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UK Regime Boycotts Palestinian Academics and Mental Health Specialists

By Gilad Atzmon | November 10, 2015

The Independent reported today that “a decision by Britain to refuse a group of Palestinian medical experts from Gaza permission to participate in an international conference at Kingston University on trauma in war zones has been condemned by campaigners.”

I guess that someone in the British Government is convinced that the Palestinians  know little about Trauma or living in a war zone.

Three doctors and a nurse who work for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, and were due to give presentations at the conference taking place this weekend, have had their visa requests refused by British authorities. Interestingly enough, some Israeli academics are invited to attend the conference.  I guess that the British government is buying into the primacy of Jewish trauma.

In addition to the four mental health specialists refused entry, Dr Nahida Al-Arja, a psychologist from Bethlehem University, has had her visa application rejected.

A letter by the UK Palestine Mental Health Network, co-organisers of the conference, published in the Independent, says: “It is beyond our comprehension how such an interference with intellectual and clinical discussion on such an important topic could be justified. This is a measure that further isolates clinicians from Gaza, already struggling under the impact of military assaults and siege,”

It adds: “We urge the UK authorities to reverse this decision immediately, and to resolve to nurture, rather than undermine, urgently needed psycho-social support services for the people of Gaza.”

To read more on this story: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-decision-to-refuse-gaza-medical-experts-from-joining-kingston-university-conference-condemned-by-a6727576.html

November 10, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

What Obama Should Have Told Bibi

And also the World Jewish Congress

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 10, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently making one of his periodic devastating plundering raids on Washington and New York. During his visit he discreetly picked up a bunch of large checks from the Wall Street crowd, benefited from the plaudits dutifully delivered by the media and chattering class and has even met with President Barack Obama, whom he quite openly despises. Netanyahu and Obama carefully concealed their mutual dislike when in front of the cameras but the president also made all the right noises about Israel’s security “needs.” Apparently all the violence occurring in Israel-Palestine is the fault of the Palestinians and Israel always has the right to do whatever it wants to defend itself. Obama will follow up on the meeting by throwing billions of dollars of additional Danegeld at Netanyahu as a token of America’s undying love and fealty to Israel’s interests.

One wonders if Obama had his fingers crossed behind his back to indicate that he was lying to Bibi except for the intention to come up with more money, which is always an easy way out for America’s ruling class. It is generally convenient to pay off blackmailers like Netanyahu in hopes that they will stop whining. The president will in any event have to prepare himself to endure the usual firestorm coming from GOP presidential candidates later this week over his less than enthusiastic support for America’s greatest ally and best friend, which would have been a consequence of the visit no matter how it had turned out.

Last Thursday a full page ad placed by the World Jewish Congress appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The group’s president Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics company heir, provided the White House with suggestions for how to deal with the visiting Israeli leader. Predictably, he delivered some debatable assertions in constructing his argument as to why the president and prime minister should kiss and make up.

Lauder wants to “reinvigorate” the relationship with Israel because “never has this relationship been more important.” Wrong Ron, the Israeli connection is an enormous liability for the United States strategically speaking that has cost well in excess of $100 billion to the American taxpayer and has done untold political damage. Compared to other strategic partners in the region including Turkey and Egypt Israel is of little or no importance but for the fact that it has an enthusiastic, politically powerful and extremely wealthy domestic lobby conniving on its behalf. Which includes you, Ron.

Lauder goes on to cite “human disaster in Syria, ISIS moving on Iraq, [and] Iran’s bid to destabilize the region.” Well Ron, the human disaster in Syria and ISIS in Iraq have been caused by policies pushed by Israel and carried out by the United States, all starting with the Iraq war which was initiated at least in part for Israel by a cadre of neocons in the Bush Administration. Iran may not be a friend of the United States, but its support is desperately needed to eliminate ISIS and help stabilize Iraq. As always, Israel sees a U.S. led military solution to each and every problem dealing with Muslims. That might provide a comfort zone for Israeli politicians but it is bad for the United States and to be completely honest it is not even good for the Israeli people.

The ad also cites “the ongoing violent attacks against Jews in Israel” and that Israel is the “only democracy” in the Middle East. Ron, more than seven Palestinians have been killed for each dead Israeli, many of them shot execution style, but you seem to have forgotten that. The simple solution to the attacks would be for Israel to give up its endless and endlessly brutal occupation of the West Bank as well as its siege of Gaza. The knifings would end.

And what about democracy when it only applies to Jews? Netanyahu has proposed expelling thousands of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, where they and their ancestors have lived for centuries. And the continuous theft of Arab land and destruction of their livelihoods proceeds at an accelerated pace. If Ron Lauder and his friends really cared about suffering humanity instead of only the Jewish subset he would be using his considerable leverage to complain directly to Netanyahu and ask him to reverse his policies.

And how to fix things? Lauder claims that Netanyahu has “the greatness, the vision and the courage to move this relationship forward on a positive path.” Sure. And pigs have wings. Let’s face it Ron, Bibi is quite likely clinically insane. Even many Israelis are saying so, though they still vote for him based on his government’s relentlessly implemented and self-fulfilling program of inciting fear of Arabs.

For what it’s worth, this is what I propose Obama should have said to Bibi but didn’t, with a transcript of the conversation also faxed over to Ron Lauder at the World Jewish Congress:

