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ILWU Struggles 1984-2010, The Struggle Continues

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November 12, 2014 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Dual Citizens in Congress?

By L. Michael Hager | CounterPunch | November 12, 2014

“You are not entitled to that information!” That’s what a staffer in Senator Markey’s office bluntly told me when I called to ask for help in identifying Members of Congress who hold dual citizenship.

Seems that’s a question no one wants to hear. The Internet sources are flaky, with only unreliable estimates for both House and Senate. So I telephoned the Washington, DC offices of my three Congressional representatives from Massachusetts to ask for their help in obtaining definitive data from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which responds to Congressional offices, but not to the general public.

I might as well have asked the respondents for their social security numbers. While the responses the offices of Senator Warren and Congressman Keating were more polite than the one from Markey’s office, they were no more helpful. Two Warren office interns tried to assist, sending me some interesting but unrelated CRS reports. However, when their internships ended in August, I started all over again with a more permanent staffer. She promised to call back, but never did. I thought I had a promise from a Keating office aide to approach CRS, but she never responded to my several follow-up emails.

As a Harvard Kennedy School alum, I emailed the two professors recommended by a member of the fundraising office, but received no response.

Two prominent ethics in government NGOs manifested a similar lack of interest. Neither the Sunlight Foundation nor the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) saw fit to respond to my phone calls. Nor did my “tipline” submission to CREW spark a reply.

Meanwhile, I did obtain some useful information from the “Ask the Librarian” service of the Library of Congress. First, it referred me to links that reported Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s recent renunciation of her Swiss citizenship and Senator Ted Cruz’ renunciation of his Canadian citizenship. The librarian service also referred me to two government organizations, one of which provided me with a document listing Members born outside the United States and another more detailed CRS document entitled “Membership of the 113th Congress: A Profile,” dated August 26, 2014. The profile document includes cumulative Member data on party breakdown, age, occupations, education, Congressional service, religion, gender and ethnicity and military service, but nothing on dual citizenship. The provided reports came with a caveat: my source was not to be “quoted or cited.”

This week I filed a Freedom of Information Request to CRS asking for the names of Members of Congress who are dual citizens; or, if such data is not available, advice on where it can obtained. Given the omission of dual citizen topic in the Member profile cited above, I suspect that the relevant data is simply not being collected.

Until the Supreme Court decided otherwise in the 1967 case of Afroyim v. Rusk, a US citizen who voted in a political election in a foreign state would lose his US nationality. Afroyim opened the way for the acceptance of dual or multiple citizenship in US law.

Not all countries allow their citizens to obtain dual citizenship.   One country that does make it easy to become a dual national is Israel. Under its “Law of Return,” every Jew has the right to come to Israel as an oleh (a Jew immigrating to Israel) and become an Israeli citizen.

The recent experience of Lenny Lapon, a Jewish American citizen from Massachusetts, shows how automatic the conferral of Israeli citizenship can be. As Lapon described it when he publicly renounced that citizenship last July, his flight to Israel in October 2010 resulted in the award of Israeli citizenship and an Israeli identification number. Thus it is likely that Jewish members of Congress became Israeli citizens if and when they visited Israel. We don’t yet know if this was the case for any or all of the visiting Jewish Members. Nor do we know if any such member has renounced Israeli citizenship.

Religion and ethnicity in such a diverse country as the US raise no serious conflict issues (1) because neither of those identifications takes precedence over citizen loyalty to the US and (2) because both religion and ethnicity of Members are transparent to the public.

Why is it important for citizens to know if their representatives in Congress are dual citizens? Because both real and apparent conflicts of interest erode the public trust. If there are dual citizens in Congress or in top levels of the Executive Branch, citizens may reasonably demand that all foreign citizenship be renounced as a condition of high political office.

At the level of individual members, transparency is essential. For example, a constituent should know whether or not another state loyalty is involved when his or her representative speaks out on a major issue, such as on military assistance to Israel or recognition of Palestine as a state. Only if we know who are the dual citizens in Congress and what are their second countries, can we intelligently assess the credibility of their policy statements and actions.

Responding to the Markey staffer, we are entitled to that information.

L. Michael Hager is a retired lawyer and diplomat whose work has been published in the Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Hill, International Herald Tribune, London Independent, Jordan Times, and Truthout. He was the executive director of Conflict Management Group in Cambridge, MA, president of the Education For Employment Foundation in Washington, DC., and co-founder of the International Development Law Organization in Rome. He now resides in Massachusetts.

November 12, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli settlers torch mosque, copies of the Quran in West Bank

Al-Akhbar | November 12, 2014

A group of Israeli settlers broke in and torched a mosque in the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank early Wednesday, locals told Ma’an news agency, hours after settlers attempted to assault several Palestinian security officers in Nablus.

Witnesses, who went to the mosque at around 4:40 am to perform dawn prayer, said the settlers burnt 12 copies of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, and set the carpets of the first floor of the two-story building on fire.

Racist slogans were also spray painted on the walls of the mosque, witnesses added.

The same mosque has been targeted by Israeli settlers before, locals told Ma’an.

“Every time the mosque is torched, the (Israeli) occupation police conduct an investigation just for show, and never arrest a single settler,” one resident said.

The incident is the latest in a series of attacks carried out by the settlers against mosques in the occupied West Bank.

This year, in January and October, two mosques were set ablaze in the West Bank. Similarly, in 2012, settlers torched the entrance of a mosque near the city of Nablus.

The settlers also leave behind racist Hebrew script reading “price tag” or “Arabs out!” on the walls of the mosques.

On Tuesday, Israeli settlers smashed the windshields of more than 30 Palestinian vehicles and damaged other Palestinian properties during a rally on the main road south of Nablus in the northern West Bank.

Witnesses said that settlers also sprayed racist slogans, such as “No cars for Arabs” and “No terror attacks,” on a sidewalk.

Meanwhile, also on Tuesday, dozens of Israeli settlers from the Yitzhar settlement in southern Nablus attempted to assault several Palestinian security officers after they parked their car on the road at the entrance of the settlement.

Zakariya al-Sadda, a human rights activist with Rabbis for Human Rights, told Ma’an that Israeli settlers forced five officers from Palestinian security forces to stop while on their way to Ramallah to take part in a festival celebrating the anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death.

The Palestinian Liaison Department intervened and solved the issue, Sadda said, adding that the Palestinian officers left the settlement’s entrance after dozens of settlers gathered and attempted to assault them.

Settler violence against Palestinians and their property is systematic and often abetted by Israeli authorities, who rarely intervene in the violent attacks or prosecute the perpetrators.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there were at least 399 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in 2013.

Israeli authorities have also allowed Zionist settlers to take over homes in Palestinian neighborhoods both in annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank, announced plans to build thousands of settlements strictly for Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem while ignoring Palestinian residents.

More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the holy city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the self-proclaimed Zionist state – a move never recognized by the international community.

(Ma’an, Al-Akhbar)

November 12, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Israeli incitement: Bundestag testimony

David Sheen testifies at the Bundestag, the German Parliament in Berlin, on 10 November 2014, about Israeli top officials inciting racism and racial violence

November 11, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Conflict Kitchen Responds to Pittsburgh Post Gazette Article of Nov. 6th

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Conflict Kitchen | November 6, 2014

Post-Gazette writer Melissa McCart approached Conflict Kitchen with a set of questions of which were to be included in this article, published November 6, 2014. Unfortunately, Ms. McCart neglected to include any of Conflict Kitchen’s answers. Additionally, we specifically requested that Ms. McCart include the viewpoints of local Palestinians in this article, as well as her initial article on Conflict Kitchen’s Palestinian version. In both cases, she interviewed and did not include these very important voices.

Below are our responses to several of Ms. McCart’s questions to us, as well as statements made in the article.

MM: How have you responded to the criticism and the letter to The Heinz Endowments? Has there been any talk initiated by The Heinz Endowments of rescinding the grant to Conflict Kitchen?

CK: The Heinz Endowments has publicly made a statement to B’nai B’rith International disavowing their support for our current Palestinian version of the project. A press release posted by B’nai B’rith on their websites claims that The Heinz Endowments stated that this iteration of Conflict Kitchen “appears to be terribly at odds with [Heinz’s] mission of promoting understanding.”

Promoting understanding is at the core of Conflict Kitchen’s mission. We have demonstrated this in the past by presenting the food, culture, and viewpoints of Iranians, Afghans, Cubans, North Koreans, and Venezuelans. We believe that presenting the viewpoints of Palestinians promotes understanding of Palestinians.

Protecting freedom of expression from the influence of biased media and powerful political and lobbying groups is essential for the cultural and political health of a democratic society. We are extremely upset that one of Pittsburgh’s most important arts and culture funders would disavow their grant to us when seemingly pressured by strong outside forces.

MM: Has your programming been shaped by the accusations? If so, how?

CK: Conflict Kitchen’s goal is to increase the curiosity and understanding about the people who live in countries our government is in conflict with by directly exposing our customers to these cultures and viewpoints. Another goal is to raise the public profile of the minority Afghan, Iranian, Cuban, Venezuelan, and Palestinian communities who live and work in our region, thereby creating a more accurate depiction of Pittsburgh’s cultural diversity. These new accusations will not alter Conflict Kitchen’s goals with our current Palestinian version. Rather, they strengthen why our mission to increase curiosity and understanding is more important than ever before.

