Families of the victims of British army forces’ indiscriminate shooting at civilians in 1972 that left 14 civil rights protesters dead in Northern Ireland will get £50,000 apiece in compensation from the government.
On January 30, 1972, British soldiers from the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment shot 26 unarmed civil rights protestors and bystanders in Londonderry, killing 14, including seven teenagers.
The British army formerly maintained that the civil rights protestors were armed, had become violent and had instigated a gunfight.
However, following a public inquiry the Prime Minister finally apologized to the families in June 2010, cleared the protestors’ names and said the shooting by the army was an “unjustified and unjustifiable” attack on unarmed protesters.
The British Ministry of Defense has made the compensation offers to the victims’ families but reports said the sums are a not final settlement and could change as lawyers of the families are negotiating them.
The ministry has also included those seriously injured as eligible to receive the damages.
This comes as the offer has angered the families of the victims that say the figure is derisory and an insult to the dead and their relatives.
Western media is obsessed with presenting a positive spin on everything related to Israel, while trivializing good and accentuating negative news on Palestine.
It’s admirably free in many aspects, but when it comes to discussing Israel the Western media loses its spark. Disingenuous news spin and Israeli pampering are doing peace a great disservice.
In 2003, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon rejected a road map for peace by adding 14 conditions. Western media downplayed the provisions, emphasizing only Sharon’s pretense at approval.
Now, the same media wants the public to believe that Israel’s anti-peace coalition lost seats in the current Israeli election.
At first glance, this may appear speciously accurate. But the media fails to impart that the pro-peace camp did not gain any new support.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have lost direct party control over some members of the Knesset, this did not translate to a loss for the anti-peace crowd. That’s because the same exact number of seats (11) went to Netanyahu’s former acolyte Naftali Bennett. That means in this election, the Israeli public voted in a far more radical anti-peace coalition. To the right of his former boss, Bennett’s Jewish Home party calls for the annexation of large parts of West Bank.
However, instead of focusing on this the Western media remained sanguine that another new self-proclaimed centrist party, Yesh Atid (There is a Future), won 19 seats. It ignored the fact that in 2009 another perceived centrist party, Kadima, won more seats than Netanyahu’s Likud party – but this hardly mattered. The anti-peace coalition of right wing parties has maintained an overall majority in the Knesset. Meanwhile, Kadima – which ran on a national and pro-peace platform in 2009 – was reduced from 28 seats to just two.
Yesh Atid did well in this election after campaigning on domestic issues and calling for an end to military service exemption for ultra-Orthodox Israelis. Even though the new party received less than 45 per cent of the seats secured by the anti-peace camp, its leader Yair Lapid declared he would not enter the government unless Netanyahu was serious about peace negotiation. In reality, and on issues most critical to Palestinians Lapid’s position does not differ much from the current anti-peace government.
In an article headlined “Lapid’s peace-process doublespeak”, Israeli newspaper Haaretz concluded his party’s platform “does little to distinguish it from the hawkish agendas”. On the subject of occupied East Jerusalem, he believes Israel has “no existence without (East) Jerusalem”. He is so far out of touch that, according to Israeli peace activist Gershon Baski, he thinks by taking firm stand he will “be able to convince the Palestinians to give up Jerusalem”.
Alon Pinkas, former Israeli consul general in New York, accused the new party of being “too vague” on peace negotiations. Sadly, even Lapid’s professed interest in “peace” stems from inhibited racism, a desire to preserve an ethnocentric nation and a wish to avoid living in a country “half Arab, half Jewish”.
Lapid belongs to the same school of deceptive Israeli leaders who claim to support a two-state solution and announce their readiness to make “painful sacrifices”, while impeding Palestinian statehood by building separation walls and illegal “Jewish only” colonies.
The Palestinian leadership must stop waddling. They need to behave like a recognized nation, not an observer of events, and they can’t afford to wait for a new Israeli government to emerge – or until the West recycles another peace plan for the same elusive Zionists.
With an indifferent world community and absence of tangible Arab support, the Palestinian leadership can’t give it another try as “Jewish only” colonies are disintegrating Palestine. It was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.
– Jamal Kanj (www.jamalkanj.com) writes a weekly column on Arab issues and is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America.
In response to hotly contested claims that Hezbollah was responsible for bombing Israeli citizens in Bulgaria last July, immigration minister Jason Kenney called the Lebanese group a “vile anti-Semitic terrorist organization” and urged the European Union to “follow Canada’s lead in listing Hezbollah as a proscribed and illegal terrorist organization.”
Kenney’s comment last week is part of a concerted campaign against a group the Los Angeles Times has called “Lebanon’s largest political party and most potent armed force.” Stephen Harper blamed Hezbollah for Israel’s summer 2006 invasion, Israel’s fifth, of Lebanon, which left 1,100 (mostly civilian) Lebanese dead and much of the country’s infrastructure destroyed. The month after Hezbollah successfully held off the Israeli invasion, foreign minister Peter MacKay said: “Lebanon is being held hostage by Hezbollah. There can be no doubt about that. Hezbollah is a cancer on Lebanon, which is destroying stability and democracy within its boundaries.” For his part, public safety minister Stockwell Day claimed the “stated intent of Hezbollah is to annihilate Jewish people.” (Despite Day and Kenney’s claims, Hezbollah was created in response to Israel’s 1982-2000 occupation of southern Lebanon and its pronouncements suggest it is largely concerned with Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.)