  • “Nice to have you back Prime Minister, but not really as it’s close to lunchtime, to which, incidentally, you are not invited. Why don’t you stay home? You have been interfering in our politics and denigrating both me personally and my office for far too long. How would you like it if I were to go to Israel and endorse one of your opponents? If you keep up this crap I will revoke your visa and you’ll never visit here again.”
  • “And by the way, your plan to expel thousands of Arabs from East Jerusalem and to shoot kids throwing stones at your occupying army is not acceptable to us. And then there are new reports of your harvesting organs and other medical transplant material from the bodies of Palestinians that you have killed. There’s a long history of that in your country, but it’s a bit much even by your standards, isn’t it, and it begs the question whether there is anything that you won’t do. Next time a motion comes up in the United Nations condemning your brutality we will support it. Maybe we’ll co-sponsor or even propose it to show that we’re serious.”
  • “We are running out of money here in Washington and are thinking of cutting benefits to our own people. I note that Israelis have free medical care and university education, which means that we are subsidizing things that we Americans do not have so it hardly seems fair. We have been giving you more than $3 billion in aid every year and also looking the other way when you benefit from tax free charitable contributions that actually are illegal under American law. By executive order, I am stopping the cash flow and asking the IRS to look at your friends over here.”
  • “And speaking of Israel’s many friends, your good buddy at the State Department Victoria Nuland is now working down in the mail room. And I am asking the Justice Department to register the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a foreign agent, subject to having its finances and operations monitored by U.S. authorities. Oh, and your spy Jonathan Pollard will be denied parole later this month and will be the guest of a federal prison for the next twenty years.”
  • “I cannot see where you have done anything for us except complain. As you are now pledging Israel to continue its occupation of Palestinian land and ‘live by the sword’, meaning the killing of Arabs will accelerate, I am suspending all military cooperation with you until you come up with a plan to remove most of your settlers from the West Bank. Come back when you have something to show me. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

Well, okay, it was never bloody likely to happen that way, but I can dream, can’t I? If you think Obama is spineless when confronted by Ron Lauder and the usual suspects, just think of how bad it will be when we have President Clinton or President Rubio, proxies for their Israel firster donors Haim Saban and Paul Singer respectively. The new president and his or her staff will have to learn how to perform proskynesis whenever Netanyahu enters the oval office.

November 10, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review of PBS Frontline’s The War Behind Closed Doors

By Hadding Scott | Occidental Quarterly | November 8, 2015

While I was in the midst of trying to publicize the Jewish instigation and the folly of invading Iraq in early 2003 as an occasional writer of scripts for American Dissident Voices,  PBS Frontline presented a rather helpful documentary called The War Behind Closed Doors, written by Michael Kirk, and coproduced by Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore.

The introduction to The War Behind Closed Doors is quite promising, with Frontline’s narrator stating: “Over two decades, they had served three presidents, and argued for one big idea, that the United States must project its power and influence throughout the world. This is the story of how they set out to change American foreign policy in the days immediately after the tragedy of September 11th.” Then, to be more specific about what that means, the intro includes a clip of former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack saying: “And it does seem very clear that this group seized upon the events of September 11th to resurrect their policy of trying to go after Saddam Hussein and a regime-change in Iraq.” This was a documentary that would clarify who was responsible for the drive for war against Iraq: Neoconservatives — which meant that that the war was not fundamentally about oil.

The documentary describes the path to invasion of Iraq (which seemed imminent but had not yet occurred when the program aired on 20 February 2003) as a struggle between Neoconservatives (also calling themselves “Neo-Reaganites” or “hawks”) led by Paul Wolfowitz, and “pragmatists” or “realists” ostensibly led by Colin Powell. The Neoconservative position was that Saddam Hussein’s government must be destroyed, while the pragmatists, without disputing the Neoconservatives’ provocative claims about Saddam Hussein, advocated containment as the appropriate response.

Brent Scowcroft (a pragmatist who had been an advisor to George H.W. Bush) is shown explaining to an interviewer that George H.W. Bush had deliberately left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991, contrary to what the Neoconservatives had wanted, because it was desirable to preserve a balance of power between Iraq and Iran, and because overthrowing Saddam Hussein might lead to various negative consequences — reasons that in hindsight make excellent sense.

The interviewer, and some other Jewish commentators in the documentary — Kenneth Pollack and Richard Perle — speak as if the goal of the 1991 war had been to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but Scowcroft is adamant that it was not.

LOWELL BERGMAN: I thought we had two interests. One was to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait, but the other really was to get Saddam out—

BRENT SCOWCROFT: No.

LOWELL BERGMAN: —of power.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: No, it wasn’t.

LOWELL BERGMAN: Well, either covertly or overtly.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: No. No, it wasn’t. That was never — you can’t find that anywhere as an objective, either in the U.N. mandate for what we did or in our declarations, that our goal was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. [PBS Frontline transcript]

The widespread belief that the goal of the 1991 war had been to eliminate Saddam Hussein was supported by the hyperbolic propaganda that had been used. The comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler started in the mass-media. In late 1990 President Bush joined the trend by comparing Saddam Hussein (unfavorably) to Hitler, because of the supposed brutality of the Iraqi troops in Kuwait (AP, 2 November 1990).  There was a tendency to see everything in terms of this Hitler comparison, from “He gassed his own people!” to  supposedly unprovoked invasions of neighboring states. Given that President George H.W. Bush had engaged in and never repudiated that kind of crazed propaganda, the first Bush Administration would necessarily be seen as having failed to fulfill a moral imperative when, ultimately, they did the practical thing by leaving Saddam Hussein in power.

In fact, George H. W. Bush did call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and then refrained from supporting such an effort, as the Neocons have charged. This can be seen either as disingenuous war-rhetoric or as vacillation between the influences of the pragmatists (Scowcroft) and the Neoconservatives (Wolfowitz), or as a combination of the two.

Immediately after the 1991 war, Paul Wolfowitz (as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy) authored a set of military guidelines that would justify preventive war — in other words, war against a state that had not attacked and was not threatening to attack, but might attack someday if not attacked first. Recall that in 1981 the State of Israel had been condemned by the UN Security Council for “preventive war” in its attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor, with the Reagan Administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick,  also voting to condemn. The President of the Security Council, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, explained:

The reasons on which the Government of Israel bases its contention are as unacceptable as the act of aggression it committed. It is inadmissible to invoke the right to self-defense when no armed attack has taken place. The concept of preventive war, which for many years served as justification for the abuses of powerful States, since it left it to their discretion to define what constituted a threat to them, was definitively abolished by the Charter of the United Nations. [Security Council Official Records, S/PV.2288 19 June 1981]

Wolfowitz was now advocating that the government of the United States adopt the uninhibited belligerence of the State of Israel, using military strikes to maintain hegemony against merely suspected (or perhaps imagined) threats.

Information about the Wolfowitz Doctrine was leaked to the news media by people within the administration who opposed it, and it became a source of embarrassment. Dick Cheney was ordered to rewrite Wolfowitz’s guidelines in a way that eliminated the option of unilateral preventive war.