MM: And is your work serving its purpose in giving voice to Palestinians? Or has it surpassed your expectations?

CK: Yes, our customers have been incredibly interested in our food and the Palestinian viewpoints expressed in our printed materials and events, responding with sincere and thoughtful questions.

MM: When I went to the dinner, it was mentioned that Conflict Kitchen is feeding 300 to 400 people a day. Are you still feeding this many people a day? Is it more than any other country you’ve featured?

CK: The real story on our Palestinian version is that it is the most popular iteration to date, with 300-400 people a day coming to the restaurant. Our public is approaching us with trust, support, and open minds.

__________________

Responses to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article and The Heinz Endowment’s statements:

Post-Gazette : John M. Ellis, senior director of communications with the Heinz Endowments, said, “There is another major issue at stake here concerning the rights of arts organizations to perform edgy and provocative programming. … That, in many ways, is the role of the arts, and while we may not always agree with the positions and opinions they express, we do support their right to express them.”

Conflict Kitchen: In a letter responding to B’nai B’rith, The Heinz Endowments President Grant Oliphant wrote: “I want to be especially clear that its current program on Palestine was not funded by the endowments and we would not fund such a program, precisely because it appears to be terribly at odds with the mission of promoting understanding.”  Oliphant also wrote that “[the Endowments] emphatically does not agree with or support either the anti-Israel sentiments quoted on Conflict Kitchen’s food wrappers or the program’s refusal to incorporate Israeli or Jewish voices in its material.”

The Heinz Endowments cannot have it both ways.

Post-Gazette : John M. Ellis, senior director of communications with the Heinz Endowments states, “The grant was made to assist in the restaurant’s relocation from East Liberty to Schenley Plaza in Oakland.” Heinz Endowments president Grant Oliphant stated, “I want to be especially clear that its current program on Palestine was not funded by the endowments,”

Conflict Kitchen: The grant made to us was, as stated in the grant agreement, “To support Conflict Kitchen’s new programming and development at its new location in Schenley Plaza.”

Post-Gazette : “Each restaurant to-go order is wrapped in packaging designed with text from interviews with Palestinians living in the U.S. and Gaza.” 

Conflict Kitchen: Palestine interviews, as stated on the wrapper, were conducted with Palestinians living in both Palestine and the U.S.” This includes both the West Bank and Gaza.

Post-Gazette : “One section homes in on what the restaurant identified as a Pennsylvania-based business.”

Conflict Kitchen: Quotes on wrapper are statements from Palestinians, not the voices of Conflict Kitchen.

__________________

Statement to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and others who frame our Palestinian Interview handouts as “anti-Israeli messages”

The Post Gazette’s (and other media and lobbying groups‘) insistence on continually misrepresenting our food wrappers as “anti-Israeli messages,” shows a distinct lack of research into what is actually on the wrappers, a reinforcement of right-wing accusations made in other media, and thoughtlessness about our current situation.

Like we have done for four years with every other country of focus, our food wrappers contain the viewpoints of multiple people within our focus country on a wide variety of topics. Our Palestinian interviews are no different, they contain interviews on food, culture, the Palestinian Authority, settlements, dating, resistance olive trees, Nakba, movement and travel, and food customs. The interviews were done by us personally with Palestinians in Palestine, and in our own city.  The thoughts and opinions that come through the interviews are informed by their personal context, experiences and histories as Palestinians. Perhaps it is hard for some people to hear that Palestinians are not happy with Israeli policies or the actions of some of its citizens, but to cast their viewpoints as simply anti-Israel is to reinforce the simplest, most polarizing, and dehumanizing reading of their lives and perpetuate the silencing of their voices.

We say read the ACTUAL wrapper, the whole thing. It is always on our website under Interviews (scroll down).

** Speaking of printed materials, we will soon be publishing a book of interviews with kids under 12 living throughout Palestine. See the version we did with Afghan kid’s earlier this year.

November 11, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Canada’s ‘Remembrance Day’: righteous or rancorous?

By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | November 8, 2014

With Canada’s annual “Remembrance Day” just around the corner, it would be wise to broach the issue of “remembering” those Canadians who fought and died in the two bloodiest conflicts in world history with some humility and skepticism.

On November 11 Canadians across the political spectrum will evoke their plastic patriotism by commemorating war veterans who fought in the First and Second World Wars. The obedient masses will blindly recite jingoist platitudes and regurgitate outdated wartime propaganda that has been instilled in the minds of each and every Canadian citizen since birth.

Like Americans and Britons, most Canadians believe that World War I and II were quintessential “good wars” fought to secure “freedom and democracy” and other such flimsy fantasies. Most people reared in Canada’s degraded education system foolishly believe that this country’s participation in WWI and WWII was “the right thing to do” and that the outbreak of such wars was “inevitable.” Without doing one scintilla of actual research, the gullible masses can tell you why these fratricidal wars that caused the deaths of untold millions of people were “necessary” and “just.”

Do any of these ignorant zombies stop for a moment to think about what they are promoting? The “necessity” of an enormous bloodbath that plunged much of the world into pandemonium? Following WWII, Canadian society has evidently devolved into a brain-damaged loony-bin filled to the brim with parrots and yes-men incapable of independent thought or critical analysis.

The fact is that Canada was not attacked in World War I or II. Positioned between two gigantic oceans, Canada is relatively safe geographically from foreign invasion and therefore had no real incentive to fight in either war. So why did Canada fight?

In his book The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Yves Engler discerns that Ottawa’s decision to go to war in 1914 and again in 1939 was essentially “because Britain went to war.” Indeed, as a de facto colony of Britain, Canada has only ever had a ceremonial facade of independence throughout its history. When London decided to go to war, Canada immediately followed suit, revealing the country’s blind subservience to the Crown.

And what was Britain’s reasoning for going to war the second time around? The brainwashed masses will say that “Nazism” was a grave and pressing danger and had to be stopped. But only if one is viewing the world through British or Jewish spectacles does that suggestion have any merit. As far as much of the global East and South were concerned, British imperialism was a far greater threat than anything posed by Hitler’s regional ambitions. From the perspective of the Arabs of Palestine and the Middle East, Jewish Zionism and its British imperial patrons were a worse adversary than Hitler’s Germany by a long shot. Germans were not the ones brutally occupying and suppressing the people of Palestine for the past two decades leading up to WWII, it was the English (and later the Zionist Jews).

Disgracefully, Canada still has major streets named after the British WWII leader Winston Churchill, a pugnacious warmongering drunkard who did everything in his power to guarantee the destruction of millions of German civilians. At one point during the war, the lunatic British statesman drew up plans to use the lethal anthrax chemical as a hellish bio-weapon against Germany, an act of unconscionable malice that would have rendered the whole of central Europe an uninhabitable toxic wasteland. Fortunately, Churchill’s military advisors talked some sense into the primitive dolt when he sobered up, so he never followed through with the maniacal strategy. However, he did succeed in annihilating hundreds of thousands of German civilians in what Chris Floyd of The Moscow Times described as “massive conventional bombing raid[s] on the enemy’s capital[s], also aimed at civilians, designed to ‘castrate’ the enemy population.”

In a ZoomerTV documentary entitled “Unlikely Obsession: Churchill and the Jews,” various commentators, all of whom are either Jewish or philosemitic, note Winston Churchill’s intimate relations with Britain’s Jewish-Zionist community throughout his political career, especially the moneyed elite among the Jews. One commentator unwittingly reveals the real causes underpinning Churchill’s bellicose stance towards Germany: he was on the payroll of wealthy Jews who bailed him out of his financial quandaries. The Zionist-produced documentary in essence recognizes that Churchill put the interests of Jews above those of Britain and its people, and that his unrelenting confrontation with Hitler and National Socialism was in large part spurred by the Jewish-Zionist financiers who kept the taps from going dry at Churchill’s residence.

“I am, of course, a Zionist,” said Churchill in 1956, “and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration.” (New York Times, Nov. 6, 1991.) The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a British government decree, addressed to a House of Rothschild baron, which promised to help the Zionists establish a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. But what is routinely left out of this equation is that Balfour’s sordid pledge to fulfill the Zionist dream was, according to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, secured by way of “persistent propaganda, through unceasing demonstration of the life force of our people.” Weizmann went on to say: “We [Zionists] told the responsible authorities: We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not. You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.” (Judische Rundschau (Jewish Review), Jan. 16, 1920.)

In other words, the Zionists bribed and perhaps blackmailed the British elite into gifting them Palestine. They did this by promising to use their economic and political clout to drag the United States into the First World War, thereby helping turn the tide of the war in favour of Britain. And they succeeded in doing so. Weizmann later boastfully acknowledged this amazing fact of history in a revealing 1941 letter to Winston Churchill. “It was the Jews,” Weizmann stated unequivocally in the letter, “who, in the last war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain. They are keen to do it – and may do it – again.” Weizmann insisted that the Jews would once again gladly form the backbone of the British war effort against Germany and Italy, telling Churchill that, “There is only one big ethnic group which is willing to stand, to a man, for Great Britain, and a policy of ‘all-out-aid’ for her: the five million American Jews.” (A transcript of this letter is available at David Irving’s website)

In his informative essay “The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 1,” writer Thomas Dalton quotes a shameless Churchill who proudly conceded this point, stating in July 1922: “Pledges and promises were made during the War… They were made because it was considered they would be of value to us in our struggle to win the War. It was considered that the support which the Jews could give us all over the world, and particularly in the United States, and also in Russia, would be a definite palpable advantage.” To solidify this notion, Dalton goes on to quote former British Prime Minister Lloyd George, himself a Christian Zionist, who similarly confessed: “The Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to… a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause.  They kept their word.” (Dalton’s essay can be found on the Inconvenient History website) One may wonder why mainstream historiography of this period is reluctant to mention Britain’s acquiescence to Zionist demands vis-à-vis Palestine and its role in escalating both world wars to cataclysmic proportions.

Zionists duly acknowledged and praised Churchill’s role as an underling and workhorse for Zionism thereafter. In 1954, American Zionists endowed Churchill with the “Theodore Herzl Award” for his “outstanding” pro-Zionist work ethic. Churchill was an “architect of the Jewish State and protagonist of Zionism,” declared representatives of the Zionist Organization of America who bestowed the disreputable “honour” upon the self-interested British politician. (The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, Dec. 25, 1954) In 2012, an Israeli group erected a statue of Churchill in Jerusalem. A spokesman of the group, Anthony Rosenfelder, described Churchill as “a passionate Zionist all his life and a philo-semite.” (The Independent, Nov. 3, 2012.)

Decades of intense Allied propaganda cannot dispute these facts which expose the hidden truth that Britain, Canada, the US, France and the rest of the Allied Powers fought and died by the millions for reasons alien to their jurisdictions. It was not in the national interests of any of these countries to sacrifice large amounts of blood and treasure to fight a wholly avoidable conflict that offered not even a semblance of economic, cultural or national benefit.

Neither WWI nor WWII were “good” or “just” wars by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, they were both catastrophic blunders that set the whole of Europe and Asia as well as parts of the Middle East and North Africa ablaze. The Second World War in particular delivered the world into the hands of the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire, thereby sealing the eternal fate of humanity as drone-like economic cogs and geopolitical cannon fodder for American, British and Jewish interests.

With all things considered, “Remembrance Day” amounts to little more than a glorification of war and an exercise in jingoism and self-aggrandizement. It re-enforces the insulting myth of the “good” and “necessary” wars. It encourages the refusal to recognize the wrongs committed by “our side” in those bloody conflicts. This ‘day of reverence’ for our soldiers acts as a mind control mechanism to deceive the public into believing that our government has always acted benevolently and in the interests of the people, when in fact the opposite is true.

Copyright 2014 Brandon Martinez

November 9, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Critics Slam US Military’s ‘Disturbing’ Praise for Israel’s Gaza Offensive

Palestinians collect their belongings from under the rubble of a residential tower, which was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on August 24, 2014. (Photo: UN Photo-Shareef Sarhan/flickr/cc)
Common Dreams | November 7, 2014

Critics say it is “shameful” that a high-ranking U.S. military official suggested the Pentagon can learn lessons from Israel’s 50-day attack on Gaza this summer.

According the Jerusalem Post, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey made statements Thursday praising the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) for taking “extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties” during Operation Protective Edge.

Dempsey told an audience at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs: “We sent a team of senior officers and non-commissioned officers over to work with the IDF to get the lessons from that particular operation in Gaza.” He referred to the group of officers as the “lessons learned team.”

But Ramah Kudaimi of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation said Israel’s tactics should not be replicated.

“It is very disturbing and shameful that U.S. military commanders believe that what Israel did in Gaza is something to be applauded,” Kudaimi told Common Dreams. “Five hundred dead children does not seem to be evidence that Israel was trying to not kill civilians. The seven-year siege on Gaza is not a policy to avoid civilian suffering.”

Israel’s recent seven-week military assault on Gaza killed at least 2,194 Palestinians, at least 75 percent of them civilians and over 500 of them children.

“At least 80 percent of the 100,000 Palestinian homes damaged or destroyed were refugee homes,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency reports.

The offensive damaged or destroyed over half of Gaza’s hospitals and health centers at a time when more than 11,000 were wounded, a UNRWA and World Health Organization joint investigation found.

Israel struck six UN schools sheltering Palestinians, including in cases where exact coordinates of the shelters were formally submitted by UNRWA to the Isreali military. These strikes alone killed at least 47 people and wounded hundreds.

Furthermore, Israel has been accused of potential war crimes by Amnesty International and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

“It is very despicable that the U.S. continues to white-wash Israeli crimes while funding them through military aid,” said Kudaimi. “Dempsey’s statements are not shocking. Anyone who follows U.S. military policy, knows they too have problematic definitions of protecting civilians.”

November 8, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel to confiscate 3,200 acres of Palestinian land near Jerusalem

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Ma’an – 08/11/2014

JERUSALEM – Israeli authorities have delivered orders to the village of Beit Iksa north of Jerusalem ordering the confiscation of 12,852 dunums (3,176 acres) of Palestinian land, locals said on Saturday.

Locals told Ma’an that soldiers deployed at the military checkpoint at the entrance to the village delivered confiscation orders signed by the Israeli military commander in the West Bank Nitzan Alon that gave them until Dec. 31, 2017 to remain on their land.

Villagers said that soldiers informed them that an official from the Israeli military liaison would arrive on Monday to specify which lands would be confiscated, adding that the lands confiscated would be used for “military purposes.”

If carried out, the confiscation would dramatically reduce the land available to Beit Iksa’s 1,700 people, the majority of whom are refugees who fled to the area in 1967 after the existing population of the village was forced to flee by Israeli authorities.

Although located immediately next to Jerusalem, the village’s lands have been progressively confiscated and the village is surrounded on all sides by the Israeli separation wall. Villagers can no longer travel to Jerusalem without permits, and Palestinians not resident in Beit Iksa cannot enter the single Israeli checkpoint that allows access to the village.

Ninety-three percent of the village is under full Israeli military control, and a majority of the total land of the village falls in areas outside of the separation wall, meaning they have been de facto confiscated, including about 1,500 dunums (371 acres) where Jewish-only settlements have been built.

The head of the Beit Iksa village council Saada al-Khatib told Ma’an that according to the order and the maps that soldiers had shown them Saturday, the lands that will be confiscated are between parcels 7 and 8 and include Haraeq al-Arab, Thahr Biddu, Numus, and Khatab areas around the village.

Al-Khatib added that the Israeli authorities claim that the confiscation order has been under way since 2012, and that the new order issued on Saturday only emphasizes the old order.

The order will prevent dozens of farmers from reaching their lands, he said, calling upon Palestinian ministries and national institutions to support the village of Beit Iksa and its neighbors.

He added that the order came after the Israeli municipality announced the approval of 244 housing units to be built in the Ramot settlement, which was previously built on lands confiscated from the settlement.

Al-Khatib warned that the land confiscation orders being issued to many villages include his own aim to carry out the “Judaization” of Beit Iksa after sealing the village shut and surrounding it with a checkpoint and the separation wall, turning it into an 2,500-dunum prison.

November 8, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Peace Process Hustle

By Lawrence Davidson | To The Point Analyses | November 7, 2014

Intractable Process

An intractable process, one that never seems to resolve itself, is either no process at all or a fraudulent one contrived to hide an ulterior motive. The so-called Israeli-Palestinian (at one time the Israeli-Arab) “peace process,” now in its sixth decade (counting from 1948) or fourth decade (counting from 1967) is, and probably always has been, just such a fraud.

One might object and say that the Oslo Accords (1993) were part of this process and they were not fraudulent. In my opinion that is a doubtful assumption. The talks were carried on in secret by officials who, at least on the Israeli side, never had an equitable peace in mind. Their goal was a political modification of the occupied territories that would free Israel from its legal obligations as occupiers of Palestinian territory and facilitate the pacification of the Palestinians and their resistance organizations. The Israeli side seemed to have believed that negotiating the return of Yasser Arafat and Fatah to the West Bank would provide them a partner in this process – not a peace process, but a pacification process.

It did not take long for the Palestinians to see through this gambit, and relations with the Israelis soon returned to the tense and sometimes violent status quo ante. It was only after Arafat’s suspicious death in 2004 that the Israelis finally got a Palestinian “leader,” in the person of Mahmoud Abbas, who would cooperate with them in this process of pacification. Organized resistance then became the pursuit of those in Gaza who persist in calling the “peace process” a fraud. They are correct.

“Detached from Reality”

The present Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and some of his ministers have, of late, hinted at the truth. Netanyahu recently told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that criticism of his government’s expansion of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem (which are illegal under international law), whether it comes from the U.S. government or Jewish groups such as J Street and Peace Now, are “words detached from reality” and “foster false statements [of hope] from the Palestinians,” therefore delaying the coming of “peace.”

Likewise, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, has accused Palestinian “president” Abbas, the very man who helps Israel pacify the West Bank population, of “promoting hatred of Jews.” Why? Because Abbas has complained at the United Nations and other world forums of Israel’s unwillingness to bring the “peace process” to a conclusion that he and his Palestine National Council could accept. Abbas, who lost the last Palestinian free election (held in 2006) to Hamas, but with U.S. and Israeli support has usurped the office of Palestinian president, is actually a nearly perfect “peace partner” for the Israelis. The amount of compromise he asks for from the Israeli side in exchange for coming to terms is embarrassingly minimal. However, Netanyahu’s government refuses the Palestinians any compromise at all because, for these Zionists, the “peace process” is a facade whose only value lies in its very fraudulence. Its only value is as a cover for the process of territorial absorption.

Thus, it is probably justified to conclude that a good number of Israelis (and certainly a vast majority of their leadership) are not interested in peace, and probably have never been, unless you define peace as total Palestinian surrender. More accurately, they are interested in expansion and control of all of Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. After six decades of a “peace process” going nowhere, anyone who does not understand this is deluding themselves.

Self-Delusion

Just who are those deluding themselves? Many of them are diaspora Jews who are, whether they understand it or not, caught in a contradiction: they are at once committed to Zionism’s ideological goal of a secure Jewish state in Palestine, but nonetheless are, at this moment of maximum Israeli power, calling for ideological compromise. Some of these people are members of Zionist groups in the U.S. such as Peace Now and J Street. Both organizations want continuing peace negotiations with the Palestinians looking toward achieving some variation of the two-state solution. J Street is apparently upset with Netanyahu’s determination to continue the colonization process “in every part of Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) as well as East Jerusalem because to do so “erects one obstacle to peace after another.”

Unfortunately, the history of official Zionist behavior is on the side of Netanyahu. All the evidence indicates that Zionism and its leaders have been committed to the conquest of all of historic Palestine at least since 1918. In that year Chaim Weizmann submitted a map of the proposed Jewish national home to the Peace Conference that settled matters after World War I. It represented a maximalist program that has been incrementally realized first in 1948 and then 1967. Nowhere in the Zionist program has there ever been room for voluntary retreat. That is why Prime Minister Netanyahu describes those who criticize his colonization efforts as “detached from reality.”

Conclusion

Netanyahu and his ilk, however, tend to ignore the fact that there are multiple realities operating here. Certainly, one should not forget the Palestinian reality, particularly that of Gaza, and Israeli culpability in its creation and maintenance. On the Zionist side there now exists at least two realities. One is certainly that of Prime Minister Netanyahu – the reality of the Zionist ideologue with Israeli power backing it up. But then there is the other Zionist reality – that of Israel’s increasing isolation, not only diplomatic and cultural, but also, over time, economic. The latter reality scares many diaspora Jews to the point where they are willing to compromise maximalist ideological goals.

The Zionists in power are as yet impervious to this fear. However, if the reality of economic and cultural isolation ever overtakes that of Israeli power, then the number of compromisers will rapidly grow, and the zealots such as Netanyahu will find themselves alone in a Masada-like fortress of their own making.

November 7, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Al-Arabiya echoes Zionist rhetoric in reporting about al-Aqsa

By Zeinab Hawi | Al-Akhbar | November 6, 2014

It was rather normal for Al-Arabiya news channel to retract its story about the unprecedented closure of al-Aqsa Mosque on October 28. The channel may have thought that the terminology it used would go unnoticed. However, Al-Arabiya later deleted the story from its website after having caused an online backlash for echoing Zionist rhetoric.

In an act further promoting Zionist terminology, the Saudi news channel replaced al-Aqsa Mosque with the “the holy compound,” a term usually reserved for Zionists in their reference to the holy site.

In fact, Israel had closed the mosque following the shooting of hardline Rabbi Yehuda Glick [allegedly] by Palestinian Mutaz Hijazi, with Al-Arabiya reporting the news as, “A right-wing Israeli activist was shot and wounded last night as he left a conference promoting a campaign to permit both Jews and Muslims to pray at the holy compound.”

The channel, hence, adopted the terminology used by Zionists. This caused an angry backlash over social media websites, with activists accusing Al-Arabiya of committing “political and religious treason” by adhering to the “Zionist plan” to Judaize Palestine.

However, after thoroughly reading Al-Arabiya’s report, one would notice that the channel not only resorted to Zionist terms, but framed the story in a manner that reflected the channel’s policy that complies with Zionism. The term “occupation” did not appear, not even by chance, and the channel opted to use “Israeli police” instead. Moreover, the story depicted Jewish hardliners present at al-Aqsa on an equal footing with Palestinians.