Almost entirely ignored by the Canadian media, the Conservatives’ demonization of Hezbollah gathered steam when Daniel Bellemare, a Canadian official, took charge of the international investigation into the February 2005 assassination of five-time Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. In November 2007 Bellemare, deputy attorney general and special advisor to the deputy minister of justice until October 2007, was appointed commissioner of the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC) into the bombing that killed Hariri and two dozen others. Concurrently, he was named prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which was set to continue the UNIIIC’s work beginning in March 2009.
Both the internal and international investigations into Hariri’s killing were far from conclusive. Initially, Syrian security officers were implicated in the killings and in the post assassination upheaval Syrian troops were driven from the country. Four Lebanese generals were also incarcerated for four years in the killings but they were released when the evidence against them was dismissed.
In 2010 the Netherlands-based STL began to point its finger at Hezbollah and in August 2011 four members of the Party of God were formally charged in the Hariri killings. But before the charges came down the international investigation was discredited in the eyes of many. A July 2011 survey of 800 Lebanese, sponsored by leading Arabic-language daily As-Safir, found that 60 percent of the country believed the international probe was politicized. The poll also found widespread distrust of Bellemare, who was accused of being pro-Israel and anti-Hezbollah. He also had suspiciously close relations with US officials.
Just after Bellemare issued the indictments against four individuals with ties to Hezbollah Lebanese daily Al Akbar published a detailed article on the Canadian titled “UN Tribunal: A Prosecutor’s ‘Tunnel Vision’” (translated by its English edition). “An example of this bias appears in paragraph 59 of the indictment, where Bellemare states that ‘all four accused are supporters of Hezbollah, which is a political and military organization in Lebanon. In the past, the military wing of Hezbollah has been implicated in terrorist acts.’ Bellemare does not offer a reference supporting his assertion that Hezbollah was involved in terrorism, and, so far, no international judicial body has issued a decision describing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. In fact, there is no international consensus surrounding Hezbollah’s ‘terrorism’ status, and the UN does not recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Several countries, including the US, Israel, and Canada have officially labeled the group as a terrorist organization — though, notably, the European Union has not. Bellemare seemingly chose to include his personal political opinion and perhaps the views of some of his colleagues in an international indictment.”
Many Lebanese believe the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had a hand in Hariri’s death yet Bellemare refused to say if he interviewed any Israeli suspects. A TV station linked to Hezbollah, Al Manar, claimed Bellemare “lost credibility” for his “politicized tribunal” because he was unwilling to investigate Israel’s possible implication in the killings. The “Israeli enemy is ‘innocent’ and will remain so in the eyes of the international community and the STL Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare.”
The most damning evidence against Bellemare came from the US State Department. A series of US diplomatic cables, released by Wikileaks, suggest he worked closely with the US embassy in Beirut. On one occasion Bellemare asked US officials for information on Syria and for help in convincing the British to assist an investigation committee. The former deputy attorney general also requested two temporary FBI investigators be paid by the US. An October 2008 cable from the ambassador in Beirut to Washington read: “Bellemare showed a good understanding of the problems [for the US] associated with complying … but his frustration was nonetheless evident: ‘You are the key player [he said]. If the US doesn’t help me, who will?’” The US embassy gave Bellemare “an ‘excellence’ preliminary assessment for his effort and determination, and we urge Washington to exert every effort to respond to the investigation committee’s request related to the information and support.”
Hezbollah claimed the Wikileaks cables confirmed that the US manipulated the probe. “The information leaked on meetings between the prosecutor and the US ambassador confirms what we have always said — that the US administration is using the court and the investigation committee as a tool to target the resistance [to Israel, i.e. Hezbollah],” noted Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah in December 2010.
In January 2011 the Lebanese government collapsed when 10 cabinet ministers and one presidential appointee withdrew over then Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s refusal to reject the STL. At the start of 2011 many feared that the STL’s expected indictment of Hezbollah members could re-ignite the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975-1990. This didn’t bother Washington. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in favour of the STL and announced $10 million in added funding for the floundering tribunal. The US ambassador in Lebanon Maura Connelly said “the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is an irrevocable, international judicial process; its work is not a matter of politics but of law.” Even President Obama chimed in, saying the STL’s first indictment could end an “era of impunity” and that it was “a significant and emotional time for the Lebanese people.”
In the first 10 weeks of 2011 Foreign Affairs released three statements that dealt with the STL. On January 13 the ministry complained about the dissolution of Lebanon’s government over the matter. “These resignations are an attempt to subvert a safe and secure Lebanon and cannot be tolerated. Hezbollah’s actions in bringing down the government are a clear attempt to undermine the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Canada believes that the work of the Special Tribunal should go forward so that justice can be served.” A follow-up statement explained: “We urge the future Lebanese government to continue to support and cooperate with the Tribunal and to continue to uphold its obligations under UN Security Council resolutions on Lebanon.” In March 2011 the Conservatives gave a further $1 million contribution to the STL. “Canada has been a strong supporter of the Tribunal, having already contributed $3.7 million to the voluntarily funded Tribunal since 2007,” explained foreign minister Cannon.
An August 2011 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report, detailed in Montréal daily La Presse, found that “many Lebanese consider the work of the STL an inquest led by Canadians.” At the time more than 20 Canadians were involved in the Tribunal’s work and last March another Canadian replaced Bellemare. According to CSIS, this country’s association with the highly divisive tribunal increased the likelihood of Canadians being targeted.
The Conservatives latest salvo against Hezbollah is another reminder that the Harper government has sided with the US and Israel against most Lebanese.
Yves Engler’s latest book is The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s foreign policy
While Britain claims to be an advocate of human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and many other countries around the world, British history itself is corroborating evidence that Britain, the greatest human rights preacher has also been the most flagrant human rights offender.
More than 500,000 German civilians and refugees, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by Britain’s saturation bombing in 1945, one of the worst massacres of all time.
Over 700,000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million defenseless inhabitants of German city Dresden under Britain’s then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s order, which not only reduced one of the greatest centers of northern Europe to flaming ruins, but also led to one of the worst war crimes of the Second World War.
Dresden’s bombing on February 13, 1945 was so relentless that some historians believe it was the height of Winston Churchill’s madness.
“I do not want suggestions as to how we can disable the economy and the machinery of war, what I want are suggestions as to how we can roast the German refugees on their escape from Breslau,” Churchill said once.
Toward the end of the war, Churchill’s desired firestorm was finally created. More than 260,000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted after British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) assaulted Dresden. However, those who perished in the centre of the city could not be traced, as the temperature in the area reached 1,600 degrees Centigrade.
Dresden’s citizens barely had time to reach their shelters and those who seek refuge underground often suffocated as oxygen was pulled from the air to feed the flames. Others perished in a blast of white heat, heat strong enough to melt human flesh.
When the bombing started, no one could imagine that in less than 24 hours all those innocent people could die screaming in Churchill’s firestorms.
If there was ever a war crime, certainly the Dresden bombing would rank as one of the most sinister of all time. Sadly, however, Churchill, who ordered the slaughter of up to a half million innocent people in this horrifying tragedy, was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
The British queen made Churchill a knight of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of knighthood.
Argentina’s top diplomat slammed Israel Wednesday for interfering in its judicial process over the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish charities building in Buenos Aires.
Last month, Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner announced an agreement with Iran to create an independent “truth commission” to investigate the bombing of the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), and said it would clear the way for Iranian suspects to be questioned by an Argentine judge.
The move was blasted by Israel and members of Argentina’s 300,000-strong Jewish community, the largest in Latin America.
“Israel has no right to ask for explanations. We are a sovereign state,” Argentinean Foreign Minister Hector Timerman said on the first day of testimony about the “truth commission” to his country’s Congress.
He added that cooperation with Iran would “bring them closer to the truth”, and in an apparent snide at Israel’s dubious history said that Argentina was not in the habit of carrying out extrajudicial punishment.
“Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told me that we cannot sign an agreement with Iran. So maybe he wants us to kidnap the suspects or put a bomb below the car of one of them.”
Timerman announced that suspects flagged by INTERPOL would be interrogated by Argentine judges, and under Argentine law.
There are five Iranians wanted by the international police group over the Argentina bombing, including current Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi.
Iran has offered mixed responses to the revelation that top officials might be questioned, denying a report about it that had surfaced earlier this week.
However, on Wednesday, Timmerman told the Senate committee that “the Iranian foreign minister said he is going to implement all the points that were agreed on in our memorandum of understanding, and that the accused will be questioned.”
Argentine Jude Rodolfo Canicoba Corral and prosecutor Alberto Nisman, the lead investigator, would go to Tehran to take the Iranians’ testimony.
Washington has cast doubt that any solution will emerge from the deal.
Israel has repeatedly accused Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah in the 1994 bombing, which killed 85 people and wounded 30, and another attack on the Israeli embassy in Beunos Aires two years before.
Hezbollah and Iran have repeatedly denied involvement in both.
On the 11th anniversary of the embassy bombing, Israel’s foreign ministry released a statement saying: “The mystery has been resolved, and it is now clear to Israel that Hezbollah, through its overseas agents under the command of Imad Moghniyeh, was the organization responsible for the deadly attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires,”
“Moreover, Israel has also been told recently that Hezbollah and Iran were involved in the July 1994 attack on the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA).”
A recently declassified communique from the US embassy in Beirut two months after the Buenos Aires reiterates the US’s intention to discredit Hezbollah.
On the January 22 broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, correspondent Margaret Warner reported on the outcome of the Israeli elections. It told the same story as most other reports on the issue, trying to sort out the implications for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Palestinians basically do not exist in the report; Warner makes one reference to ultra-right Israeli politician Naftali Bennett, who she says believes “the time for negotiating with the Palestinians is over.”
But what was most intriguing was a comment at the end of the piece, from anchor Gwen Ifill: “We will hear more from Margaret as she travels through Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the next week and a half.”
That sounded like it could be be an interesting opportunity for TV viewers to get a glimpse of Palestinian life. But that’s not what PBS chose to put on the air.
The next installment (1/25/13) was also about the Israeli elections: “So, Margaret, a few days after the election, what kind of government seems to be taking shape?” asked anchor Jeffrey Brown. The emphasis was on Israeli society: “How divided does it feel politically and culturally?”
Warner explained that
the old divide used to be over how much and how to deal with the Arabs and the Palestinians in particular and whether to give land for peace. The new divide is very cultural, and it is between the ultra-orthodox religious and also the pro-settler nationalist movement, which aren’t the same.
Later on Brown asked Warner to explain what her reporting would be touching on. Warner explained that the big stories are “the Iranian nuclear program, the conflict in Syria, and the Israeli/Palestinian issue.” She added that, “of course, we have talked to a lot of Israelis. But, yesterday, for instance, we went up to the Golan Heights, which is, you know, land that the Israelis captured from the Syrians.” So Israelis one day, Israeli-occupied land the next day. Warner nonetheless promised “some textured stories next week that look at all three of those.”
The next report (1/28/13) was again about the Israeli elections–a look at the relationship between Netanyahu and Barack Obama, including their plan to deal with “the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.” Warner started in Israeli-occupied Golan Heights:
The sweeping vistas of the Golan Heights plateau and the bucolic life of the Israelis who live here bear quiet witness to the strategic importance of this area, which Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Arab/Israeli war.
The report was entirely about how Israeli officials view the possibility of the Syrian war “spilling over” into the land they were occupying. Warner shifts the focus to include a look at Tel Aviv, where houses include safe rooms, and she recalled
the conflict last November,when radical Palestinian groups in Hamas-controlled Gaza fired rockets into Tel Aviv, sending residents scrambling to their shelters.
At the end of the piece, anchor Gwen Ifill previewed the next installment: “Margaret’s next story looks at the debate in Israel over how to deal with the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.”
And that’s exactly what viewers got on January 30, a report that started out with Warner’s unsubstantiated claims about an Israeli airstrike inside Syria, relying on what the Israeli and U.S. governments were saying. Warner also referred to how several nations were “concerned about Iran’s nuclear weapons program”–a false description of the state of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, which has not been shown to be connected to any weapons program.
On January 31, Warner was back–with another report about what Israelis think of the world. Anchor Judy Woodruff offered this description:
Tonight, Margaret Warner, on assignment in the Middle East, reports on the growing debate within Israel about how much of a threat Iran really is.
The piece was an exploration of Iran from various Israeli perspectives–from those who see Iran as an “existential threat” to those who do not. Current and former military officials occupied much of the conversation. And Warner took a look at an Israeli emergency medical facility.
It wasn’t until the February 1 broadcast–in a series that was supposed to take viewers around Israel, the West Bank and Gaza–that viewers actually started hearing from Palestinians.
The report started with a furniture business in the West Bank, which used to do a lot of business with Israelis. “Then came the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising,” explained Warner, “that brought suicide bombings and terror to Israel.”
Had violence ever been “brought” to Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank? Warner didn’t say.
And years later, this West Bank shopping district “has become a virtual ghost town.” Israelis and Palestinians are not hopeful about the future and are suspicious of each other. Warner makes a brief stop in Gaza, interviewing a Palestinian fisherman who used to work alongside an Israeli who lived in a Gaza settlement.
So what the PBS NewsHour gave viewers was the view from Israel–with a few moments at the end of the series to include Palestinian perspectives, never as subjects in their own right, but to illustrate a “divide” that exists on “both sides.”
On February 5, anchor Jeffrey Brown remarked, “All last week, Margaret Warner and a NewsHour team reported from Israel on many facets of its increasingly tense relations with its neighbors.” That is a far more accurate description of what PBS actually gave viewers.
On January 31, 2013 the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy hosted a public education event just north of Apollo Pennsylvania. Author Grant F. Smith discussed key findings from his 2012 book, “Divert! NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro, and the Diversion of US Weapons-Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program” at the Parks Township Volunteer Fire Hall.
Smith’s talk covered the corporate histories of NUMEC and Apollo Industries, how regulators dealt with the plant’s massive losses of bomb-grade nuclear material, the FBI’s investigation of NUMEC’s joint venture with a front for Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and the ongoing clandestine interactions of NUMEC executives with Israeli intelligence and covert nuclear weapons program operatives.
Smith also unveiled a major new effort to declassify all remaining CIA, NSA, Justice Department and National Security Council files revealing how American presidents quietly grappled with NUMEC as a proliferation and safeguards issue from the LBJ to the Carter administrations.
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been ferociously attacked by the American motion picture industry. The attacks have grown more vehement in recent years.
Iran’s response: Drop a “truth bomb” in retaliation.
The multi-megaton truth bomb – the third Hollywoodism Conference at the Fajr Film Festival – brought together fifty authors, scholars, political figures and filmmakers to oppose and expose Hollywood’s war on Islam in general, and the Islamic Republic in particular. (Full disclosure: I was a participant in the conference, which ended Wednesday.)
Former Senator Mike Gravel, a Democratic candidate for President in 2008, said Americans are being fed a distorted view of Iran. “Everything Iran has done has been entirely within its rights” (to develop peaceful nuclear energy) Gravel stated at the conference. Merlin Miller, another US presidential candidate who ran with the Third Position Party in 2012, added: “The nonexistent Iranian bomb is not the real issue.”
America’s CIA and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei agree on one very important thing: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. Supreme Leader Khamenei has pronounced nuclear weapons haram (forbidden). Anyone who understands the role religious authority plays in Iran knows that no Iranian scientist would even think of contravening the Supreme Leader’s ruling.
Most of the participants, including Miller, agreed with Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) that Hollywood demonizes Iran for a fairly obvious reason: Hollywood, even more than the rest of the US media, is controlled by Zionists. Since Iran opposes Israeli apartheid, and supports the Palestinian resistance, Hollywood endlessly bashes Iran on behalf of Israel.
Weber cited quotes and statistics revealing that Jewish power dominates Hollywood. According to Weber, the vast majority of Hollywood studio heads and top-level executives are Jewish and committed to Israel. Even at the lower-level but important creative positions, Weber argued, Jews are wildly over-represented. The result: Hollywood ceaselessly bashes Arabs, and churns out nonstop hate propaganda supporting Israel’s war on Islam and the Muslim world.
Weber cited Jewish Hollywood columnist Joel Stein, who famously tried to sweeten the bitter pill of Jewish-Zionist power with a dash of humor:
“How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.”
Stein concluded:
“I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.”
Stein’s column was a response to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) press release celebrating a poll showing that only 22% of Americans know that Jews control Hollywood. In other words, the ADL was triumphantly celebrating the fact that 78% of Americans have been brainwashed into believing an outrageous, transparently false lie (“Jews don’t control Hollywood”). Talk about chutzpah.
And speaking of chutzpah, Abe Foxman and the ADL predictably launched a counter-attack on the Tehran Hollywoodism conference. Oddly, the ADL singled out four participants: Senator Mike Gravel, Jim Fetzer, Merlin Miller, and yours truly as the leaders of what they termed “a rogues’ gallery of conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and anti-Zionists.” (Though I am honored to be attacked by the ADL three times in less than two years, I must point out that all four of us are anti-Zionists, not anti-Semites.)
One of the conference’s most stimulating and controversial speakers was Dr. Michael Jones, a Catholic who wears his anti-Jewish credentials on his sleeve. Dr. Jones argued that the “Jewish revolutionary spirit” is the source of Hollywood’s attacks on traditional values, including the religious values of Islam. If the ADL feels the need to attack anti-Jewish thinkers, they should target Dr. Jones and give his sophisticated and disturbing work some much-deserved publicity.
A key theme of this year’s Hollywoodism conference was 9/11 truth. European 9/11 authors Thierry Meyssan (France) and Roberto Quaglia (Italy) joined such Americans as filmmaker-politician Art Olivier, philosophy professor Jim Fetzer, 9/11 hero and eyewitness William Rodriguez, and yours truly. All conference participants, and every Iranian we met, expressed skepticism about the official version of 9/11 and/or belief that it was an inside job.
Many participants observed that this conference could not have been held in any Western country, where it would have been harassed by the authorities, boycotted by the media, and (possibly) bombed by the officially-tolerated terrorist group the Jewish Defense League. Many though not all participants are holocaust revisionists, making them unemployable in the US and subject to arrest when they travel to many European countries.
The entire conference – roughly fifty hours of high-quality videos of the presentations and interviews – will be archived at the website Hollywoodism.org.
Let’s not be too quick to dismiss the “ranting” of renegade LAPD officer Chris Dorner.
Dorner, a three-year police veteran and former Lieutenant in the US Navy who went rogue after being fired by the LAPD, has accused Los Angeles Police of systematically using excessive force, of corruption, of being racist, and of firing him for raising those issues through official channels.
By all media accounts, Dorner “snapped” after his firing, and has vowed to kill police in retaliation. He allegedly has already done so, with several people, including police officers and family members of police already shot dead.
Now there’s a “manhunt” involving police departments across California, focusing on the mountains around Big Bear, featuring cops dressed in full military gear and armed with semi-automatic weapons.
Nobody would argue that randomly killing police officers and their family members or friends is justified, but I think that there is good reason to suspect that the things that Dorner claims set him off, such as being fired for reporting police brutality, and then going through a rigged hearing, deserve serious consideration and investigation.
The LAPD has a long history of abuse of minorities (actually the majority in Los Angeles, where whites are now a minority). It has long been a kind of paramilitary force — one which pioneered the military-style Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) approach to “policing.”
If you wanted a good example to prove that nothing has changed over the years, just look at the outrageous incident involving LAPD cops tasked with capturing Dorner, who instead shot up two innocent women who were delivering newspapers in a residential area of Los Angeles. The women, Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71 (now in serious condition in the hospital), were not issued any warning. Police just opened fire from behind them, destroying their truck with heavy semi-automatic fire to the point that it will have to be scrapped and replaced. The two women are lucky to be alive (check out the pattern of bullet holes in the rear window behind the driver’s position in the accompanying photo). What they experienced was the tactics used by US troops on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the tactics that one expects of police. Their truck wasn’t even the right make or color, but LAPD’s “finest” decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so instead of acting like cops, they followed Pentagon “rules of engagement”: They attempted to waste the target.
LAPD officers fired on this car with clear intent to kill (check out the bullet holes behind the driver-seat position). Trouble was, it was the wrong make and wrong color, and instead of Dorner, it was two Latino women, one of whom is now in serious condition from her wounds. No warning was given before the barrage.
Local residents say that after that shooting, which involved seven LAPD officers and over 70 bullets expended, with nobody returning fire, the street and surrounding houses were pockmarked with bullet holes. The Los Angeles Timesreports that in the area, there are “bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs.”
In roofs?
What we had here was an example of a controversial tactic that the military employed in the Iraq War, and still employs in Afghanistan, called “spray and pray” — a tactic that led directly to the massive civilian casualties during that US war.
We shouldn’t be surprised that two brown-skinned women were almost mowed down by the LAPD–only that they somehow survived all that deadly firing directed at them with clear intent to kill.
The approach taken by those cop-hunting-cops of shooting first and asking questions later suggests that the LAPD in this “manhunt” for one of their own has no intention of capturing Dorner alive and letting him talk about what he knows about the evils rampant in the 10,000-member department. They want him dead.
When I lived in Los Angeles back in the 1970s, it was common for LAPD cops to bust into homes, gestapo-like, at 5 in the morning, guns out, to arrest people for minor things like outstanding court warrants for unpaid parking tickets, bald tires, or jaywalking.
Police helicopters also used to tail me — then an editor of an alternative news weekly — and my wife, a music graduate student, as we drove home at night. Sometimes, they would follow us from our car to front door with a brilliant spotlight, when we’d come home at night to our house in Echo Park. It was an act of deliberate intimidation. (They also infiltrated our newspaper with an undercover cop posing as a wannabe journalist. Her job, we later learned, was to learn who our sources were inside the LAPD — sources who had disclosed such things as that the LAPD had, and probably still has, a “shoot-to-kill” policy for police who fire their weapons.)
Friends in Los Angeles tell me nothing has changed, though of course the police weaponry has gotten heavier and their surveillance capabilities have gotten more sophisticated and invasive.
It is clear from the LAPD’s paramilitary response to the Occupy movement in Los Angeles, which included planting undercover cops among the occupiers, some of whom reportedly were agents provocateur who tried to encourage protesters to commit acts of violence, and which ended with police violence and gratuitous arrests, as in New York, that nothing has changed.
In other words, Dorner may be irrational, but he ain’t crazy.
A black military veteran, Dorner joined the police because he reportedly believed in service. Unable to go along with the militarist policing he saw on the job, he protested through channels and was apparently rewarded by being fired. Now, in his own violent way, he is trying to warn us all that something is rotten in the LAPD, and by extension, in the whole police system in the US. Police departments almost everywhere in the US, have morphed, particularly since 9/11/2001, from a role of providing public safety and law enforcement into agencies of brutal fascist control.
As Dorner says in his lengthy manifesto (actually quite explicit and literate, but described as “ranting” in corporate media accounts), in which he explains his actions and indicts the LAPD, “The enemy combatants in LA are not the citizens and suspects, it’s the police officers.”
That could be said of many US police departments, I’m afraid.
Example: Last fall, I had the experience of trying to hitchhike in my little suburban town. A young cop drove up and informed me (incorrectly, it turns out) that it was illegal to hitchhike in Pennsylvania. When I expressed surprise at this and told him I was a journalist working on an article on hitchhiking, he then threatened me directly, saying that if I continued to try and thumb a ride, he would “take you in and lock you up.”
When I called a lawyer friend and said I was inclined to take the officer up on that threat, since I was within my rights under the law hitchhiking as long as I was standing off the road, he warned me against it, saying, “You don’t know what could happen to you if you got arrested.”
And of course he’s right. An arrest, even a wrongful arrest, in the US these days can lead to an added charge — much more serious — of resisting arrest, with a court basing its judgement on the word of the officer in the absence of any other witnesses. It can also lead to physical injury or worse, if the officer wants to lie and claim that the arrested person threatened him or her.
If I had been in Los Angeles, I would most likely have been locked up for an incident like that. Forget about any warning. You aren’t supposed to talk back to cops in L.A. And if you are black or Latino, the results of such an arrest could be much worse.
I remember once witnessing LAPD cops stopping a few Latino youths who had been joyriding in what might have been a stolen car. There was a helicopter overhead, and perhaps a dozen patrol cars that had converged on the scene, outside a shopping mall in Silverlake. I ran over to see what was happening and watched as the cops grabbed the kids, none of whom was armed, out of the vehicle and slammed them against the car brutally. It was looking pretty ugly, but by then neighbors from the surrounding homes, most of them Latino, who had poured out onto their lawns because of the commotion, began yelling at the cops. One man shouted, “We see what you’re doing. These boys are all healthy. If anything happens to any of them after you arrest them we will report you!”
The cops grudgingly backed off in their attack on the boys, and took them away in a squad car. I don’t know what happened to them after that, but they were most certainly saved, by quick community response, from an on-the-spot Rodney King-style beating that could have seriously injured them, or worse.
As things stand right now, with the LAPD gunning for Dorner, and wanting him dead and silenced, not captured, the public has to worry that it has more to fear from the LAPD than it has to fear from Dorner himself. At least Dorner, in his own twisted way, has specific targets in mind. The LAPD is in “spray and pray” mode.
Chris Dorner, in happier days, now a fugitive on the run from the LAPD “manhunters”
Hopefully, Dorner will realize he can do more by figuring out a safe way to “come in from the cold” so he can try to testify about LAPD crimes, than by killing more cops. If he does manage to surrender, he’d better have a lot of support lined up to keep him safe while in custody.
It’s already clear that a lot of people in the LAPD want him dead.
Last year more US troops died by suicide than died in combat in Afghanistan. More than 20 percent of military personnel deployed to combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some 32 percent of US soldiers reported depression after deployments. More than 20 percent of active-duty military are on potentially dangerous psychotropic drugs; many are on multiple types. Violent crime among active duty military members increased 31 percent between 2006-2011.
The statistics, compiled by the military last year, are as telling as they are disturbing. The Defense Department scrambles to implement new programs to better treat the symptoms. They implement new substance abuse and psychological counseling programs while they continue to prescribe more dangerous psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately, most often ignored are the real causes of these alarming statistics.
The sharp rise in military suicides, drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic and other violence, is the unintended consequence of a violent foreign policy — of an endless and indefinable “global war on terrorism.”
Particularly in the past decade or so, we have lived in a society increasingly marked by belief in the use of force as a first and only option. We have seen wars of preemption and aggression, everywhere from Iraq to Pakistan to Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. We have seen an unprecedented increase in the use of drones to kill overseas, often resulting in civilian deaths, which we call “collateral damage.” We have seen torture and assassination (even of American citizens) become official US policy. When asked by Senator Ron Wyden last week if the president has the right to assassinate American citizens on US soil, President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, could not even give a straight answer.
The warning that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword” goes not only for individuals but for entire societies. It is a warning to all of us. A country or a society that lives with the violence of pre-emptive war in fact self-destructs.
Let us not forget that this endless war is brought to us primarily by the neo-conservatives who dominate foreign policy in both political parties and who never cease agitating for US military deployments overseas. Of course with very few exceptions they have declined to serve in the military themselves. These endless wars would not be possible, we should also remember, without the Federal Reserve printing the money out of thin air to finance our overseas empire. We are speeding toward national bankruptcy while at the same time turning the rest of the world against us with our aggressive foreign policy. Does anyone really believe this will make us safer and more secure?
Many who claim to support the military look the other way when the service-members return home broken in mind and body after years of deployments abroad. I served five years as a US military doctor in the difficult 1960s and even then saw some of this first-hand. During the 1960s the consequence of an unwise prolonged war tragically resulted in violence in our streets, and even students being shot by our military at Kent State University.
The truth is, killing strangers in unconstitutional and senseless wars causes guilt to the participant no matter what kind of military indoctrination is attempted. Those afflicted may attempt to bury the pain in alcohol or drugs or other destructive behaviors, but we see that only leads to more problems. It may not be popular to point this out, but it goes against human nature to kill a fellow human being for retaliating against those who initiate a war of aggression on their soil.
Who cares most for those in military service, those who agitate for more of what is destroying their lives and weakening our national defense, or the many of us who are urging a foreign policy of non-intervention and peace? If we are to survive, we must beware the seen and unseen consequences of pre-emptive war.
McClatchyreports that Israel now believes Iran will not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until 2015 or 2016. That is progress of a sort; Netanyahu had previously been claiming that Iran would have the bomb no later than late summer 2013 — around six months from now. But Israel is still insisting that Iran is only two or three years away from nuclear capability, so I think it is useful to recall and update the timeline I mentioned early last year of breathless Israeli and Western claims about Iran’s nuclear program:
1984: West German intelligence sources claim that Iran’s production of a bomb “is entering its final stages.” US Senator Alan Cranston claims Iran is seven years away from making a weapon.
1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells the Knesset that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
1995: The New York Times reports that US and Israeli officials fear “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought” – less than five years away. Netanyahu claims the time frame is three to five years.
1996: Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres claims Iran will have nuclear weapons in four years.
1998: Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claims Iran could build an ICBM capable of reaching the US within five years.
1999: An Israeli military official claims that Iran will have a nuclear weapon within five years.
2001: The Israeli Minister of Defence claims that Iran will be ready to launch a nuclear weapon in less than four years.
2002: The CIA warns that the danger of nuclear weapons from Iran is higher than during the Cold War, because its missile capability has grown more quickly than expected since 2000 – putting it on par with North Korea.
2003: A high-ranking Israeli military officer tells the Knesset that Iran will have the bomb by 2005 — 17 months away.
2006: A State Department official claims that Iran may be capable of building a nuclear weapon in 16 days.
2008: An Israeli general tells the Cabinet that Iran is “half-way” to enriching enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon and will have a working weapon no later than the end of 2010.
2009: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak estimates that Iran is 6-18 months away from building an operative nuclear weapon.
2010: Israeli decision-makers believe that Iran is at most 1-3 years away from being able to assemble a nuclear weapon.
2011: An IAEA report indicates that Iran could build a nuclear weapon within months.
2013: Israeli intelligence officials claim that Iran could have the bomb by 2015 or 2016.
The McClatchy articles quotes an Israeli intelligence officer as asking “Did we cry wolf too early?” That’s amusing: Israel (and the West) have been crying wolf over Iran’s nuclear capability for nearly three decades.
David Brooks’ op-ed piece in the February 9 International Herald Tribune – the global edition of the New York Times – is an insult to any serious student of international relations and political theory as well as to Yale University. As part of a course at Yale on Grand Strategy that he is “taking part in” – Brooks does not say if he is a student in the course or teaching the course – the editorialist wheels out the 16th century Florentine political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince to justify the use of drones. Citing passages often used by Realists to justify whatever action fits their aims above and beyond moral considerations, Brooks says that “in the real world, a great leader is called upon to create a civilized order for the city he serves. To create that order, to defeat the forces of anarchy and savagery, the virtuous leader is compelled to do hard things, to take, as it were, the sins of the situation upon himself…Sometimes bad acts produce good outcomes. Sometimes a leader has to love his country more than his soul.”
Brooks’ caricature of Machiavelli allows him to pose a dilemma that has appeared regularly in Realist literature as a binary division between idealism and realistic power politics that is now couched in terms of using drones. “Do I have to be brutal to protect the people I serve? Do I have to use drones, which sometimes kill innocent children, in order to thwart terror and save the lives of my own?” Brooks asks. The political theorist Michael Walzer wrote about this dilemma as “The Problem of Dirty Hands”.
If I were grading Brooks as a student, I would begin by noting in the margins of his paper that his understanding of Machiavelli is terribly superficial. Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince must be understood in the context of the time and place, as R.B.J. Walker has brilliantly shown in “The Prince and ‘the pauper’”. Renaissance life, as sophisticated as it was culturally, was centuries before the codification of public international law, the Geneva Conventions on international humanitarian law, the Genocide Convention, etc. The limited world of the Italian city-states in no way resembles today’s global society. To compare advising the ruler of a small city-state in 16th century Italy with advising President Obama today on the use of drones (or whatever else Brooks can imagine would be justified) is like comparing apples and oranges. Although Brooks praises the fact that “we’ve inherited an international order that restrains conflict,” he cannot go beyond that statement to see that the international order that he praises also restrains the killing of non-combattants by drones, just as it restrains torture. The very basis of that order, and what distinguishes the civilized from the barbaric, is adherence to international law, not the projection of naked power.
David Brooks’ use of Machiavelli is not deserving of a serious first year college student (Will he next be quoting Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue to justify nuking a country when negotiations fail?). Yale’s political science department has long been a leader in the field. By quoting Machiavelli as he does, and then to add legitimacy to the quotations by citing his presence at Yale, Brooks disqualifies himself as a competent student and no more than a simplistic power politics Realist who has no right to whisper in the ear of the Prince, let alone be an editorialist for an institution that considers itself the paper of record.
Mr. Brooks, I do hope you will do better on your next paper. This one is not up to serious standards. You fail.
~
Daniel Warner is a political scientist living in Geneva, Switzerland, and the author of “An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations”. Daniel is a contributing writer to NYTX’s “Geneva Dateline” column.
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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![Chris Dorner, in happier days, now a fugitive on the run from the LAPD "manhunters"](https://i0.wp.com/www.thiscantbehappening.net/sites/default/files/images/ChrisDorner.jpg "Chris Dorner, in happier days, now a fugitive on the run from the LAPD "manhunters"")
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.
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