Neoconservative William Kristol however commends the Wolfowitz Doctrine, declaring that Wolfowitz was “ahead of his time.” The narrator explains: “One day there would be a more receptive president, and another opportunity.”

That more receptive president was not Bill Clinton.

The narrator implies that George W. Bush was chosen as the likely successor to Bill Clinton as early as 1998, and that a group of “foreign-policy wisemen” including Wolfowitz on one hand and Colin Powell on the other, attempted to groom him for that position.

This period, when the struggle for the mind of George W. Bush occurred, shows most clearly that invading Iraq was not the idea of George W. Bush. William Kristol states that Bush was not immediately supportive of the Neoconservatives’ aggressive foreign policy: “I wouldn’t say that if you read Wolfowitz’s defense policy guidelines from 1992 and read most of Bush’s campaign speeches and his statements in the debates, you would say, ‘Hey, Bush has really adopted Wolfowitz’s worldview.’” Thus the pragmatists initially prevailed over the Neoconservatives, so that George W. Bush, in the period before the election, was advocating a reduced role for American military forces in the world.

The narrator says that Bush’s foreign policy during the first few months of his administration was “stalled between the two competing forces” — stalled between the Neocons and the pragmatists. Kristol indicates that this continued until the 9-11 attacks: “I think you could make a case that on September 10th, 2001, that it’s not clear that George W. Bush was in any fundamental way going in our direction on foreign policy.”

A pivotal moment, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came when Bush delivered a speech that evening that included the line: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

The War Behind Closed Doors treats this as a highly important utterance. Obviously it is important, since rumors that some government harbors or supports terrorists are easy to generate, and were in fact generated. The narrator says: “The hawks welcomed the president’s phrase, ‘those who harbor’ terrorism.” Richard Perle is quoted praising the speech.

David Frum, Bush’s Canadian-born Jewish speechwriter, also praises the speech:

Within 48 hours, he had made the two key decisions that have defined the war on terror. First, this is a war, not a crime. And second, this war is not going to be limited to just the authors of the 9/11 attack but to anyone who assisted them and helped them and made their work possible, including states. And that is a dramatic, dramatic event. And that defines everything.

What Frontline fails to mention is that it was Frum who insisted on that crucial line in Bush’s speech. One week before PBS Frontline aired its documentary, The Nation magazine had already revealed that detail:

It was not, alas, “a war speech.” It did, though, contain the line about making “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” And Frum cannot resist informing us he had been the one to insert that thought into every draft of the speech. [David Corn, “Who’s in Charge?” The Nation, 13 February 2003; emphasis added]

This casts a very interesting light on another comment from Frum about the speech: “When he laid down those principles, I don’t know whether he foresaw all of their implications, how far they would take him. I don’t know if he understood fully and foresaw fully the true radicalism of what he had just said.”

Who was really making the big decisions for which Frum liked to give Bush so much credit? Frum had put words into Bush’s mouth and then said that he was not sure that Bush had understood the implications. The picture that we get, by adding just a bit of information that Frontline had omitted, is that George W. Bush was pushed into belligerent posturing by his Jewish advisors.

The pragmatists continued to push the idea of going after terrorists rather than governments; Powell for example spoke of “persuading” governments that might be harboring terrorists. But the fact that the President had already talked about going after governments had created an expectation that was difficult to oppose.

Meanwhile the false notion that Iraq was unfinished business was revived. (Obviously such an evil man must be doing evil things.) The notion that Iraq was somehow a “state sponsor of terrorism” (having been taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism by the Reagan Administration in 1982, but reinstated amid the war-propaganda of 1990) was bandied about.

Dick Cheney is a favorite target for leftist critics of the War on Terror, and for the John Birch Society, who want a scapegoat that allows them to avoid saying anything critical of Jews. Very often, Cheney is represented as a key “Neocon.” In fact Cheney had worked with the Neoconservatives at various times since the days of “Team B” during the Ford Administration. But William Kristol described Cheney’s position at the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency thus: “Cheney is a complicated figure and, obviously, a very cautious and reticent figure, so hard to know what he thinks in his heart of hearts. I think he had feet in both camps, so to speak.” In other words, Cheney was not initially committed to the Neoconservative position on Iraq.

George W. Bush adopted the doctrine of preventive war that had been advocated by “the brains” of the Neoconservative outfit, Paul Wolfowitz (see here, p. 41ff, for a portrait of Wolfowitz’s Jewish identity and connections). From this, given 15 years of demonization-propaganda against Saddam Hussein and a little nudging from Jews like David Frum who were positioned to influence George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq followed.

At the time when The War Behind Closed Doors aired, the Neoconservatives were getting their way and enjoying practically unanimous support for their project, and perhaps it was overconfidence that motivated William Kristol to claim for his Neoconservative movement such unequivocal responsibility for the imminent war. There was always obfuscation about who had agitated for war, with many habitually blaming the oil industry or other economic interests, because such explanations fit their leftist theory about how the world works. It was extremely useful that PBS Frontline documented that it was in fact Neoconservatives who spent more than a decade agitating for that war, and also, if it did not explain exactly who these Neoconservatives were, at least gave some indications about who they were not.

There are however some negative aspects to The War Behind Closed Doors, the worst of them being the propaganda spouted by Jewish television-host Ted Koppel’s Jewish son-in-law, Kenneth Pollack, who also happened to be a former CIA analyst, a sometime member of the National Security Council and various think-tanks, and author of a pro-war book, The Threatening Storm, that was especially influential with liberals. (Pollack had excellent liberal credentials, having served in the Clinton administration; he was also indicted for spying on behalf of Israel, but the indictment was dropped under less than convincing circumstances.) Although supposedly giving an expert outsider’s perspective on the Neoconservatives’ agitation for war, and seeming to criticize the Neoconservatives in some ways, the most important part of what Pollack said really supported the Neoconservatives’ project. I suspected that Pollack was Jewish when I first saw the program in 2003 because of the general thrust of what he was saying, but now it is confirmed.

In the section of PBS Frontline’s The War Behind Closed Doors about Bill Clinton, Pollack promotes the idea that Saddam Hussein really was developing WMDs behind the backs of the UN’s weapons-inspectors, and tries to portray the clashes in the 1990s between Iraqi officials and the UN’s inspectors as the expression of some kind of psychological strategy on Saddam Hussein’s part for undermining “containment.” Frontline should have pointed out that there was no direct evidence for any ongoing WMD-program. It was all speculation, based, as Pollack says, on the fact that the Iraqis gave the inspectors trouble. But the friction between inspectors and Iraqi authorities was easily explained with the fact that the inspection-team, infiltrated by agents of the CIA, appeared to have been used to try to orchestrate a coup:

But one of the problems is, is that you have a situation, in June of 1996, where the United States is fomenting a coup against Saddam Hussein, a coup based upon Special Republican Guard units. At the same time, you have an UNSCOM inspection, UNSCOM 150, which is in Iraq, creating a confrontation by inspecting Special Republican Guard sites.  [Scott Ritter, PBS Frontline: Spying on Saddam, 27 April 1999].

These known facts should have been brought to bear on Pollack’s statements.

The Newsweek of 24 February 2003, four days after this documentary aired, quoted Saddam Hussein’s son, General Hussein Kamel, as telling an interrogator in 1995: “All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear — were destroyed.” Pollack, with his positions in government as a supposed expert on Iraq, should have known about this.

It is the major fault of The War Behind Closed Doors that it allows Pollack’s claims in support of the WMD accusation to go undisputed.  Pollack admitted after the invasion that he had been wrong (“I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence.”  New York Times Magazine, 24 October 2004), but it is worse than being wrong: he was either a liar or incompetent. The failure to challenge Pollack’s statements is a crucial omission in PBS Frontline’s presentation, because the proposition that Saddam Hussein had been 100% successful in circumventing weapons-inspections was essential to the argument for war. Add the claim that weapons-inspections were not working (and probably could not work) to the premise that Saddam Hussein is “another Hitler,” and it becomes self-evident that one must go to war.

November 9, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel benefited from Hariri assassination: Lebanon ex-President Lahoud

Press TV – November 7, 2015

Lebanon’s former President Emile Lahoud says the Israeli regime has benefited most from political assassinations in the country, including that of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Press TV reports.

In an exclusive interview with Press TV, segments of which were aired on Saturday, Lahoud rejected accusations that the Syrian government and Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah had a role in the 2005 assassination of Hariri.

The Tel Aviv regime was the entity that largely benefited from Hariri’s killing and other assassinations in Lebanon, Lahoud stated.

He also cited as a proof the fact that the satellites that were watching over the area where Hariri was killed in Beirut belonged to Israel and the United States. Neither Tel Aviv nor Washington later accepted to share their data and images on the assassination, he said.

The former Lebanese president said the West and Israel have accused everybody in Lebanon for the killing, so that they can divert public attention from their own potential role in the incident.

Lahoud said the assassination of Hariri showed that the United States and Saudi Arabia have been doing what Israel wants them to do in the Middle East.

November 8, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Infamous Video of an Aircraft Exploding in Air at High Altitude and the “Big Chutzpah” Construct

By Doug E. Steil | Aletho News | November 7, 2015

Only a day after the Russian Metrojet airliner Flight 9268 went down, killing 224 people, a short video went onto the Internet on YouTube, purporting to show the explosion of the Airbus 321-200 aircraft in mid-air, at roughly 30 thousand feet elevation. This video was immediately ridiculed because the group claiming responsibility for bringing down the airliner, ISIS, which was said to have presented the video as proof, did not have the sophisticated military capacity, according to intelligence analysts, to shoot down any aircraft at such an altitude. Yet the video did not show a missile approaching the jet, nor did the group claim to have shot it down in such a manner. It simply showed an explosive burst, consistent with a bomb being detonated, and heavy black smoke trailing the aircraft as it subsequently descended.

Even though a civilian style aircraft, with two engines mounted below its wings, can be discerned, and no such video had previously been seen — nor were there reports of any civilian aircraft with such features having exploded in mid-air during daytime — the video was denounced as a fake (computer generated imagery) nonetheless, perhaps because the video quality was poor or not sufficiently specific, which was suspiciously indicative of an attempt to obfuscate any confirmatory information.

A dose of skepticism is certainly legitimate when being presented with such videos, which may be intended to convey false political propaganda. However, since no compelling proof of the imagery not possibly showing what was claimed has yet been presented, the authenticity cannot be completely discounted. Indeed, this question is currently a point of discussion on some technical forums. What appears to be the case is that the shaky nature of both embedded videos — a second version appears at 20 seconds in the 32 second video — both came from two mobile phone camera recordings that were taken of a screen playback of the explosion. It has also been suggested that the imagery was actually shot from another aircraft following the fateful jet from farther below. Though this was likely the case, it would not necessarily invalidate the claimed authenticity of this particular jet being shown.

It should be noted that a professional quality video recording, filmed through a heavy zoom lens mounted upon a camera on a stationary tripod, would provide investigators with sufficient information to calculate a small circle on the ground from where the shots were most probably taken, which would likely not be in the interest of the perpetrators or co-conspirators. If, for the sake of argument, one presumes the authenticity of what was being filmed, then the most interesting and compelling proof of a desire to obfuscate and mislead comes from the obvious image reversal, which is particularly evident during the first second. The sky to the left of the screen is bright whereas, in stark contrast, it is dark on the right side, though exactly the opposite should be the case because the jet was then flying northward at a track of 340° in the morning, shortly after sunrise.

The ground track in the eastern portion of the Sinai peninsula during the final minutes of flight was exactly parallel to and 40 km away from the border between Israel and Egypt. The mid-air explosion occurred west of the highest mountain in the Negev Desert (Har Raman, 1035 meters), not hard to make out on a topographic map of the area. The impulse of the explosion and its aerodynamic effects then changed the heading of the aircraft by more then 15°. When viewing the video through a mirror to correct the image reversal, one sees that the vantage point of the camera is behind, below, and to the right (east) of the aircraft’s flight path. When one accepts the notion that the incident was filmed from another aircraft, pursuing the Airbus in roughly the same direction, then one must logically conclude that the video was taken from within — or just slightly outside of — Israeli airspace, likely by a surveillance drone, operating in the southern region, north of Eilat. One would expect Israeli surveillance drones to operate here on a regular basis because this region, at the northernmost part in the Gulf of Aqaba, is strategically important; the borders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt nearly converge here.

