The overblown image of police heroism, and the ‘obsession’ with officer safety, do not only serve to justify police violence after the fact; by providing such justification, they legitimize violence, and thus make it more likely.”
If ever there were a time to de-militarize and de-weaponize police forces, it’s now, starting at the local level, with local governments and citizens reining in local police. The same goes for scaling back on the mindset adopted by cops that they are the law and should be revered, feared and obeyed.
Police have been insulated from accusations of wrongdoing for too long and allowed to operate in an environment in which whatever a cop says, goes. The current practice is to let the police deal with these transgressions internally by suspending the officer involved with administrative pay, dragging out the investigation until the public forgets about the incident, and then eventually declaring the shooting incident justified based on the officer’s fear for his safety, and allowing him to go back to work as usual. And if, on the off chance, a shooting incident goes before the courts, the judiciary defers to police authority in almost all instances. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that police officers who used deadly force to terminate a car chase were immune from a lawsuit. The officers were accused of needlessly resorting to deadly force by shooting multiple times at a man and his passenger in a stopped car, killing both individuals.
Meanwhile, the epidemic of police violence continues to escalate while fear of the police increases and the police state, with all its surveillance gear and military weaponry, expands around us.
“Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
—–Mark Twain
It’s commencement season again, so the nation’s pundits are taking advantage of the opportunity to take university youth to task for rejecting commencement speakers who espouse unpopular causes (anti-Muslim crusader Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Condoleezza Rice, I.M.F. head Christian Lagarde etc.), which demonstrates a failure to be open to a true “marketplace of ideas.” Of course, the circulation of ideas is a lot more significant than a mere “marketplace,” but since profit is the only value that capitalism will tolerate, and capitalism is not about to disappear tomorrow morning, we’ll leave that consideration aside for the moment. Just what moral standing does U.S. punditry have to condemn others for not tolerating speech it can’t stand?
The obvious answer is, “none at all.” “Liberals,” and “conservatives,” (and for that matter, many university students) are quite similar in their intolerance for political views that conflict with their own. The corporate media, those entrusted with the task of perpetuating political orthodoxy, i.e., the incapacity to question, does not, cannot, and will not tolerate speech delivered by doctor David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, the honorable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bolivian President Evo Morales,Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Russian president Vladimir Putin, Syrian president Assad, any spokesperson of Hamas, and Holocaust revisionists such as Ernst Zundel and Bradley Smith, among others. Even Phil Donahue and Helen Thomas have been ex-communicated by the media czars, the former for questioning the wisdom of attacking Iraq, the latter for suggesting that (illegal) colonizers of Palestine ought to return to the lands where they have legal standing. In short, the pundits presuming to lecture American youth on the virtues of tolerance and respect for a diversity of views are themselves partisans of a narrow orthodoxy, one they don’t even know they have, much less are willing to question.
From the point of view of the upholders of a “free marketplace of ideas,” you are a racist murderer if you think lack of forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers in WWII poses a problem for those who believe in them, an unreconstructed Bolshevik if you question capitalist rule by a microscopic minority of investors, an apologist for chemical warfare if you don’t support overthrowing the government of Syria, a supporter of dictatorship if you think the Russian people have the right to resist a U.S. orchestrated coup in the Ukraine, and an apologist for terror if you support democratically elected Hamas’s right to govern the Palestinian people. Small wonder that Americans have a dim view of politics and are reluctant to participate. When vulgar smears greet every original thought, who in their right mind wants to participate?
Meanwhile, how do the pundits greet whistleblowers? In general they applaud the jailing and torture of Chelsea Manning and the forced exile of Eric Snowden for revealing state secrets to the American people, who otherwise would not have any means of knowing about many of the crimes committed in their name. The American First Amendment establishing press freedom is much celebrated by the punditocracy for distinguishing the U.S. from Canada and European states, some of whom have official secrets acts that allow the state to raid the files of media companies. However, the presumed moral superiority of the American system becomes difficult to appreciate given the perpetual eagerness of the corporate media to spout the national security state’s propaganda of the moment. As the saying goes, once the bull has been spayed, he receives all barnyard privileges.
The existence of the First Amendment is precisely what makes the corporate media’s craven submission to official doctrines reprehensible. If the press and broadcast media were subject to state intrusion, they could plead self-defense in making “news” coincide with the propaganda needs of the state. But since they do not face any penalty for crafting the news however they see fit, one can only call them cowards for giving credence to the lies and distortions favored by Washington. Base and criminal cowards.
Reject this hypocrisy, students, and demand full employment for graduates by establishing a free and independent media with access to mass audiences. Let freedom ring!
Since 2010, I have been Press TV’s Canadian correspondent based in Calgary, Alberta. I have been forced by the actions and statements of Canada’s ruling neoconservatives to hone in on the role Zionists and the organized Jewish community play in Canadian society.
Canada’s current government has shifted this country from being a comparatively benign and peaceful nation to being a warmongering de facto colony of Israel. I believe the evidence suggests this didn’t just happen by accident; the Zionization of Canada was a carefully planned, well-oiled operation.
