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700 artists announce a cultural boycott of Israel

MEMO | February 14, 2015

Over 700 British artists, from the worlds of literature, film, stage and music, have pledged to boycott Israel “as long as the state continues to deny basic Palestinian rights.”

The campaign was launched Saturday with a letter in The Guardian signed by Peter Kosminsky, Mike Leigh, Jimmy McGovern, Miriam Margolyes, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Hardy, Brian Eno, Richard Ashcroft, Gillian Slovo, China Miéville, and Liz Lochhead, among others.

The pledge in full, organised by ‘Artists for Palestine UK‘, states:

We support the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. In response to the call from Palestinian artists and cultural workers for a cultural boycott of Israel, we pledge to accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.

Former English PEN president, writer Gillian Slovo, said: “As a South African I witnessed the way the cultural boycott of South Africa helped apply pressure on the apartheid government and its supporters. This Artists’ Pledge for Palestine has drawn lessons from that boycott to produce an even more nuanced, non-violent way for us to call for change and for justice for all.”

February 15, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | Leave a comment

US Officials Silent on Israeli Abuse of Palestinian Children

By Matt Peppe | Just the Facts | February 14, 2015

Six weeks after being abducted on her way home from school in the occupied West Bank, 14-year-old Malak al-Khatib was released from the Israeli jail where she had been imprisoned on Friday. She was the youngest Palestinian girl ever to be incarcerated, and is one of hundreds of children to be prosecuted through the Israeli military court system each year. As of the December 2014, there were 156 child prisoners, 17 of which were under 16 years old, according to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. As the patron benefactor of the illegal Israeli occupation, the United States government is complicit in Israeli’s disgraceful persecution and abuse of Palestinian children. While American officials refrain from condemning human rights violations against Palestinian children, they vocally condemn any resistance against the violent Israeli occupation.

During Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in August, the Obama administration expressed its strongest indignation regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during President Obama’s six years in office. After the apparent capture of Israeli Occupation soldier Hadar Goldin by the Palestinian resistance, administration officials said the action was “barbaric” and “outrageous.”

That morning a cease-fire was set to take effect after nearly two weeks of fighting in which hundreds of Palestinian civilians had already been slaughtered. A few hours before the designated cease-fire time, Israeli occupation troops continued operations trying to destroy tunnels inside Gaza used to smuggle food and goods that were denied to the Palestinian territory as part of the eight-year-long blockade imposed by Israel for voting the wrong way. When the IOF forces reached a tunnel they encountered resistance from Palestinian fighters in the Qassam Brigades. Several Israeli troops were killed. It appeared that Goldin had been captured and led away into the tunnel.

The Occupation Forces then reportedly employed the savage Hannibal Directive, a repulsive military procedure developed nearly 30 years ago in which the Israeli army uses massive amounts of firepower in an attempt to kill their own soldier rather than allow him to be captured. Journalist Max Blumenthal says that Israeli troops employed an “indiscriminate assault on the entire circumference of the area where … Goldin was allegedly taken.” According to Blumenthal, this was one of three possible instance of the Hannibal Directive during Israel’s murderous summer rampage in Gaza.

So during a military operation inside Palestinian territory shortly before or at the time Israel had agreed to a cease-fire the Palestinian militants defending themselves from the savage onslaught against homes, hospitals, mosques, parks, sports clubs, cafés, high-rises, ambulances, disability centers, power plants, and  UN schools, captured an enemy combatant consistent with the laws of war. Israel then orders indiscriminate fire to kill him rather then let him be taken alive. This is the situation American officials found to be barbaric – by the Palestinians, not the Israelis.

A month later, when Israel finally agreed to a cease-fire (which it has continued to violate nearly every day with impunity) more than 2,100 Palestinians had been killed, including 578 children. Among the children whose lives had been snuffed out was four-year-old Sahir Abu Namous, whose head was blown open by shrapnel; five-month-old Faris Juma al-Mahmoum, killed along with his mother and 18 other family members in shelling; five-day-old Shayma Sheikh Khalil, born prematurely after her mother was killed by an Israeli airstrike; and four cousins playing soccer on a beach, at least one of whom was killed in a second explosion after the Israeli gunner who had failed to kill him with an original shell re-aimed and fired again.

In his strongest language against the Israeli operation, Obama told Netanyahu that he was “deeply concerned” about further escalation. Yet he did not call any Israeli actions – which numerous human rights groups have since decried as war crimes that must be referred to the International Criminal Court – “barbaric” or “outrageous.” And he was apparently not concerned enough to stop the delivery of weapons to resupply Israeli so they could be used to massacre more Palestinian civilians. Neither was he concerned enough to direct his administration to join 29 other nations on the UN Human Rights Council in voting just to investigate potential war crimes.

The US government even fails to oppose child abuse by Israel against its own citizen. Several weeks before the bloodbath in Gaza, 15-year-old Tarek Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian-American from Tampa, was savagely beaten by Israeli police. The teen from Tampa was visiting Jerusalem with his family shortly after a cousin had been abducted, doused with gasoline and burned alive by Israeli settlers. Tarek and his family claimed he was ambushed while on his family’s property. After the assault that left the teenager with head wounds, he was jailed. This was deemed by the US administration to be “profoundly troubling,” but again not “barbaric” or even “outrageous.”

For teenagers who do not hold American citizenship, their mistreatment by the US-funded occupation does not elicit as much as a shrug from American officials. As the Electronic Intifada reported, Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem have demanded that the Israeli forces stop harassing schoolchildren and provoking confrontations with them.

As was the case with Malak al-Khatib, many Palestinian children are accused of throwing stones. Malak was also accused of having a knife, which would not be a problem if she were an Israeli settler, many of whom carry and use guns.

Human rights groups have claimed that Palestinian children are often accused of stone-throwing. When they are arrested and thrown into the Israeli military justice system, they are often detained arbitrarily and questioned without an adult present.

Malak was convicted after an alleged confession, which was obtained after hours of questioning by Israeli soldiers while she was unaccompanied. Her father dismissed the veracity of her alleged confession, telling the Israeli paper Haaretz “How can you question her without her parents and without a lawyer? Interrogate a little girl like this and she’ll admit to being in possession of an M16 rifle, too.”

Regardless, throwing stones is a legitimate act of resistance according to international law. A 1987 UN General Assembly resolution differentiates terrorism from the “struggle of peoples for national liberation.” The resolution grants “peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation … the right to these peoples to struggle to this end.” The measure was approved with 153 votes in favor. Only the United States and Israel voted against it.

Even militant resistance against occupying troops is clearly protected as part of a struggle against occupation. Clearly, stone-throwing falls within the protections explicitly stated by the UN resolution. In fact, some people have even said that Palestinians have a “duty to throw stones.”

“Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule,” wrote Israeli journalist Amira Hass. “Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance. Persecution of stone-throwers, including 8-year-old children, is an inseparable part – though it’s not always spelled out – of the job requirements of the foreign ruler, no less than shooting, torture, land theft, restrictions on movement, and the unequal distribution of water sources.”

Yet like Malak, the Israeli occupation uses stone-throwing to punish and abuse children whose land they have illegally occupied for 47 years.

The human rights group Defence for Children International Palestine found that “Palestinian children detained by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last year fell victim to a pattern of abuse designed to coerce confessions.”

They reported that Israeli occupiers ordered solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and torture against the children they abduct. “Impunity for violations was a significant obstacle in 2014 as DCIP filed nine complaints with Israeli authorities concerning the ill-treatment and torture of five children while in Israeli military detention. Not a single indictment has been issued against a perpetrator,” the group wrote.

Another human rights group reported that 240 children detained in Jerusalem by Israeli authorities suffered sexual abuse.

Yet the only thing that the United States government will declare as “barbaric” is the capture of an adult Israeli combatant in a defensive military operation. To American officials, Palestinian life – even for children – does not matter. When Israelis teens are killed, President Obama and American officials express their condolences and lament the “terror against innocent youth.” This is never reciprocated for Palestinian children, who are killed by Israelis at nearly more than 15 times the rate of Israeli children being killed by Palestinians – with 2,060 Palestinian children killed since September 2000.

The United States government has long held as its policy that it values its strategic relationship with Israel above any concerns for democracy and human rights. Regardless of how serious Israel’s offenses of its oppression against Palestinians – including and especially children – government officials will refuse to allow actions to change this predetermined policy.

Not even the lives of Palestinian children matter enough to force American officials to show any semblance of humanity for the tragedy that they aid and abet in Palestine. The only outrage the US government is capable of showing is when Palestinians dare to resist the violence and colonial domination that Israel subjects them to, under approving American sponsorship.

Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.

February 15, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu urges European Jews to move to Israel after Denmark attack

RT | February 15, 2015

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, has urged European Jews to immigrate to Israel following the shooting dead of a Danish Jew outside a Copenhagen synagogue on Sunday.

Netanyahu announced the government will discuss Sunday a $46 million plan to encourage Jewish migration from Belgium, France and Ukraine and said at the start of a cabinet meeting that Israel is the home of all Jews.

The shooting at the Krystalgade synagogue that killed a 38-year old Jewish security guard came just hours after another deadly shooting at a free-speech event featuring an artist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.

Five Danish police officers were also wounded in the shootings. Police said Sunday they had shot and killed the man who had carried out both the attacks.

“We send our condolences to the Danish people, and also to the Jewish community in Denmark. Once again Jews are murdered on the soil of Europe just for being Jews. This wave of terror attacks is expected to continue, including these murderous anti-Semitic attacks,” said Netanyahu.

Netanyahu said that Jews should feel protected wherever they live and then called on the Jewish community in Denmark to move to Israel.

“We are preparing for a wave of mass aliya [Jewish immigration] from Europe; we are calling for a wave of mass aliya from Europe. I want to tell all the Jews of Europe, and Jews wherever they may be: ‘Israel is the home of every Jew… Israel awaits you with open arms,” he said.

Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, called for an even tougher stance to be taken and said Jews were the canaries in the coal mine in the battle against Islamic extremism.

“The international community in its entirety cannot be satisfied with declarations and demonstrations against this terror, but must throw off the rules of political correctness and conduct and a truly uncompromising war against Islamic terror and its causes,” said Liberman.

Jair Melchior, Denmark’s chief rabbi, said he was “disappointed” by Netanyahu’s call for immigration.

“Terror is not a reason to move to Israel,” he said.

This is not the first time Netanyahu has called on Europe’s Jews to move to Israel. After the terror attacks in Paris that involved Charlie Hebdo magazine offices and a kosher shop he called on Jews to leave Europe because of what he said is “the rising tide of anti-Semitism”.

“Europe is waking up to a new era, a new reality, to which we in Israel and around the Jewish world have been pointing out for the last 10 years. We are witnessing a rise of anti-Semitic attacks and expressions,” expert on anti-Semitism from the World Zionist organization Eitan Uri Bakhar told RT.

“We need to wake up and say, ‘You know what? It is the responsibility of every government in Europe and around the world to protect their minorities and their citizens,” he added.

February 15, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel divestment narrowly fails at Stanford

The Stanford University undergraduate senate needed a two-thirds majority to approve a resolution calling on the school to “divest from companies violating human rights in occupied Palestine,”  and it came close: Nine in favor and five against, with one abstention.

But the 64% in favor vote, sponsored by Stanford Out of Occupied Palestine, a coalition of 19 campus organizations including the Black Student Union, MEChA, and Students for Justice in Palestine, wasn’t enough for passage of the resolution according to the Stanford Daily.

Updated Resolution 2/9/2015

A Resolution to Divest from Companies Violating Human Rights in Occupied Palestine

WHEREAS the Stanford University Code of Conduct states that all members of the Stanford University community “are responsible for sustaining the highest ethical standards of this institution, and of the broader community in which we function,[1]”

WHEREAS in managing university investments, Stanford University Trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to consider both financial risk and “substantial social injury,” defined as “proximate corporate direct or indirect actions that cause injury to… individuals, or groups… [and] violat[e], subver[t], or frustrat[e] enforcement of rules of domestic or international law intended to protect individuals and/or groups against deprivation of health, safety, basic freedoms or human rights,”[2]

WHEREAS Stanford University has a rich history of calling for ethical oversight of its endowment as a non-violent strategy towards social change, which has included divestment from companies violating human rights in South Africa and Sudan, the adoption of criteria pertaining to conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and divestment from coal mining companies following last year’s fossil free divestment student campaign,

WHEREAS international humanitarian law recognizes the right of all people, including Israelis and Palestinians, to life, security[3] and self-determination[4],

WHEREAS Israel has been recognized by international law since 1967 as an occupying power in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza[5], hereafter referred to as the Occupied Palestinian Territories,

WHEREAS this resolution calls for targeted divestment from multinational corporations causing substantial social injury by violating international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, regardless of which countries contract said corporations,

WHEREAS multinational corporations disproportionately conduct business in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as compared to other conflict areas (e.g. Syria or North Korea), where binding law often prevents engagement with human rights violators,

WHEREAS many of the same companies profiting from human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories also profit from such violations against communities of color within the United States,[6]

WHEREAS Stanford’s May 2014 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings demonstrate past direct holdings in Raytheon and Eaton Corp[7], corporations that are implicated in such violations of international humanitarian law[8], suggesting that Stanford’s current and future investment portfolios are likely to include similar companies,

WHEREAS investment in these companies shows implicit support for such violations, and the only way to achieve financial neutrality is to end our investment in such companies,

WHEREAS selective divestment, as in the context of South Africa and Sudan, does not seek to determine a political solution nor target a particular ethnic or religious community, but rather the actions of a set of multinational corporations that facilitate human rights abuses and violations of international law,

WHEREAS our peers at many university student associations, including Wesleyan University, Oberlin College, DePaul University, Evergreen State College, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Davis have passed resolutions calling for divestment from companies that violate international law and human rights in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,

WHEREAS the petition asking Stanford’s Board of Trustees to selectively divest from companies that violate international law and human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been signed by over 1500 current students and 19 Stanford student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Students for Alternatives to Militarism (SAM), the Asian American Student Association (AASA), MEChA de Stanford, Stanford National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Stanford NAACP), Black Student Union (BSU), Student And Labor Alliance (SALA), Stanford Asian American Activism Committee (SAAAC), Muslim Students Awareness Network (MSAN), Pilipino American Student Union (PASU), Arab Students’ Association at Stanford (ASAS), First Generation Low Income Partnership (FLIP), International Socialist Organization at Stanford (ISO), Stanford Students for Queer Liberation (SSQL), Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO), Islamic Society of Stanford University (ISSU), Pakistanis at Stanford (PaS), Stanford University Students for  UNICEF (SUSU), and the Stanford Law School chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (SLS-NLG),

WHEREAS these companies’ actions affect the Stanford community directly, including students whose families live under occupation, and thus attend an institution complicit in violence against their own communities,

WHEREAS the Associated Students of Stanford University has been authorized “to exercise major privileges and responsibilities” with the express purpose of “[encouraging] responsible citizenship and the exercise of individual and corporate responsibility on the part of students,”[9]

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the Associated Students of Stanford University Undergraduate Senate, exercising its representative authority on behalf of all undergraduates:

THAT the ASSU Undergraduate Senate calls upon the Stanford University Trustees to divest from companies that violate international humanitarian law by:

  1. Maintaining the illegal infrastructure of the Israeli occupation, in particular settlements and separation wall, which includes companies like Veolia Transdev and Elbit Systems[10]
  2. Facilitating Israel and Egypt’s collective punishment of Palestinian civilians, which includes companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Eaton Corp[11]
  3. Facilitating state repression against Palestinians by Israeli, Egyptian or Palestinian Authority security forces, which includes companies like Combined Tactical Systems and G4S,[12]

THAT the ASSU Undergraduate Senate calls upon the Stanford University Trustees to withdraw investments in securities, endowments, mutual funds, and other monetary instruments with holdings in Veolia Transdev, Caterpillar, Raytheon, Eaton Corp, Lockheed Martin, Combined Tactical Systems, G4S, and all corporations that are similarly complicit in violating these criteria, at such time and in such manner as to be determined by the Board of Trustees with the goal of maintaining the divestment until they cease these specific practices deemed as unethical by the Stanford community,

THAT this is not a resolution concerning boycotts nor sanctions from any nation state,

THAT this resolution overrules the previous resolution UGS-W2013-10 that passed in the 14th  Undergraduate Senate,

LET IT FINALLY BE RESOLVED that the ASSU Undergraduate Senate, exercising its representative authority on behalf of all undergraduates, calls upon our university to affirm its commitment to justice for all people by divesting from companies implicated in our criteria for substantial social injury in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, many of which facilitate parallel injury against communities of color here in the United States.

[1] https://adminguide.stanford.edu/chapter-1/subchapter-1/policy-1-1-1

[2] Stanford University’s Statement on Investment Responsibility

[3] http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

[4] UN General Assembly, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 16 December 1966, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 999, p. 171, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3aa0.html

[5] Geneva Convention, UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch; http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/007/2009/en/4c407b40-e64c-11dd-9917-ed717fa5078d/mde150072009en.html#2.2.1.2.%20Law%20of%20occupation|outline

[6] See supplementary document.

[7] Stanford’s May 2014 SEC Filings: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1315828/000106299314002805/xslForm13F_X01/form13fInfoTable.xml

[8] See supplementary document.

[9] The Constitution of of the Associated Students of Stanford University: http://assu.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ASSU-Constitution.pdf,4.

[10] In violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. See supplement.

[11] In violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. See supplement.

[12] In violation of the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. See supplement.

Supplementary Document 
Background on our Criteria for Substantial Social Injury

February 14, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Thousands of Palestinian homes on Israeli demolition ‘shortlist’

israeli-bulldozers-demolishing-palestinian-home-beit-hanina

MEMO | February 14, 2015

More than 20,000 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem have been shortlisted to be demolished by the Israeli occupation authorities, Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER) has revealed.

The centre’s head, Ziad Hamouri, said that the reason these homes have been shortlisted for demolition is that they were built without building licences issued by the Israeli municipality in the occupied city. Applications for such licences from Palestinians are rarely approved.

According to Hamouri, the Israelis use the licence issue as a pretext to get rid of the centuries-old Palestinian existence in Jerusalem. Few Palestinians can afford a building licence even if an application is approved. “The Israeli demands for a construction licence are punitive financially and procedurally,” said Hamouri. “Every licence takes from five to eight years to be issued and they cost from $30,000 t0 $50,000 each.”

Such measures do not apply to Jews living in the city, who even find apartments ready-made for them to move into and are exempt from frequent and very high taxes.

The Palestinian Authority has called for the international community to stop Israel taking ever more Palestinian land by stealth.

February 14, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US admits 1980s aid to Israel’s H-bomb program

RT | February 13, 2015

Conceding to a federal lawsuit, the US government agreed to release a 1987 Defense Department report detailing US assistance to Israel in its development of a hydrogen bomb, which skirted international standards.

The 386-page report, “Critical Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations,” likens top Israeli nuclear facilities to the Los Alamos and Oak Ridge National Laboratories that were key in the development of US nuclear weaponry.

Israelis are “developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level,” said the report, the release of which comes before Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech in front of the US Congress in which he will oppose any deal that allows Iran’s legal nuclear program to persist.

“I am struck by the degree of cooperation on specialized war making devices between Israel and the US,” Roger Mattson, a formerly of the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical staff, said of the report, according to Courthouse News.

The report’s release earlier this week was initiated by a Freedom of Information Act request made three years ago by Grant Smith, director of the Washington think tank Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. Smith filed a lawsuit in September in order to compel the Pentagon to substantially address the request.

“It’s our basic position that in 1987 the Department of Defense discovered that Israel had a nuclear weapons program, detailed it and then has covered it up for 25 years in violation of the Symington and Glenn amendments, costing taxpayers $86 billion,” Smith said during a hearing in late 2014 before Judge Tanya Chutkan in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Smith described in his federal court complaint how those federal laws were violated by the US in the midst of Israel’s budding nuclear program.

“The Symington Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits most U.S. foreign aid to any country found trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside international safeguards,” Smith wrote.

“The Glenn Amendment of 1977 calls for an end to U.S. foreign aid to countries that import nuclear reprocessing technology.”

In November, Judge Chutkan asked government lawyers resistant to the report’s release why it had taken years for the government to prepare the report for public consumption.

“I’d like to know what is taking so long for a 386-page document. The document was located some time ago,” Chutkan said, according to Courthouse News Service.

“I’ve reviewed my share of documents in my career. It should not take that long to review that document and decide what needs to be redacted.”

The government’s representatives in the case — Special Assistant US Attorney Laura Jennings and Defense Department counsel Mark Herrington — initially said confidentiality agreements required a “line by line” review of the Defense Department’s report. They later shifted, arguing that its release is optional and not mandatory, as “diplomatic relations dictate that DoD seeks Israel’s review.”

Smith and the US agreed that the government would redact sections of the report on NATO countries, though the passages on Israel remain intact.

“The capability of SOREQ [Soreq Nuclear Research Center] to support SDIO [Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, or “Star Wars”] and nuclear technologies is almost an exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories,” said the report, written by the Institute for Defense Analysis for the Department of Defense.

“SOREQ and Dimona/Beer Sheva facilities are the equivalent of our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories…[and have] the technology base required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.”

The report’s authors Edwin Townsley and Clarence Robinson found that Israel had Category 1 capability regarding its anti-tactical ballistic missile and “Star Wars” weapons programs.

“As far as nuclear technology is concerned the Israelis are roughly where the U.S. [w]as in the fission weapon field in about 1955 to 1960,” the report said. “It should be noted that the Israelis are developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs.”

In a statement on the report’s release, Smith said Thursday, “Informal and Freedom of Information Act release of such information is rare. Under two known gag orders — punishable by imprisonment — U.S. security-cleared government agency employees and contractors may not disclose that Israel has a nuclear weapons program.”

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s planned address before the US Congress was controversially arranged by Republican leadership without consultation of congressional Democrats or the White House.

The speech will occur weeks before Netanyahu will seek reelection, and is to center around his opposition to any agreement with Iran over its [civilian] nuclear program, a deal the US — while levying heavy sanctions on Tehran — has pursued despite protests from its preeminent ally [sic] in the Middle East, Israel.

Tehran’s nuclear program is legal under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Israel is one of the few United Nations members that is not a signatory.

February 13, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chapel Hill Shooting and the ‘New Atheist’ Neocons

By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | February 11, 2015

A terrible crime has happened in North Carolina – three young Muslim university students were shot dead ‘execution-style’ in their Chapel Hill apartment on Tuesday.

Police have arrested and charged 46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks with the brutal murders, a man known for posting anti-religion comments online and whose Facebook page is riddled with pictures of and quotes from his ‘New Atheist’ heroes Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher.

The cops are conveniently saying that the Muslim students were not targeted because of their faith, but rather a “parking dispute.”

How bizarre.

“It was execution style, a bullet in every head,” the father of the two deceased girls told the media, insisting that “this was not a dispute over a parking space, this was a hate crime.”

The suspected killer was an avowed ‘anti-theist’ who admired Richard Dawkins, the famed British atheist author and poster boy of the ‘New Atheist’ movement. But police are reticent to link the suspected shooter’s anti-religious attitudes to the odious events in Chapel Hill.

Muslims cannot be portrayed as victims of a vicious hate crime ­­– that would fall too far outside the boundaries of the neocon-induced popular discourse which always presents Muslims as violent, irrational aggressors. Muslims as victims of a lethal hate crime is not politically palatable at the present time when America and its subservient lackeys are executing a war of attrition against the Islamic world, which explains why the cops are avoiding that angle at all costs.

This tragic shooting brings the ‘New Atheist’ movement into focus. Other prominent ‘New Atheists’ include the aforementioned Bill Maher, Sam Harris and the deceased Christopher Hitchens. What all of these characters have in common is an unreserved and unabashed disdain for Islam in particular. Critics have noted that a very large portion of New Atheists’ criticisms of religion is aimed squarely at Islam, leading some to believe that they are political propagandists rather than true free thinkers.

The ‘New Atheist’ movement has little to do with encouraging skepticism and critical thought. It is in actuality an insidious offshoot of neoconservatism, hence the movement’s obsession with disparaging Islam and Muslims. Another notable characteristic of the New Atheists, which coincides nicely with their neocon antecedents, is their proclivity for philosemitism and pro-Israel evangelism – odd for people claiming to oppose ‘all religion.’

We dislike and disavow all religions, but we don’t have a problem with Judaism or the ‘Jewish State of Israel,’ the New Atheists whisper under their breath, hoping their followers don’t notice the brazen contradiction.

Bill Maher calls himself a “big supporter of Israel.” The Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu frequents his television talk show Real Time. Sam Harris, the author of a number of books on atheism and religion, has said that Jews are the “least of the least offenders” when it comes to acting on irrational religious beliefs. In a 2014 blog post titled “Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?” Harris tells us that the Palestinians are to blame for their own murderous mistreatment by the Zionist Jews. In the same article Harris concedes that Jewish religious texts, particularly the books of Leviticus, Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, are “the most repellent, the most sickeningly unethical documents to be found in any religion. They’re worse than the Koran. They’re worse than any part of the New Testament.” While Harris acknowledges the obvious, he excuses it by saying that few Jews take those doctrines seriously or act upon them. He fails to provide any evidence for the assertion that most Jews disregard the Old Testament’s bloodthirsty edicts and he clearly hasn’t familiarized himself with the Babylonian Talmud, which also contains incitement to genocide against non-Jews. “Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed,” reads the Talmud. “The Jews are called human beings, but the non-Jews are not humans. They are beasts,” says Judaism’s ‘holiest book.’

Prominent rabbis have echoed these malignant Talmudic sentiments. Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the godfather of the extremist ‘Chabad’ sect, openly proclaimed that non-Jews have evil souls “with no redeeming qualities whatsoever… All Jews are innately good, all Gentiles are innately evil.” The difference between the souls of Jews and non-Jews is “greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle,” declared Rabbi Abraham Kook, a revered sage of the Jewish religion. At the funeral of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler who gunned down 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque, a prominent Israeli rabbi said, “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” In 2010, Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, told his followers that, “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel.” In his 1939 book A Program for the Jews, a rabbi named Harry Waton suggests that Jews are “the highest and most cultured people on earth” who have a right to “subordinate to themselves the rest of mankind and to be the masters over the whole earth.”

The New Atheists don’t seem to lose any sleep over the fact that the Jewish religion holds Jews up as a superior ‘chosen people’ above all others who are destined to accrue all of the world’s wealth, as stipulated most vividly in the Old Testament book of Isaiah.

In an April 2009 C-SPAN interview, Christopher Hitchens, the ‘New Atheist’ former Trotskyite and Iraq war enthusiast, attributed his bellicose neoconservative views to the fact that after the 9/11 attacks some people were saying “the American Jews or the Israeli Jews blew up the World Trade Centre.” Hitchens apparently sensed a career opportunity in coming to the defence of Zionists who stand accused of involvement in 9/11. On another C-SPAN program Hitchens bemoaned a caller’s suggestion that Israel has too much influence in American politics. In addition to shielding Zionists from charges of false flag terrorism and undue political clout, the posh ideologue routinely evangelized in favour of wars in the Muslim world that ultimately served to benefit Israel. It is not hard to understand why.

It is also not particularly arduous to locate the cause of the pro-Zionist inclinations of many New Atheists – they harbour Jewish backgrounds. Maher, Harris and Hitchens all have Jewish roots. Dawkins is a classic example of a ‘Sabbath Goy,’ a well-paid lackey of the Zionists. The Brit showcased his aptitude at singing from the Zionist hymn sheet when he famously equated creationists with ‘Holocaust deniers,’ affirming his blind belief in and subservience to the West’s state-enforced religion.

While some prominent New Atheists occasionally criticize the more extreme elements within Judaism, their infrequent and feeble inferences in that direction reveal the hidden pro-Zionist agenda underpinning their incessant, narrow attacks on Islam. Apart from their ethnic biases, they all know that in order to procure riches by proselytizing anti-religionism to the masses one cannot afford to offend Organized Jewry in the process. “Jews totally run Hollywood,” according to the Jewish journalist Joel Stein. “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 concluded in a gutsy 2008 column for the Los Angeles Times, affirming the “dominant” position of Jews in Tinsel Town and Wall Street. Stein forgot to mention the publishing industry which is likewise a Zionist dominated enterprise.

All of this clarifies the reality that the ‘New Atheists’ are lackluster intellectuals motivated purely by greed and opportunism. As ‘guardians of Zion,’ we can assuredly expect these dedicated ‘free thinkers’ to continue to deny the very real threat of Jewish extremism and continue to inflate the counterfeit menace posed by Islamic theocrats.

Beware the neocon ‘New Atheists.’

Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez

February 12, 2015 Posted by | Islamophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia the world’s last line of defence against Isramerica’s murderous grand design

By Greg Felton | February 8, 2015

The world is heading for war. The Isramerican empire is funneling tons of heavy weaponry into Ukraine to provoke Russia into launching a defensive attack, and then that response will be used to justify starting a major war. It is a waste of time trying to find any intelligent discussion in the mainstream corporate media of why the U.S. wants to provoke war with Russia. Its job is to cover up and falsify, not report. For example, take the following well-known acts of violence.

Despite what the media told us at the time, we know that the collapse of World Trade Centre had nothing to do with Muslim anger, and the Boston Marathon bombing had nothing to do with Chechen terrorism. These three events, among others, were executed with such clumsiness that they should have immediately been exposed as frauds, but they worked because their simplistic cause-and-effect narrative, black-and-white morality and shock value stampeded the public into doing what was expected: embrace official anti-Muslim bloodlust, self-identify with the officially approved victims, and, most importantly, accept the need to sacrifice liberty for security, as in this official declaration.

If we look at the Charlie Hebdo shooting synoptically with the Boston Marathon bombing and the World Trade Centre/Pentagon attack, Isramerica’s handiwork in Ukraine becomes frighteningly obvious. These seemingly discrete false-flag attacks fit together to reveal a coherent pattern of deliberate, Isramerican subversion that is now being played out in Ukraine.

Debunking the cover story

The Charlie Hebdo shooting had nothing to do with anti-Westernism or press freedom. It was executed with such clumsiness that no sentient being could possibly buy the cover story that our organs of orthodoxy shamelessly regurgitated.

First of all, the identification of the two black balaclava-wearing shooters is not credible—an identity card of one of them fortuitously found in a car. If the shooters took pains to conceal their identity so completely, such carelessness is implausible. More likely, the card was planted to implicate the shooters, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, just like the pristine passport identifying one of the “hijackers” that just happened to found among the rubble of the World Trade Centre. To date, no positive ID of the Charlie Hebdo shooters has been made.

Second, the idea that Muslims committed murder over defamatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad is unsupported. We have only video of two unidentified people claiming, in Arabic, to be avenging the Prophet, but we have no proof that these men are Muslims. They could just as easily be Musllim impersonators. Besides, if Muslims felt that strongly about the cartoons, they should have gone after the staff of the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. In 2006, the newspaper’s cultural editor Flemming Rose commissioned defamatory cartoons, but perhaps no avenging attack took place because Rose is a zionist Jew with close ties to Daniel Pipes.

Third, we have a smoking gun, literally, that proves the Charlie Hebdo attack was staged. The video below shows one of the masked “Muslim” shooters killing a Paris police officer who is lying on the sidewalk. As this footage and commentary show, the killing is a badly staged hoax.

Finally, we come to the issue of press freedom, the shibboleth used to inflame democratic passions about journalism, especially the freedom to satirize. As if on cue, the “je suis Charlie” crusade erupted and had people all over the world commiserating with their fallen fourth-estate brethren and bemoaning an assault on one of the sacred institutions of a free Western society. But this sentiment is unjustifiable. First, the cartoons in question fail to meet the definition of satire:

“Satire is a technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society by using humour, irony, exaggeration or ridicule. It intends to improve humanity by criticizing its follies and foibles. A writer in a satire uses fictional characters, which stand for real people.” (http://literarydevices.net/satire/)

Gratuitous, defamatory renderings of the Prophet Muhammad serve no useful purpose, cannot improve humanity and contain no irony or humour. Therefore we have no business treating them as legitimate forms of journalistic expression. Second, France arrested dozens of people on charges of “defending terrorism” because they verbally satrized the shooting. Those arrested include a 14-year-old girl as well as three school workers who allegedly refused to observe a moment of silence.

I am tempted to say that the staff at Charlie Hebdo brought the attack upon themselves through their ignorance and arrogance, but that would feed the propaganda, as was the case with the WTC/Pentagon attack, that Muslims were to blame for a mass murder.

To see the machinations behind the attack, let us gag the “je suis Charlie” reflex, tune out the lamentations about press freedom and reject the nonsensical Muslim revenge causality. For it to make sense we need to approach it from the point of view of who benefited—cui bono? as the Romans used to say. Going from effect to cause negates the sense-dulling effect of official anti-Muslim propaganda and shows the attack to be not an act of direct violence against French civilians but an act of indirect intimidation against the French government.

Disobeying the empire

In the week and a half leading up to the Jan. 7, 2015, Charlie Hebdo attack, the government of François Hollande committed two acts of disobedience against the Isramerican empire.

The first occurred on Dec. 29, 2014, in the UN Security Council when France chose to stand with the civilized word in support of Palestinian statehood. There was no reason to oppose the motion. It was rational, logical, fair and just. But for Israel a successful vote would have been disastrous because Israel requires unfettered power to terrorize and murder the region’s native Palestinian population and steal their land to set up illegal Jewish colonies. A vote to acknowledge Palestine as a state would have been a lethal challenge to Israel’s raison d’être. In November 2014, Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu went so far as to threaten France with grave consequences should it vote for Palestinian statehood.

The second came a week later when Hollande announced France would end economic sanctions against Russia, sanctions that the empire demanded because of events in Ukraine. France was in the forefront of the European anti-sanctions movement, and therefore posed a real threat to Israel’s plans to destabilize Middle Eastern regimes.

The grand design that animates Israel’s lethal Middle East policy was defined as far back as 1982 by Oden Yinon, a journalist formerly attached to Israel’s foreign ministry. In an article entitled A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, he gave a candid depiction of Israel’s imperial objectives, which we still see unfolding today. The article reads, in part:

The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.…

In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon.

While the Cold War was on, Israel could do nothing overtly subversive, but after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991, the Yinon Plan became doable. That fact became clear immediately after the WTC/Pentagon attack. On CBS’s Meet the Press host Tim Russert, showed an embarrassed Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld his own notes from 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, which proved he wanted to frame Saddam Hussein for the attack:

best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]…. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.

The need to frame Hussein was corroborated by George W. Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke:

The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, “I want you to find whether Iraq did this.” Now he never said, “Make it up,” but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this…“Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.” And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer.

Iraq has been largely destroyed based on a fabricated premise. The next victim to fall would be Libya; now it’s Syria’s turn. As the next sections show, The Yinon Plan is the backdrop against which the Charlie Hebdo shooting must be understood.

Russia, Syria and the Yinon Plan

Overall, Israel’s main target in the Yinon Plan is Iran because it could soon have its own nuclear power capability, thus breaking Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly and weakening its ability to use it to blackmail European governments into acquiescing in the genocide of Palestine. Sabre-rattling, disinformation and sanctions have so far failed to intimidate Iran, and when taken together with its geographical location has meant that more attention is being paid to Iran’s ally, Syria.

In spring 2011, Isramerica’s assault on Syria become overt with the formation of the Free Syrian Army, ostensibly an indigenous rebel force against the authoritarian Assad regime. In reality, it’s not Syrian and it’s not indigenous. It’s a foreign insurgency designed to foment unrest and overthrow Assad in favour of a leader more to Isramerica’s liking. The leader of the FSA is Media al-Harati, a Dublin-based Libyan who had been head of the Tripoli Army Brigade after the overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi. Adding to its illegitimacy are its organizers. The attendees at a Syrian opposition conference on July 6, 2011, in Saint-Germain, France, included:

  • Bernard-Henri Lévy, zionist philosopher;
  • Bernard Kouchner, former French foreign minister and a major proponent of war on Iraq;
  • Frederick Ansel, member of the youth wing of Israel’s Likud Party; and
  • Alex Goldfarb, former Knesset member and advisor to former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Significantly, nobody felt the need to challenge Goldfarb’s credentials as a member of the Syrian opposition or as a spokesman for the group “Democratic Change in Syria,” probably because the meeting was chaired by Zionists.

The key event that was supposed to stampede the world into abetting the overthrow of Assad was a deadly sarin gas “attack” in a Damascus suburb on Aug. 21, 2013. Instantly and without evidence, the Syrian Army was blamed and Obama was expected to authorize invasion because he had said that use of chemical weapons was “a red line” that Assad could not cross without repercussions.

The Israeli imperial influence here is obvious: Netanyahu used that exact cliché in a Sept. 27, 2012, speech to the UN when he said Iran would cross a “red line” if its nuclear enrichment of Uranium reached 20 per cent. Moreover, a pre-emptive assault on Syria by sea-based U.S. Tomahawk missiles had been on the drawing board, leaving open the question of whether the sarin gas attack was really designed to justify a foregone conclusion. It was not be the first time a mass murder was used to rationalize an aggression: The USA PATRIOT Act, written and robotically passed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack was in fact drafted the previous month by Philip Zelikow. Soon after the attack

Just as Muslims had nothing to do with bringing down the World Trade Center or ventilating the Pentagon, Syria had nothing to do with the attack. The sarin belonged to the Isramerican insurgents and was supplied by Saudi Arabia. Even after the case against Assad blew up in the U.S.’s face, Obama was still trapped by his inflammatory rhetoric, and the Yinon Plan seemed poised to claim another victim after Iraq and Libya. Then, Putin came up with a face-saving diplomatic solution for Obama that ruined everything. He offered to support a UN Security Council resolution that would have Syria surrender its chemical weapons to UN inspectors in exchange for a promise from Obama not to bomb.

Putin’s Sept. 11, 2013, opinion piece in the New York Times was a plea for statesmanship over sadism, and as such amounted to a frontal assault on the Yinon Plan.

From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos… It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”… We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.… If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues. [my emphasis]

If the Yinon Plan were to succeed, Russian moderation and power would have to be weakened considerably.

Ukraine’s fascist coup

What didn’t work for Isramerica in Syria finally did work in Ukraine. A year ago this month, the legitimate government of Viktor Yanukovitch was overthrown in a coup that brought to power the pro-Western, pro-NATO, neo-fascist régime of Arkadiy Yatsenyuk. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland even boasted that the U.S. spent $5 billion to subvert the Yanukovich government and its eastward-looking pro-Western politics, even though former White House resident George W. Bush promised to Putin that the U.S. would not interfere in Ukraine. Nuland is married to Robert Kagan, who comes from a leading Jewish Isramerican family.

The coup was pure stagecraft. After it happened and Yankuovich was forced to flee for his life, the empire and its media mouthpieces reinvented the coup as a “democratic, Ukrainian revolution” and proceded to regurgitate a spate of anti-Putiin/anti-Russian propaganda. One extreme case was a clumsily fabricated story in the New York Times about Russian special forces invading eastern Ukraine to start an uprising. Just two days later on April 20, 2014, the Times issued a half-assed retraction because the sheer ineptitude of the story had made it indefensible.

It turns out the Russian troops didn’t invade; they were already in Ukraine under an international treaty, and Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the treaty allowed for up to 25,000 Russian troops. Moreover, Putin only mobilized Russian forces to defend Russia’s security and to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Crimea who wanted to flee the fascist coup. Russia did not take any aggressive action.

One of the few informed writers on the coup in Ukraine, investigative journalist Robert Parry, ties it to the larger issue of implementing the Yinon Plan:

Since their current strategic necessity is to scuttle the fragile negotiations over Syria and Iran, which otherwise might negate the possibility of U.S. military strikes against those two countries, the Putin-Obama collaboration had to go. By spurring on the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, the neocons helped touch off a cascade of events – now including Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and its annexation by Russia – that have raised tensions and provoked Western retaliation against Russia. The crisis also has made the continued Obama-Putin teamwork on Syria and Iran extremely difficult, if not impossible.

On Dec. 11, 2014, the Israel-occupied U.S. Congress passed Russian Sanction Bill H.R. 5859, without it having been read or debated. Just over three weeks later. French President François Hollande repudiated the sanctions. Two days latter, 12 members of Charlie Hebdo were murdered.

The Common Russian Denominator

The execution of the Charlie Hebdo attack is reminiscent of the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing: Two brothers were accused of a shock mass killing; their motives were contrived and illogical; both were Muslims; police set out to execute them afterwards; and Isramerica was the only beneficiary. Dzhokhar Tsarnayev, one of the Boston marathon bombers, somehow managed to survive. Although he was severely wounded, he is expected to be fit for his show trial this April.

One significant difference in the two attacks, though, is the ethnicity of the brothers. Saïd and Chérif Kouachi were French citizens of Algerian heritage; Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are Chechens. Setting up Franco-Algerians as patsies for a false-flag attack does not seem out of character for Isramerica, but setting up Chechens is another matter.

The U.S. had been up to its eyes in anti-Russian subversive activity since 1991 when the Dzhokar Dudaev government in Chechnya declared independence from the Russian federation. From 1994 to 1996 Russia and Chechnya were at war and then again from 1999 to 2009, but fighting in the North Caucasus persists. Seeing an opportunity to undermine Putin’s rule, the U.S. and the U.K. began funneling money and support to various secessionist ethnic groups in the region.

For example, the Jamestown Foundation, a CIA front founded in 1984 by former CIA Chief William Casey, is affiliated with the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, which puts on seminars and conferences to foment anti-Putin activism. Between January and July 2012, Georgian intelligence reported that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was in the capital Tblisi attending some of these seminars, a fact that got little to no attention in the stage-managed post-bombing propaganda.

Given the importance of the Chechen independence movement, it made no obvious sense to set Chechens up to look like terrorists, especially the Tsarnaev brothers. Moreover, these brothers had had a relationship with the FBI going back at least two years. Given that not one but two parts of the U.S. security apparatus knew who the brothers were and that they posed no threat, the idea that they set off the bombs is implausible.

The only way the Boston Marathon bombing makes a lick of sense is as a political gambit—a false flag attack that was an indirect message to Putin to convince him to roll over on Assad: “We made Chechens look like terrorists, so now you stop blocking our attempts to attack Syria.”

In the hierarchy of the Yinon Plan, Chechnya doesn’t register, so sacrificing a peripheral activity to get at Syria seemed like sacrifice worth making even though it didn’t work.

Note that the sarin gas attack in Damascus, occurred just four months after the Boston Marathon bombing, which raises the question of whether it would have been necessary if Putin had done as Isramerica wanted.

At any rate, we only “know” the Tsarnaev brothers committed the bombing because we were told they did, just as we were told the Kouachi brothers shot up Charlie Hebdo.

In fact, the backpacks that contained the bombs belonged to the mercenary security/ murder-for-hire outfit Craft International. As I wrote in May 2013, no agency admitted to hiring Craft and of course no mainstream news agency would touch this angle. At the time, though, New Hampshire State Senator Sheila Tremblay said that a black ops team was behind the bombing, but she was later pressured into issuing a political apology, the standard punishment meted out to anyone who has the poor judgment to expose imperial deceptions.

2013_05_09 Craft1

Are these the real bombers? Click here for enlargement and commentary.

Executing the Yinon Plan drives everything Isramerica does in the Middle East, and it is the only motive that can explain the Boston Marathon bombing, sarin gas attack, the coup in Ukraine, and Charlie Hebdo shooting. To get at Iran, Isramerica focused its attention on Syria. To get at Syria it first has to isolate and weaken Russia.

We are headed to something approaching another major European war if Isramerica and its puppet regimes can effectively poison the world against Russia.

February 12, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Water running dry for Palestinians as Israel turns off the taps

By Jessica Purkiss | MEMO | February 11, 2015

In the northern Jordan Valley last week, Israeli forces destroyed a 1,000 metre pipeline built to provide water to Palestinian communities. In East Jerusalem, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been cut off from a regular supply of running water for nearly a year. In Gaza, the water infrastructure has been decimated and in the homes that do receive water it is still undrinkable. Water and who controls it has become a key part of Israel’s occupation, with the Palestinian territories; West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, in a constant struggle for the vital resource.

Before the birth of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the country’s first president, said in 1919: “[It is] of vital importance not only to secure all water resources already feeding the country, but also to control them at their source.” Rafael Eitan, chief of staff and minister of agriculture and environment, said some years later: “Israel must hold on to the West Bank to make sure that Tel Aviv’s taps don’t run dry.”

Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 1998: “And when I talk about the importance to Israel’s security… It means that a housewife in Tel Aviv can open the tap and there’s water running to it, and it’s not been dried up because of a rash decision that handed over control of our aquifers to the wrong hands.”

In 1967, the year the occupation began, Israel put the plan Weizmann had talked about as early as 1919 into action. All Palestinian water resources were declared Israeli State Property and Palestinians had to apply for permits to develop their water resources. After nearly 30 years, the Oslo Accords were signed, supposedly bringing an end to the situation. Another 20 years on, it is apparent that they instead formalised and legitimised an existing discriminatory arrangement – an arrangement still in place today.

In the West Bank, the Jordan River, one of the main water sources, has been diverted upstream into Lake Kinneret/Tiberias/Sea of Galilee – lakes inside Israel, while Palestinians are physically barred from accessing its river banks. Palestinians have access to one fifth of the mountain aquifer, the other main source, while Israel abstracts the balance, and in addition overdraws by more than 50 per cent, up to 1.8 times its share under Oslo.

The Separation Wall, roadblocks, checkpoints and other Israeli ‘security measures’ further restrict Palestinian communities’ access to water resources and filling points. Meanwhile Israeli settlers living in the same territory are supplied with an abundance of water; the consumption of more than 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank is about six times higher than that of 2.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

To boost insufficient supplies, the Palestinians must buy water from Israel’s national water company “Mekorot” – the same water that Israel extracts from the mountain aquifer and which the Palestinians should be able to extract for themselves.

Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Stop the Wall campaign, an organisation which is part of a network of groups challenging Mekorot, said: “The real water problem in Palestine is not about scarcity of water. There is more annual rainfall in Ramallah than in London and per capita consumption of water in Israel is higher than the average consumption in Europe. The water problem in Palestine is created by Israel, through systematic theft of water and denial of access to water. Mekorot is the core player in implementing what we call Israel’s water apartheid.”

For East Jerusalem residents the situation is slightly different. East Jerusalem fell under Israeli jurisdiction after Israel annexed the whole of the city. The Jerusalemite Palestinians pay taxes to Israel and also technically qualify for Israeli healthcare, social benefits and services – including running water. However, the neighbourhoods of Ras Shehada, Ras Khamis, Dahyat A’salam and the Shuafat refugee camp have been suffering from a severe water crisis since last March when residents went three weeks without any water supply. They have been forced to buy water bottles at a high cost, and must limit their consumption by using electric pumps and industrial containers.

In Gaza, the water infrastructure is in pieces as a result of repeated wars and a blockade which has prevented repairs and maintenance. By the end of the latest bombardment over the summer, around 26 water wells had been completely or partially destroyed, while 46 kilometres of the water supply networks had been damaged, according to a statement by the Palestinian Water Authority. The water distribution network suffered an estimated $34.4 million worth of damage.