While the notion of a military drone operating near this particular region on a Saturday morning may not be unusual, what certainly should raise some questions is that the Russian Metrojet aircraft — assuming, as before, that the video is not a fake but authentic — would have been pursued and filmed (surveillance operations would be more interested in what happens on the ground rather than pursuing a civilian airliner emitting its tracking data by beacon and not posing a potential threat). Even more worthy of question or inquiry is that these modified (second-hand) video versions of the on-board explosion and descent of the aircraft would be loaded onto the Internet the next day, allegedly by the ISIS terrorist group, which has been publicly exposed to be in an alliance with Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia in the Syrian battleground.

While the concept of the “Big Lie” is based on the idea that (nearly) everyone will believe a major fabrication that is completely untrue because these heavily conditioned people couldn’t possibly imagine that their government would dare lie to them so blatantly about something so important, viewers of the video may have been subjected to the opposite phenomenon, namely “Big Chutzpah”, the raw truth presented right in your face in such a brazen way that (nearly) everyone will still refuse to believe it because these people cannot possibly imagine that the Israeli government would dare to actually do something like that.

November 7, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A guide to Palestine in the British media

By Amelia Smith | MEMO | November 6, 2015

2f6e1922-52b1-465b-9b95-179fc9c25fe7On a trip to Cuba in May, I had to look twice when an elderly man selling newspapers walked past the restaurant I was eating in. On the front page of one was a huge photograph of an Israeli soldier holding a Palestinian boy by the neck, the boy’s face twisted away from the camera in pain.

The photo said it all: an aggressive, well-built soldier wearing a helmet, bulletproof vest and carrying a machine gun was manhandling a child half his size, not more than 10 years old, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. Why was I so shocked to see such an image published on the front page of a mainstream newspaper? Because this would be a rare moment in the UK.

Over here, the images that are used to represent almost 50 years of military occupation are of Palestinian youth throwing stones, black-and white-kuffiyeh wrapped around their faces. The Cuban picture portrays the Palestinian as the subject of aggression, the UK image as the perpetrator; just like that, our media helps perpetuate the myth that Palestinians are faceless terrorists predisposed to random outbursts of violence and against whom Israel has every right to defend itself.

A closer look at how the British media has covered the recent escalation of violence in Palestine reveals some worrying trends. For the past year right-wing Israeli groups have entered the Haram Al-Sharif compound daily with their armed escorts, often chanting anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian slogans. This came to a head on 13 September when a group of settlers and the Israeli minister of agriculture Uri Ariel, protected by Israeli soldiers, actually entered the Al-Aqsa mosque shooting tear gas, stun grenades and rubber coated steel bullets at worshippers, injuring Palestinians inside and causing damage to the interior of the mosque.

With this in mind take a look at how these confrontations were described in the Telegraph : “Four Israelis and 23 Palestinians have died in 12 days of bloodshed fuelled in part by Muslim anger over increasing Jewish access to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.”

And earlier in the year, Reuters reported that: “Those groups [devout Jews and Israeli nationalists] are at the centre of a creeping shift in Jerusalem: After 900 years, Jews are chipping away at Muslims’ exclusive control of the site, the third holiest in Islam. The shift, which has provoked violence in the past, threatens to open a dangerous new front in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, adding religious enmity to a political struggle in the very heart of the disputed city.”

Not only do these reports reduce the provocation by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the Al-Aqsa mosque to Muslim anger and a failure to compromise over increased Jewish access to the compound, but they make the current protests in Palestine sound as though they are merely a religious dispute. Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam and holds huge religious significance for Muslims across the world, but Palestinians are also protesting against almost 50 years of military occupation under which their land has constantly been taken away from them.

Since 14 September, 72 Palestinians and 11 Israelis have been killed and over 8,000 Palestinians and 134 Israelis have been injured – yet many reports have picked out and highlighted the knife attacks carried out by Palestinians, using phrases such as “Israel’s knife terror”, describing “knife wielding” Palestinians or “anti-Israeli knife attacks”. The following report published on the BBC answered the question of what is happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the following manner:

“There has been a spate of stabbings and gun attacks on Israelis by Palestinians since early October, and one apparent revenge stabbing by an Israeli. The attacks, some of which have been fatal, have struck in Jerusalem and in northern and central Israeli cities and towns, and in the occupied West Bank. Israel has tightened security and clashed with rioting Palestinians, leading to deaths on the Palestinian side. There has also been associated violence in the border area inside the Gaza Strip.”

Note that there is not even a mention of what took place at Al-Aqsa mosque on 13 September. The weapons used by Palestinians are specified but Israel’s excessive use of tear gas, stun grenades, live ammunition and rubber bullets is not included.

The term “Palestinian rioters” (other reports have used “Muslim rioters”) has been widely adopted in the British media; the notion of “rioters” is associated with wild disorder and conjures up very different images than the word “protesters”, which suggests a group of people who are simply asking for their rights. Another common term used in the above quotation and frequently in other articles is “clash”, which implies fighting between two equal forces– Israeli soldiers, part of the fourth largest army in the world, storming the Al-Aqsa mosque and firing tear gas and rubber bullets at Palestinians armed with stones, sticks and knives cannot be described as a “clash”.

Deaths on the Palestinian side are a result of rioting Palestinians, and so somehow justified. This headline from Reuters, this one in the Independent and this one in the Daily Mail all report Palestinian deaths but say they took place after Palestinians attacked Israelis with knives. In contrast, this article from the BBC is typical of how Israeli casualties are reported across the media: “Three Israelis killed in Jerusalem bus attacks.” No justifications or explanations of the deaths in sight.

The BBC casually writes about “associated violence” in the Gaza Strip. Between 13 September and the publication of this article, 12 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, including 26-year-old Nour Rasmi Mohammed Hassan who was five months pregnant and her three year-old daughter, both of whom were at home when an Israeli airstrike hit their house.

Rather than recognise that their excessive use of force and almost 50 years of occupation – under which Palestinian homes have been demolished, children have been arrested, freedom of movement restricted and Gaza placed under siege – may evoke anger in some Palestinians, Israeli authorities, echoed in news reports, would rather blame Palestinian leaders and the use of social media for “inciting” violence, as seen in this headline: “Israel sentences Islamic leader to jail for incitement”; and this one too: “Is social media driving the current violence?”

In this video, Israeli security forces have planted undercover stone throwers among a group of Palestinians who then turn on one of the Palestinians in the same group before ten Israeli soldiers drag him away (note – excessive use of force). In fact there are numerous videos online that highlight Israeli aggression and incitement of violence towards Palestinians but they are not widely published in the mainstream press. This particularly disturbing video filmed on a mobile phone in Aida refugee camp last week captures an Israeli soldier announcing: “You throw stones and we will hit you with gas until you die – the children, the youth, the old people; you will all die. We won’t leave any of you alive.” This video shows an Israeli soldier running over a Palestinian then preventing paramedics helping him; this one shows settlers throwing stones at Palestinian homes in Hebron.

On 16 October, much media attention was focused on the case of a Palestinian man who dressed up in a press jacket and inflicted moderate wounds on an Israeli soldier in Hebron before being shot dead by another soldier. On the same day, four other Palestinians died, including 36-year-old Shawqi Jamal Jaber Ebeid who succumbed to injuries after sustaining a bullet wound to the head a week before whilst working in a stone factory in Gaza. His story is much harder to find and yet it is part of the media’s job to help give a voice to those who have been deliberately silenced – those like Shawqi Ebeid and his family – and to hold politicians and people in authority to account when they do something wrong; even more so if they commit war crimes. If, however, the media is complicit in silencing those same people, then in some cases we may be looking at political propaganda dressed up as news.

November 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ICC prosecutor must rethink Gaza flotilla probe: Judges

Press TV – November 7, 2015

Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) say the court’s prosecutor must reconsider an earlier decision not to open a probe into an Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla back in 2010.

Following a few months of deliberations, judges at the appeals chamber ruled on Friday that prosecutor Fatou Bensouda must rethink her decision against the Gaza flotilla probe.

Judges at The Hague-based court had initially asked Bensouda to reconsider her decision in July, saying she made “material errors in her determination of the gravity” of the case.

The latest decision could force Bensouda to open a full investigation into the case.

Last year, Bensouda declined a request by the Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros to investigate the attack on the Turkish Mavi Marmara ship that was sailing under a Comoros flag. She ruled the case was not serious enough to merit an ICC probe.

The prosecutor said publicly available information provides “a reasonable basis” to believe that the Israeli forces committed war crimes during the attack in international waters back in 2010, but the case does not fall under their jurisdiction for an official probe.

However, lawyers representing Comoros had sought a review of Bensouda’s original rejection, insisting that “the interests of justice and fairness, which are the core of the ICC’s mandate, strongly militate in favor of the prosecutor reconsidering her decision.”

On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos attacked the Freedom Flotilla in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, killing nine Turkish citizens, including a teenager with dual Turkish-US citizenship, and injuring about 50 other people who were part of the team on the six-ship convoy. Another injured activist died in May 2014 after having been in a coma for four years.

The flotilla was attempting to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, carrying aid to Palestinians in the enclave.

Gaza has been blockaded since June 2007, a situation that has caused a decline in the standard of living, unprecedented levels of unemployment, and unrelenting poverty.

The attack sparked international outcry and plunged relations between Tel Aviv and Ankara to an all-time low at the time.

November 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Clinton vows to strengthen relations with Israel

MEMO | November 6, 2015

Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, vowed to strengthen ties with Israel if she is elected president.

In an op-ed published by the American-Jewish newspaper The Forward, Clinton wrote: “The alliance between our two nations transcends politics.”

The piece was published before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, where President Barack Obama will receive him.

This will be the first meeting between Obama and Netanyahu after the Iranian nuclear agreement was reached in July between Tehran and the P5+1, which Netanyahu described as a “historic mistake.”

Clinton also added: “I will do everything I can to enhance our strategic partnership and strengthen America’s security commitment to Israel, ensuring that it always has the qualitative military edge to defend itself.”

“I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office,” she wrote.

The former US Secretary of State wrote that she believed Netanyahu’s visit to Washington “is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and governments of the United States and Israel.”

She stressed that she has always supported Israel and she mentioned that she had first visited Israel in 1981. She wrote: “As president I will never stop working to advance the goal of two states for two peoples living in peace, security and dignity.”

With regards to the Iranian issue, Clinton reaffirmed her commitment not to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

November 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Is Israel Bombing Syrian Military to Benefit ISIS Near Lebanon?

By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | November 2, 2015

The neoconservative Washington Free Beacon is reporting that the Israeli air force has attacked a Syrian government-controlled missile base near Syria’s border with Lebanon. The Beacon cites a pro-rebel website that claims:

Israeli planes breached Lebanese and Syrian airspace and bombed the Syrian regime’s 155th Brigade [base] in the Qutayfa area, destroying a number of missile warehouses.

If the report is accurate it would suggest that Israel is attacking military facilities of the Syrian government to the benefit of ISIS and the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, at least according to the latest battle map released by the Institute for the Study of War (when coordinated with a Google map search for Qutayfah, Syria).

Israel has routinely violated Syrian airspace to bomb Syrian territory and uses any stray rocket fire into Israel-occupied Golan Heights as a pretext to hit Syrian government positions inside the country.

Recently Israel has been forced to back down from its routine flights over Syrian airspace by the arrival of Russian fighters, and after at least one Israeli close call with sophisticated Russian fighter jets a hotline was reportedly set up for the two countries to avoid any clashes in the area.

Though these reports of Israel hitting Syrian government assets to the benefit of ISIS in the area should be taken with a grain of salt, if true this would mark yet another very volatile variable in an already very complicated and dangerous part of the world. If the Russians are busy bombing ISIS and al-Nusra positions in the area north of Damascus toward Aleppo, how will Moscow take to Tel Aviv making it difficult for Syrian ground forces to take advantage on the ground of their operations in the air?

November 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chinese Hackers? US Propagandists Should Look in the Mirror

By Eric Draitser |New Eastern Outlook | November 4, 2015

Like millions of Americans, this past week I was sitting on my couch, drinking a cold beer, watching Game 1 of the World Series – professional baseball’s hallowed championship. Suddenly the satellite feed went out, the screen went dark. Naturally, as FOX Sports scrambled to get their live feed fixed, many of my fellow Americans took to twitter to speculate as to what had caused the outage. I was, sadly, unsurprised to see that the most common joke people were making was that China must have hacked the World Series.

On the one hand, it is understandable given the barrage of propaganda about Chinese hackers as a threat to corporate and national security; seemingly every week there is a new news item highlighting the great red cyber-menace. On the other hand, it is a perfect illustration of the hypocrisy and ignorant arrogance of Americans who, despite being citizens of unquestionably the most aggressive nation when it comes to both cyber espionage and surveillance, see fit to cast China as the real villain. It is a testament to the power of both propaganda and imperial triumphalism that a proposition so disconnected from reality, and bordering on Orwellian Doublethink, is not only accepted, but is ipso facto true.

But there is a deeper political and sociological phenomenon at play here, one that begs further exploration. How is it that despite all the revelations of Edward Snowden regarding US intelligence and military snooping capabilities across the globe, Americans still cannot accept the culpability of their own government and corporate interests – the two work hand in hand – in global cyber-espionage? Even if they explicitly or implicitly know about the NSA, CIA, DIA, and Pentagon programs (among many others), their instinctive reaction is to blame China. Why? The answer lies in the complexity and effectiveness of the anti-China propaganda.

In his landmark book Public Opinion, the renowned writer, commentator, and theoretician of propaganda, Walter Lipmann, defined the term “stereotype” in the modern psychological sense as a “distorted picture or image in a person’s mind, not based on personal experience, but derived culturally.” In other words, the stereotype is an image in our mind’s eye, one that is constructed by outside forces; it is information filtered through a particular societal or cultural framework that then creates a picture of how something is to be understood. Lipmann went further, noting that carefully constructed propaganda could be used to shape stereotypes, thereby allowing the powers that be the ability to construct and manipulate information and narratives.

And this is precisely the phenomenon at work here. By repeating it endlessly, the US political and corporate media establishment have successfully convinced Americans that China is the real threat when it comes to cyberspace, playing on the stereotype of Chinese people in general, and the People’s Republic of China specifically. But, I would argue something far different: rather than seeing China as a threat, perhaps Americans, and westerners generally, should shine a light on what their own countries are doing, thereby gaining a broader perspective on the issue. For China’s moves in this field pale in comparison to those of the US, and are clearly a response to them.

China and the US: Comparing the Rap Sheets

The corporate media is replete with stories of Chinese hacking of US institutions. From alleged Chinese hacking of the University of Virginia employees connected with US government programs directed at China, to the infamous breach of the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management which resulted in the theft of the personal information of more than 20 million Americans, such stories help to construct an image of China as the world’s leading hacker-state. This week it is Chinese hackers targeting health care providers, last year it was stealing the secrets of Westinghouse and US Steel, and literally dozens of other such examples.

The purpose of this article is not to deny the veracity of these reports; I’m not a computer expert, nor do I have access to the information that an expert would need in making a determination. Instead, my purpose here is to show the grossly unbalanced, and utterly dishonest, way in which the issue is presented to Americans especially, and to probe why that might be. For any fair and balanced approach to the issue would present the simple fact that the US is the world leader in cyber-warfare, having actually conducted what are to date the only recorded live uses of cyberweapons.

Take for instance the joint US-Israel developed Stuxnet virus, a pair of highly complex and severely destructive, computer viruses launched at Iran’s nuclear facilities. According to a group of independent legal experts assembled at the request of NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, the Stuxnet cyberattack was “an act of force.” Their report noted that “Acts that kill or injure persons or destroy or damage objects are unambiguously uses of force [and likely violate international law].”

Indeed, the US and its Israeli partners launched the very first true cyberweapon. As cyber security expert Ralph Langer wrote in Foreign Policy in 2013:

Stuxnet is not really one weapon, but two. The vast majority of the attention has been paid to Stuxnet’s smaller and simpler attack routine — the one that changes the speeds of the rotors in a centrifuge, which is used to enrich uranium. But the second and “forgotten” routine is about an order of magnitude more complex and stealthy. It qualifies as a nightmare for those who understand industrial control system security… The “original” payload… attempted to overpressurize Natanz’s centrifuges by sabotaging the system meant to keep the cascades of centrifuges safe.

Essentially, the US and Israel employed the world’s first cyberweapon without even fully knowing the potentially destructive consequences. As the virus migrated out of the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz and onto the internet, innumerable variables could have come into play, with the potential for disastrous outcomes.

But of course Stuxnet was not alone. The US and Israel also deployed both the Gauss and Flame viruses, two more sophisticated cyberweapons designed to cause major damage to online infrastructure. The Gauss virus, discovered by Kaspersky labs, one of the world’s most highly respected cyber-security firms, was designed to steal sensitive data such as financial records. According to the US officials who spoke with the Washington Post, the Flame virus was a: massive piece of malware [which] secretly mapped and monitored Iran’s computer networks, sending back a steady stream of intelligence to prepare for a cyberwarfare campaign… “This is about preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action… Cyber-collection against the Iranian program is way further down the road than this.” said one former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, who added that Flame and Stuxnet were elements of a broader assault that continues today.

Clearly the US and Israel were not merely interested in surveillance and information-gathering, but actually having the ability to manipulate and destroy vital computer infrastructure in Iran. Any reasonable reading of international law should hold that such actions are, in fact, an act of war, though of course war with Iran has not come to pass. But just the very use of such sophisticated weapons, far more elaborate, technical, and dangerous than mere hacking by humans, should call into question the weepy-eyed condemnations of China for its alleged stealing of corporate and government information.

And then of course there is the seemingly endless supply of revelations from Edward Snowden regarding the US surveillance infrastructure, how all-encompassing it truly is, how it is used to manipulate political outcomes, how it is used as a weapon against foreign governments, and much more.

Just to name a few of the countless programs and initiatives of the NSA and the surveillance state designed to capture information for political purposes:

PRISM – allows “The National Security Agency and the FBI [to tap] directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs.”

BLARNEY – “Gathers up metadata from choke points along the backbone of the internet as part of an ongoing collection program the leverages IC (intelligence community) and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks.”

Boundless Informant – “Details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.”

US & UK Target G20 Leaders – “The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government.”

US Spied on EU Offices – “America’s National Security Agency (NSA) not only conducted online surveillance of European citizens, but also appears to have specifically targeted buildings housing European Union institutions… in addition to installing bugs in the building in downtown Washington, DC, the European Union representation’s computer network was also infiltrated.”

But of course, the US has also specifically, and successfully, trained its cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare sights on China itself. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that US intelligence repeatedly hacked into Beijing’s Tsinghua University, China’s top education and research institute. As revealed in the South China Morning Post:

The information also showed that the attacks on Tsinghua University were intensive and concerted efforts. In one single day of January, at least 63 computers and servers in Tsinghua University have been hacked by the NSA… The university is home to one of the mainland’s six major backbone networks, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) from where internet data from millions of Chinese citizens could be mined. The network was the country’s first internet backbone network and has evolved into the world’s largest national research hub.

But it wasn’t only Tsinghua University that was targeted. Snowden also revealed that Chinese University in Hong Kong was the victim of US hacking; the university is home to the Hong Kong Internet Exchange, the city’s central hub for all internet traffic. In addition, it came out that US intelligence has repeatedly hacked into Chinese mobile phone companies, spied on users, and stolen data, including text messages. These are, of course, only what we know about thus far from the Snowden revelations. The scope of US hacking operations against China is not known, but could be safely assumed to be far-reaching.

In fact, the depth of US hacking and other intelligence operations targeting China, including those taking place inside China itself, has been alluded to repeatedly. The New York Times noted in August 2015 that the Obama administration was cautious about any retaliation against China for the breach of the Office of Personnel Management because “Intelligence officials say that any legal case could result in exposing American intelligence operations inside China — including the placement of thousands of implants in Chinese computer networks to warn of impending attacks.”

It is clear that what we do know about US cyberwar programs and tactics is really only the tip of the iceberg. It is likely that Washington has myriad other China-specific hacking programs and initiatives, including the much discussed attempts to subvert the oft referenced “Great Firewall of China.” Put simply, the US is engaged in the most sophisticated forms of hacking and cyber-subversion, and much of it is directed at China (and Russia and Iran). This should now be beyond question.

Keep this information in mind the next time another story about Chinese hackers attacking US interests runs in the corporate media. While the hack may or may not be true, it is the context within which such actions take place that really needs to be understood.

There is a cyberwar going on, of this there can be no doubt. But who’s got the biggest guns? And who fired the first shot?

November 6, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces kill Palestinian woman, 72, after alleged car attack

Ma’an – November 6, 2015

BETHLEHEM – Israeli forces shot and killed an elderly Palestinian woman after an alleged vehicle attack in Halhul, north of Hebron on Friday.

A spokesperson at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem told Ma’an that the woman, aged 72, was dead upon arrival at the hospital.

Israeli media reported that the woman attempted to run over Israeli soldiers in Halhul and was shot and seriously wounded by Israeli forces.

The Jerusalem Post said that a “suspicious vehicle” drove at Israeli soldiers, with forces opening fire at the car.

No Israeli injuries were reported.

The victim was identified as Tharwat al-Sharawi, 72. Her husband, Fouad, was killed by Israeli forces during the 1st Intifada.

Two Palestinian youths who were standing at a gas station nearby were injured as Israeli gunfire shattered the car’s windows.

Both youths were taken to the al-Ahli hospital in Hebron to treat their injuries, which were described as moderate.

Al-Sharawi was the 74th Palestinian to be killed since the beginning of last month, the majority of whom were shot dead by Israeli forces during alleged, attempted, and actual attacks on Israeli military and civilians.

On Wednesday, Ibrahim Skafi, 22, was also shot dead by Israeli forces in Halhul after a vehicular attack that left a 20-year-old border policeman seriously injured.

The town of Halhul, north of Hebron city, was sealed by Israeli forces following the attack.

Recent attacks come as Israeli intelligence said earlier this week that a recent lull in violence was unlikely to be long-term, citing high levels of frustration among the Palestinian public.

Tharwat al-Sharawi, 72.

November 6, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu aide: Obama is an anti-semite

By Jonathon Cook | The Blog From Nazareth | November 5, 2015

Picture the scene. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is off to Washington to see Barack Obama next week for the first time in more than a year. Their last major dealings were in March, when Netanyahu travelled to the US to speak to Congress in a bid to undermine a key plank of the US president’s foreign policy – reaching a nuclear deal with Iran.

This time Netanyahu wants a favour. He hopes to squeeze from Obama billions more of US taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars in “aid” so that he can buy yet more weapons to use against the Palestinians.

How is Netanyahu preparing for this important visit? He has appointed a new head of public diplomacy, Ran Baratz.

And how will Baratz help Netanyahu repair relations with Obama? It seems he won’t. Last March, as Netanyahu went behind Obama’s back to try to stymie the Iran deal in Congress, Baratz posted his views of Obama on Facebook. He called the US president an “anti-semite” for criticising Netanyahu’s behaviour.

Here’s what he wrote:

Obama’s reference to Netanyahu’s speech – this is what modern anti-Semitism looks like in Western and liberal countries. And it comes, of course, alongside much tolerance and understanding toward Islamic anti-Semitism.

By the way, to give you a flavour of quite how unhinged Netanyahu has become in appointing someone like Baratz as his new spokesman, Baratz has also argued that the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem should be replaced by a third Jewish temple and Muslims denied the right to pray at the site unless they recognise its holiness to Jews. Almost as crazy as accusing the Palestinians of persuading Hitler to carry out the Holocaust.

Will this cause Netanyahu any harm in Washington or prompt Obama to refuse to subsidise Israel’s belligerent and illegal occupation? Don’t hold your breath. It seems there is no insult Obama and the US political elites won’t swallow when it comes from their “ally” Israel.

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.684417

November 6, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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