The story was hence reported as follows, “the Israeli police closed the Noble Sanctuary… in a rare step aiming to prevent clashes between Muslims and Jews.”

The hardline rabbi who was calling to “open the doors of the Noble Sanctuary for Jews” and promoting “prayers that gather both Muslims and Jews” is for Al-Arabiya a simple “right- wing Israeli activist.”

The scandalous coverage did not stop there; it also “reassured” that the Palestinian shooter – “the sole suspect” in the incident – was shot and killed by a police special force unit at his house in Abu al-Thuri neighborhood in Jerusalem.

Al-Arabiya did not settle for such biased reporting, it also quoted the director of Shaare Zedek Medical Center as saying that the rabbi is in “critical but stable” condition and that he underwent surgery after being shot in the chest and abdomen.

The closure of the al-Aqsa Mosque apparently meant nothing for the Saudi channel. It was more interested in reassuring the public about the health of the injured Zionist and making sure that the shooter “got what he deserved.”

In the end, it is not merely about adopting the Zionist settlers’ policy to change the understanding of the issue and the terminology used to define it, but it is about adopting a process aimed at wiping out the cause of not just a people but an entire nation, which the Saudi channel and its affiliates are slowly paving the way for.

November 6, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces demolish three houses, and several water pipes and roads in village near Nablus

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Sofian Maher and a local resident near their destroyed home near Khirbet Al-Tawil
International Solidarity Movement | November 4, 2014

Khirbet Al-Tawil, Occupied Palestine – Early on Monday morning, while the inhabitants of the village of Khirbet Al-Tawil, near Aqraba (Nablus), were sleeping, eight military vehicles, and 30-40 Israeli soldiers entered the village.

Within two hours the military had demolished three houses, and several water pipes and roads.

The water pipes destroyed were new and scheduled to be turned on Monday. The Aqraba community had funded these water pipes as part of the municipal water system.

Of their destruction, Sami Dariyah, stated: “They are trying to prevent people from living in this area. This is their clear policy.”

Due to the continuing demolition of houses, electricity lines, water lines and other living necessities, the farmers have fled to the city of Aqraba and departed their lands in Khirbet Al-Tawil. Sami Direyah grew up near Khirbet Al-Tawil and remembers the many houses and shops that used to be there.

Khirbet Al-Tawil is part of Area C (under full Israeli military civil and security control), which means the army can choose which buildings and activities are ‘allowed’. Sami wonders how their existing community, their farms and their 100-year-old houses, can suddenly become illegal.

Even though the three demolished houses were nearly 100 years old, dating back to the British occupation, they were all still active homes for families like the Mahers. The residents of the houses were not given any warning of the military’s planned visit. Sofian Maher, a former resident of one of these homes, spoke to ISM and explained that this is not the first time the military has paid a visit to Khirbet Al-Tawil. In May of this year the village’s Mosque was demolished, together with four houses, four cottages, and two barns. Less than one month ago the power line was cut by the military, leaving the village without electricity.

Sofian Maher explained to ISM that his family tried to rebuild their house after it was demolished in May. While rebuilding, Sofian’s family lived in a donated tent, which the army soon tore down. The family then moved into old stone huts that were built, long ago, to house animals while shepherding. Periodically the military returned and destroyed the newly rebuilt portions of their house.

The family is now trying to rebuild their home for the fourth time.

To further make the area uninhabitable, the military has destroyed large sections of the road leading to the remaining farms.

November 6, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Gaza residents lose faith in international aid

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MEMO | November 6, 2014

It has been more than three months since the end of the war on Gaza however Fadl Misbah, 41, is still living as others are, in a house which is covered in plastic sheets and which is not suitable for winter.

Fadl, whose family is made up of 13 members, said: “We are always subjected to extreme cold, and this is the case for most people whose homes were destroyed in the war. My children sit in this place and raindrops fall from the roof of the house which is made up of nylon sheets which do not protect us from the elements or the cold.”

“We have heard a lot about the donor conference to reconstruct Gaza, however they are working so slowly and we no longer believe what the international institutions are saying or what they are promising.”

“The occupation is the main problem; it allowed 440 tonnes of cement to enter Gaza 20 days ago during [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon’s visit to show a positive side to itself in front of the world, but after that it didn’t allow any more items into Gaza. Solving our problem will need contracts to be signed, and that’s if it is resolved at all,” Fadl said.

“International institutions have appealed to intervene and find a solution to this disaster, which hundreds of families whose homes were destroyed during the war on Gaza are now living through.

The West must be mobilise itself and not be satisfied by its silence. Those who call for human rights and advocate for it on behalf of those who are oppressed have exposed this world. It has no credibility.”

November 6, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment