When the Zionists decided in 1897 to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, the Jews of Vienna dispatched a delegation to examine the country for its suitability. The delegation reported back as follows: “the bride is beautiful but she is married to another man”. They had found that Palestine to their dismay was already inhabited by another people. And this has been Zionism’s central problem ever since. How to “vanish the Palestinians” and get an empty land? The latest manifestation of this imperative is the barrier wall, which Israel is currently building to separate and enclose Palestinian towns and villages in the lands it occupied after 1967. There are those who rightly point to the wall’s illegality and infringement of human rights. And the International Court of Justice has just affirmed this view resoundingly in its ruling, passed on 9.7.04 by 14 of the 15 judges, that the wall was an illegal structure when in the occupied Palestinian territories and that Israel would have to tear it down and make restitution for the damage it has caused to thousands of Palestinians. This position is entirely valid, but critics, in my view, have missed one crucial aspect of the wall’s purpose, which is, to “vanish” the Palestinians, to make them so invisible that Israelis can go on pretending that there is no “other man”.
Observers of Palestinian history have long been familiar with Israel’s position on this issue. But few realise how successful, subtle and far reaching this Israeli policy has been. Arriving in Haifa recently I could see how hard Israel had tried to make that wish to send the Palestinians into oblivion come true. Haifa prides itself on being the best example of a ‘mixed’ Arab-Jewish city in Israel, practising a much-vaunted mutual tolerance and cooperation. In fact, it is overwhelmingly Jewish, the Arabs forming less than ten per cent of the population. Haifa is a picturesque city; its famous Carmel Mountain, where the city’s Arab notables used to live before 1948, overlooks a beautiful harbour.
Today, Jews inhabit those houses and the Arab minority that remained after the 1948 expulsions lives in a rundown district by the port below, segregated in all but name. The old Haifa street names have been replaced by Jewish ones. To me, an “original” Palestinian exiled in England since 1948, the place was ineffably depressing. Beneath the phoney friendliness in public there was no disguising the unequal relationship between the two sides: the menial jobs in which Arabs are concentrated, the discrimination in housing, jobs and education, implicit rather then legislative, and the aversion to meaningful social contact. One woman described her struggle to buy into the exclusive Carmel district. People had said Arabs in the neighbourhood would depress property prices, rather as blacks are said to do in some Western countries.
Israeli Jews look down on Arabs. Even recently arrived Ethiopian “Jews”, themselves fighting discrimination, affect to despise Arabs. Walking along Haifa’s streets, a disturbing hybrid of modern European and old Arab, I had a sense of a city gutted and soulless, its true past barely discernible beneath the new constructions. People showed me where my uncle’s house had once stood; it is now a municipal car park, demolished by the authorities in 1983. The vanishing process I could see was well advanced here. It had started with the Zionist slogan of Palestine as ‘a land without a people’, to which end the Israelis expended much effort. In 1948, a majority of Palestine’s population was expelled (my family amongst them) and was never allowed to return. A campaign to eradicate the Palestinian presence swiftly followed. Over 500 Palestinian villages were demolished and replaced with Israeli settlements; Hebrew place names were substituted for the previous Arabs ones; the country’s history was re-written to claim that Palestine had been a wasteland, home to a few wandering Bedouin tribes. Israeli schoolchildren were reared for decades on this mythology. Palestinian customs were appropriated as “Israeli”, and the minority of Palestinians that remained became invisible.
This was the narrative I grew up with in Britain. It was so effective that no one here doubted its truth for decades and Israelis themselves were astonished to “discover” the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. However, in occupying them, Israel was back to the old problem of how to keep the new land without the people. Since physical expulsion was no longer an option, the alternative has been to make the Palestinians disappear as a nation by destroying their society. The history of the last 37 years of Israeli occupation can perhaps be best understood in this context. The Israeli colonisation of land and resources has strangled the Palestinian economy and made statehood unviable. At the same time, the destruction of Palestinian history proceeds unabated. One of the least noted aspects of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was the removal to Israel of truckloads of crucial Palestinian archives and documents from the PLO Research Centre in Beirut. The Israelis did the same in 2002 when they invaded Ramallah. Vital statistics, computer hard drives, population statistics and land registers were taken out with the aim of destroying the Palestinian collective memory, history and national existence.
Israel had meanwhile denigrated the PLO, which threatened to give the Palestinian cause international stratus, as terrorists. In 1969, Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, made the now notorious statement that “there was no such thing as a Palestinian people”. The world was supposed to understand that, even if there were Palestinians, they did not amount to a separate people with national rights. Our route from Haifa to Jerusalem took us past the barrier wall, which is the subject of the ICJ’s preoccupation and snakes its way down to Jerusalem; it is obscenely high in some places up to eight metres clearly on the principle that what you don’t see does not exist. When we reached East Jerusalem and saw the shrivelled Palestinian community there that tries to survive in this truncated part of the original homeland, I saw another kind of vanishment. So-called Arab Jerusalem now consists effectively of three main streets and is surrounded by Jewish settlements. Israel considers the city “Jewish forever” and the previous Arab population preponderance has been deliberately overturned from 72 to 28 per cent by vigorous Israeli colonisation.