If I was wrong in my analyses of the interface between Canada’s government and pro-Israel forces, I believe I would have been invited on one of the many Zionist-controlled media organs here, debated by some high-IQ Zionist intellectual and exposed as erroneous and foolish. I believe it is because we at Press TV are accurate in our analyses of Canadian power and politics that a segment of the organized Jewish community has decided to turn to coercion.
I would like to make available an email I received from the Jewish Defense League, a group described in an FBI report entitled “Terrorism 2000/2001” as a “violent extremist organization:”
“Mr Blakeney,
In the middle of the last century, Jews had no right or means of response when they were demonised, persecuted and attacked by your ideological soulmates. Today, the world is a very different place. When we are attacked by hate-filled antisemites like you, we respond with all the resources at our disposal, and with extreme prejudice.
You clearly enjoy indulging your pathological hatred of Jews, but there are three things that you should remember: The code that we live by is ‘never again’; our loathing of those who incite hatred against Jews is stronger than their hatred of us; we didn’t choose you as an enemy, you chose us.”
There are several fallacies committed in this unpleasant email. Firstly, I am not a “hate-filled anti-Semite.” I define Anti-Semitism as an “irrational hatred of all Jews generically.” You have to dislike all Jews and irrationally so to qualify as an Anti-Semite in my book. I merely oppose the actions, arguments and assumptions of those Jews who are oppressors, warmongers, apologists for Israel and proponents of a Zionist exeptionalist police state, etc. Some Jews agree with me, some almost agree with me and others evidently hate me. Either way, criticizing those in power, regardless of their ethnicity, is a natural right which I embrace zealously.
Unlike the JDL, who claim they intend to act with “extreme prejudice” against me, I’m guided by post-judice insofar as my conclusions are derived from an analysis of the factual record. My analyses are rational, logical and evidence based. Evidence emerged of Israeli involvement in 9/11 and then I deduced that Israel conducts false-flag terrorism against the US. The evidence came first, then my conclusion.
Equally misguided is to characterize my alleged “hatred of Jews” as “pathological.” The usage of psychoanalytic verbiage to quash criticism of Jews is the product of Sigmund Freud and members of the Frankfurt School, Jewish thinkers who popularized their ethnocentric doctrines in the first half of the 20th Century. By describing my criticism of certain Jews as “pathological,” the writer of the email exempts himself from addressing the content of my criticisms. If my criticisms are the product of a psychopathology, then they have no relation to the real world and thus need not be addressed. How convenient.
Some academicians and law experts have advised me to take this threatening email to the authorities here in Canada. However, I am intuitively averse to having the state decide which emails are good and which are bad. I’d rather engage in debate and dialogue with my interlocutors. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that Canada’s current regime would ever prosecute Jewish ethnic activists like the members of the JDL. That would be in contravention of the Jewish-exceptionalist ideology that seemingly governs this country at the present time.
The Canadian state has defenestrated the values of British Common Law that once guided Canadian society (such as freedom of speech, freedom of expression, adversarial argumentation, habeas corpus and freedom of movement) in favor of the eliminationist ideology of Jewish exceptionalism. Critics of Jews find themselves arrested for “hate speech” or “inciting genocide” and non-Canadian citizens are barred from the country or deported.
For example, it has now been demonstrated that Canada’s ruling neoconservatives barred pro-Palestinian peace activist and parliamentarian George Galloway from Canada in 2009 at the behest of the JDL. This is one reason I don’t fear the JDL per se; there was a time when they had no political clout and thus had to actively engage in their own thuggery and aggression toward those whose perspectives they sought to suppress. Now they have Canada’s MPs and politicized police forces at their disposal to do their dirty work for them. If Mr. Galloway had turned up at the Canadian border in mid-2009, the police would have arrested and incarcerated the six-times-elected British MP, based on lobbying efforts by the JDL. In this epoch, the JDL can sit back and let Israel’s client regime in Ottawa do all the work.
The extent of the Zionization of Canada is revealed by the very presence of the JDL in this country. The militant organization is reportedly proscribed in the US and in many EU countries. In spite of this, periodically Meir Weinstein, leader of the JDL in Canada, pops up on our TV screens as if he is a moderate Canadian political pundit. Quite what the members of the JDL contribute to Canadian society other than aggressive censoriousness and ethnic tension is unclear.
In 1995 German ethnic-activist and historian Ernst Zundel had his house firebombed by Zionist terrorists who disagreed with his historical conclusions. A group called the Jewish Armed Resistance Movement claimed responsibility for the attack but the Toronto Star later claimed that the group had ties to the JDL. Instead of locking up those aggressors who arrogated to themselves the right to revoke Mr. Zundel’s freedom of speech and destroy his property, the police incarcerated Zundel under so-called anti-terrorism legislation, which was later found to be unconstitutional.
Another falsehood in the email is the claim that “we didn’t choose you as an enemy, you chose us.” I grew up in a philo-Semitic household with holidays to Israel and visits to Auschwitz (and I’m not even Jewish!). It was primarily Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and proven involvement in false flag attacks on Western countries that spurred me to voice criticism of certain Jews. Within recent days, Australia’s former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has confirmed that Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in June 1967. Is he a “pathological” “antisemite” too?
So, to repeat, my conclusions are post-judicial not prejudicial (I actually pre-judged Jews favorably). The Zionists want to use countries like Britain, Canada and the US as playthings to advance Israeli geopolitical goals, expending the blood and treasure of us stupid goyim rather than that of Jews. Certain Zionist fanatics in my view declared war on my historically philo-Semitic people not vice-versa.
I’m keen to engage in dialogue with my detractors. It seems because I have the moral high ground and evidence on my side that some Zionists are now resorting to coercion to silence me.
In my view, the pen is mightier than the sword. The JDL should take a leaf out of my book instead of trying to eliminate anybody who criticizes them and their fellow Zionist ideologues.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making familiar noises about Hamas and “terrorism” in the wake of the announcement of the Palestinian unity government. “I call on all responsible elements in the international community not to rush to recognise a Palestinian government which has Hamas as part of it and which is dependent on Hamas,” he is reported to have said. “Hamas is a terrorist organisation that calls for Israel’s destruction, and the international community must not embrace it. That would not bolster peace, it would strengthen terror.” Israel, let us not forget, is a nuclear-armed state with massive military capabilities which is occupying and colonising Palestinian land. It is the state for which successive political party leaders and prime ministers in Britain have expressed their unflinching support.
Netanyahu clearly needs a reminder that his state was itself founded on what has been called “Jewish terrorism”. As the world prepares to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Israel’s timeline of terror, which started well before the founding of the state, makes interesting reading. It was intended, quite deliberately, to attack the British Mandatory government at a time when Britain and its allies were leading the fight against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers.
Throughout 1944, as the Allies prepared for and invaded Europe to free it of the Nazi menace, the Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist terrorist groups carried out a series of bombings against police stations and other government offices across Palestine. Their terrorism was not confined to historic Palestine, however. In November 1944, two “Jewish terrorists” murdered Britain’s Lord Moyne, the Minister of State resident in Cairo. The plan, it is claimed, was to blame the murder on Arabs but the Egyptian police caught the murderers who were hanged after being tried and found guilty.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a strong supporter of Zionism, said in the House of Commons that such acts will make him “reconsider” his support “if our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labours for its future are to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany.” Even the Executive of the Jewish Agency referred to the group behind the murder as a “terrorist organisation”.
British military and security personnel were also attacked: in September 1944 a policeman was killed in Jerusalem; in December 1946 an army officer was kidnapped and flogged; and in July 1947 two British sergeants were hanged by Irgun and their bodies were booby-trapped. The most infamous attack of all during that period was the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 British and local officials were killed.
Much has been made by Israel’s propagandists over the years about the visits of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, to Adolf Hitler, in order to court Nazi support for the Palestinian cause. Little is said, though, about the efforts of the eponymous Avraham Stern and his gang to do a deal with the Nazis “concerning the solution of the Jewish question in Europe”. This has been described as an “aberrant episode in Jewish history” which “should alert us to how far extremists may go in times of distress, and where their manias may lead.”
Throughout its short history, the state of Israel has committed many terrorist acts against Palestinian civilians. Former Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur is on record as stating that from 1948 onwards Israel always fought “against a population that lives in villages and cities.” Israeli military analyst Zeev Schiff has noted that Gur’s comments are basically an admission that the so-called Israel Defence Forces have “always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously.” Atrocities took place in places like Qibya, where sixty-nine villagers were killed in 1953, two-thirds of them women and children; and Kafr Kassem in 1956, where 48 Palestinians were killed, more than half of them women and children. In neighbouring Lebanon, Israeli troops facilitated the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 when up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees were slaughtered in their homes. The massive, and disproportionate Israeli onslaught against the largely civilian population of Gaza in 2008/9 and again in 2012 was merely the most significant of a long catalogue of such acts. Palestinian farmers and fishermen are attacked by the Israel “Defence” Forces on an almost daily basis, with an accompanying loss of life, limbs and livelihood.
Israel continues to condone the terrorist acts of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; security forces regularly stand and watch as they commit their crimes, only springing into action when the victims are moved to defend themselves.
Arguably the biggest act of terrorism is Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the land of historic Palestine. That this continues in the full view of history, the media and the international community is a disgrace matched only by its politicians’ attempts to justify it on the grounds of “self-defence”. Netanyahu’s latest bleats about Hamas and terrorism are one example of where – no apologies for paraphrasing Orwell once again – lies are made to appear truthful and murder becomes respectable. He presides over a government which is well-versed in the dark arts of terror against civilians.
The state of Israel was founded on terrorism and its timeline of terror is long and bloody, and has yet to reach its end. When politicians and journalists have the courage to challenge the Israeli prime minister’s outrageous claims in an objective manner, perhaps it will.
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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