Deir Yassin massacre has not ended
Ma’an – 09/04/2013
BETHLEHEM – The massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948 is still going on today, lawmaker Mustafa Barghouti said Tuesday, as Palestinians mark the 65th year since Jewish militias murdered over 100 Palestinian villagers.
“What happened 65 years ago in Deir Yassin was a horrible massacre which prepared the ground for the ethnic cleansing of 70 percent of the Palestinian people,” Barghouti told Ma’an.
“The same ethnic cleansing is going on today but in a different way. In 1948 they used direct massacres, now they use airstrikes in Gaza and shoot young Palestinians in the West Bank.”
On April 9, 1948, the Lehi and Irgun Jewish militia groups, the latter headed by former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, despite the fact that villagers had signed a non-aggression pact.
Over 100 men, women and children were killed by the Jewish fighters in the village, which was designated as part of the Corpus Separatum plan for Jerusalem as part of the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine.
Survivor statements from the massacre report that villagers were ordered to line up against village walls before being shot by Jewish fighters, according to Deir Yassin Remembered.
Militia members looted homes and stole jewelry from villagers and there were reports of sexual violence, survivor accounts say.
“What is happening today in Jerusalem is not different to what happened all those years ago in Deir Yassin. Ethnic cleansing is happening at a slower rate today, the form has changed but the content is the same,” Barghouti added.
More than 760,000 Palestinians — estimated today to number 4.7 million with their descendants — were pushed into exile or driven out of their homes as the State of Israel was established in 1948.
Massacres such as those at Deir Yassin were pivotal catalysts in forcing Palestinian civilians to flee their homes for fear of being killed by Jewish militia groups.
The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Information released a statement condemning the massacre, calling it an “open wound” which continues to affect the Palestinian people through continued Israeli aggression.
On Richard Dawkins and How Atheism has Become a Warmongering Religion
By Martin Iqbal | Empire Strikes Black | April 9, 2013
I want to start out this piece by making a couple of things clear about my beliefs. I do not suggest for a millisecond that readers should care; there’s nothing more nauseating than a person who trumpets their personal beliefs at any given opportunity. (Sadly in the case of many atheists, this is often done in the pursuit of smugly asserting one’s perceived intellectual superiority).
I will try to keep this braindump coherent; do bear with me.
I am an atheist. I was not raised in a religious household. I am a firm believer in the theory of evolution – which I see as a readily observable and beautiful fact and no mere theory. I find the idea of creationism quite silly in the face of an overwhelming abundance of evidence for evolution. I hold dear the ideals of intellectual freedom and critical thought, and I staunchly oppose all forms of dogma.
Moving swiftly on, do I think ‘Islamist extremism’ exists? Of course I do.
But now I come to the meat of the matter. And this is where Richard Dawkins and his army of blindly loyal followers will scoff, spit and curse like a seventeenth century congregation that’s just been thrown a copy of The God Delusion.
The ‘New Atheism’: a Vehicle for Dogma & Herd Mentality
Atheism has become a vehicle for the very thing it claims to oppose: dogma. Buoyed by a rising tidal wave of knee-jerk bigotry, atheism is instilling a rigid dogma in its followers. This army of self-professed ‘critical thinkers’ has now disposed of critical thought, and has instead taken up a campaign of hero worship, ultimately spreading a pernicious and baseless dogma in the form of the War on Terror. Allow me to explain.
Richard Dawkins – one of New Atheism’s High Priests – attacks Islam on a regular basis, saying things like (on Twitter), “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about nazism.”.
Dawkins commands ‘decent’, moderate Muslims to come out and condemn stoning (a practice that is admittedly barbaric and indefensible on any level).
Such frequent rabble rousing against Muslim nations and cultures (while ignoring far greater human rights abuses carried out by ‘enlightened’ Western nations) constitutes a trend amongst atheists, even amongst ex-Muslims who are eagerly touted and re-tweeted by Dawkins and his over 600,000 Twitter followers.
Am I saying that we should not criticise Islam or any other religious beliefs? No, absolutely not.
But, there is a deeper significance to this that, as ‘critical thinkers’, atheists (Dawkins included) have failed to grasp in a spectacular display of irony.
The Religion of 9/11 & The War On Terror – A Monstrous Fraud Disproved by Science
Allow me to point out before I continue: ‘Muslim’ terrorists and extremists exist. They behead those they see as ‘infidels’. They mercilessly slaughter women and children in their pursuit of misguided ‘jihad’.
And they do this with the active and tacit support of every single Western nation that so loudly decries ‘Islamist terrorism’. For a recent example, please refer to the 2011 decimation of Libya and the ongoing war on Syria, both orchestrated on the ground by hordes of brainwashed and misguided ‘jihadis’ wielding NATO rifles in their left hands, and Qatari paycheques in their right.
If ones traces further back in time, one will see that the mercenary army often referred to as ‘al Qaeda’, was created by the USA as a proxy force, which was used to fight the Russians in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s – precisely as they are being used today in Libya and Syria.
But I digress.
Aside from ‘al Qaeda’ being a proxy army that is literally airlifted on demand to wherever NATO requires manpower, it is also used as an instrument of fear. The notion that these braindead savages are in any way a threat to Western nations, is laughable.
I hear your internal dialogue: “But what about 9/11? What about the London bombings of 2005?”
Well, the very kernel of the ‘Muslim terrorist’ meme is the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. One of Dawkins’ favourite quips is “Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings”.
The ‘official narrative’ of 9/11 however, which has formed the basis for the global ‘War on Terror’, is an out and out lie, nothing more than a political dogma.
More than a decade on, any thinking person worth his salt has begun to ask questions about the events of 9/11. As a learned scientist of global repute, it is surprising that Richard Dawkins apparently has such an elementary grasp of physics. Most secondary school students can figure out that steel cannot be melted to a liquid by jet fuel. A 110-storey steel-framed skyscraper cannot explode entirely into dust, roof to street, in a matter of seconds due to airplane impact, fire, or both. Perhaps Dawkins can get a physics lesson from the over 1,700 architects, scientists, and structural engineering professionals who are asking these questions, to be met with silence:
It may seem insignificant to talk about the manner in which the World Trade Center was destroyed. Bearing this in mind however, if you do employ the scientific method and a dose of critical thought, then you will eventually see that this fundamental problem with the 9/11 account actually precludes the possibility of any of the central tenets of the 9/11 dogma being true. Bearing this in mind, along with the bewildering number of other inconsistencies and lies surrounding the 9/11 attacks, it becomes clear that 9/11 was, in military intelligence speak, a ‘false flag’ operation.
Of course at this stage, believers of the 9/11 religion will sneer and laugh at this heretic ‘conspiracy theory’. Well if you’ve made it this far, I ask you to employ your critical thinking faculties and question your faith in the 9/11 religion that has been thrust upon us all. Apply the scientific method in order to fill the hundreds of fundamental holes in the official story of 9/11. I will not attempt to explain the 9/11 false flag on this page, but the following articles make a start.
9/11 ten years on: there are no excuses for buying the myth:
http://empirestrikesblack.com/2011/09/911-ten-years-on-there-are-no-excuses-for-buying-the-myth/September 11, 2001: Zionist shock therapy and the birth of the lie:
http://empirestrikesblack.com/2011/09/september-11-2001-zionist-shock-therapy-and-the-birth-of-the-lie/
There is a mountainous wealth of information and evidence, accessible online, that will answer your objective, honest, and scientific questions relating to 9/11, as well as the 7/7 London false flag.
Conclusion: Atheists, put your money where your mouth is – drop ALL dogma and don’t be a weapon of war
What we need to realise as thinking people is this: the ‘Muslim terrorist’ meme serves a deeply nefarious purpose in our mass media and popular culture. Through the fraud of the War on Terror – which subsists on the omnipresent ‘Muslim terrorist’ meme – at least four nations have been attacked and well over 1 million people have been killed. The numbers maimed, orphaned, displaced, and otherwise consigned to a life of perpetual misery completely dwarf this very conservative estimate.
Yes ‘Muslim’ terrorists and extremists exist, but it is wrong to characterise a miniscule minority as being representative of the wider group.
And let us be honest: there are far more non-Muslim terrorists than Muslim ones, and the piles of skeletons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria attest to this.
As free people we should be free to discuss anything we like in an open forum, including criticising any religious beliefs. People should be free to criticise any and all ideas and beliefs, including Islam, but this should be done in a principled and well-researched manner that does not feed into destructive, warmongering, and false dogma.
And how absurd is it for a person to stand on a soapbox, bashing Islam because of its followers’ supposed moral failings, while diligently spreading a far more deadly and dangerous dogma that has directly resulted in the death and misery of millions? I call for all decent atheists to put their money where their mouth is and reject ALL dogma, and this includes the naked lie of 9/11.
If a central tenet of atheism is resisting dogma and employing critical thought, then by measure of its adherents, New Atheism is failing pitifully.
P.S. It is incredibly telling that the anti-stoning petition posted by Richard Dawkins on his Twitter feed, comes from Avaaz – an empire propaganda mill that seeks to demonise Muslim nations in order to make anti-Muslim wars of aggression more palatable.
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Is the Custodian of Absentee Property Awaiting the Absentees?
By Paul Larudee | Dissident Voice | April 8th, 2013
cus·to·di·an (kəs-ˈtō-dē-ən) n. 1. One who has charge of something: caretaker
– The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language, International Edition, 1973
The office of Ronen Baruch, the current Custodian of Absentee Property for Israel, is in an ancient Arab home at 8 Yoel Salomon Street in Jerusalem. A house of this type is not unusual in this part of Jerusalem, and this one has few markings to indicate its function. Even its mail is delivered to the main building of the Ministry of Finance in another part of the city.
Searching the Internet will not yield this information unless you read Hebrew, and even then not much else. Much more is available about the Mossad, but perhaps only because it is bigger and more interesting. Information about the Custodian is not necessarily secret, just possibly of little interest to journalists. However, it has no website and does not advertise its contact information. It is almost as if Israel would prefer that no one knows it is there.
Despite this, the office plays a pivotal role in the existence of Israel. Most Israelis live and work on land that was once in the charge of the Custodian of Absentee Property, an office created less than two months after the Israeli state and existing to this day as part of the Ministry of Finance.
Who or what is the Custodian of Absentee Property?
To many of the indigenous nations of North America, the European notion of land ownership was strange. The role of humans was to be custodians of the land and for the land to be the custodian of its human inhabitants. Similarly, the rulers of Makkah and Medina have historically referred to themselves as custodians, not owners, of the holy shrines.
Thus, when Israel created the Office of the Custodian of Absentee Property in July, 1948, to take charge of property belonging to refugees that fled or were expelled, was its intention for the custodian to be a steward and trustee for the property of these refugees while they were away? Certainly, the title of the office implicitly acknowledges that the property belongs to the absentees, not the Custodian, which land registry documents in fact confirm.
Of course, land and the structures on it – some dating back a thousand years or more – were not the only property that came into the charge of the Custodian. Many millions of dollars of gold, jewelry, antiques, cars and other items made their way into the inventory. However, real estate was by far the most important and valuable. The absentee owners were almost all Palestinian Arab refugees and exiles, both rich and poor. A few were Jews, and their property was quickly returned to them. Not so for the rest, except a tiny fraction that were able to prove that they had not fled at all.
How much of the territory within the 1949 ceasefire line did the absentees leave behind? Prior to the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, some 6% of Mandate Palestine was Jewish property (Sami Hadawi, Village statistics: 1945). Considering that Zionist forces seized 78% of Palestine, however, the proportion within those areas would have been closer to 8%, excluding Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In addition, the remnant of the Palestinian Arab population that was not expelled retained some of their lands and homes, currently estimated to be less than 3% of the same areas. Roughly half of the captured territory was state land of the government of Palestine, mostly the Naqab (Negev) desert.
It is likely that all the rest, roughly 39%, was declared absentee property, and placed under the control of the Custodian. This figure agrees with an inventory made by the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) of 7,069,091 dunams. If the Custodian also took charge of state lands, the total would have been 89%. This information has not been released, but a statement by Jacob Manor, the Custodian in 1980, to journalist Robert Fisk (Pity the Nation, p. 45) indicates that the higher figure may be more accurate.
Of course, Israel had no intention of respecting the legal records of land ownership. The Absentee Property Law of 1950 made clear that the job of the Custodian was to “release” the property in its custody to other agencies, which would use the land without regard to the registered owners.
Thus, in effect, the Custodian of Absentee Property became Israel’s largest “fence” for stolen property. Under the powers authorized by the Absentee Property Law, the Custodian “released” the land to the Israeli state, the Development Authority and the Jewish National Fund (JNF), with the combined lands (93% of the state of Israel) under the management of the Israel Land Administration (ILA). The ILA thus became the largest recipient of stolen property in Israel, notwithstanding the international racketeers and blood diamond traffickers that have found a safe haven there.
Curiously, however, the ILA has until recently been prohibited from offering the land for sale, but rather to lease it to users, although in 2009 plans were made to begin granting title. This policy was promoted in the 1950s allegedly as an enlightened socialist program of collective ownership borrowed from the institution of the kibbutz. Was it instead a means of protecting individual Israeli citizens from the accusation of receiving stolen goods? If so, it constitutes another implicit admission that the property legally belongs to expelled Palestinians and not to either the Israeli government or its citizens.
The Absentee Property Law is in fact contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Declaration of Human Rights, both of which were constituted less than two years earlier and to which Israel became a signatory. This discrepancy came to light in the case of the Jerusalem residence of the Consul General of Belgium, which has been located since 1948 on absentee property known as the Villa Salameh. In order to be in compliance with international law, Belgium elected to pay rent to the exiled Palestinian owners of the property rather than to any Israeli authority or to Israeli businessman David Sofer, who claims to have “bought” (leased) the property from the Israeli government since 2000.
Surprisingly, Israel has been one of the strongest proponents for the restoration of absentee property to its original owners or their rightful heirs. One of the best examples of this is the HEART (Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce) Project, established in 2011 with more than $2.5 million per year funding from the Israeli government, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency for Israel. Its purpose is to seek restitution for Jewish property seized by the Nazi government in Germany. Other victims of the Holocaust, such as Slavs, Poles, Romanies (Gypsies), disabled persons, non-Europeans, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others are apparently ineligible for this service, as well victims of the 1948 Israeli ethnic cleansing project known to Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe).
Although the extent of past Israeli property theft is well known to students of such matters, popular awareness is lagging. Current activists are likely to consider the more recent thefts of Bedouin property in the Naqab (Negev), confiscation of Palestinian property in Jerusalem and West Bank land seizures, house demolitions and village eradications as the major problem without taking into account the much larger scale of earlier crimes. They might be shocked to learn, for example, that the land stolen from Palestinian owners prior to the 1949 ceasefire is equal in size to more than the total area of the West Bank and Gaza combined.
The issue is sometimes raised when defining “Arab land” in the Palestinian context. If, for example, “Arab land” is defined only as that which was seized in the June 1967 war, it disregards the enormous amount of property that was confiscated without compensation from “absentee” Palestinian refugees and exiles in 1947-49 and soon after.
Is the Custodian of Absentee Property awaiting the return of the absentees to reclaim their property? In a sense probably so, though not with a sense of joy. Rather, all who are responsible for the theft of the property and for the ethnic cleansing and other crimes committed in furtherance of that theft know that a day of reckoning always awaits those who think they are above the law.
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.
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Palestinian Amer Nassar, Aged Seventeen: A Last Poem
Amer Nassar, 17. (Photo: Via Facebook)
By Felicity Arbuthnot | Palestine Chronicle | April 4, 2013
Last night and overnight, two unarmed teenagers, cousins Amer Nassar (17) and Naji Abdul-Karim Balbeisi (18) were shot dead by Israeli Defence Force troops.
The two were from the village of Anabta, near the town of Tulkarm, in Palestine’s West Bank. Tulkarm was founded in the 13th century, its name derived from the Aramaic “Toor Karma” meaning “mount of vineyards.”
Amer died from a bullet in his chest at 22.30 on Wednesday night, according to eye witnesses. Hearing shots, three boys from the village went out and found Amer lying on the ground, with soldiers standing over him. When they tried to reach him, the soldiers opened fire, injuring one, Fadi Abu-A’sr, in the arm, and subsequently hospitalized.
The three say that ambulance crews were prevented from reaching Amer for thirty vital minutes, with threats to shoot anyone attempting to intervene. Deiyaa’ Nasser, who did attempt to reach Amer:“was arrested by the Israeli Army and taken to an unknown location.”
Naji Abdul-Karim Balbisi, was found as dawn broke this morning, lying in a field. He was reported to have been shot from behind.
Tensions have been high in Gaza and the West Bank since the death of Maysara Abu Hamidya in Israel’s Soroko prison on 2nd April. Sixty five year old Abu Hamidya was a former high ranking officer in the Palestinian Authority (PA) prior to his arrest, which took place when the IDA invaded the West Bank, destroying PA Headquarter buildings, in May 2002.
Palestinian authorities have claimed that the prison was withholding treatment for his cancer. On Monday released prisoner Ayman Sharawna alleged that Hamdiya was in a life threatening condition in the prison infirmary – with his hands and feet shackled.
The Director of the Palestinian Prisoner Society has held the Israeli regime fully responsible for his death.
So, as Palestinians mark another onslaught, the massacre in the Jenin refugee camp (April 1st-11th 2002) the mourning, heartbreak, lost lives and lost youth grind on. But so does the spirit, in young and old.
Seventeen year old Amer Nassar left a poem. When others of his age write on Facebook of their dreams, aspirations, exams, plans, dates, travels, on 15th March, his last entry, he wrote (translated):
“Point your bullet where ever you like in my body
I will die today, but my homeland will live tomorrow
Be careful, Palestine is a red line.”
He did not die on March 15th, but just two weeks and three days later, at the hands of “the most moral army” and the “only democracy in the Middle East.”
(The writer is indebted to the resident of Palestine who drew attention to and translated Amer’s poem and to the International Solidarity Movement, for their careful details of another tragedy.)
– Felicity Arbuthnot is a freelance journalist specializing in social and environmental issues with a special knowledge of Iraq.
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Book Review
The Zeolite Book — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
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