I was born in Jerusalem and yet I hate to see it now, The Old City, with its magnificent Islamic architecture, once the glory of Jerusalem and beyond into the Arab and Islamic worlds, is now a place of aggressive competition for ownership. Extremist religious settlers harass the Arabs, aiming to evict them, and threaten openly to build the Jewish Temple in place of the Aqsa mosque. Sad shopkeepers tell a story of poor business, encroaching Jewish settlement, unfair competition from Israeli traders and tourist guides who warn visitors against buying from “cheating Arabs”, and high taxes imposed by a state of which they are not citizens. It is an unnatural place, but not yet a ghost town like Haifa, though with Israeli strictures against Jerusalemites, I wondered for how long? Friends who worked in Jerusalem were now barred from entry there (or anywhere else). Visiting them in Ramallah one night, I left later than I should, forgetting that the checkpoints close at arbitrary times in the evening. I just made it to the no-man’s land beyond the second checkpoint and stood waiting for a taxi to take me on. None came, and in the eerie stillness with the shapes of heavily armed Israeli soldiers just discernible in the night gloom, I felt I was in a war-zone. But what war and with whom? With a poor people whose only crime is that they are not Jewish?
The wall, the stifling restrictions on movement, the impoverishment, and the daily killings are all designed to encourage flight. Unconfirmed reports say that 200,000 West Bank people have already left. The deliberate targeting of Palestinian leaders, (Sheikh Yassin, the head of Hamas and his replacement were both killed within weeks of each other earlier this year and Arafat is threatened with a similar fate), aims to create a chaotic people incapable of articulating their case. The constant reiteration that “there is no one to talk to” on the Palestinian side, when such interlocutors have been effectively eliminated, is another tactic towards the same end. These extreme antics bespeak an Israeli desperation to preserve the Jewish state “pure”, perhaps understandable in those who perceive, however wrongly, that without it their very survival is at stake. But what continues to baffle and frustrate is America’s unwavering support for Israel and thereby its collusion with this campaign to render the Palestinians invisible President Bush backed Ariel Sharon’s unilateral plan for the Palestinians in April of this year and would be expected to veto any Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s wall. The US of course is only following on British precedent when, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration decided the Palestinians’ fate over their heads and cancelled their identity by re-defining them as “non-Jewish communities”.
The world, meanwhile, looks on ineffectually, as if there were a tacit consensus to see the Palestinians vanish. Of course the rhetoric is beguiling; it speaks of a Palestinian state that even Bush supports. The ICJ’s condemnation of Israel’s barrier wall has encouraged Palestinians to feel hopeful. But the facts speak otherwise. Compare the treatment of the Kosovans in 1999. Then every effort was made to safeguard their integrity as a people; NATO, the EU and the US strove to return them to their homes. Compare also the case of the Iraqi Kurds, protected since 1991 by US and British no-fly zones, and now given special status by the Coalition in Iraq. So why are the Palestinians denied the same treatment? Why are their national identity, aspirations and right of return to their homeland under such vicious, concerted attack? They have retaliated by largely standing their ground, refusing to repeat the tragic exodus of 1948 and 1967, though for how long they can withstand this multi-pronged attack on their society is anyone’s guess. As for Israel, racing against time to hold back the Arab “demographic” tide, it is also anyone’s guess how long it can put off its inevitable absorption into the Arab world by such antics.
Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian writer and academic living in London. Her latest book is ‘Married to a man: Israel’s dilemma and the one-state solution’.
Potential failure to reach an interim agreement at the P5+1 negotiations in Geneva this week can be attributed to various factors: The lingering damage to confidence caused by the French spoiler lobbed into the previous round earlier this month; the subsequent lack of commitment by the US to pursue the undoubted progress that had been achieved towards closing a deal; and the intrusive lobbying by Israel and its formidable American supporters in Congress creating unhelpful background tensions.
But another major factor is this: Western arrogance. The United States, Britain and France are still behaving as hegemonic powers whose arrogance blinds them to their own outrageous double standards and hypocrisy, and prevents them from treating Iran with mutual respect.
Without this basic ingredient of mutual respect, any negotiations will continue to be frustrated.
French arrogance was perhaps most salient at this particular time. Three days before the opening of the third round of P5+1 talks in Geneva, French President Francois Hollande travelled to Israel in a display of pathetic kowtowing.
On the eve of sensitive talks in Geneva, Hollande’s theatrical rhetoric about “taking a tough stance in support of Israel against a nuclear-armed Iran” was a reckless confidence-sinking salvo.
But more than this, the French leader betrayed the kind of counterproductive arrogance that characterizes the Western attitude generally towards Iran. This hegemonic mentality is at the root of ongoing political deadlock and the continued imposition of unethical economic sanctions on the Iranian population.
Why should France be allowed to have some 60 nuclear power stations operating on its territory supplying 80 per cent of that country’s total energy needs? Why should France be allowed full control of all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment to unrestricted concentrations? Why should France possess up to 500 nuclear weapons? Yet when Iran asserts its legally entitled right to develop peaceful atomic technology, France and the other Western powers impede with unreasonable objections.
Such thinking – displayed by the French, but pervading the other Western powers too – is surely the apex of arrogant doublethink. And it is this mindset that must be addressed if the P5+1 talks are to progress.
This astounding Western arrogance was again revealed in the preposterous claim by the French leader before the Israeli parliament that his country stands against proliferation of nuclear weapons. How can a Western leader spout such arrant nonsense without being ridiculed and held to account? It is a well-known historical fact that it was France that played a crucial role in illegally proliferating nuclear weapons in the Middle East by arming Israel during the 1950s and 60s.
Washington and London also share due blame for creating this dangerous and criminal double standard of nuclear weaponry in the Middle East.
Countless investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency verify Iran’s claims of pursuing legitimate civilian nuclear energy. Iranian assurances have been issued numerous times, most recently this week, by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
Nevertheless, the Western powers continue to thwart progress towards a mutual settlement by a) not acknowledging Iran’s fundamental legal right to enrich uranium as bestowed to all signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty; and b) by continuing to cast aspersions on Iran’s avowed nuclear plans.
This attitude of the Western powers is arrogant and insulting to the integrity of Iran and its revered leader; it is hegemonic and presents an unreasonable, unlawful block on resolving the dispute.
The Western hegemons’ opinions and prejudices are simply being allowed to warp what is a legal process enshrining inalienable rights.
Hollande’s words and actions this week are ample proof of that. But here is another illustration of the Western arrogance from a quarter that shows how deep and problematic that mindset runs. In a debate televised earlier this week on Press TV between Iranian Professor Mohammad Marandi and American commentator Lawrence Korb, it was notable just how regressive Western thinking is. The more troubling aspect perhaps is that Mr Korb is considered to be a voice of reason among the Washington establishment, who is in favor of diplomatic rapprochement and a deal at the P5+1 talks.
Korb sought to make an equivalence between the US and Iran, saying that “mistakes have been made on all sides.” He cited in particular the siege of the American embassy in Tehran some 34 years ago as an example of alleged Iranian transgressions.
As Prof Marandi cogently pointed out, there is no comparison between Iran and US “mistakes.” The crimes committed by the US against the people of Iran are incomparable and inordinate, including the installation of the vicious CIA-backed police state of the Shah until 1979, the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner with the loss of hundreds of lives, the US-backed Iraqi war on Iran between 1980-88, including the American-assisted use of chemical weapons against Iranian civilians. Plus the ongoing raft of economic sanctions that target sick children and terminally ill cancer patients.
In all these crimes committed against the Iranian nation, the US has been supported directly by Britain and France.
Americans, including many supposedly progressive voices, are oblivious to the scale of horror that their country has inflicted on Iran (and many other nations besides). This obliviousness is the blind outlook of arrogance that infects the brain of Washington, London and Paris, and a good many of their citizens.
Americans need to listen more and talk less; they need to do some serious soul-searching instead of pontificating all the time.
Until that arrogance is eradicated, negotiations with these powers will always prove to be frustrating and may be even futile.
In all the media coverage of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with its predictably misleading analysis of the attendant conspiracy theories, there are a few intriguing facts that you are unlikely to read.
Fact #1: When John F. Kennedy demanded in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963 that David Ben-Gurion end Israel’s nuclear weapons program — considered by one leading Israel advocate in a 2010 Jerusalem Postop-ed to be “necessary to ensure Jewish survival in a very hostile world” — the Israeli Prime Minister “abruptly resigned” in order to avoid answering.
Fact #2: Kennedy’s alleged lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was assassinated by Jacob Rubenstein, whose rabbi recently told The Jewish Daily Forward that he thinks Ruby told him when he visited the mobster from Chicago the next day in jail, “I did it for the Jewish people.”
Fact #3: Oliver Stone’s conspiratorial “JFK” movie was produced by Arnon Milchan, described in a 2011 biography as “one of the most important covert agents that Israeli intelligence has ever fielded,” who according to recently declassified FBI files played a key role in the stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers by the Middle East’s sole albeit “unmentionable” nuclear power.
At no point have more than 36% of Americans believed Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman. What is it about human psychology that makes conspiracy theories so appealing?
Perhaps it has something to do with many people’s healthy, well-founded skepticism of the media’s rather selective reporting of the facts. Or that no matter how manyconspiracy theories they are prepared to discuss, journalists will rarely, if ever, look into the one conspiracy that might tell us who had the most to gain from Kennedy’s abrupt death 50 years ago today.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter @O_Cathail.
Thousands of people protested in Tokyo against a bill that would see whistleblowing civil servants jailed for up to 10 years. Activists claim the law would help the government to cover up scandals, and damage the country’s constitution and democracy.
A 3,000-seat outdoor theater in a park in downtown Tokyo, near the parliament, was not enough to contain everyone who came on Thursday to denounce government plans to considerably broaden the definition of classified information.
For photos of the Tokyo protests, see RT’s Gallery.
According to organizers’ estimates, about 10,000 people crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in the isles of the theater and outside of it, holding banners that read: “Don’t take away our freedom.”
The adoption of the law, proposed by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, would enable the authorities to put civil servants responsible for information leaks behind bars for up to 10 years.
This would seriously threaten the freedom of the press, as Japanese media would face serious problems gathering information on burning issues, because state employees would be reluctant to share information for fear of prosecution.
That’s why a group of Japanese journalists gathered at the Nagatacho District, close to the country’s parliament, to protest the proposed bill.
Currently, long prison terms for whistleblowers only apply to those Japanese citizens who leak classified data that came from the US military.
“The definition of what will be designated as secrets is not clear, and bureaucrats will make secrets extremely arbitrarily,” TV journalist Soichiro Tahara told Japan Daily Press.
Protesting journalists have submitted a petition to the Cabinet Office, calling for the bill to be scrapped.
The proposed law is conceived in such broad terms it allows wide interpretation and could be used for many purposes, for example such as hiding information about the situation at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.
The bill could be adopted as soon as next week, because the ruling Liberal Democrat Party has a majority in both houses of the Japanese parliament.
“If this law comes to pass, our constitution is nothing more than a scrap of paper,” Reuters reported Yasunari Fujimoto, an activist with the Peace Forum NGO, as saying. “Without the right to know, democracy cannot exist.”
Many Japanese have been suspicious of the legislation, since it reminds them of the tough military secrecy laws that existed before World War II, when Japan’s hardline militarist government was engaged on an expansionist policy throughout Asia, until its defeat in 1945.
PM Shinzo Abe says that the new legislature is extremely important to secure cooperation with Japan’s major ally, the US, as well as other countries.
The data security bill resembles laws targeting whistleblowers in the US, and Abe is also considering setting up an American-style National Security Council, too, Reuters reports.
The protesters do not support Abe’s eagerness to copy repressive foreign laws.
“We have a right to know everything,” said Akio Hirose, a 54-year-old transport worker, adding that the proposed law is “absolutely unacceptable.”
November 22, 2013, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The true story of JFK’s murder has never been officially admitted, although the conclusion that JFK was murdered by a plot involving the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been well established by years of research, such as that provided by James W. Douglass in his book, JFK And The Unspeakable. Ignore Douglass’ interest in the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Merton’s prediction and focus on the heavily documented research that Douglass provides.
Or just turn to the contemporary films, taken by tourists watching JFK’s motorcade that are available on YouTube, which show clearly the Secret Service pulled from President Kennedy’s limo just prior to his assassination, and the Zapruder film that shows the killing shot to have come from President Kennedy’s right front, blowing off the back of his head, not from the rear as postulated in the Warren Commission Report, which would have pushed his head forward, not rearward.
I am not going to write about the assassination to the extent that the massive information permits. Those who want to know already know. Those who cannot face the music will never be able to confront the facts regardless of what I or anyone else writes or reveals.
To briefly review, the facts are conclusive that JFK was on terrible terms with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. He had refused to support the CIA organized Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He had rejected the Joint Chiefs’ Operation Northwoods, a plan to commit real and faked acts of violence against Americans, blame Castro and use the false flag events to bring regime change to Cuba. He had rejected the Joint Chiefs’ case that the Soviet Union should be attacked while the US held the advantage and before the Soviets could develop delivery systems for nuclear weapons. He had indicated that after his reelection he was going to pull US troops out of Vietnam and that he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. He had aroused suspicion by working behind the scenes with Khrushchev to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading to claims that he was “soft on communism.” The CIA and Joint Chiefs’ belief that JFK was an unreliable ally in the war against communism spread into the Secret Service.
It has been established that the original autopsy of JFK’s fatal head wound was discarded and a faked one substituted in order to support the official story that Oswald shot JFK from behind. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and President Johnson knew that Oswald was the CIA’s patsy, but they also understood, as did members of the Warren Commission, that to let the true story out would cause Americans to lose confidence in their own government at the height of the Cold War.
Robert Kennedy knew what had happened. He was on his way to being elected president and to holding the plotters accountable for the murder of his brother when the CIA assassinated him. A distinguished journalist, who was standing behind Robert Kennedy at the time of his assassination, told me that the killing shots came from behind past his ear. He submitted his report to the FBI and was never contacted.
Acoustic experts have conclusively demonstrated that more shots were fired than can be accounted for by Sirhan Sirhan’s pistol and that the sounds indicate two different calibers of firearms.
I never cease to be amazed by the gullibility of Americans, who know nothing about either event, but who confidently dismiss the factual evidence provided by experts and historians on the basis of their naive belief that “the government wouldn’t lie about such important events” or “someone would have talked.” What good would it do if someone talked when the gullible won’t believe hard evidence?
A common phrase used by major Jewish organisations.
At least 400 Palestinians, mostly women and children, were deliberately murdered and thousands are maimed and wounded when Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache attack helicopters began premeditated massive aerial bombing attacks on the densely populated and Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip on Saturday 27 December 2008. It was a classic act of Jewish (State) terrorism.
In order to inflict terror and maximum civilian casualties, the Israeli attacks begun during traffic police graduation ceremony and just as thousands of Palestinian school children were coming home from schools. Vital civilian infrastructures, including hospitals, mosques, houses, schools and universities, including women dormitories have been destroyed.
According to an independent eyewitness in Gaza, five innocent girls were killed in their sleep when Israeli helicopter attacked a mosque. “There is no such thing as precision strike in a densely populated Gaza”, said the eyewitness. Let’s be honest, the attacks against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians (mostly refugees), 750,000 of them are children, have nothing to do with “self-defence”. Israel is not “defending itself”; Israel is committing deliberate war crimes in violation of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Convention. The concentration camp has been under two-year-long total blockade. The blockade designed as a collective punishment (not peace) of the 1.5 million Palestinians and had already caused a humanitarian catastrophe before the anticipated Israel’s terror blitz.
The Israeli blockade policy in Gaza has effectively destroyed the economy and the living condition of the Palestinians. It had impoverished and starved the whole civilian population of Gaza. While this policy is illegal under International Humanitarian Law and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the U.S. and its European allies have encouraged Israel and Egypt to continue enforcing the blockade. The policy constitutes an indiscriminate collective punishment, a war crime and genocide. As a result, hundreds of innocent civilians have died in what Israeli leaders call “truce” (ceasefire) in which Israel practises violence and acts of terrorism with impunity. Israel broke the ceasefire in order to flex its muscle before Israel’s coming elections and to derail any prospect of peace. It was only after the Jewish State murdered 23 Palestinians that HAMAS fired the ineffective home-made Qassam rocket towards Israeli positions. Israeli Jewish leaders use HAMAS – the only democratically-elected people’s movement in the Arab World – as a pretext to justify terrorising the entire Palestinian population.
It is important to note that Israeli leaders would not have committed such heinous acts of terrorism without the full complicity and backing of the U.S. administration, the European governments, and the dictatorial regime of Egypt and Mahmoud Abbas’ thuggery. Palestinian leaders in Gaza have rightly accused the Egyptian brutal dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak and collaborators in the Palestinian Authority of colluding with Israel against the Palestinian in Gaza. Indeed, the treacherous Egyptian regime – propped-up and financed by the U.S. – has been a willing complicit in the Gaza blockade. Just before the massacre took place, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was in Cairo to consult with the dictator of Egypt.
This is not the first time the Jews have committed acts of terrorism in Palestine. Historically, the Palestinian people have suffering under Jewish terrorism for more that sixty years. The Jewish State was founded by heinous aggression and war crimes in 1984. It is just that Jewish terrorism is deliberately covered-up and justified as “self-defence” by Western media. With the exception of a few honourable voices, condemning the subject of Jewish terrorism remains taboo.
Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law Professor at Princeton University was recently denied entry into Israel. He was accused of comparing the policies of the Jewish State with that of Nazi Germany. It is ironic, because comparisons of Israel with Nazi Germany are very common in Israel itself.
However, Professor Falk chose his words carefully when he described Israel’s policies towards Palestinians as a “crime against humanity” that should be stopped by international action. Falk urged the UN to invoke “the agreed norm of a responsibility to protect a civilian population being collectively punished.” He also called for an International Criminal Court investigation of Israeli military and civilian officials for potential prosecution. “The recent developments [the two-year-old blockade and other war crimes] in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy.” Falk was lucky. Other Americans who dared to criticise the Jewish State were destroyed by a single shot of “ant-Semitism” and lost their jobs before they have committed political suicide.
While the parallels between the Jewish State of Israel and Nazi Germany are frightening, they are not surprising. Zionism grew out of German National Socialisms (Nazism). There are few important differences: (1) Unlike Nazi Germany, Israeli war is entirely against defenceless innocent civilians population resisting the illegal occupation of their homeland; (2) Unlike Nazi Germany, in addition to its superb propaganda system, Israel is supported by a global propaganda campaign led by the like of the BBC, CNN, Fox News, the Murdoch Press, and other Western media outlets which works tirelessly to portray Israel as a victim and propagate Israel’s Zionfascist ideology; and (3) Unlike Nazi Germany, Israel – in addition to possessing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons – is unconditionally supported (financially, militarily and politically) by major Western powers, including the U.S. and Britain. In short, Israel is untouchable. Moreover, like Nazi Germany, the Jewish State of Israel is committing war crimes by a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing and extermination of a particular ethnic-religious group of people, the Palestinian people.
As Jean Ziegler, Professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and a Member of UN Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee said recently; “Behind the headlines of military conflict and escalating [Israeli] violence, there is a continuing physical, social and psychological destruction of a whole and very ancient [Palestinian] society”. The West’s “never again” rhetoric that followed the Second World War seems to be applicable to Jews only. Isn’t it time for the “international Community” to implement its solemn rhetoric?
We know that unlike other peoples, Jews have repeatedly cited the “Jewish holocaust” to gain sympathy and to raise it as a tool to extort money and weapons and political support from Europeans. They have no sympathy for Palestinian victims and Palestinian suffering. Every time Israel commits mass murder of Palestinian women and children, Jews (with a few exceptions) around the world remain silent. In order to deflect attention from Israel’s terror, Israeli Jews and major Jewish organisations have been promoting and “exploiting the wave of Islamophobia [particularly] in the U.S. and Europe, to engage them in this war on the Palestinians, doing their part in suffocating, starving, and weakening the Palestinian people, as Israel caries its mission of destruction”, wrote the late Israeli scholar Tina Reinhart. They are complicit in the Jewish State’s crime against humanity.
A report published in July 2008 by the National and International Relations Department of Palestine in Ramallah revealed that the Israeli military killed 466 Palestinian citizens during military operations carried out in the Palestinian territories during the first half of 2008, including 75 children under the age of 18 and 23 women. At least 200 Palestinians have died as a result of the unjust collective punishment and blockade imposed on Gaza, preventing Palestinians from leaving to receive adequate treatment abroad. “A genocide is taking place in Gaza … an average of eight Palestinians die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed”, wrote the Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe.
Furthermore, in the illegally Occupied Territories, Jewish settlers have unleashed new waves of terror attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron. On Thursday, settlers shot at Palestinians, set fire to homes and olive groves, and defaced mosques and graves after Israeli troops evicted a group of settlers from a disputed Palestinian-owned home near a biblical site. Persistent acts of terrorism by Israeli occupation soldiers and illegal Jewish settlers against the Palestinian farmers have destroyed millions of olive trees and farms decimating the livelihoods of Palestinians. “As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term ‘pogrom’ to describe what I have seen,” said the now discredited Israeli PM Ehud Olmert whose government is not only behind the policy of house demolishing but also behind the Jewish settlers’ terror against the Palestinians. In fact the Jewish settles are an effective weapon of the Jewish State to terrorise the Palestinians. The aim is to terrorise the Palestinian and forced them to leave their land.
As Palestinian houses are demolished, the illegal Jewish settlers’ population in the West Bank has grown three times higher than that of the rest of Israel during the past 12 years. An Israeli annual report shows that the illegal Jewish population in the West Bank more than doubled during that time, with a growth of 107 percent. The report also shows that the settler population has surged from 130,000 in 2005 to 270,000 by the end of 2007. Other illegal settlements in the West Bank have witnessed expansion between 50 per cent and 100 per cent of their areas in 1996.
Since 2007, more than 8,000 homes have been built in the West Bank and in the heart of annexed East Jerusalem, the capital of “future” Palestinian state, which is being intensively “Judaised”. Jewish extremist settlers are literally taking over Palestinian homes with impunity. A report by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) described the situation in the Israeli occupied West Bank as “reminiscent, in many and increasing ways, of the apartheid regime in South Africa”. The report also revealed that many of the 430 Palestinians killed and 1,150 wounded in the West Bank alone by Israeli soldiers and death squads in 2008 were innocent by standards.
A study published by the Applied Research Institute- Jerusalem (ARIJ) said that the Israeli occupation increased the area of Jewish settlements in the West Bank by 85per cent between 1996 and 2007. The study added that Jewish settlements are the cornerstone of the Israeli policy of Judaizing the occupied Palestinian lands. According to the study the process building the Jewish settlements in various parts of the West Bank and in particular in the Jerusalem district started immediately after the occupation in June 1967 to impose changes on the ground in an attempt to get control of most of the occupied Palestinian lands.
The study concludes that the Israeli occupation seems to have no intention to stop the settlement activity as these settlements doubled since the Oslo accords. This is in addition to the thousands of Dunums of Palestinian lands being confiscated to build the Apartheid Wall and Jewish-only roads to serve the settlements and further isolating Palestinian communities from one another and limiting the expansion of Palestinian towns and villages.
The illegal expropriation of Palestinian lands and the building of Jewish-only settlements have continue thanks to massive injection of fund and investment by wealthy individual Jews and Jewish organisations in the US, Australia and Europe. For example, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a global corporation, had illegally expropriated most of the land of 372 Palestinian villages, which had been ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948, to build exclusively Jewish settlements. Like many wealthy Jews, Joseph Gutnick, an Australian wealthy Jew has poured millions into building Jewish settlements on expropriated Palestinian land with Israel’s blessing. Of course, Israel continues to use all kinds of terrorist acts to dispossess the Palestinian people of their lands.
Instead of being sanctioned to stop violating international law and the Geneva Convention, Israel is being rewarded by the U.S. and Europe with closer economic, academic, trade and defence links and privileges. “All we hear is a hollow laugh coming from behind the Apartheid Wall and the seething and starving prison camps for Palestinians under siege in Gaza and the West Bank”, writes Abe Hayeem of Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine. On the other hand, Israel remains an extremist, right-wing, nationalistic and corrupt society which have rejected every step to live in peace and coexistence with its neighbours.
The ongoing massacre of innocent Palestinian civilians is not the first Jewish-perpetrated massacre and certainly won’t be the last. Israel follows a Nazi-like racist policy based on physical extermination and ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population.
Like Nazi Germany, Jewish Israel should be condemned, forced to renounce terrorism and end the occupation of Palestinian lands. The deliberate murder of innocent Palestinians is a classic act of Jewish State terrorism. There is no terrorism like the State of Israel terrorism. It remains to be seen if the world community needs a third world war to stop Jewish State terrorism.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.
A senior leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, Salah Bardawil, said he was disappointed with the third Arab-African Summit in Kuwait and the Arab Peace Initiative Committee which endorsed the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, believing they represent “concrete proof of the Arab regimes’ intention to escape their responsibilities towards Palestine.”
Bardawil told Al-Quds Press that: “the Palestinians have high hopes in the Arab and Islamic nations and the international community as a whole to play an active role in pressuring the Israeli occupation to retreat from its crimes against the Palestinians; whether it is the siege imposed on Gaza or the Judaisation of holy sites or its daily assaults against the Palestinians. We also hoped that the Arab-African summit would play an active role in protecting the Palestinian refugees, but it is clear that the level of action is much lower than the level of speech.”
Bardawil added that even the message conveyed by the Arab-African Summit to the Palestinians is disappointing: “the Arab-African summit has conveyed a negative message to the Palestinians, the Arabs and supporters of democracy. The problem does not lie in endorsing the negotiations with Israel per say, but rather supporting the negotiations indicates that the Arab regimes are trying to escape their commitments towards the Palestinian issue by handing it over to a politically failing party. Yet the most serious issue is that the Arab-African Summit’s position is anti-democratic by accepting to host a party that had failed in the elections as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, while the elected-party is being besieged in the Gaza Strip. This position is contradictory and hostile to democracy and unfortunately consistent with the American-Israeli position.
New revelations show an undercover unit of the British army was sanctioned to carry out a shoot-to-kill policy in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, in the 1970s during conflicts known as the Troubles.
The Troubles refers to the violent thirty-year ethno-nationalist conflict that began in Northern Ireland with a civil rights march in Londonderry on October 5, 1968, and came to an end with the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998. The constitutional status of Northern Ireland is said to be at the heart of the conflict, which spilled over into England, the Republic of Ireland and even into parts of Europe.
The UK army unit, dubbed the Military Reaction Force (MRF), admitted for the first time that they had killed an unspecified number of Irish Republic Army (IRA) members regardless of them being armed or not.
Former members of the MRF made the confession to the BBC’s Panorama programme, saying that they had been tasked with “hunting down” the IRA in west Belfast and that they observed no laws in commissioning their mission.
The MRF, which was disbanded in late 1972, had also killed unarmed people on the street in drive-by shootings without any independent evidence showing they were part of the IRA.
“We were not there to act like an army unit, we were there to act like a terror group,” said one former soldier.
The force comprised about 40 men hand-picked from across the British army who operated in west Belfast for an 18-month period between 1971 and 1973, including all through 1972.
“The ex-members said their elite status meant they didn’t believe military regulations against opening fire unless their lives were in immediate danger applied to them,” said the report.
The revelations come as the families of victims in the conflict said they are outraged by Northern Ireland Attorney General John Larkin’s proposal to end the Troubles-related prosecutions.
The offer was made irrespective of the fact that more than 3,000 deaths are being investigated by detectives from the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) as part of the peace process.
The Afghan President says he will not sign a crucial security pact with the US till after presidential elections next year. Hamid Karzai backs the deal, but does not trust the US.
“The agreement should be signed when the election is conducted, properly and with dignity,” Karzai told the Loya Jirga grand assembly that began on Thursday.
The unexpected statement comes just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry said the two sides had finalized the wording of the agreement.
Karzai said that his deferment would show America’s assurance “that we are moving on the path to security and they are accompanying us on this path.”
A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Kabul declined to comment on Karzai’s plan as it was an on-going diplomatic discussion.
President Karzai told the gathering in Kabul that President Barack Obama had sent a letter assuring him that a security pact between the two states was in Afghanistan’s best interest.
The five-day long 2,500-member national consultative council is set to debate the draft and decide whether US troops will be permitted to stay in the country post-2014.
The deal indicates that up to 15,000 US troops could remain in the country until 2024. But both sides still want final details to be clarified.
One of the main stumbling blocks in reaching the bilateral security agreement was the legal status of American troops on the ground.
On Wednesday the Afghan foreign ministry released a draft security deal, which said that US forces remaining in Afghanistan after 2014 will be under the jurisdiction of the US and not be subject to Afghan courts.
The Loya Jirga’s decision on the 25-page “Security and Defense Cooperation Agreement between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” is expected by Sunday.
The council can revise or reject any part of the draft agreement. After Loya Jirga amendments, the Afghan parliament is set to review the agreement and also make more changes before it is approved.
Despite his statement, Afghanistan’s President said he backs a security deal with the US, but at the same time he acknowledged there was little trust between the two sides.
“My trust with America is not good. I don’t trust them and they don’t trust me,” Karzai said. “During the past 10 years I have fought with them and they have made propaganda against me.”
Karzai’s decision, which came as a surprise even for the closest of the President’s aides, means that the long-debated deal will not be signed before April 5, the day when the presidential election is scheduled.
“This may be misconstrued as if the president wants someone specific [to win] in the elections,” Hedayat Amin Arsala, Karzai’s former vice president, said according to The Wall Street Journal. “I hope that is not the case.”
The US had wanted the agreement signed by the end of October 2013 as it would give military planners time to prepare to keep troops in the country after the scheduled 2014 withdrawal.
The great corporate myth-making machine has been hard at work of late, attempting to create the false impression that US corporations are increasingly uncompetitive with their foreign rivals due to the fact they pay much higher corporate taxes in the US and abroad than their capitalist counterparts. But that is one of the great myths perpetrated by corporate apologists, pundits and their politician friends. The myth is high in the pantheon of conscious falsifications their marketing machines feed the American public, right up there along with such other false notions that ‘business tax cuts create jobs’, ‘free trade benefits everyone’, ‘income inequality is due to a worker’s own low productivity contribution’, ‘overpaid public workers are the cause of states’ budget deficits’, or that ‘social security and medicare are going broke’.
If corporate America can create and sell the idea that they pay more taxes than their offshore capitalist cousins, then they are half way home to getting their paid politicians to provide them still more corporate tax cuts—a proposal by the way that both Republicans and Obama are on record for, in their joint proposal to reduce the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 28% (Obama) or 25% (Republicans).
The message of too high corporate taxes is appearing more frequently nowadays, since actual legislation for big corporate tax cuts is now working its way through Congress. Driving the legislation are Teaparty favorites in the House of Representatives, like David Camp, head of the Ways & Means Committee, and Max Baucus, Democrat in the Senate, who is set to retire in 2014 and wants to give his business buddies yet another big cash freebie (you know Max, the guy who rode herd on that Health Insurance Corporation subsidy bill called Obamacare?).
So it’s time to debunk the ‘US Corporations Pay Too Much Taxes’ (and thus need another tax cut) myth. What follows is the first segment of a longer essay—with tables and graphs—on the same topic that will appear shortly in the December issue of ‘Z’ magazine. More segments of that essay will follow.
US corporations don’t pay the nominal corporate tax rate of 35% today; they pay an effective (i.e. actual) rate of only 12%. The additional effective state-wide corporate income tax they pay amounts to only a 2% or so—not the 10% they claim. And the effective corporate tax on offshore earnings is only another 2.2% or so—not the 20% average they’ll complain. So the total US tax for US corporations is barely 16%–not the 35% plus 10% (state) plus 20% (offshore) nominal tax rate. And however you cut it, the story is the same: US corporations’ share of total federal tax revenues have been in freefall for decades. The share of corporate taxes as a percent of GDP and national income has halved over the decades. And corporations since 2008 have realized record level profits during the ‘Obama Recovery’—while their taxes as a percent of profits since 2008 is half that of the average paid as recently as 1987-2007. Okay, more detail on all that in parts 2 and 3 to follow.
For the moment, what all the corporate tax cutting to date has produced is a mountain of corporate cash.
US Corporations today in fact are sitting on more than $10 TRILLION in cash!
For example, even the US business press admits today that US multinational corporations have diverted more than $2 trillion to their offshore subsidiaries, to avoid paying the U.S. Corporate Income Tax. (watch for parts 2 and 3 of to follow for how they do this).
In addition to the $2 trillion now diverted by US multinational corporations offshore, after having paid federal taxes another $1 trillion is now held as cash on hand by the 1,000 largest nonfinancial companies based in the U.S. as of mid-2013, an increase of 61% in the past five years, according to a study by the REL Consulting Group.
For financial companies, deposits in US banks are currently at a record $10.6 trillion, while bank loans outstanding have been declining since 2008 and are now at a record low of $7.58 trillion—thus leaving US banks sitting on a cash hoard of nearly $3 trillion according to the Wall St. Journal. That’s a total approaching $7 trillion so far.
This record after-tax cash exists despite corporations having bought back their stock and paid dividends worth trillions more since 2008. Corporate buybacks of stock since 2009 passed the $1 trillion mark in 2012, according to a survey by Rosenblatt Securities—with projections to increase at an even faster rate of $400-$500 billion more in 2013. Corporate dividend payouts equaled another $282 billion in 2012 alone, perhaps at least that amount in years prior, and are today projected to exceed $300 billion in 2013. That’s another $2.5 trillion.
Include hundreds of thousands of US corporations and businesses that are not part of the largest 1000 or who don’t operate offshore—plus cash socked away in depreciation funds and other special funds for all the above—and that comes to at least another $500 billion.
That $10 trillion corporate total, moreover, doesn’t include still further additional dollars that have been spent by US corporations abroad. While business investment in the US has been declining, total US corporate foreign direct investment is estimated at $4.4 trillion in 2012, up from $3 trillion in 2007 and from $1.3 trillion in 2000. So that’s another roughly $1.4 trillion in corporate income committed offshore since the official ‘end’ of the recession in June 2009.
Add all that up and its well more than $10 trillion in buybacks, payouts, and hoarded cash (onshore and offshore) by US corporations since 2009—i.e. during the sub-par economic recovery (for the rest of us) of the past four years. That’s corporate income and cash that has been diverted, hoarded, or otherwise not committed to US real investment, and therefore never contributing to jobs, income creation and consumption in the US. No wonder consumption (70% of the US economy) for the bottom 80% households in the US has been stagnating, stalling, or declining in the US in recent years. No wonder all the US economy can do is create low wage, contingent, service jobs, while more than 20 million are still unemployed and uncounted millions more have left the US labor force altogether. No consumption recovery follows declining US investment, while tens of trillions of dollars go elsewhere or sit on the sidelines.
To summarize, at least as much as $10 trillion—and perhaps approaching $12 trillion—has been taken out, redirected, diverted, or otherwise hoarded by US corporations since the 2008 crash. Keep all that in mind when you next hear politicians from the two wings of the one party system in America—Republicans and Democrats—and their friends in mainstream media trying to justify proposals for still more corporate tax cuts.
Jack is the author of the 2012 book, ‘Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few’ (Pluto press), and host of the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network. His website is http://www.kyklosproductions and blog, jackrasmus.com. His twitter handle, @drjackrasmus.
Nothing like starting out your day with a laugh — and today I have Matthew Lynch (“12 Reasons Why Obama is One of the Greatest Presidents Ever,” Huffington Post, November 15) to thank for it.
About half of Lynch’s points boil down to, “Obama is for x, because he makes speeches talking about x all the time.” He starts out with the best one of all:
“Unlike the many presidents who preceded him, he cares about what is best for the greater good. He truly does represent The People. His actions have always been motivated by a sincere desire to do what is best for the majority, even if it meant losing ground with the wealthy, influential or powerful minority.”
Um, yeah. That’s why he adopted a Republican “universal healthcare” proposal to require everybody to buy private health insurance — and give taxpayer money to the ones who can’t afford it. That should be popular with “The People,” all right — at least those who own stock in insurance companies. That’s why he quietly promised the drug companies he wouldn’t use Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices. That’s why Joe Biden conducts copyright enforcement policy out of Disney’s corporate headquarters and the administration backs draconian copyright legislation dictated in secret by proprietary content industries.
Among my favorite other howlers:
“2. He is for civil rights. He has consistently spoken on behalf of the disenfranchised, the underdog and the most controversial members of society …”
Yeah, I know he said a lot of stuff about gay marriage and ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. But he refused to actually stop prosecuting gays in the military before the law was repealed, or to put enforcement on the back burner, even when he was fully capable of using his executive authority to do so.
And notice Lynch doesn’t say “civil liberties.” Obama said a lot of stuff about them, too — back in 2008. Since then he’s expanded unconstitutional wiretapping, run interference for the telecoms that help out with it and given amnesty to people who systematically ordered and engaged in torture. Holding war criminals accountable would be “divisive,” you see. He owes the late Nuremberg defendants an apology — they were only following orders, too.
4. Healthcare. I think we already covered that.
“5. He is for the middle class. Here are just a few of the comments made by President Barack Obama in recent months …”
A lot of presidents were for a lot of stuff, if you stick to reading their collected speeches. In practice, Obama’s farm policies are written by ADM and Monsanto, and the office of Secretary of the Treasury is permanently reserved for Goldman-Sachs alumni, just as under his predecessors.
Obama’s actual economic policy is classic Hamiltonianism: Responding to technologies of abundance that reduce the need for capital and labor by using Rube Goldberg mechanisms to artificially prop up the demand for those inputs — even if it means giving people tax breaks for throwing stuff away and replacing it. The stomach-churning irony is that most of the same greenwashed Whole Foods liberals who applaud this also condemn planned obsolescence and the Military-Industrial Complex, which were designed to accomplish exactly the same result. The proper approach to technologies of abundance is to make sure their benefits are fully internalized by workers and consumers, by ceasing to enforce monopolies, artificial scarcities and rents of all kind. If it takes only fifteen hours of labor a week to produce our standard of living, it should only take fifteen hours of labor to enjoy that standard of living. But that would annoy Obama’s Big Business friends.
My favorite, though, is this:
“10. He is for peace. Let us never forget that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 …”
Yeah, he uses that Peace Prize as a paperweight to hold down his drone kill list. Obama didn’t end the war in Afghanistan — he transformed it into a remote-control video game war in which wedding parties can be massacred at the push of a button. And of course, Lynch can’t resist throwing in a mention of the Zero Dark Thirty crap about killing Bin Laden.
I can’t help picturing someone fifty years ago breathlessly gushing “I love JFK because he’s the Peace President” — while ignoring the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination and Green Berets in Vietnam.
Lynch’s points, edited for substance, are basically on the same level as a guy in a bar decked out in Full Cleveland thirty years ago saying “I feel comfortable with Reagan.” Obama’s the Reagan of moderate center-left NPR liberals who shop at Whole Foods. If you’re satisfied with the image of peace and social justice, while government in substance continues to serve the same powerful interests, keep right on voting — that’s what it’ll get you.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
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Nothing like starting out your day with a laugh — and today I have Matthew Lynch (“12 Reasons Why Obama is One of the Greatest Presidents Ever,” Huffington Post, November 15) to thank for it.
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