Waste water treatment is another longstanding problem in Gaza. Many residents are not connected to a sewage system and domestic waste flows into cesspits, contaminating groundwater. Electricity shortages and damages to waste water treatment facilities during “Operation Cast Lead”, Israel’s 2008-2009 military offensive, made the situation worse – some 90 million litres of untreated sewage flows into the Mediterranean daily.

Prior to the recent attack, 97 per cent of residents in Gaza were connected to a public water system. However, 90 per cent of this was undrinkable and so residents were forced to buy water treated in governmental or private factories, or factories run by charities. The public water system means households can have running water; however electricity and fuel shortages prevent the water from being pumped through the system.

Access to water is a highly politicised and manipulated resource in Palestine. As Palestinian communities suffer – albeit through the destruction of their wells, through water that doesn’t come through the taps, or sewage that flows into the street – it is clear that, in Palestine, water is not a right.

February 11, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Boycott Hamas, brand Hezbollah terrorists, don’t trust Iran…

By Stuart Littlewood | Intifada-Palestine | February 10, 2015

Every general election brings with it the irksome task of reading the manifestos of the political parties. Now the Board of Deputies of British Jews have launched their very own “Jewish Manifesto”. The 40-page document is intended to persuade policy-makers and politicians to promote key aspects of Jewish life in Britain and do some big favours for the abhorrent Zionist regime in Tel Aviv

“It will form the centrepiece of the Board’s drive to ensure that all the political parties take the concerns of Britain’s 300,000-strong Jewish community into account when setting out their own proposals for government.”

Favours we are asked to do for the Rogue State

At the heart of the Manifesto is a list of “policy asks”, some of which attempt to demonise Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran and portray them as Britain’s enemies as well as Israel’s.

Others aim to perpetuate Israeli dominance in the Holy Land at the Palestinians’ expense, like this one from the ‘Ten Commitments’:

  • “Advocate for a permanent, comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, resulting in a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state.”

The Board of Deputies explicitly state that the UK Jewish community is committed to equality for Israel and the Palestinians, yet here they want us to press for a “secure” Israel with Palestine only “viable”. And that has become the mantra among Israel’s stooges in the West. We know what it will mean on the ground, and it’s despicable. Why should the Palestinians, whose land it is, live in permanent fear and subjugation, defenceless among the shredded and disconnected remnants of their territory and not even in control of their borders? Let’s turn it round so we have “a secure Palestine alongside a viable Israeli state”. How do the Board of Deputies like the sound of that?

Here are a few more Manifesto gems…

  • They want restitution for private property the Nazis stole during the Holocaust leaving many survivors living in dire poverty and without a legacy for the descendants.

This is a very cruel injustice. But what about all the land, homes, other property, infrastructure and natural resources the Jewish State confiscated from the Palestinians during the Nakba and continued to seize ever since? When will that be returned? According to the UN, last year alone Israel demolished the homes of 1,177 Palestinians in Jerusalem and West Bank (never mind the countless thousands of homes they reduced to rubble in Gaza).

They don’t like to see Israel boycotted.

  • “We urge resistance of calls for boycotts of Israel. By their very nature, such measures attribute blame to only one side of the conflict, and through this stigmatisation they perpetuate a one-sided narrative.”

At the same time they want our help in boycotting Palestinians.

  • The Manifesto urges the British government “to refuse to engage with Hamas politicians, officials or supporters until the movement agrees to recognise Israel, abide by previous diplomatic agreements, and desists from terrorist attacks”.

Are the Board of Deputies aware that Israel refuses to recognise the Palestinian State, has failed to honour previous agreements and never ceases its terrorist attacks? Are they also aware that the UK does not list Hamas’s political wing as a proscribed organisation, only its military wing – the Izz al-Din al-Qassem brigades.

The boycott of Israel simply calls for non-violent measures that should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall

2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

There’s nothing controversial. The same is required of Israel by international and humanitarian law.

Other bizarre “asks” include these:

  • The Manifesto wants us to “promote awareness of the acute threats to Israeli and regional security, and encourage further security cooperation between the UK and Israel”.

Many experts conclude that the main threat to Middle East peace is Israel itself. It would be foolish to be drawn into closer co-operation. Our already slavish support for Israel (and indeed its protector, the US) undermines our own security, puts UK citizens in harm’s way and blackens our reputation. It is hard to see how this is in our national interest.

  • The Manifesto says the world must ensure “no backsliding towards an Iranian military nuclear capability… it is vital that Iran knows that there is a credible military option to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons if diplomacy should fail”.

The Zionist regime is reckoned to have up to 400 nuclear warheads. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It has not signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. In short, Israel is the neighbour from Hell.

These endless attempts to drive a wedge between Britain and Iran are tiresome. Israel would love to launch a war against Iran if support from the US and its EU lackeys was assured. Iran has no nuclear weapons and poses no threat to the UK. What’s more, our Iranian friends are menaced by an unrestrained nuclear-armed Israeli regime on their doorstep. UN Security Council resolution 487, in 1981, called on Israel “urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards”. Israel has defied it for 34 years. In 2009, the IAEA called on Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection. Israel still refuses while Iran has complied.

  • “Years of disingenuity and obfuscation from the Iranian authorities should not be naively forgotten.”

So says the Manifesto, oblivious to the staggering hypocrisy.

The “violent nature” of Hezbollah

For a long time Israel has planned to annex Lebanon’s Litani River. Hezbollah (the ‘party of God’) was formed in response to the Israelis’ 1982 invasion and occupation. An international commission concluded that Israel’s aggression was contrary to international law, the government of Israel had no valid reasons for invading Lebanon and Israel was directly or indirectly responsible for the massacres in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, declared an act of genocide by the UN General Assembly.

So Hezbollah came into being for very good reasons. Israel began overflying Lebanese territory in 2000 after its troops vacated parts of southern Lebanon they had occupied since 1978. These flights are a constant provocation. In 2006 Israel launched another invasion and received a bloody nose from Hezbollah. The conflict killed over six thousand people and severely damaged Lebanese infrastructure. Much of Southern Lebanon was left uninhabitable due to unexploded Israeli cluster bombs.

The Jewish Manifesto talks of Hezbollah’s “violent nature” but in the circumstances how valid is this next “ask”?

  • It wants Hezbollah in its entirety designated as a terrorist organisation, and asks the UK to take the lead in getting the whole EU to proscribe Hezbollah’s political wing.

Lebanon’s Cabinet has confirmed Hezbollah as an armed organisation with the right to “liberate or recover occupied lands”. Israel routinely breaches UN Resolution 1701 by crossing the Blue Line or violating Lebanese airspace and still occupies the Shebaa Farms area. Hezbollah is hardly going to disband with Israel next door always poised to grab what isn’t theirs.

Why should the UK take on another of Israel’s enemies and try to weaken Lebanon’s defence against the Zionist predator?

In case we forget, the US defines terrorism as an activity that

(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and

(ii) appears to be intended

  • to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
  • to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
  • to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.

Anyone spring immediately to mind?

  • The Manifesto also asks Britain to maintain an expenditure of 0.7% of GNP on overseas development.

So that so we continue to subsidise the Zionists’ never-ending occupation of Palestine?

  • It urges us to “support efforts to remember and understand the Holocaust and strive to prevent any future genocide”.

Most ordinary people in the UK (though not necessarily our politicians) have taken on-board the lessons of the Holocaust and don’t need constant reminding. How about the Israeli regime?

The ‘Israel problem’ a Jewish family matter

Finally, this ‘hot potato’:

  • July 2014 was the worst month for anti-semitism on record, presumably on account of another murderous assault on Gaza by the Israeli military. “A robust political and policing response is required when criticism of the policies of a government spills over in to hatred, intimidation or violence against a religious or ethnic group” ..

Prime Minister Cameron’s Holocaust Commission Report says: “The Community Security Trust, an organisation that looks after the safety and security needs of the Jewish community, recorded more than 1,000 incidents last year, making 2014 the worst year on record.”

Do Jewish leaders in the UK need reminding that Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land have suffered a high tide of hatred, intimidation, violence and worse for decades under Israel’s brutal occupation?

We’re told that anti-semitism is often bound up with perceptions of the political and military decisions of the Israeli government, and that Israel represents a fundamental component of Jewish identity. In that case, one would have thought, Israel’s appalling conduct – and damage to reputation – is something the global Jewish family would wish to deal with themselves. Wise heads have warned long enough that Jews worldwide will pay the price for Israel’s crimes. Many Jews, to their great credit, have taken heed and faced up to the moral challenge, and are now fiercely critical of the Israeli regime’s behaviour.

For example, over 400 rabbis from Israel, the USA, Canada, Britain and other countries have just signed a call to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop the practice of home demolitions. “Every year, hundreds of Palestinian homes are demolished due to discriminatory administrative plans created and implemented by the Israel military without significant Palestinian influence. Palestinians are very rarely allowed to build, even on their own land.”

That’s leadership.

February 11, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

HRW: ‘No Position for or against the War’

Reflections on HRW and Amnesty International

By Bruno Jantti | teleSUR | February 9, 2015

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has just published its 25th annual report. World Report 2015 runs 644 pages, reviewing human rights situation in over 90 countries.

HRW’s Executive Director Kenneth Roth laments what the organization labels as a “circle-the-wagon approach to human rights.” According to Roth, “Human rights violations played a major role in spawning or aggravating many of today’s crises,” highlighting that “[p]rotecting human rights and ensuring democratic accountability are key to resolving them.”

Fine. Considering the report’s analysis on the human rights climate in the Middle East, however, one cannot but notice how HRW is quite careful in dealing with the subtleties of advocating for respect for human rights, on one hand, yet conveniently dismissing the issue of U.S. power in the region, on the other.

Although its clout is in decline, the U.S. is the most influential external power operating in the Middle East. Besides the immensely destructive U.S. invasion of Iraq, the military footprint of the U.S. in the Middle East is substantial. The U.S. has a permanent deployment of its military personnel in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi-Arabia, Turkey and Egypt.

For an American NGO seeking to raise the profile of human rights, one obvious question regarding the U.S. and the Middle East could be, for starters: How much is there room for improvement in the region’s human rights climate if the U.S. continues to back states that it deems sympathetic to U.S. foreign policy interests — such as Saudi-Arabia, Israel and Egypt — and which happen to be among the worst human rights violators in the world?

The question of the legitimacy of U.S. power in the Middle East is of primary importance. Here are some basic factors to consider.

First of all, as far as one can tell from the available data and research on public opinion in Middle Eastern countries, there is little popular support for, and quite a bit of opposition to, U.S. hegemony. Secondly, economic wealth and political power are highly concentrated and the degree of militarization and the number of armed conflicts is exceptionally high in the Middle East. Thirdly, most of the regional powers are close U.S. allies which are able to continue to breach human rights partly due to massive U.S. backing.

This might lead to the conclusion that the U.S. influence in the region is not a bed of roses. But despite its startling simplicity, this equation is nowhere to be seen in the domestic U.S. political discourse, not even in the human rights camp. HRW is indeed able to criticize particular aspects of U.S. foreign policy, including its foreign policy in the Middle East, but HRW avoids touching the overriding issue of the legitimacy of U.S. clout in the region. Nonetheless, given the realities outlined above, it is a no-brainer that the U.S. cannot under any stretch of the imagination maintain such clout without being in fundamental conflict with realization of human rights and democratic principles.

No state has been able — nor probably willing — to exercise power in an area outside of its borders against the will of the area’s population while simultaneously respecting and enforcing human rights. This should be obvious. Hence, an American human rights organization that merely demands that U.S. adheres to the principles of human rights ends up lacking credibility, for such a demand rings hollow if the broader question of U.S.-imposed influence is not addressed.

After the Second Intifada had erupted, I became one of Amnesty International’s (AI) country coordinators on Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories. Before I joined the AI team, I had come to the conclusion that conventional human rights work would serve the cause of Palestinian self-determination. I was wrong.

Our group, and AI as a whole, was calling on Israel to abide by international law. I still agree with that. But the Israel-Palestine conflict is a political conflict and highly political topics may or may not be resolvable by the mere enforcement of human rights and international law. To illustrate, rather than demanding an immediate end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, AI simply asks Israel to respect human rights in the territories. But to ask a state which maintains a military occupation of an area against the will of the people in that area to merely respect human rights seems absurd — somewhat as useful as asking a mugger to be polite.

I still tried to make it work. Everything will be fine if we all just adhere to the law, respect human rights and never breach anything that the Fourth Geneva Convention states.

Then I began to notice stumbling blocks that were completely unjustifiable. AI would be quite willing to accuse Palestinian armed groups of crimes against humanity, yet letting Israel off the hook with just the “excessive use of force” accusation. Observing this was a turning point.

In 2004, for example, AI’s press release stated on attacks carried out by armed Palestinian groups:

“Such deliberate attacks against civilians, which have been widespread, systematic and in furtherance of a stated policy to attack the civilian population, constitute crimes against humanity, as defined by Article 7 (1) and (2)(a) of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal.”

How come AI was so reluctant to use the same terminology when describing Israel’s conduct? To this day, no satisfactory answer has been provided since no satisfactory answer exists.

Since I left the AI country coordinator team, not much has changed. AI and HRW still produce top-notch research on human rights violations and legal aspects of various wars and conflicts, yet their political analysis remains as inadequate as it was back in the days when I was at AI.

To conclude, here is what HRW’s Kenneth Roth wrote about U.S. invasion of Iraq:

“Human Rights Watch ordinarily takes no position on whether a state should go to war. The issues involved usually extend beyond our mandate, and a position of neutrality maximizes our ability to press all parties to a conflict to avoid harming noncombatants. — Because the Iraq war was not mainly about saving the Iraqi people from mass slaughter, and because no such slaughter was then ongoing or imminent, Human Rights Watch at the time took no position for or against the war.”

I rest my case.

February 10, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel lobby: Attendance mandatory at Netanyahu speech

Press TV – February 9, 2015

Several pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States have threatened to “publicly condemn” Democrats who plan to skip the Israeli prime minister’s speech about Iran before Congress next month.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s well-funded Jewish conservative backers say they may use their funds to draw attention in the districts and states of any Democratic lawmaker who is not at the US Capitol to listen to Netanyahu on March 3.

Netanyahu has been invited by House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner to address a joint session of Congress to speak about the “threat” of Iran’s nuclear energy program.

“This is, I think, a critical visit by the prime minister. If these Democrats would rather put partisan politics ahead of principle and walk out on the prime minister of Israel, then we have an obligation to make that known,” said Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a political lobbying group which promotes Jewish Republicans.

“We will commit whatever resources we need to make sure that people are aware of the facts,” Brooks said. He did not specify what methods this campaign would use, but promised that his group would do whatever it can.

Other Zionist organizations are sending similar messages. “We will, of course, be publicly condemning any Democrats who don’t show up for the speech, unless they have a doctor’s note,” said Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, a prominent pro-Israel group with 30,000 members.

“It’s really an anti-American, anti-patriotic position to take,” Klein added.

AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel lobby in the US, is encouraging members of Congress to attend the speech, although the group also has reservations because it is turning into a partisan event.

Growing criticism over Netanyahu speech

Democrats are angry over the Boehner’s invitation of the Israeli premier, which was planned without the knowledge of the Obama administration.

The event will take place just two weeks before the Israeli elections, which is seen by the White House and senior Democrats as particularly manipulative. The White House has called the invitation a breach of protocol.

President Barack Obama would not meet with Netanyahu during his trip to Washington, according to the White House. Vice President Joe Biden’s office also confirmed on Friday that he would not be present during Netanyahu’s speech.

It seems Netanyahu plans to go ahead with the trip despite growing criticism both in Israel and the United States. The Israeli prime minister says he will address Congress to lobby against a “bad and dangerous” nuclear deal with Iran.

Iran and the P5+1 group – the US, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany – are in talks to narrow their differences and pave the way for a final, long-term nuclear accord.

The Republican-controlled Congress, however, is pushing a new round of sanctions on Iran, despite the veto threat from the White House and warnings that additional sanctions at this juncture risked derailing the nuclear talks.

Iran argues that as a committed signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

February 9, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment