The Palestinian Authority’s authoritarian turn

Link
Ben White, The Electronic Intifada, 30 April 2009

Appointed Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad at the opening ceremony of the Presidential Guards College in the West Bank city of Jericho, March 2009. (Mustafa Abu Dayeh/MaanImages)

Last week, less than two weeks after I had talked with him in his an-Najah University faculty office, Abdel Sattar Qassem was arrested by the Palestinian Preventive Security forces in Nablus, occupied West Bank.

Qassem is a 60-year-old professor of political science, and has been at an-Najah University since 1980. Imprisoned several times by the Israeli occupation, he is the author of dozens of books and papers, as well as hundreds of articles, on Palestinian politics and Islamic thought. But Qassem is also an eloquent and prominent critic of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and he has been arrested, and targeted by politically-motivated attacks, on a number of previous occasions.

The most recent of these was in January of this year, when his car was set alight. According to a news report from the Palestinian news agency, Ma’an, claim of responsibility was circulated by an unknown group who accused Qassem of being a “mouthpiece for the Iranian and the Syrian regimes.” As reported by Asharq al-Awsat, Qassem pointed out how the statement was a “hoax,” and thus a cover for individuals who did not want to openly identify themselves. The attack was condemned by a variety of public figures “in the harshest possible words,” according to Ma’an.

This time, the official line is that his arrest was a civil, criminal case, the result of litigation proceedings against Qassem by two figures within the PA’s security forces. The Palestinian Information Center reports that Qassem, who according to his family was arrested hours after he gave an interview to al-Aqsa TV to discuss the shooting of West Bank Hamas leader Hamid al-Bitawi, insists that the charges are groundless and politically motivated. Speaking to me on the telephone after his release, Qassem noted:

“It was evident that they didn’t want to arrest me on a political basis, so they decided to fabricate something against me. Last Thursday, in court, there were many lawyers trying to represent me, because they feel like this is a national issue. They see that this is intimidation, not a genuine civil case.”

The attempts to intimidate a critic of the Palestinian Authority into silence is disturbing, but is only one incident in a growing trend. The Ramallah-based political leadership, dominated by Fatah, and the PA security forces, are becoming increasingly authoritarian, encouraging a culture of militarized policing and a lack of respect for human rights and the rule of law. Now, nonviolent resistance leaders against the Israeli occupation like Sami Awad, based in Bethlehem, are saying that they “have to be ready to face any injustice even if caused by our own people, within the PA.”

One aspect of this phenomenon is an assault on the freedom of the press. Back in December of last year, the Ma’an news agency carried out an investigation into what it described as “an unprecedented campaign of censorship and intimidation against West Bank and Gaza Strip journalists,” carried out by the Palestinian Authority.

The report detailed how independent news agencies had become targets for “President Mahmoud Abbas’s security establishment, particularly the PA’s Office of the Attorney General.” The same month as Ma’an’s investigation, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate demanded that the PA release journalists from West Bank prisons, noting that “some journalists had been in prison for more than three months.”

Criticizing the PA, or even affording Hamas coverage, now seems enough to get on the blacklist, or become a target for the PA’s security apparatus. In fact, a Nablus-based journalist “found himself in a prison cell” in January for reporting the torching of Professor Qassem’s car, according to The Jerusalem Post. In February, the Post reported that “the PA’s crackdown on the local media was aimed at intimidating Palestinian reporters and stopping them from reporting about financial corruption and human rights violations by Abbas’s security forces.”

Another worrying trend in the PA-administered areas is an increasing militarization of civilian policing. During my recent visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, one of the first things several of my friends told me about was an energetic campaign by the PA to clamp down on car-related crime. There were now impromptu checkpoints thrown up on the main roads where drivers’ licenses were checked and the special permission required to drive Israeli yellow-plated cars was requested.

Nobody minded, in theory, increased efficiency in law enforcement; what was troubling was the way the PA forces were going about it. It can seem like a small thing, a friend told me, but “it’s this militarization, this way of asserting a kind of domination over the people.” Many complained of the disrespectful behavior of the gun-toting men checking the cars.

This focus on “law and order” has become a repeated theme in the last few years, particularly in cities like Nablus and Jenin. Just recently, in a fairly typical episode, Ma’an news agency reported that PA forces conducted a “sweep” in a village three kilometers from Nablus, arresting apparent “fugitives” and checking the registration of some 250 cars.

Consistent, genuine complaints about lawlessness and corruption in Nablus had already emerged in 2004-05, but it wasn’t until the end of 2007 that the current campaign was launched by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, appointed by Mahmoud Abbas, whose official term as PA president expired in January. Beginning in Nablus, the law and order drive was replicated in Jenin in the summer of 2008. Residents have undoubtedly welcomed the increased security, but the nature of the campaign — and the context — is not so straightforward.

For example, the PA’s infrastructure (largely destroyed by Israel in 2001-02) is completely ill-equipped. In April 2008 in Nablus, for example, Reuters reported that only 13 percent of the prison’s inmates had actually been convicted; the restrictions of occupation and the inadequacy of the PA’s legal system mean that many face a long wait before their guilt or innocence can be determined in a court of law.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military continues to invade PA-controlled areas, particularly at night, an arrangement which was actually a joint Palestinian-Israeli agreement. Moreover, while a weary Palestinian population is grateful for small economic upturns in their occupied cities, they are well aware that the PA’s law and order focus is a welcome part of Israel’s strategy in the West Bank; the BBC noted in December last year how the Israeli army was pleased with the “good job” Palestinian forces were doing.

One of the reasons for Israel’s complimentary report card is the extent to which PA forces have been arresting members of groups who oppose the official “peace process,” and in particular, detaining those who are either openly, or simply suspected, members and supporters of Hamas. According to the International Middle East Media Center, estimates give the number of detainees in Palestinian security forces’ custody at between 500 to 600, many of whom have had no trial.

The secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmad Saadat, himself a prisoner in an Israeli jail, noted just last week in a public statement that it was “impossible” for the PA “to demand freeing the detainees [from Israeli prisons] while the Palestinian prisons are full of prisoners jailed for resistance background or internal disputes.”

On 4 December of last year, Reuters reported on the claims being made of torture at the hands of Mahmoud Abbas’ Preventive Security forces and General Intelligence. The article cited Ghandi Rabei, a lawyer from the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) in Hebron, who told the news agency that “hundreds of civilians have been transferred to military courts without legal procedures in breach of Palestinian law and international norms.” The ICHR’s annual report for 2008 recorded 111 complaints of torture or mistreatment in detention in the West Bank, according to Agence France-Presse.

On 31 January, the British Daily Mail ran a story under the dramatic headline: “Financed by the British taxpayer, brutal torturers of the West Bank.” The paper reported how the British government’s Department for International Development had given 76 million British pounds in 2008 to the PA for what it called “security sector reform.” Once the figure is broken down, 3 million pounds went directly to the PA police, while “17 million [pounds] pays the salaries of the PA’s array of security organizations — including the Presidential Guard intelligence service and the feared Preventive Security Organization.”

One of the most important factors shaping these developments is the US strategy as directed on the ground by Lieutenant General Keith Dayton. Dayton started work with the Palestinian security forces at the end of 2005. While ostensibly charged with general reform of the PA security forces, it became apparent that the US was intent on building up Abbas-loyal PA forces in order to directly confront Hamas should the need arise.

Dayton’s plan involved giving the PA forces an increase in funding, manpower, training and weaponry. In October 2006, The New York Times reported that the US intended to expand Abbas’ Presidential Guard at a cost of $26 million. At the time, it was clear that any such plan — which also included “the transfer of thousands of guns from Egypt” to the Presidential Guard — would only go ahead with a “positive response from Israel,” according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, this “systematic effort to bolster Abbas and his Fatah loyalists to counter the political success of Hamas” suffered an embarrassing setback, of course, when Hamas forces easily triumphed over Fatah in the Gaza Strip in June 2007 and thus “inherited thousands of guns, equipment and vehicles supplied by the United States.”

The only lesson learned, however, seems to have been that the US, Israel and the PA could ill-afford a similar debacle in the West Bank — and therefore Dayton’s work was to be intensified, rather than reconsidered. This, then, is what has been happening with increasing fervor in the West Bank in recent months.

On 27 February 2009, The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner wrote about the 1,600 Palestinians who “have been through American-financed courses in Jordan.” Dayton, the article said, “hopes to have a well-trained battalion based in each of eight West Bank cities” (plans to expand the program were also reported by Reuters this week). The Israelis, needless to say, are content to cooperate: an Israeli officer “inaugurated the firing range” at one of the US-funded Palestinian training camps.

Whether it is the “top brass” training provided by the US for Palestinian security officials in Ramallah, or the special “SWAT” team organized by Dayton, Salam Fayyad and the Jordanians, it is clear that the primary purpose of these forces is not neighborhood crime-busting. As the World Tribune reported in the case of the SWAT team, the “elite” forces can be used against “Hamas squads” and help “protect the PA.” As one critic put it, the PA’s security agencies in the West Bank are trained to “persecute resistance elements and provide Israel with intelligence with which to arrest or assassinate resistance leaders.”

Shawan Jabarin, general director of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, agrees that these training programs are more about internal suppression than “law and order”:

“If the senior officers who train them taught a respect for the rule of law, I’m sure we would feel that — but our feeling is completely different. I’m not saying they are training them how to torture people, but they don’t put any mechanism in place for monitoring these things. For political reasons, the Palestinians are trying to show that they are strong, that they are doing exactly what the others are asking them to do — this happened during [Yasser] Arafat’s time, and it’s also [happening] these days.”

If there was any doubt about the real purpose of these forces, one just needs to listen to Dayton himself. Dayton stressed to The Jerusalem Post in December that “the trainees are taught over and again that ‘you are not here to learn how to fight against the Israeli occupation.'” That’s why Dayton could affirm that he, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and his “IDF [Israeli army] colleagues” are of one mind: “something new is out there” and “it’s worth encouraging.”

It may not be new — one only has to go back to the mid-1990s to find something similar happening — but PA forces are certainly being encouraged to suppress dissent. While Israel was attacking Gaza in January, The Jerusalem Post described how the PA’s crackdown on the opposition in the West Bank was “being carried out in coordination with the IDF and under the supervision of US security experts.”

These were the very same police officers who had “received special training in Jordan and the West Bank as part of a security plan engineered by the US,” and were apparently reporting directly to Salam Fayyad. Israeli “security officials” “praised” Mahmoud Abbas’ “iron-fist policy” in the West Bank, reported The Jerusalem Post and “expressed satisfaction with the coordination between the PA security forces and the IDF and Shin Bet [Israel’s internal intelligence agency].” Sometimes, “Hamas members were detained by the IDF only hours after they were released from PA detention centers.”

So why have key elements within Fatah and the PA decided to go down this path? It seems like the Ramallah-based political and intelligence elite are primarily driven by fear; fear of losing their power and privileges, and fear of Hamas. More specifically, there is a real sense that Hamas’ popularity has not suffered any kind of significant fall since 2006, and if anything, has been consolidated or increased.

At the same time as Hamas has emerged intact and uncompromising from Israel’s recent Gaza onslaught, the Fatah-dominated PA has nothing to show for its strategy of softly-softly negotiations; just an entrenched, apartheid-like Israeli occupation. The “peace process” has brought Israel a degree of peace, but left the Palestinians trapped between Israel’s colonies and wall. The PA’s only card is that it continues to pay the salaries of thousands of desperate Palestinians — money that is only forthcoming from the international community with strings attached.

Meanwhile in Nablus, Professor Qassem, who is considering a run for president in the future as an independent, feels like the PA “is reflecting its inner crisis against the population”:

“So instead of going back to their own people they are trying to punish their own people. Why? Because there is Dayton, and the money of the donor countries, which they cannot sacrifice. If they want to go back to their own people, they will lose their salaries, and the situation in the West Bank will be similar to that in Gaza.”

This is a deal that was made many years ago, but it has meant that there is a class of political leaders in the PA who are seemingly eternally wedded to the idea that the international community is directing the peace process in good faith. For reasons of self-interest, they are desperate to keep the PA, and all the assumptions of Oslo, alive — even while sometimes admitting that in terms of obtaining basic Palestinian rights, there is, and will continue to be, nothing to show for meeting the “benchmarks” and “roadmaps.”

If the US/Jordanian-trained PA security forces are the “stick” in the West Bank, then the manipulation of foreign aid is the “carrot.” This is beyond the scope of this article, but it is worth mentioning in passing two recent Reuters reports on how “ventures backed by President Abbas’s allies have received loan guarantees, grants and agricultural assistance.”

At a critical moment for the Palestinian people, and the prospects for the region as a whole, it is arresting that many in the Palestinian leadership can sound like they are reading from Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s speech notes, when he said that “the path forward” lay in “security” for Israel, an “improved economy” for the Palestinians, and “stability for both,” as reported by The Jerusalem Post. As Shawan Jabarin said to me, “for political reasons you make a compromise and sacrifice human rights. This is what is going on these days.”

These are dangerous developments, something that Professor Qassem was quick to highlight in an interview with the Palestinian Information Center after his recent arrest: “Freedom of speech and expression is a paramount issue over which there can be no compromise … If we tolerate violations of our human rights and civil liberties, then we will be jeopardizing our future as a people.”

Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer whose articles have appeared in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’, The Electronic Intifada, the New Statesman, and many others. His book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide (Pluto Press), will be published this summer. He can be contacted at ben A T benwhite D O T org D O T uk.

Soldiers Confirm Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza

Soldiers Confirm Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza

‘Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist’, said the commander.

By Kim Bullimore

Testimony given by Israeli soldiers involved in Israel’s 22-day December-January assault on Gaza to a pre-military preparatory program at the Oranim Academic College in Israel on February 13, and which the March 18 Haaretz daily began printing daily excerpts of, revealed that they repeatedly committed crimes with impunity in Gaza.

One soldier, a squad commander, revealed that his unit was instructed to open fire in densely populated areas without warning. “We were supposed to go in with an armoured personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally meaning “cruel”] to burst through the lower door [of Palestinian houses], to start shooting inside and then … I call this murder … in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified — we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?” He said his commanding officers “said this was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand: On the one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault.”

The squad commander said that Palestinian civilians were suppose to be given five minutes’ warning to leave their houses. However, many soldiers under his command challenged this, one soldier saying, “Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist”. According to the squad commander, that sentiment was backed up by other soldiers under his command who said, “We need to murder any person who’s in there … any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist”.

‘Do Anything You Want’

According to the squad commander, the soldiers believed that “inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want”. He went on to say that commanding officers did little to counter this attitude and that it was permissible “to write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can”.

The squad commander also related that soldiers under his command killed an old woman was who walking down the road. When asked why this happened, he responded, “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: you see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon.”

According to another soldier, the descriptions of the squad commander were accurate. A third soldier said that lax rules of conduct within the attacking Israeli army also resulted in the death of many Palestinian civilians. In one incident, Israeli troops occupied a Palestinian house for several days, detaining the family who owned the house. According to the soldier, after a few days an order came through to release the family. However, not all the soldiers were informed “and they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go”. As a result, a mother and her two children were shot dead.

According to Rachel Johnson, an Australian human rights activist with the International Solidarity Movement, the testimony of the soldiers is just the tip of the iceberg. Johnson, who entered Gaza two days after the war concluded, visited dozens of Palestinian villages and cities, taking testimony and writing reports about the attacks on Palestinian civilians. Along with other international human rights activists, she also provided international accompaniment to Palestinian civilians who were still coming under Israeli fire, despite Israel’s supposed unilateral cease-fire.

Johnson told Direct Action that while it was clear that Israeli soldiers were allowed to act with impunity in Gaza, this “was part of a broader sanctioned policy by the Israeli military that sought to deliberately target Palestinian civilian infrastructure and Palestinian civilians”. She noted that the Israeli military wantonly destroyed civilian houses during the three-week bombardment. “Of the thousands of houses that were destroyed during those three weeks of ceaseless bombardment, the vast majority were in villages that were close to the Green Line [the 1949 armistice line] … In these areas that were harshly targeted during the attacks, entire neighbourhoods were wiped out, with the devastation being total”. She recounted that “in Gaza city, locals often now struggle to orientate themselves”, because “buildings were not just bombed, but the area was then bulldozed, altering the landscape utterly”.

Bulldozers Used against Residents

According to Johnson, Palestinian civilians not only endured aerial bombardment, but many residential areas were either destroyed by military bulldozers or by the placing of “internal explosives by Israeli ground forces”. She told DA: “The huge civilian death toll is largely a result of the fact that houses were destroyed while the residents were still inside”. She said that in the village of Khoza’a, “Israeli bulldozers tried to bury more than 200 of the residents of the village alive, using debris from the bulldozed houses … When they tried to run, they were shot at … Finally they were able to crawl away and most of them survived.” However, 15 people were killed in Khoza’a on that night. In addition, 150 houses were destroyed. Johnson told DA that “the bombing of houses created an intense level of fear and helplessness among the residents of Gaza”. She “often encountered the rhetorical cry ‘Where could we go? There is nowhere that was safe. We would think to go to the school, but they bomb the schools. We would go the mosque, but they bomb the mosques.’”

White phosphorous was used widely in Gaza, Johnson said. Use of munitions containing white phosphorus is illegal in populated areas under international law. It causes severe burns and death because it is easily absorbed into the skin and burns through soft tissue to the bone and vital body organs, resulting in multiple organ failure. Johnson said many Gazan children are suffering from severe white phosphorous burns. “Doctors in Gaza simply don’t know what to do with these burns, which are very common”.

Johnson noted that the Israeli military also repeatedly attacked medical personnel and hospitals during its war on the civilian population, recounting that a number of her colleagues who were in Gaza during the war were inside hospitals when they were being bombed by the Israel military. Johnson pointed out that the targeting of medical facilities or people seeking medical aid is a war crime under international law. Her testimony is corroborated by the Israeli-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR-Israel), which issued a report on March 23 noting that in Gaza the Israeli military repeatedly targeted medical facilities and medical teams in contravention of international law.

The report by PHR-Israel noted that in many cases the Israeli military refused to “give medical assistance to wounded human beings that were within several feet of soldiers” and refused to allow the evacuation of wounded or trapped civilians for days, leaving them in isolated areas with no food, water or medical treatment. PHR-Israel also noted that 16 medical personnel had been killed and another 25 wounded by Israeli fire while performing their duties. In addition, the report stated, “34 medical facilities were hit by the army, eight hospitals and 26 primary care clinics”. This was a “severe violation of directives of international law that forbid attacks on medical personnel and medical facilities”. PHR-Israel said that the actions of the military were “in violation of the army’s code of ethics, the medical code of ethics and basic human values”.

– Kim Bullimore has recently spent 12 months living and working in the Occupied West Bank with the International Women’s Peace Service www.iwps.info. She has a blog at www.livefromoccupiedpalestine.blogspot.com. This article was first published in the Australian newspaper, Direct Action www.directaction.org.au. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Who killed Hariri??: A Tale of Four Generals and a ‘Revolution’

A BOMBSHELL!

A Tale of Four Generals and a ‘Revolution’
Mohamad Shmaysani Readers Number : 39

29/04/2009 In a record speed and a clear political background, the March 14 bloc spread accusations against the four detained officers of standing behind the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. Their main slogan was ‘down with the Lebanese-Syrian security system.”

Hours after the assassination, the well designed pictures of the four officers with different but unified and well organized comments, were raised during ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations where March 14 media outlets were mobilized against the four security officers as well as judicial and political figures.

Although accusations have never been linked to evidence, the “Cedars Revolution” camp – a term that then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the March 14 movement – had built its revolution on the glittering slogans of freedom, sovereignty and independence, and of course chastising the culprits, always written under the officers pictures.

When some of the public opinion and most of the international opinion was had fallen under the magical effect of Lebanese flags, revolutionary spirits and anti Syrian and Iranian slogans, it was time to move to the second phase: ‘Truth’

Then key witness in the Hariri case, Mohamad Zuheir Siddiq, had made false testimonies to the UN investigation panel headed by Detlev Mehlis to request the Lebanese judiciary – after slight changes were made to this body – to arrest the officers.

“The Truth” was the slogan that was feeding the March 14 campaign, however it was the political means for the Qornet Shehwan members and their allies to garner as much political gains as possible in the framework of the so called Cedars Revolution.

The four officers were detained based on this fictional slogan.
They have spent nearly four years in solitary confinement and harsh conditions without charges and without trial. Even the Washington, the sponsor of the Cedars Revolution, described the Generals’ detention as arbitrary.

These senior officers are:
Major General Jamil Sayyed, former General Security chief.
He served in the Lebanese army for 30 years and served another seven years in the General Security apparatus, until the fifth of June 2005.

Major General Mustapha Hamdan, Presidential Guards chief.
He was the only General –of the four officers- to remain in his post after the Hariri assassination.
Major General Ali Haj, former Internal Security Forces General Director.
He was appointed in 2004 as chief of the ISF.

Brigadier General Raymond Azar, former Military Intelligence chief.
He rarely appeared in public and had very little to do with the political and media milieus.

With their release, ends a long and exhausting period of delusions and fact distortions to derail the search for the true killers of martyr Hariri, particularly after this case had been purely politicized and diverted from the true and factual course that would eventually lead to the killers and perhaps compensate the four officers who lost four years of their lives behind bars, not knowing why.

STL Pre-Trial Judge Orders Immediate Release of 4 Generals
Readers Number : 130

29/04/2009
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) has decided that the four Lebanese General be released, after nearly four years of detention over the assassination of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri yet without charges or trial.

Pre-Trial Judge Daniel Francine ordered in a press conference the immediate release of the Generals. Francine has taken his decision Wednesday based on Judge Daniel Bellemare’s recommendation presented to the STL on Monday.

Shortly after the announcement, people took to the streets spontaneously to express their satisfaction and joy, and fireworks lit the sky of Lebanon.

Well informed judicial sources have told Al-Manar that procedure are underway to release the officers today as an STL representatives arrive in Beirut to follow-up on General Prosecutor Judge Daniel Bellemare’s decision on four generals’ case.

The officers are the former head of the presidential guard, Mustafa Hamdan, Security Services Director Jamil Sayyed, Domestic Security chief Ali Hajj and Military Intelligence chief Raymond Azar.

The court ruling was broadcast live on Lebanese television.

Whither the Tribunal?

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Lebanon, March 14, Syria Tags: Daniel Bellemare, Hariri investigation, Lebanese elections, March 14
No Comments

BREAKING NEWS: All Four Generals Released… (see below for update)

We are hours away from a potentially groundbreaking decision, vis-à-vis the detention of the four generals held in connection with Rafiq Hariri’s murder, the fate of the International Tribunal, and (further down the road) the outcome of the parliamentary elections.

Daniel Bellemare, prosecutor to the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, handed over the investigation’s files to the pre-trial judge, Daniel Fransen, who must make a decision today regarding the detention of all suspects. As you may recall, Lebanese authorities released three of the seven suspects two months ago, but the generals (who have been held without charge for four years) are the high-profile figures that many in Lebanon’s ruling coalition were hoping would be implicated in the conspiracy. Nailing the generals, so the thinking went, would have established with virtual certainty Syria’s involvement in the crime, especially if the prosecutors were able to compel a confession along these lines from the generals themselves (”rolling them up”, in The Wire’s lingo…)

There is a possibility that not all will be released; some may be sent to the Hague while others are freed. Should they be released however, it will be hard to escape the conclusion that Syria is off the hook. Almost four years to the day when the last Syrian soldier trudged ignominiously over the Lebanese border, Syria may have finally wiped its hands of the entire Hariri debacle.

Update: Celebratory gunfire and fireworks, it turns out, are even more effective in communicating breaking news than Twitter. The generals are free. What this means for the future of the Hariri tribunal is unclear, but one can probably safely conclude that Syria is off the hook, barring any major surprises in Bellemare’s investigation. More on this soon enough…

FLASHBACK

Bush’s strangest Syrian bedfellow: At center of suspicion in Hezbollah leader’s car bombing

A BOMBSHELL!

“Shawkat, by delivering the goods on the assassination of America’s “Most Wanted” Mugniyah, has ensured that he will now receive the protection of the Bush White House in the current UN investigation of car bombings in Lebanon, most notably that of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.”

Posted by Evelyn at Free Iraq

***

A COMMENT:
There have been so many signals that Assad is moving back (if he ever left) to the USraeli camp:
– Attending Annapolis.
– Secret and not so secret negotiations with Israelis.
– Improved relations with Jordan.
– Improved relations with S.A.
– Next Arab summit is being held in Damascus.
– Helping the puppet Maliki government in Iraq.
– Handing over to the U.S. occupation some leaders of the Iraqi resistance who were in Syria.
– Cooperation with the occupation to seal the Syria-Iraq border.

And more.

It is no secret that the U.S.-Saudi plan has been to break the Iran-Syria “alliance.” This will do it.

# posted by Tony : 2:05 PM Comments (17)

Don’t forget to read the 17 comments

UPATE

General Hajj: I Will Wear My Uniform Again, It’s My Right
General Azar: God Forgive All Those Who Offended Me
General Hajj: We Had Hoped Lebanon Judiciary Had Taken Decision, Not STL
General Sayyed: Hariri Should Hold Judges Mirza and Sakr Accountable
General Sayyed: Hariri Either Deluded or Traded Politics With His Father
General Sayyed: Hariri Wants Truth, However Associates Don’t
MP Hariri: Some Lebanese Feel Disappointed at Tribunal Decision
General Sayyed: Jailer of Martyr Hariri is March 14 and its Media
General Sayyed: Generals Released, Only Prisoner Left is Martyr Harire

ISRAEL ~ THE TALMUD IN ACTION

Watch these short videos and you will understand from whence most of the problems of Zionism arise. Then do more research yourself. I have touched upon this in my previous writing on The Protocols of Zionism. But there is more, so much more. And remember, NOT ALL JEWS subscribe to these obscene beliefs, just the few and the powerful who seek to subvert all to their ways.

You will understand the cruelty then that allows soldiers to shoot small children innocently minding their family goats, as was done a few days ago to a 13 year old boy. See previous post for this. You will understand why they do as they do and why the soldiers obey their rabbis. They have been taught the ways of the Talmud from childhood and know no better. This is what explains the hideousness of so many settlers and their belief that they are right to steal all they can from the Palestinians.

The Babylonian Talmud ~ Translated by Michael L. Rodkinson, [1918]

There is one admission I have to make however. I see a lot of quotes around, many of which are disputed most earnestly by various Zionist writers. I was going to type them in here, but I found there to be too much controversy about them being taken out of context and, in truth, I can understand this being done. Everyone who wishes to demonize “the other” does this. You will find many of them repeated in the videos below.

Since I have a few of these videos, why limit myself to the one? Here is another on the Babylonian Talmud.
MORE.

AND MORE:

AND MORE!:

DR. DAVID DUKE ON TALMUDISM.

Posted by Barbara L at 2:18 AM Links to this post

The Dahiya Strategy – A Painting

The Dahiya Strategy – A Painting
Readers Number : 175

04.24.2009 Lukekendall.com

Painting and description by: Luke Kendall
When a building is disassembled, you lose its facade and its very structure is revealed, you see what it is made up of.
The same can be said of when countries decide to partake in strategies such as the ‘Dahiya strategy’: it removes the facade and the PR illusions, and reveals the true values of a country. Values are an essential component of conflict, and it can tell you alot about what a country stands for.
The painting is named after a military strategy approved by the israeli military, which is basically to use disproportionate military force against countries it considers it’s enemy. When implemented in Dahiya, the objective was to completely level a number of high story apartment blocks during the 2006 Lebanon war, with no regard to civilian casualties or world opinion.
The events that happened in Dahiya weren’t accidental, or a breakdown in communications, it was a calculated strategy that was monstrously executed, as a warning that israel knows no limits to what it is prepared to do in ’security’ actions.
Luke Kendall-London-April 2009

ISRAEL’S WALLS ~ FOR PALESTINIANS OR JEWS?

Source

Part of the Warsaw Ghetto Wall today

Arthur Topham explores the reasons for the apartheid wall, and reveals that the Pharisees never really went away.
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=990
by Arthur Topham
April 14, 2009.
“What is called “Western civilization” cannot be conceived without Christianity… Its greatest improvement was in the field of the spirit and of man’s behaviour towards man.

The West established men’s right to public charge and open trial, or release, (a right which was again in jeopardy in the Twentieth Century) and this was the greatest advance in the entire history of man; on the survival or destruction of this achievement depends his future.” – Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion

The old query about the half full or half empty glass is one that might aptly be applied to the massive concrete wall that now divides Palestinian lands into two respective ghettos ~ one for the Palestinians and, yes, one for the Jews. Current collective wisdom would suggest the wall was designed by the Zionist government of Israel for the simple purpose of maintaining control over stolen Arab territory as well as for ‘security’ reasons but this proposition I suggest is much too simple and too misleading.

Internationally renowned street artist Banksey
calls the wall the greatest canvas he
could wish for but would prefer to see it torn down.

Deception of the non-Jewish masses, the guiding principle of the Mossad and the Jewish state, demands that one look much deeper into such a surface explanation. For Israel to convince a world now extremely skeptical of its modus operandi, that its legitimacy as a nation and its actions toward the Palestinians are in fact justified, it must retain within its own arbitrarily chosen and illegal captured territories a populace that will support and promote its racist, expansionist agenda.

The recent polls taken during the slaughter and destruction of Gaza over the Christmas season which registered a 94% approval rate for Israel’s military crimes is a poignant example of just how crucial and effective this process of indoctrination really is. In order to have accomplished such a high degree of agreement for genociding a defenseless ghetto of starving refugees, there has to be something in place that goes beyond the normal apparatus of democratic structures.Because of the inherent contradictions imbued throughout Israel’s racist, delusive ideology ~ ones upon which the state was initially founded ~ the Talmudic leaders of this supposedly secularized “democratic” state have exhibited something that most commentators tend to overlook and that is the age old technique of building a fence or a wall around their chosen brethren in order to maintain a tight, rigid doctrinal control over the minds of those within; a critical prerequisite to sustaining the irrational tenets necessary to justify their otherwise fraudulent, immoral and illegal existence.

The technique of maintaining such control of its citizenry was perfected prior to the birth of Jesus Christ and as the famed British journalist Douglas Reed shows us in his classic on the subject, The Controversy of Zionism, even before Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 AD there were two different “bands of travelers” already passing through its gates.

In Reed’s words, “The disciples bore a new message to mankind, for Christianity had been born. The Pharisees, foreseeing the fate which they had brought on Jerusalem, removed to a new headquarters from which (as from Babylon of yore) the ruling sect might exercise command over “the Jews” wherever in the world they lived.
These two small groups of travelers were the vanguard of parties of light and of darkness which, like a man and his shadow, have gone ever since through the centuries, and ever westward. The crisis of “the West” today traces directly back to that departure from doomed Jerusalem nineteen centuries ago, for the two groups bore into the West ideas that could never be reconciled.One had to prevail over the other, sooner or later, and the great bid for victory of the destructive idea is being witnessed in our generation. In the centuries between, the story of the West was always, in essentials, that of the struggle between the two ideas.

When “the Law” according to the Levites and Pharisees was in the ascendant, the West made slaves of men, brought heretics before an inquisition, put apostates to death, and yielded to primitive visions of master-racehood; thus the Twentieth Century was the time of the worst backsliding in the West.

When the West made men and nations free, established justice between them, set up the right of fair and open trial, repudiated master-racehood and acknowledged the universal fatherhood of God, it followed the teaching of him who had come to ‘fulfill the Law’.”

The Wall of the Warsaw Ghetto

These prophetic words written in the mid-1950s predicted that the second half of the century would be but a continuation of this struggle between the forces of darkness and light, one culminating in either of the two being victorious.

Prior to the sacking and destruction of Jerusalem, the Pharisees had already skipped town and relocated in a new headquarters called Jamnia, still in Palestine. It was from there that they began to reassess the new kid on the block so to speak and work out a plan to rid the world of his seemingly enduring presence.

To their longstanding power and control over their Jewish brethren this new sect known as Christians were a direct threat to their power and influence. Here they were (the new ones) claiming that the Messiah had finally arrived and that he was proclaiming that the God of Abraham and Isaac and Israel was the God of all the people, Gentiles included and not just the god of the self-chosen Judahites.Such chutzpah on the part of this young Galilean upstart was anathema to the Pharisees and their Priesthood. They couldn’t, as Reed suggested, permit such a creed to gain prominence, especially one whose ruling tenet was “love your enemies” when that of the Pharisees was the polar opposite, stated the Jews should “hate” their enemies and destroy them down to the very last child.

As we saw in the Gaza example last December/January the deliberate shooting of defenseless women and children was living proof that their methodology has not changed in over two millennia. After Jerusalem’s destruction the Jewish Nation was broken up and dispersed throughout the world but the Pharisees at Jamnia continued on with their claims that they and only they possessed the true, oral “Law” purportedly secretly passed down from the God of Abraham into their hot waiting hands and retained by them and them alone ever since.

This of course flew in the face of all that Jesus Christ had taught throughout his ministry where he constantly berated the Pharisees and Scribes for claiming exclusive right to God and using that supposed occult knowledge for their own selfish purposes.The New Testament is full of such chastisements by the Messiah where he exposes the fallacies and falsehoods of this exclusionary, “self-chosen” tribal group. Nevertheless the Pharisees, being a tenacious, determined lot, persisted in maintaining that their secret, orally transmitted laws were the exclusive domain of their particular sect and no other, including the rest of the eleven tribes that had originally made up the bulk of what was once the true 12 Tribes of Israel.

Over the next few hundred years these oral laws would be formulated into what eventually became the Babylonian Talmud, a complex system of rules and regulations and rituals and superstitions compiled with the intent to create an atmosphere of perplexing, confining laws designed to captivate the tribe and breed an eternal hatred for the Messiah Jesus Christ and his followers who, because of the message that was spoken and believed in, posed a direct threat to their own power and design.
The Talmudic Pharisee’s method was to maintain a mental stranglehold over their fellow tribal members by, “interposing a fence between the Jews and the forces of integration released by Christianity.”

The ghetto thus became the traditional form of maintaining control over the intervening centuries and succeeded in keeping the majority of the Jews held in a cohesive amalgam right up until the 19th Century when conditions in the West, especially the new West of North America where freedom and liberty were the watchwords, began to draw the introverted, ghettoized Jews out and away from their confining, separatist dogmas and into a new world of integration with the rest of America’s immigrant population.This became a temptation too great to resist. It was during the 19th Century that the Talmudic powers began to realize the threat to their control posed by this new trend toward integration and liberty and thus set about organizing a more comprehensive plan to ensure their control over the ghettos remained intact.

Thus was born the nationalistic phase projected into the minds of Jews around the world. It was a fencing project to outdo any others before it and by the end of the 19th Century the plans were in place, spearheaded by Theodor Herzl and the Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe who gathered in Basel, Switzerland to form the World Zionist Organization in 1897. It’s objective the creation of “spiritual” homeland in the heart of the ancient Arab territory of Palestine.Probably the modern world’s first major heart transplant designed to gain the Zionist faction of World Jewry a long sought after foothold in the Middle East. Political Zionism in that sense became then the thought form which would, after fifty years and more of consistent lobbying and terrorizing of the Palestinian people, eventually precipitate down and manifest within the finite world of global politics into what became, in 1948, the entity known as the state of Israel.

A misnomer from the start the nation should have been called the state of Judah but in true form to its guiding principle of deception it stole its name from the true Israelites, like it stole its territory from the true Arabs. Since the establishment of this Talmudic state of Judahites in 1948, preparation began in earnest to re-create a new ghetto population that would be guaranteed to remain loyal to and complicit with whatever acts of terrorism the state chose to employ in their quest for greater and greater territorial gains.Finally, after close to sixty years of violence and endless broken treaties and continuous acts of terrorism against the Arab people of the region, the outcry from the rest of the world at the obvious injustices being committed, spurred the Talmudic masters of “Israel” to materially actualize their ancient mind-control methods to the point where they began creating in truly concrete form their mendacious techniques for ensuring control over their tribal members.

The world reacted in horror to these walls and automatically assumed that they were being built to create barriers to keep the Palestinians out of their sacred Talmudic territories. But while this was ostensibly a part of their rational the walls were more an attempt to increase the ghettoization of the Jews themselves so that their later actions, particularly the more brutal and insane attacks upon Gaza could somehow be justified and given a sense of actual legitimacy by the perpetrators of these most heinous of genocidal crimes.All the while the rest of the civilized world was forced to witness their evil intent whenever they turn on their television sets and watched the Zionist news broadcasts or pick up their Zionist newspapers and read about the latest atrocity being committed by these so-called “persecuted” and “victimized” members of the Talmudic tribe of Judea.

Now as if things weren’t bad enough already, all of these efforts by the Pharisees to keep their members trapped in a cult of hatred toward Christians, was only exacerbated six centuries later by the birth of Muhammad and another new religious faith that, like Christianity, also maintained there was but one God, Allah, and He was a God of all peoples just as the Christian God was.This new religion taught love for everyone and hatred for no other religions, especially the Christian religion and its Messiah Jesus Christ. Unlike the Talmud which heaped profanities and abuse upon Jesus and his Mother Mary, Muhammad held Christ in the greatest of reverence and recognized him as one of the great prophets in the lineage of Abraham.

Now the Talmudic Pharisees had a second religion that they needed to include in their plans for destruction, and as we can witness today, they’re doing their utmost to create hatred and dissension amongst the Christians for the followers of Islam in order to start another major war between two religions whose founders were in accord with everything that the Talmudic Jews despised and held in the deepest of contempt.

The final point brought that needs to be stated here is the fact that down through history and right up until the 20th Century, the most astute observers of civilized development in the West continually questioned and criticized the actions and motives of the Babylonian Talmudic tribe of Pharisees whenever they began to meddle to deeply in the affairs of other nation states.

But beginning with the take-over of the majority of the media in the West around the turn of the century, this practice began to cease and in its place began the efforts on the part of the Zionist Jews to attack any and all critics of their ideology with the endless epithets of “anti-Semite” and “racist” and “Jew Hater”, an enterprise that has today reached such epidemic proportions, that critics of present day Zionism lay wasting away in dungeons and website owners, university professors, researchers and critics everywhere are being accused of “hate crimes” throughout most if not all western nations.
All of these negative, dark designs by the Talmudic tyrants who control the state of “Israel” and the global institutions of media, money and manufacturing ,compose what is now the shadow thrown upon the world by a wall of deception that soon must be torn down if the world is to ever again know peace and harmony.

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Who killed Hariri??: A Tale of Four Generals and a ‘Revolution’

Bitter disputes within Fatah prevent it from holding its sixth conference

[ 29/04/2009 – 04:07 PM ]

AMMAN, (PIC)– Fatah sources ruled out that the sixth conference of Fatah could be held in the near future attributing this to the altercations that erupted between members of the preparatory committee on the mechanisms and the place of holding the conference.

The sources said, in a statement published Wednesday in the Saudi Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper, that these disputes heated after members of the preparatory committee of the sixth Fatah conference called Hakam Balawi and Nasser Yousef traded insults over the increase of the conference membership.

According to the sources, Yousef strongly refused the proposal of increasing the conference membership and insisted the committee reduce the number of members from 2,900 members to about 1,500.

The sources added that Fatah inside the 1948 occupied lands rejected this reduction and tried to raise the number of members.

They noted that Fatah conference members are also wrangling over the place of holding this conference after Jordan and Egypt refused ex-PA chief Mahmoud Abbas’s request to hold the sixth Fatah conference in their lands.

In the same context, informed sources in Fatah revealed that Farouq Al-Qaddoumi, the political chief of the PLO and the secretary-general of Fatah, called, during the meeting of the preparatory committee, for preventing Mohamed Dahlan from participating in the sixth conference.

The sources added that Qaddoumi said to Mohamed Ghoneim, the head of the preparatory committee of the sixth conference of Fatah, that Dahlan and his gang, who led Fatah to the present situation and inflicted great harm on it, must not participate in the conference.

For their part, Ahmed Al-Nasr, a Fatah central committee member, and other senior Fatah officials gave a detailed account supported by evidence about the practices of Dahlan and his followers which led to the current setback of Fatah.

Al-Nakba: The [ONGOING] Palestinian Dispossession

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Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Dispossession

Date posted: May 14, 2003
By MIFTAH

In 1948 their homes were taken away; today they are still denied their Right of Return!

Then and Now

posted by annie at 7:05 AM

Salim Nazzal – The issue of Racism between Zionism and the Apartheid ideology

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You are here: Home » Regional » Israel » Salim Nazzal – The issue of Racism between Zionism and the Apartheid ideology

Dr. Salim Nazzal*

This is a quick and generalized paper, which gives evidences of which might explain why the Zionist regime has been more capable of resisting the pressures of the culture of human rights and self determination while the apartheid regimes have vanished.

Despite the similarities between the white Racist regime, in earlier South Africa and those of the Zionist regime, in terms of the oppressive policy against the natives, there are seven major differences: the first, white Europeans immigrated to Africa without a prior plan to the country and to the natives. Their immigration was rather spontaneous, guided by wide colonial thought rather than of a well theorized racist ideology decided from before. The construction of the racist regime was done through a process in the history of their domination there. Zionists arrived in Palestine from day one armed with comprehensible ideology, unambiguous policy, from which its aims were to transfer Palestinians.

The most dangerous thing was that Zionists linked the Jewish existence in Palestine with murdering Palestinians, thusly creating a Paranoia of Life and death strategy, which is always ready to justify the horror towards Palestinians. This paranoiac thinking has become the melting pot of the Israeli society today, where fear of others has become one of the characteristics of its society. The result of this is that it oppresses any rational thinking in the Israeli society which might emerge with new ideas towards reconciliation with Palestinians. The Israeli officer in the massacre of Kufr Qasim which took place in 1956 was not only proud of what he committed of murder but summarized the Zionist worldview: “In killing of any Arab here (in Palestine) we save the life of an Israeli, and by killing Arabs outside we save Israel“!

The problem with this suicidal thinking is that it is a blinding mechanism which closes all other alternatives towards finding a peaceful formula based on coexistence on equal footing. Thusly the Zionist formula which says that “Jews live and the Palestinian die” is a direct contradiction to the other alternative which says that Jews live and Palestinians live too.

The second difference is that the white Afrikaner wanted to exploit the natives of the country, but they did not send the natives into exile, the Zionists wanted the total removal of the natives following the Zionist copy of the final solution. The dangerous thing in this thinking is that Zionists did their very best to negate the existence of Palestinians while the whites never denied the existence of native Africans. At first they said Palestine is an empty land waiting for them. Then Golda Maier (prime minister of Israel in 1973) declared that Palestinians never existed, and at the end with Menahem Pegin (prime minister of Israel in 1978) who declared that the real Palestinians are the Jewish European immigrants and not Palestinians.

In so doing Zionist used three interconnected methodology, which its aim to remove Palestinians from the Past, Present and Future: the first is to oust Palestinians from history by claiming that European Jews are the real Palestinians, and second by using the physical removal of Palestinians and third in insisting on the Jewishness of the state of Israel which means that there is no place to non Jews.

The letter written in allegorical language posted by a Zionist who visited Palestine to investigate the possibility for a Jewish state expressed the status of Palestine as a country populated by its folk. “The woman is beautiful but it is married with another man!” History showed us that Zionists decided to murder the “husband” but one thing they did not calculate on was that the “husband” has got enough sons and daughters to resist.

Third, unlike Zionists the white regimes in South Africa and Rodecia lacked the “tragic factor” or the “drama factor” to play on. Consequently the white Africans lacked a Jewish and sympathetic lobbyist which could influence the foreign policy of countries like the United States and Europe .The American Jewish professor Norman Finkelstein who himself lost close relatives in the holocaust is required reading on this subject: “The Holocaust industry: reflections on the exploitation of Jewish Suffering” and “beyond Chutzpah: on the Zionist misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history.

The fourth difference is the handing of the apartheid regime to its nuclear capacity to the new regime.
But in the case of Israel it is extremely doubtful that this would happen peacefully as the state of Israel owns a recite of three dangerous combinations that never existed in the history before: A, the atomic capacity which Zionist sources call the doomsday weapons, B, a hateful sentiments towards Arabs and Muslims and suspicious ideology to the entire world, C, a suicidal mentality which Zionists call the Samson factor.

Fifth, Zionists invented perhaps a new rule in war, a position which stands against all logic and is called: “kill and cry”, whenever Zionists murder Palestinians they present themselves as the victim. A perfect example is when Goldamaeir used the most Hippocratic words ever uttered in the history of the politics of hypocrisy, and which I doubt one could find equivalent hypocrisy in modern politics for. “We will never forgive Arabs that they obliged us to kill them!!“

Sixth, Zionist froze the Palestine and Middle East history, as if nothing has occurred in that place since the Roman Empire. They only wanted Palestine to be seen as geography and thusly froze its history at a certain point of which it fit their ideology. This is clear in the Zionist utterance when they refer to the ancient nations of the region as if they still existed now, while the simple fact is that these nations were melted in the main stream of variations of the Arab culture. In the present time and despite the significant changes which took place in the last 20 years regarding the world recognition of the Palestinian rights; as to the question of human rights and self determination, Zionists are not able to see these developments.

They froze the holocaust as if it is a constant event and not a horrible historical event of which Jews must be the first to draw conclusions from. Yet the fact remains that it has and is being used in the opposite direction, to oppress Palestinians and to silence the critics against the Zionist oppressive policy.

Seventh, the white Afrikaner did not have the culture of the “chosen people” despite the racist policy, which they ran over centuries and despite the failed attempts by a few theologians to legitimize apartheid through theology. While Zionism is based partly on the Jewish religious notion of the chosen people. It has secularized this notion to legitimate its existence in the “backward region”, which they will bring “civilization” to but, as we see the retreat of the rational thinking and the rise of Jewish fundamentalism it is no doubt that Zionism has fed this notion. The policy of oppressing Palestinians and the insistence on “Jewishness” of the state had contributed in the rapid strength of the religious fundamentalism which was indirectly planted by Zionism, and which leading to the creation of a Taliban Jewish state in the region which might lead to a total confrontation between Muslims and Jews.

The policy which Zionists implemented until today goes in perfect harmony with the rhetorical guidelines of political Zionism in which its content can be summarized in a few words, Terror, Terror and more Terror, with the goal being to impose facts on the ground. How to validate Zionism when it denies Palestinians their basic rights to live on their land, how to validate Zionism when it confiscates Palestinian land and gives it only to Jews, How to validate Zionism when it makes only streets and housing for Jews, how to validate Zionism when it views Jews as a superior race and Palestinians are but “insects and sub humans”? How to validate Zionism when its everyday policy’s is based on violence, discrimination and prejudice towards native Palestinians?

Indeed, we are dealing with a unique case of racist ideology, which is a blend of Nazism and apartheid, the modernizing of bronze age history to fit the modern concept of nationalism, Paranoiac politicized thinking, modern and dynamic forms of apartheid but undoubtedly more dangerous. A weird contradiction of the absence of rational thinking at the same time having the most advanced technology of which aids them to commit genocide. More severely, the illusion that with force they can impose facts all the time as if all occupants in history were brainless and they are the only occupants which could avoid the fate of all occupations.

Galileo asserted once all truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

The problem is when the truth about Zionism atrocities is known and well documented at the UN and the human rights organizations yet Zionists and their friends in this world are not willing to listen to the sound voices which seek to find a peaceful solution based on the international law and the principles of justice.

* Dr. Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian-Norwegian historian in the Middle East, who has written extensively on social and political issues in the region. – snazzal@ymail.com

cartoon of the day

By Guest Post • Apr 28th, 2009 at 20:04 • Category: Artwork, Cartoon of the day, Palestine

Leunig Cartoon
Little picture, big picture
Introduction by Sonja Karkar:

On Saturday, Australia’s most well-known cartoonist and social commentator Michael Leunig, gave his readers a disturbing account of how the time-honoured traits of decency and caring for others in what we call our civilised world, are fast giving way to the callous “me first” syndrome with dire consequences for the human condition that few realise will inevitably affect even them. He recounts a shocking incident where a women is accosted by a group of men in a suburban street and is saved by a 72-year-old man who is badly beaten, but lives with honour intact. He then reminds us about the incomprehensible atrocities taking place in Gaza against an imprisoned and defenceless people while most of the world turns away without any sense of outrage or compassion. We pick up his story from this point.

When we walk away from cruelty and rationalise it in the scheme of things, we do ourselves an invisible injury.

By Michael Leunig The Melbourne Age January 10, 2009

As this small unfortunate event was taking place in the suburban street, a massacre was in progress on the other side of the world. Israeli aircraft were bombing Gaza – the tormented little punishment space of one-and-a-half million desperate and helpless Palestinian refugees, half of them children. The Palestinians were being crushed yet again in the most cynical and brutal way – and as if this was not appalling enough, the government of Israel was also trying to tell the world that this chaotic mire of blood and rubble and burnt human flesh was a legitimate and necessary procedure in the making of civilisation and a better world. One cannot help but think the Israeli Government a bunch of amateurs in the business of nationhood.

Modern military conflict should not longer be called “warfare”. It is more like mass industrial killing than combat. It is coercive homicide posing as defence, and is radically uneven – or “asymmetrical” as the militarists like to say. In the Western calculation, it means that we do the killing and they do the dying. The children, the mothers, the elderly and the poor do the dying in particular: those not-quite-white people, born in distant unfortunate lands – they do all the wailing and the suffering.

To witness this as a moral being, albeit at a distance, is to be made sick and aghast, and driven half mad with a bewildering mix of sorrow, anger and shame. It is the strong abusing the weak. It is what conscience, justice and honour cannot abide. Yet, if there is such a distinguishing change in war, there is also a change in the overriding effect it has upon the earth and its people – regardless of so-called winners and losers. We are stupid if we do not know this, but there are reasons to believe that with the advancement of fiendish military technology, there had been an equivalent advancement of universal consciousness about the meanings of war and those who drive and control it.

Humanity, although oppressed and tormented by militarism and its abuses, now seems to instinctively understand that something is fundamentally different about the meaning of military might, and that modern war in a modern world makes victory increasingly irrelevant and tragically absurd. It is the vary practice of military violence that is now most significant, because of the psychological cancer it creates in the world – a condition that eventually affects us all. Nobody escapes. Even those who shrug and turn away will find this complex spread of depression and chaotic perversity arriving mysteriously in their homes and among their families sooner or later. We have much to learn about the universal ecosystems of the psyche.

War makes death, but even worse it creates living death. A complex and painful new disease, distributed slowly and evenly to the rich and the poor around the world. It poisons all and makes borders meaningless. Humanity is being united by this common heartbreaking, life-wrecking despair. No armies, no weapons can stop it.

It’s just simply too late for the promised land – the earth is what’s urgently at stake now, and the world is sick and in revulsion. Atrocity is atrocity, injustice is injustice and enough is enough.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The entire column by Michael Leunig is available online at:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/little-picture-big-picture/2009/01/08/1231004194072.html

Racism, boycott and a big dose of hypocrisy

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Isabelle Humphries, The Electronic Intifada, 28 April 2009

Written in Latin, “Geneva City of Refuge” — except for Palestinians? (Isabelle Humphries)

Reading the papers in a Geneva cafe, a paragraph at the bottom corner of page four caught my eye. A small article reported on the latest World Bank publication emphasizing what we already know: Palestinians don’t get their fair share of water. Israelis use four times the amount of water as the average Palestinian who doesn’t even have enough for his or her basic needs. Unfortunately, this example of Israeli apartheid was hidden amongst pages of commentary on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech. Yet again the racist reality that is life for Palestinians was hidden beneath the political rhetoric.

Back in the UK, thumbing through the week’s copies of the Guardian, the only issue discussed relating to last week’s United Nations Durban Review Conference on racism seemed to be Ahmadinejad and the Euro/North American boycotters. So much for the UN tackling racism. As one civil society participant pointed out, not only could this have been an opportunity for discussion of Israeli racism, but a chance to highlight other key issues like racism against vulnerable groups such as the Roma and the Dalit or the importance of reparations for descendants of the European-Atlantic slave trade.

International activists seeking justice in Palestine call for a radical reflection on the overall framework of Zionism, which as an ideology prioritizes the rights of one racial group over another. While no one was expecting that the Durban Review Conference would adopt an apartheid analogy, in recent years many senior international figures have sharply criticized Israel’s systematic discrimination against the Palestinians. While Palestinians are as aware as any other occupied nation that UN resolutions do not necessarily lead to international action, nevertheless the document resulting from the Durban 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) was considered something of a landmark. Dismissed as “anti-Semitic” by the usual US-Israeli suspects, the declaration named Palestinians as specific victims of racism. Though it failed to mention the source of this racism, many civil society organizations saw Durban as a useful conceptual framework for combating the racism at the heart of the protracted plight of the Palestinians.

The Durban Review Conference held last week was initially intended to be a forum to evaluate the progress towards goals set eight years ago. But bullying tactics by certain European/North American states ensured that the draft Durban Review Conference declaration excluded any criticism of Israel. In the planning process original “offensive” statements such as those referring to “unlawful collective punishment” and “torture” were removed. Israel, Canada and the US — under both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — had no intention of allowing a repeat of the language of 2001. All three boycotted the process from the start. Obama initially rejoined the planning stage but pulled out again.

Palestinian and Arab activists were not the only ones frustrated that the first African-American president of the US refused to attend a UN conference on racism. Stressing the importance of providing “support and reparations” to victims of history and contemporary times, actor and activist Danny Glover made a last minute appeal to Obama in The Nation, 8 April: “Would the United Nations conference not be exactly the right place for our new president to show the world that his administration’s commitment to ‘change we can believe in’ means rejecting our country’s tarnished legacy of violating international law, undermining the United Nations and using American exceptionalism to justify walking away from the leadership responsibility many in the world expect of the United States?”

Such pleas fell on deaf ears. As if watering down the main agenda was not enough, less than two weeks before the start of the conference, the Palestinian refugee rights organization Badil’s Geneva representative, Rania Madi, was called into the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and informed that Palestine-related events would not even be permitted as official “side events.” Israeli lobbyists on the other hand found a way to conduct their own side meeting, despite the fact that official side events on Israel-Palestine were not permitted. Apparently the ban was dodged by labeling the event as addressing a more general universal “theme” of racism and avoiding reference to Israel. The session then proceeded to allow the likes of Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel and actor Jon Voight to rail against Iranian and Palestinian “anti-Semitism,” “nazism” and racism against Israelis.

With the voices of Palestinian critics of Israel silenced, the field was left to Ahmadinejad to mix valid criticism of Israel as a racist state with more suspect ideology. Israeli lobbyists must have thought they had won the jackpot. The speech and a walkout of 23 Euro/North American state delegates (not to mention those who had never come to start with) meant they had little work to do not only to avoid accusations of racism, but to cast Israel as the victim of racism.

Despite the fiasco of the main event, a successful two-day conference sponsored by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) brought a group of international legal experts and activists together to examine and develop possibilities of using legal instruments to combat Israeli racism. As one of the organizers, director of Badil Resource Center Ingrid Jaradat Gassner noted, similar boycotts by US allies at UN anti-racism conferences in 1978 and 1983 “could not prevent the eventual isolation and eradication of the apartheid regime in South Africa.” With long-term goals in sight, activists from across Europe and further afield discussed issues from applicability of the crime of “apartheid” as enshrined in international law to strategies for campaigning against Jewish parastatal organizations (such as the Jewish National Fund) in home countries to the potential of legal strategies in bringing Israel to account before international courts.

Seamus Milne of the Guardian, one of the few commentators talking sense in the mainstream UK press, pointed to the disturbing fact that all the boycotters were “European or European-settler states … In international forums, it’s almost unprecedented to have such an undiluted racial divide of whites-versus-the-rest.” How brutally ironic for a conference supposedly for tackling global racism; “the Geneva boycotters, fresh from standing behind Israel’s carnage in Gaza, are in denial about their own racism — and their continuing role in the tragedy of the Middle East” (23 April 2009). The hypocrisy of being told by European politicians and media that boycotts against Israel are either anti-Semitic or counter-productive, yet to be instructed that boycott of Ahmadinejad or even the whole UN racism conference is right and justifiable leaves anyone dedicated to justice fuming. That’s what I feel like — I can only imagine how Palestinians feel to be let down by the international community. Again.

Isabelle Humphries took part in the Israel Review Conference as a part of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (www.badil.org) network of international lawyers/academics working on refugee rights. Her own doctoral research focuses on Palestinian internal refugees in the Galilee.

Video Edward Said: Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human rights!

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Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the…

This Lecture at Berkeley University by the late Edward Said is a must see!. Everything He says about Netanyahu and the question of Palestine is very much relevant to today’s events. Administrator

The late Edward Said, author of the groundbreaking work “Orientalism” and a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was one of the most prominent literary and cultural critics in the United States. His writings about the Middle East and its relationship to the West have had a major influence on both scholarship and public opinion. [events] [glopubaffairs] Credits: producer:UC Berkeley Educational Technology Services, speaker:Edward Said

April 27, 2009 Posted by Elias

Obama’s Iraq – The Picture of Dorian Gray

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By JEREMY SCAHILL

Remember when Barack Obama made that big announcement at Camp Lejeune about how all US combat troops were going to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30? Liberals jumped around with joy, praising Obama for ending the war so that they could focus on their “good war” in Afghanistan.

Of course, the celebrations were and remain unwarranted. Obama’s Iraq plan is virtually identical to the one on Bush’s table on January 19, 2009. Obama has just rebranded the occupation, sold it to liberals and dropped the term “Global War on Terror” while, for all practical purposes, continuing the Bush era policy (that’s why leading Republicans praised Obama’s plan). In the real world, US military commanders have said they are preparing for an Iraq presence for another 15-20 years, the US embassy is the size of Vatican City, there is no official plan for the withdrawal of contractors and new corporate mercenary contracts are being awarded. The SoFA Agreement between the US and Iraq gives the US the right to extend the occupation indefinitely and to continue intervening militarily in Iraq ad infinitum. All it takes is for the puppets in Baghdad to ask nicely…

In the latest episode of the “Occupation Rebranded” mini-series, President Obama is preparing to scrap the June 30 withdrawal timeline.

As The New York Times reports: “The United States and Iraq will begin negotiating possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul, according to military officials. Some parts of Baghdad also will still have combat troops.”

According to the Times, the US is playing with the definition of the word “city” when speaking of withdrawing combat troops from all cities:

[T]here are no plans to close the Camp Victory base complex, consisting of five bases housing more than 20,000 soldiers, many of them combat troops. Although Victory is only a 15 minute drive from the center of Baghdad and sprawls over both sides of the city’s boundary, Iraqi officials say they have agreed to consider it outside the city.

In addition, Forward Operating Base Falcon, which can hold 5,000 combat troops, will also remain after June 30. It is just within Baghdad’s southern city limits. Again, Iraqi officials have classified it as effectively outside Baghdad, so no exception to the agreement needs to be granted, in their view.

Combat troops with the Seventh Field Artillery Regiment will remain in the heart of Baghdad at Camp Prosperity, located near the new American Embassy compound in the Green Zone. In addition to providing a quick reaction force, guarding the embassy and noncombat troops from attack, those soldiers will also continue to support Iraqi troops who are now in nominal charge of maintaining security in the Green Zone.

Camp Victory is of tremendous strategic importance to the US occupation. In addition to the military’s share of Baghdad International Airport, it includes four bases—Victory, Liberty, Striker and Slayer—as well as the US-run prison “Camp Cropper.” That’s where the US keeps its “high value” prisoners. While the US officially handed control of Forward Operating Base Freedom to “Iraqi control,” the US military is keeping the swimming pool.

Meanwhile, future plans are being laid for other US bases. Camp Prosperity is going to house US contractors and other personnel, while at Camp Union III housing is being built for several thousand soldiers, trainers and advisers.

What is abundantly clear is that there are enough cosmetic changes going on in Baghdad intended to make it look like the occupation is ending, while continuing it. Again, from the Times:

The Green Zone was handed over to Iraqi control Jan. 1, when the agreement went into effect. In addition to the United States-Iraqi patrols, most of the security for the Green Zone’s many checkpoints and heavily guarded entry points is still done by the same private contractors who did it prior to Jan. 1.

“What you’re seeing is not a change in the numbers, it’s a doctrine change,” said First Sgt. David Moore, a New Jersey National Guardsman with the Joint Area Support Group, which runs the Green Zone. “You’re still going to have fighters. Every U.S. soldier is trained to fight.”

The Iraq occupation is like The Picture of Dorian Gray. No matter what public face the Obama administration attempts to present, it only grows more heinous with each passing day.

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.His new website is RebelReports.com

Posted by JNOUBIYEH at 10:03 AM

Labels: Barack Obama, Occupation of Iraq

USAID Contracts with Sons of Abbas Called Into Question

USAID Contracts with Sons of Abbas Called Into Question
Monday, April 27, 2009

Reuters’ recent review of U.S. aid programs in the Palestinian territories uncovered two USAID contracts made with the sons of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that are involved with the agency’s attempts to promote a better public image of the U.S., winning over the hearts and minds of the Palestinians through advertising and infrastructure. Sky Advertising, managed by Abbas’ son Tarek, was awarded a $659,600 contract in May 2006, to take part in a USAID’s campaign to “reduce the negative attitudes and skepticism held by many Palestinians towards economic assistance from the American people.” The other contract of $1.89 million was awarded in May 2005 to a firm owned by Yasser Abbas, Falcon Electro Mechanical Contracting Company, to build a sewage treatment facility in the West Bank.

The lawyer for Abbas’ sons asserts that the firms were awarded the contracts after legitimate processes of competitive bidding. However, government watchdog groups question the fact that when the contracts were released to Reuters, the names of several aid recipients were withheld, including the names of Abbas’ sons and their respective companies. The explanation provided by USAID cites the need to maintain confidentiality and protect the security of the recipients from exposure to groups in the West Bank and Gaza, “including designated foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law.”

The U.S. has supported Abbas and his Fatah Party publicly and financially since his election in 2005 and has condemned Fatah’s rival Hamas as a terrorist organization, supporting sanctions against the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas, since 2007.

-Amira Elmallah

More than $2 Million Dollars in USAID Contracts For Abbas’s Sons (by Adam Entous, Reuters)

USAID Contracts With Firms Headed By Abbas’s Sons (Reuters)

PA Officials Scandalized at Disclosure by Abbas’s Son of Vast Personal Fortune (by Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post)

United States Agency for International Aid (USAID) (AllGov)

Destruction of Mosques In Israel After1948

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By HELENA COBBAN

An argument that I heard from many peace activists in Israel and Palestine during my recent visit is that the Nakba– that is, the dispersal of the Palestinians from their homes, primarily in 1948, and the expropriation and frequent destruction of the properties they had left behind– was not a one-ff affair, but is a continuing process.

Current news photos of Palestinians in Gaza or Jerusalem who have been expelled from their homes through Israeli acts of violence, and are forced to live in tents while Israelis either take over or demolish their homes, are continuing evidence of this.

Recently I read Meron Rapoport’s painfully evocative article “History Erased: The IDF and the post-1948 Destruction of Palestinian Monuments”. It originally appeared– I believe only in Hebrew– in Ha’aretz in July 2007, and was published in English in the Jouranl of Palestine Studies in Winter 2008. Sadly, it’s behind a pay-wall.

Rapoport gives some information about a controversy that arose inside the Israeli bureaucracy about the IDF’s July 1950 demolition of the Mashhad Iman Husain (Iman Husain Mosque) in what had been the Palestinian town of Majdal– now, in Israel, Ashqelon.

According to local Islamic tradition, the mosque was the spot where the head of Husain ibn ‘Ali, one of the Shiite tradition’s most revered founders/martyrs had been buried.

After the mosque was levelled by the IDF, Shmuel Yeivin, the director of Israel’s department of Antuities, became quite angry.

Noting that the mosque in the nearby, abandoned Palestinian “village” of Ashdod had also been blown up, Yeivin wrote to the head of the “department for special missions” in the defense Ministry, “I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should be brought to trial and punished, because there was no justification for a swift, war-contingent operation.”

Guess what. It never happened.

Rapoport also noted that Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti has written of the 160 mosques in Palestinian “villages” incorporated into Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements, “fewer than 40 are still standing.”

This makes me want to go and read Benvenisti’s 2000 book on the subject, Sacred Landscape; The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention the work of the two Merons here, because I recall that a few years ago some of the Israeli apologists who comment here at JWN were claiming there was no evidence at all regarding widespread Israeli destruction of Palestinian places of worship and cemeteries inside Israel.

Au contraire. There is lots of evidence– even for Engish-speaking readers. We just need to know where to look.

Source

Posted by JNOUBIYEH at 6:29 PM

Labels: Horror of Israeli Occupation, Mosques

UNVEILING OF THE B’NAI B’RITH BY WM COOPER ~ Pt5

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THIS SERIES IS DEDICATED TO
CANADIAN PM STEPHEN HARPER

IN THE HOPE THAT HE WILL SEE THE LIGHT

WITH REGARD TO B’NAI BRITH CANADA.

By William Cooper

“Sometime ago I had the opportunity to meet William Cooper and his wife Annie. It was part of my job to verify whether this man did indeed speak the truth or was just another person seeking fame and fortune. What I found was a rugged, bulldog, driven individual who was kind, thoughtful and tenderhearted. He was truly concerned about you and your welfare.

“Bill knew that people were badly informed by a society which spoon- feeds you deception until there is no distinction between fiction and reality. He sees what many other(s) see happening, and he is not afraid to do something about it.

“There are many who do not want you to know what Bill has to say. They have tried many times to stop him from saying it. The scars on his face and the loss of his leg are his bandages of sincerity on your behalf.

“No one becomes popular by telling people the truth. History records what happened to the true prophets of the past. However, some have listened to their warnings and were not caught off-guard. Others have put their heads in the sand and refused to listen.

“Bill has it together, and has put it together for you so you can also be one of the informed of the world. A well informed person can make the right decision. William Cooper has my vote of approval because I cared enough to find out who the man is. Now is your opportunity.” ~ Barbara Ann, Researcher

Anti-Defamation League #5

THE HOUR OF THE TIME
Tape No. 535: “ADL #5″
Thursday, January 26, 1995

This broadcast was taken in whole or in part from investigations conducted by the CAJI News Service, and the Intelligence Service, and from reports published by The Executive Intelligence Review entitled “The Ugly Truth About The ADL”, and “Dope Inc.”.

From the “Miami Harold”, Miami, Florida, June 29th, 1994: “ADL Launches Book Against Religious Right”, by Peggy Landers, “Harold” Religious Writer.

“Art Teitlebaum minced no words Tuesday in blasting a contingent of the religious right for using what he called ‘murderously mean tactics’…”

Murderously mean tactics!

“…in pursuing an exclusionary and dangerous political agenda, particularly in Florida.

“The Anti-Defamation League Southern Area Director called a news conference at his downtown office to announce the distribution of a 190-page National Anti-Defamation League Report called ‘The Religious Right: The Assault On Tolerance and Pluralism in America’.

“The book, which costs $7.50, and is available through the Miami ADL Office, is the result of a year-long national research project to document what its authors call ‘a bitter push to replace the wall of separation of church and state with a citadel of Christianity, while suggesting that those who defend the walls are enemies of God’.”

Well, it sounds like at least they know who they are.

“It warns that the Religious Right is seeking to Christianize public school curricula and gain control of the Republican Party.

“‘Florida has become a lightning-rod state for grass-roots campaigns to return prayer to public schools, oppose abortion, elect Christian candidates, and oppose civil rights protections for homosexuals,’ Teitlebaum said.

“‘Florida represents, in many of its communities, what America will be like in the year 2000 in cultural diversity and changing demographics. The state’s future depends on our success in being a multi-cultural society,’ he said.

(Why is the ADL, who represents what could be considered one of the most racist countries on the planet where separations are vast, so concerned about multi culturalism in North America?)

Babylon, brought down for her excesses, inhumanity and evils, was one of the first human experiments in multi culturalism. Has humanity changed enoughto make it work this time? It was also in Babylon that the Babylonian Talmud was written by the Rabbis of old, which is why the book itself contains so much debauchery.

Teitlebaum pointed to the murder of Dr. David Gunn by religious anti-abortion activists in Pensacola. I wonder why he didn’t point to any of the murders committed by the ADL.

“…the success in Lake County of Christian fundamentalist school board members in mandating that public school students be taught that American culture is superior to all others, and the American Family Association’s initiative to block civil rights protections for homosexuals as religious right activities in Florida.”

Folks, what they call protections for homosexuals are really the granting of rights to homosexuals that no one else has, and that should never be allowed.

“Teitlebaum warned of stealth candidates who hide their religious objectives in the possibility of religious tests for political office. ‘If he’s a Christian, vote for him. If he’s not, don’t.’

“But Raul Molina, Director of the Dade County Chapter of the Christian Coalition, said such claims are inaccurate and mean-spirited.

“‘The 1.2 million members of the Christian Coalition are people of faith who have felt disenfranchised, and under-represented, and want to have a voice in our country’s government,’ Molina said.

“‘We are a political movement based on issues, not on religious doctrines.

It’s the liberals in organizations such as

the Anti-Defamation League that are attempting

to censor us and take away our voice

in government. They are the ones who are

intolerant and exclusionary.’”

Amen!

On February the 28th, 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palm was assassinated by a lone gunman on the streets of Stockholm. Just before his assassination, Palm was in the process of cracking down on Swedish arms dealers who were funneling guns to the Nicaraguan Contras and to the Iranian regime.

Assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme.

Shades of Ollie North!

The Iran-Contra Scandal had not yet broken publicly, and Palm’s probe threatened to blow the lid on the entire covert program of the Israeli Mossad, B’nai B’rith, the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, the Anti-Defamation League, and of course, the American Intelligence Network.

Curiously, many of the guns being sold by the Swedes, with the collusion of Oliver North, the CIA Chief William Casey, and the Israelis, were coming from East Germany and other Soviet bloc states. Are you beginning to understand the implications?

Was Palm in the process of unearthing a cynical east-west collusion, as I have warned you about previously? ~ an even nastier reality buried beneath the then-unknown Iran-gate Scandal?

Was he about to blow the lid on the phony Cold War?

Had he inadvertently stumbled onto the trail of the Anti-Defamation League’s own involvement in this demi-monde of gun and drug dealing?

Absolutely, ladies and gentlemen. Absolutely.

And the answer to that question was implicitly given within days of the Palm assassination when the Anti-Defamation League joined with the KGB and the East German Stasse (State Security Service) in an effort to blame the Palm murder on Swedish associates of Lyndon LaRouche, who had already exposed all of their dirty dealing.

ADL Fact-Finding Division Chief Irwin Sewell, himself an Oxford University-trained, active member of the Socialist Internationale, an alumni of our President William Clinton, personally flew to Stockholm to fuel the disinformation campaign linking LaRouche to the Palm murder.

Soviet Ambassador Boris Pankin ~ a major general in the KGB who specialized in planting disinformation in the western press ~ directed the Soviet side of the “LaRouche Killed Palm” hoax, while Jorge E. Arbitov ~ the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ U.S.A/Canada Institute ~ added his voice to those accused of LaRouche. Ultimately the Soviet government-owned TV network aired and hour-long docudrama elaborating this lie.

And it was a lie.

The role of Edgar Bronfman’s pals in the East German Stasse in the Palm cover-up would not surface until three years later.

However, back in August of 1989, the Stockholm daily newspaper, “Expression”, revealed that Swedish police had bugged the home of a resident KGB agent, and had audio-tape evidence that the man knew at least 24-hours before Palm’s murder that the Prime Minister would be killed.

This alone absolved Lyndon LaRouche.

The pivotal role of the Stasse in the Palm murder cover-up was first revealed in the August 20-26, 1992 edition of “Journalisten”, the magazine of the Swedish Journalist Association, which published an interview with a former top Stasse officer named Herbert Bremmer.

In that interview, ladies and gentlemen, and in a series of subsequent Swedish nation-wide radio broadcasts, Bremmer confessed that, as an official of Department X (which is disinformation) of the Stasse, he personally had engineered the disinformation campaign, blaming the European Labor Party (ELP), the Scandinavian affiliations of Lyndon LaRouche, for the Palm murder.

Bremmer told “Journalisten”:

“At my desk I drew up the outlines of how the ELP theory would be conduit into the Swedish police investigation. The plan was to have a national Swedish newspaper receive an anonymous telephone tip-off. As an alternative, the information would go directly to one of the special tip-off phones made available by the police. The content would be along the lines that the caller ‘knew that the ELP had committed the crime’. In addition, he or she had ‘witnessed hectic activity in the ELP headquarters in the night’. Nothing was really true, but it sounded well-informed and credible.”

Indeed, the 1986 Stasse-manufactured disinformation was conduited into the United States media through the Anti-Defamation League.

NBC television ran the story as a leading news item on their evening news broadcast, interviewing Anti-Defamation League official Sewell as part of their coverage, just as they conducted repeated–repeated–interviews with Anti-Defamation League officials and officials of the Cult Awareness Network, another branch of the B’nai B’rith, during the Waco Massacre.

Ultimately, the United States Justice Department would use the Palm disinformation to justify a massive paramilitary police raid against LaRouche’s home and offices of his associates in Leesburg, Virginia in October 1986, resulting in a tremendous miscarriage of justice.

Am I a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche? Not on your life, ladies and gentlemen, for he himself is a closet socialist masquerading as a conservative.

The “LaRouche Killed Palm” hoax was no isolated instance of Edgar Bronfman and the ADL teaming up with a Communist ~ Communist! ~ secret police agency to target a political enemy or ply a lucrative business scam. It is, and always has been, and will be unless you stop it, standard operating procedure for the Anti-Defamation League.

According to syndicated columnist Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, on January 23rd, 1989, Bronfman hosted a secret meeting at his New York City penthouse to forge what the columnists dubbed: “a Jews for grain” deal between the Soviet Union and Israel. Also present at the gathering was Dewaynes Andreas, the Chairman of the Arthur Daniels Midland (ADM) Grain Cartel, and a long-standing ally and financial backer of the Anti-Defamation League.

The “Wall Street Journal” had dubbed Andreas “Gorbachev’s closest pal in the west.”

At Congressional hearings, Andreas identified former Anti-Defamation League National Chairman Ben Epstein as the man who taught him all he knew about politics.

The Bronfman/Andreas deal was straight forward.

In return for vast quantities of dirt-cheap grain

from ADM and other United States-based

grain cartels, the Soviet government would

permit the mass exodus of Soviet Jews to Israel.

It was an updated version of the Pollard espionage affair in which United States military secrets were swapped for controlled Soviet-Jewish migration to Israel.

The invariant in the two efforts was the central role of the ADL.

Now, I’d like to ask all of you out there who claim that the Soviet Union is controlled by Jews: why are so many Jews immigrating from the Soviet Union? I know the answer, but I bet you don’t.

As part of the Bronfman/Andreas deal, the Soviet KGB teamed up with the ADL and Bronfman’s World Jewish Congress (the WJC) to foment a diplomatic breach between the Reagan Administration and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, the former Secretary General of the United Nations.

Kurt Waldheim, the former Austrian President
and Secretary General of the United Nations

The KGB manufactured, and the ADL-WJC conduited, phony evidence that the Waldheim had been a top Nazi war criminal during World War II.

United States Attorney General Ed Meese, still employing the legal services of Anti-Defamation League fellow-traveler–that’s right, folks, fellow-traveler–Leonard Garment, bit on the forged material and declared Waldheim persona non grata in the United States.

The purpose of the smear job was to shut down Austria as a way-station for Soviet Jews coming out into the west. In the past, once Soviet Jews landed on Austrian soil, they were granted political refugee status, which then enabled them to settle in any country of their choosing. The majority either stayed in western Europe, or found their way to the United States.

Very few went to Israel voluntarily.

THIS INFLUX MEANS MORE SETTLERS TO FILL THE WEST BANK AND CONTINUE TO BREAK UP THE WEST BANK MAKING THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO CREATE.

With Austria shut down, Bronfman and Gorbachev worked out alternative routes through Warsaw Pact states and eventually set up direct flights from the Soviet Union to Israel to ensure that the Soviet refugees had no choice as to where they would live.

By the time Bronfman and Andreas forged their Jews-for-grain deal with Gorbachev in early 1989, the ADL had just about perfected their use of forged KGB documents to smear the entire eastern European community in the United States as closet war-time Nazis.

As early as 1979, the ADL had played a pivotal role in getting legislation through the United States Congress establishing the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), a special Nazi-hunting unit, inside the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, against ~ directly against, ladies and gentlemen ~ all of our laws, our ethics, and our morals.

This, in fact, was direct recognition of one specific religion, against the Constitution of the United States of America, specifically to reap revenge upon their imagined enemies.

ADL Asset Representative Elizabeth Holzman had sponsored the bill, which effectively stripped naturalized American citizens of central European and Ukrainian descent of their Constitutional rights by providing for automatic de- naturalization and deportation without any due process whatsoever if the OSI could produce evidence that they had been tied to the Nazis during World War II.

Elizabeth Holzman

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, the Supreme Court has ruled that no one can strip an American citizen of their citizenship ~ period ~ for any reason.

Yet they do it. And you sit out there and don’t say a word.

And where did the lion’s share of this evidence come from 40 years after the end of World War II? From the Soviet archives, ladies and gentlemen.

And how were they getting information from the Soviet archives ~ a Communist nation behind an Iron Curtain, supposedly our bitter enemies?

The ADL sponsored OSI, provided Moscow with a foot in the door to the American judicial system. For the first time ever, Soviet documents and witnesses were given full standing in United States court proceedings, no questions asked. The enemies of the United States of America, bound by their vows and oaths of office to the Soviet Union, publicly declared their goal is to destroy the United States of America.

While a handful of the people targeted by the ADL/OSI may have been low-level Nazi sympathizers or assets during the war, many innocent people fell victim to the KGB’s sophisticated forgers, courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League and their friends at the Justice Department’s OSI.

And what was the purpose of this?

To keep the Jews in line by continually whipping them with the threat of another Nazi holocaust. That’s what.

To maintain their power. That’s what.

Remember the man who was sent to Israel and tried and found guilty, and then tried again and found innocent? And all the time the Justice Department, and the OSI, and the ADL, and everyone concerned with this knew that he was innocent? And then they wanted to hold him until they could scrape up some other phony evidence and try him again on some other charges not yet imagined?

And all of you sat and said nothing. And why did you sit and say nothing?

Because you’re a bunch of whimpering, scared little sheep. You were afraid that someone would call you antisemitic.

I would much rather be called antisemitic than be called a coward ~ and that’s what most of you are.

Karl Linus, falsely accused of Nazi collaboration, was stripped of his American citizenship and shipped off to the Soviet Union where he died in a prison, reportedly from a heart attack.

Shirem Subzukoff, accused of working with the Nazis in his native Bellarussia, beat the OSI and even won a lucrative out-of-court libel suit against the “New York Times”. He was then murdered ~ then murdered–by a Jewish Defense League bomb attack on his Patterson, New Jersey home in 1985 because he had thwarted them and embarrassed them publicly.

Dr. Arthur Rudolf, German-American rocket scientist

Dr. Arthur Rudolf, a celebrated German-American rocket scientist who contributed greatly to America’s space program, was falsely accused by the Anti-Defamation League and OSI of torturing Jews at the Penamunde research facility in war-time Germany. Rather than lose his lifetime pension with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and throw his family into poverty, he renounced his United States citizenship and returned to West Germany.

After a three-year probe, based on the same evidence passed on by the East German and Soviet authorities to the OSI, West German prosecutors concluded that there was no evidence against Dr. Rudolf. But by that time, his life was in ruins.

John Demjanjiak, a Ukrainian-American retired auto worker, accused of being the Treblinka concentration camp mass murderer Ivan the Terrible, was stripped of his citizenship and hauled of to Israel to stand trial. It was the biggest show trial since the proceedings against Adolf Eichmann, broadcast in its entirety live on Israeli national television.

Demjanjiak was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.

Through unflagging efforts by his family and friends, Demjanjiak eventually gathered evidence showing that the OSI had suppressed evidence proving that another man had been identified as the real Ivan.

They knew all along that he was innocent, and were prepared to allow him to go to his death rather than buck the ADL, B’nai B’rith, the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and the State of Israel.

They were afraid of being called antisemitic. They are cowards.

The case is now pending before both the Israeli Supreme Court and the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The ADL’s liaison to OSI, Elliot Wells, in a signed letter to the editors of the “Washington Post”, demanded that Demjanjiak not be set free.

Using the kind of stilted, stupid logic that would make the KGB blush, Wells argued that even if Demjanjiak is innocent of the Treblinka charges, he must be guilty of some other war crimes, and therefore should be held in custody until new evidence can be manufactured.

And they’re so used to getting away with this kind of ploy, that it’s actually a miracle that nobody listened. And I mean, ladies and gentlemen, a genuine miracle.

Nixon went down for the count as the result of the botched Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in Washington, D.C. during the 1972 Presidential campaign.

A prominent Central Intelligent Agency operative who was involved in the Watergate break-in, G. Gordon Liddy, is now a prominent radio talk show host.

And all you stupid sheeple idolize his every word.

As reporters, Congressional committees, and special prosecutors poured over the details of the Watergate Scandal, evidence of a pattern of bribery and cover-ups emerged that ended up contributing to Nixon’s resignation even more than the break-in itself.

You see, folks, they never had anything that could have impeached Richard Nixon.

Since the fall of Nixon, the American political lexicon has been blessed with such Watergate offspring as “Debate-gate”, “Carter-gate”, “Iran-gate”, “Bush-gate”, “Iraq-gate”, and even “Space-gate” ~ and we’ll talk about “Space-gate” on another program to do with mind control.

Political corruption scandals have become as American as apple pie. Despite the growing addiction to political sleaze, the vast majority of Americans are totally oblivious to the fact that on any given day, the Anti-Defamation League ~ and its fellow-hooligans in what is euphemistically dubbed the Zionist lobby (the dope lobby is a far more appropriate description), commit crimes against the American electorate that make Watergate seem tame by comparison.

Blackmail, extortion, and bribery, ladies and gentlemen, are such routine tactics of the Zionist lobby that its primary target victims, the United States Senate and House of Representatives ~ filled with cowards ~ have been turned into political mush, incapable of governing under the best of circumstances, and completely paralyzed in the face of the current political and economic crises.

How do you think we got to the point where we are at now?

While the media had led the charge against Congressional incumbents, appealing to a justified “throw-the-bums-out” sentiment building among the majority of voters, the sad reality is that

unless the power of the Zionist lobby

is cut down to size,any newly elected Congress

will be like a bunchof silly lambs

walking to the slaughter, and nothing ~

nothing, nothing ~ will ever, ever change.

You see, they hold this holocaust and anti-emitic bullshit over everybody’s head. And everybody, being the stupid sheeple that they are, they cower in fear in the corner.

Officially, both the ADL and its leading collaborator in this corrupting of the Congress, the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, are forbidden from engaging in political campaigning due to their tax-exempt status.

But both groups have managed to systematically break the electoral and tax laws with impunity, largely due to the fact that they have placed fellow-travelers ~ that’s right, I said fellow-travelers ~ in key posts in the Executive Branch regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor the activities of groups benefiting from the tax exemptions: the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Internal Revenue Service.

Just a glimpse at how the Zionist lobby has used the power of the narco-dollar to corrupt and control the Congress is contained in a law suit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on August 10th, 1992. Get it. Read it.

The suit, filed by a group of retired United States diplomats against the FEC, charges that the agency failed to impose sanctions against the AIPAC for functioning as an unregistered political action committee.

Even though the general counsel at the FEC agreed that AIPAC had violated the law, the commissioners decided in July 1992 not to take any action against the group.

According to the court papers, AIPAC secretly controls at least ~ at least–27 different political action committees or PACs (other investigators place the figure at 59) and uses them to funnel enormous amounts of money to candidates for Congress who support AIPAC’s political agenda.

Under the FEC statutes, strict limits are imposed on how much money can be given to an individual candidate by a single PAC. The purpose of the regulation is to curb the power of special interest groups in the financing of candidates. But as you can see, it does not work.

By running dozens of PACs, AIPAC, according to the suit, illegally circumvents the law.

And they are not the only ones.

The case of the Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs (or JACPAC), one of the 27 PACs named in the suit, underscores the tight relationship between AIPAC, the ADL, and the political committees. JACPAC lists among its directors the wives of Thomas Dyne and Stewart Eisenstat.

Since 1980, Dyne has been the Executive Director of AIPAC. Eisenstat, formerly Domestic Policy Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the head of the National Jewish Democratic Council (or NJDC), an ADL-dominated organization dedicated to winning control over the Democratic Party, and placing as many of its members as possible on the staffs of Congressmen, governors, and mayors.

Why does it want to put its members on the staffs of Congressmen, governors, and mayors ~ instead of in the office of Congressman, governor or mayor?

Simply because, folks, Congressmen, governors, and mayors don’t write anything. They very seldom even read what has been introduced. So, these people write the law, and the Congressmen ~ never reading any of the law ~ just endorse it and go right on along with it. That’s why, many times when you call your Congressman and confront them with something you found in a bill, they profess ignorance.

Do you know why? Because it’s the truth. They don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.

And where does all of the money come from to buy up the hundreds of Congressional seats currently owned by ADL/AIPAC? A brief look at the Roundtable PAC, one of the 27 outfits cited in the law suit as AIPAC-owned, answers that question.

Roundtable PAC was founded in 1981 by a group of leading ADL and AIPAC officials and contributors, led by Malcolm Holein, the head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

From day one, it was housed in the Manhattan offices of a tax shelter firm called the Integrated Resources, and Integrated was a thinly-veiled money conduit for Michael Milken and his crew of junk bond peddlers and dope money washers at Drexel Burnham. In fact, Drexel CEO, Steven Weinroth, the liaison between Milken and Ivan Boesky in their insider-trading scams, was a director of Integrated.

All, ladies and gentlemen, all of Milken’s prime investors socked their money into Integrated as a tax dodge. All of them also poured contributions into the Roundtable PAC.

Among the biggest donors to Roundtable: Ivan Boesky, Robert Davido ~ Milken’s personal aide at the Beverly Hills office of Drexel ~ and the sons and daughters of Meshulam Rickless. Remember him? Lawrence Tish, Sol Steinburg, and Paul Millstein of Carl Lidner’s United Brands.

When the Roundtable PAC holds its meetings, guests of honor include, respectively, New York and Minnesota attorneys Gen. Robert Abrams and Skip Humphrey, and New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is one of the biggest traitors on Capitol Hill. All are regular recipients of AIPAC PAC dollars.

In return for such generosity, Senator Moynihan, in 1986, shepherded a tax code revision through the United States Congress that gave Integrated Resources an added $43 million in tax breaks.

Don’t you wish you had friends like that?

With friends like Moynihan in key posts in the United States Senate, Integrated could afford to be generous ~ at least for a while.

The relationship between Milken and Integrated was so tight that within three months of Milken’s indictment in March 1989 for insider trading, Integrated defaulted on $1 billion in short-term loans.

It seems that without the running pipeline of hot money from Milken’s bottomless Caribbean cash pool, Integrated was lost ~ because the truth is, it never did anything except wash money.

The AIPAC/ADL-run political action committees, in short, represent the combined financial clout of the Lansky dope syndicate. Any similarity between Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, and the genuine national interests of the State of Israel, or the Jewish people, is purely crap.

Absolute horse manure.

All told, 211 candidates for the United States House and Senate from 48 states received money from the ADL/AIPAC PACs between January 1st, 1991 and March 31st, 1992.

Of the 211 recipients, 187 were incumbents.

The total amount given in that 15-month period was well over $2 million, making ADL/AIPAC the second largest source of institutional money to candidates for federal office, second only to the combined donations of all of the labor union PACs.

And they’re all in bed together.

By October 1992, that figure had soared past the $3 million mark.

The ADL/AIPAC PACs don’t funnel the majority of their money into Jewish candidates, or even into candidates running for office in states where there are large Jewish populations.

Are you listening to me?

If you’re Jewish, you had better be learning from this program, from this series of broadcasts. Or will you continue along as you always have been ~ afraid that your friends and neighbors will call you antisemitic? And they will, you know. It takes guts to be a real people instead of a stupid sheeple, no matter who or what you are.

More typical of the kinds of office-holders and candidates who receive AIPAC pay-offs is Richard C. Shelby, a first-term Democratic United States Senator from Alabama, who has recently gained notoriety for pushing a death penalty bill for the District of Columbia. Shelby received $67,800 from the AIPAC PACs in the 15 months beginning in January 1991, with a career total of $133,825.

Another record-setting recipient of AIPAC largesse is Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, who ran an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1992. Harkin came into the Senate in 1984 by defeating incumbent Roger Gepson , who in 1981, had cast a decisive vote against AIPAC in a fight over the sale of AWAC surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

In his first Senate bid, Harkin received over $100,000 from the AIPAC combine. His career total in AIPAC money is a staggering $366,130.

And we are accurate to the penny.

A total of 29 current incumbent Senators and Congressmen have received over $100,000 in illegal contributions from the ADL/AIPAC PACs.

A dozen have received $50,000 or more dollars just for their 1992 re-election campaigns. That “dirty dozen” are: [NOTE: applies to all names below]

Richard Shelby (D-Alabama)
Mel Levine (D-California)
Timothy Worth (D-Colorado)
Daniel Inowe (D-Hawaii)
Barbara McCulsky (D-Maryland)
Christopher Bond (R-Montana)
Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota)
Robert Packwood (R-Oregon)
Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania)
Harris Wofford (D-Pennsylvania)
Thomas Dashell (D-South Dakota) and
Robert Caston (R-Wisconsin)

Narco-dollars ~ narco-dollars ~ dope money.

Narco-dollars are the key to the ADL’s hold over the United States Congress, but the League and its AIPAC associates have other trump cards as well. Both groups operate secret, highly illegal spy units that gather blackmail material and carry out dirty tricks against political opponents.

When Richard Nixon got caught running such a plumbers unit at the offices of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) ~ aptly named ~ in 1972, the American people demanded his scalp.

It remains to be seen what the reaction will be now that AIPAC has had its first damaging defection from its own plumbers unit.

You see, Gregory Slobodkin worked for a number of years in AIPAC’s Policy Analysis Unit. Slobodkin eventually got turned off by some of the dirty deeds he was ordered to carry out by the unit’s chief, Michael Lewis. And he quit his job and went public with his story.

Not surprisingly, Michael Lewis is the son of Dr. Bernard Lewis, the Oxford-trained ~ always coming back to the same places ~ Oxford-trained Arabist, who was the architect of the Carter Administration’s Ark of Crisis Policy, which abetted Ayatollah Komeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran, and the spread of fundamentalism throughout the region.

Policy Analysis, the super-euphemistic name given to AIPAC’s plumbers, maintains dossiers on thousands of American activists, many of them Jewish.

Many of them Jewish.

University professors who criticize AIPAC or the Anti-Defamation League’s activities are placed on a black list and labeled antisemitic. Their lectures are monitored by spies who occasionally stage noisy disruptions. Their homes and cars are vandalized. University alumni linked to ADL and AIPAC threaten to pull financial backing from the schools unless the targeted faculty members are immediately fired or blocked from tenure.

nd every day, Americans turn their heads because they are afraid that someone will call them antisemitic.

The Anti-Defamation League has learned to use

the antisemitic label to get whatever they want,

from whomever they want, whenever they want.

Members of Congress are cast as either friends or targets of the ADL/AIPAC. There is no in-between. If they are on the friendlies list, they may be the recipients of weekly computerized blackmail dossiers on some of their colleagues and other policy-shapers which are called activities.

Remember lately, folks, in San Francisco when the ADL was caught red-handed operating a spy ring from inside the police department, gathering information on Americans?

When the investigation began, it was found that they were doing this across the country, infiltrating supposedly secure records systems, collecting information on American citizens to use against them.

How long are you going to put up with this bullshit from these creep, lying scumbags?

The activities dossiers are sent out in plain white envelopes bearing no organizational emblems. Deniability is a priority, and the whole, filthy blackmail and extortion program was 100% deniable until Slobodkin’s defection ~ complete with reams of AIPAC documents ~ which proved it.

AIPAC’s unit maintains a singularly close link to the ADL’s parallel Fact-Finding Department which engages in the exact same kind of activity. In fact, shortly after Thomas Dyne took over as Executive Director of AIPAC, he hired Amy Gutt as the first full-time staffer of the Policy Analysis Unit.

Gutt had worked for years at the ADL. Her shift of address was apparently blessed by her bosses at the League, and she continued for a period of time to work for both agencies, thereby assuring near-total integration in the covert operations level.

One feature, ladies and gentlemen, of the job that ultimately got under Gregory Slobodkin’s skin was the fact that many of his targets were themselves prominent Jewish activists, usually affiliated with left-wing causes in both the United States and Israel.

You see, all you silly people out there who think it’s the Jews: you’re off your rocker, and the ADL does not work for Jews, or in the interests of Jews, and never has. Neither does B’nai B’rith.

I don’t know how many letters I’ve gotten from you stupid jerks out there who think you’re going to solve all the world’s problems by killing all the Jews. How stupid!

Most Jews don’t know any more about what’s going on than you sheeple did before I told you. And then you’ll, most of you, will never know if it’s true or not because you won’t get off your butt and go check it out.

You see what a state of affairs we’ve sunk to? ~ a nation out of control, run by scumbags, with an agenda emanating from deep inside the secret societies of the Mystery Schools, right under the noses of the sleeping watchdog, the American people, who are so ignorant, stupid, and apathetic that anybody that wants can get away with anything that they want, at any time that they want, and they can tell any lie that they want, because they know that you will believe whatever they tell you, and you’ll never check anything out.

For all you know, I might be one of them. I might be sitting here telling you lie after lie after lie, and you won’t get off your ass and go check it out.

“It’s too hard and I’m just one lonely, little person. I don’t have the capabilities to check anything out.”

Boy, I hear that all the time. Hear it all the time.

God, I must be some super, super spirit from some foreign planet. I must have the biggest brain in the world. I must have some secret access to every source of information that there is, because I’m just one lonely, little, ol’ helpless individual, and I’m busy, too, and I’ve got a family to run, and I don’t have any more time than anyone of you out there has.

So, when you spout that bullshit at me, I just know that’s another stupid sheeple standing in front of me that’s too damn lazy. And that’s the truth of the matter.

Many of these people that Slobodkin was supposed to target, many of them were simply outspoken critics of the Israeli-Lecoud government’s brutality toward the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Many simply favored a peaceful and equitable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Many of these Jewish activists were treated to the same violence and vicious smearing by the ADL/AIPAC that was meted out to Palestine Liberation Organization (or PLO) officials.

This McCarthy-ite targeting of prominent Jews who simply bucked the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, on some policy issue or financial deal, underscores the fact that the League and AIPAC are anything but Jewish defense organizations. They are, in fact, liars, deceivers, and manipulators.

And whether you believe it or not, most of their victims are innocent Jews, many of them patriots who love this country and love the Constitution and the Bill of Rights just as much as any of you listening out there.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Maj. Klerken.

Good night, folks, and God bless you all.

Posted by Barbara L at 3:47 PM

IOA releases MP Abdelrazek, Fatah preventive security kidnaps his son

IOA releases MP Abdelrazek, Fatah preventive security kidnaps his son

[ 28/04/2009 – 05:13 PM ]

NABLUS, (PIC)– The IOA released Dr. Omar Abdelrazek, a Palestinian lawmaker and the former minister of finance in the 10th government, from the Negev prison Tuesday morning while the Fatah-affiliated preventive security apparatus kidnapped his son Mohamed soon after his release.

In a press statement to the PIC, his family said that Dr. Abdelrazek told them on the phone that he was still in Al-Khalil city and on his way home.

Instead of congratulating him on his freedom, the preventive security kidnapped his son just few hours after he was released from Israeli jails.

Israel kidnapped Dr. Abdelrazek in mid-2006 in the context of the campaign which was waged then against Palestinian lawmakers affiliated with Hamas, then he was released in August 2008 and later re-arrested again at the end of the same year.

In another related context, the PA security apparatuses kidnapped Monday the son of Sheikh Nasr Jarrar, a prominent Qassam leader who was assassinated by the IOF troops in 2002.

They also kidnapped a Palestinian professor called Yousuf Abu Al-Rub from Jalbun town, east of Jenin, and remarkably issued many summonses on Hamas members in Jenin in the last period.

Torture kills..

US interpreter who witnessed torture in Iraq shot herself with service rifle

By David Randall

Sunday, 26 April 2009

It is possible that one of the victims of the United States’ torture policy is a young, devout Mormon woman from Arizona called Alyssa Peterson. She was a soldier who not only saw the rough interrogation methods that the US military used on Iraqi prisoners, but was deeply troubled by them. Some weeks after formally protesting about them to her superiors, and asking to be reassigned, she took her gun and killed herself. The cause of her death was kept secret for two years, and the mystery of what Peterson witnessed, and the content of the notes she made, still goes on.

It was in September 2003 at Tal-Afar air base, northern Iraq, that Specialist Peterson, serving with a military intelligence section of the 101st Airborne, came across interrogation methods very different from the ones she had known in training. An Arab-speaker, Peterson was assigned to work as an interpreter at interrogation sessions in a unit known as “The Cage”. After only two nights, she refused to take further part in the sessions and was reassigned. Then, on 15 September, she shot herself with her service rifle. A notebook recording her thoughts was found by her body. Its contents were blanked out in the subsequent official report.

Her family, in Flagstaff, Arizona, were told she had died from a “non-hostile weapons discharge”. It was only after an Arizona reporter, Kevin Elston, investigated, that the army revealed Peterson had killed herself. They refused to say what interrogation she objected to, and maintain that all documents relating to methods used at Tal-Afar have been destroyed.

But, at Mosul, also in northern Iraq, a former US soldier, Kayla Williams, later told the broadcasterCNN: “There were prisoners that were burned with lit cigarettes. They stripped prisoners naked then removed their blindfolds so that I was the first thing they saw. And then we were supposed to mock them and degrade their manhood.”

She, too, objected. Williams had once met Peterson, and conceded the interpreter had personal problems. The official army report into her death, obtained in 2007 by the Arizona Daily Sun, said that she had once been reprimanded for “showing empathy” to detainees. It said her superiors had given her suicide prevention training.

Her body was buried, with military honours, in Flagstaff, Arizona. One of scores of messages on a memorial website reads: “Alyssa Peterson was a shining example to all, a true hero and patriot for displaying empathy and her opposition to torture.”

Related articles

Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11

Barghouthi: IOA embarking on biggest ever racial cleansing in Jerusalem

Barghouthi: IOA embarking on biggest ever racial cleansing in Jerusalem

[ 27/04/2009 – 11:10 AM ]

RAMALLAH, (PIC)– MP Dr. Mustafa Al-Barghouthi, the secretary general of the national initiative party, on Monday condemned the Zionist schemes and the policy of demolishing Palestinian homes in occupied Jerusalem.

Barghouthi, in a statement distributed to the media, said that Israel was carrying out the biggest ever racial cleansing campaign in occupied Jerusalem, describing it as the most serious ever since the city was occupied in 1967.

He charged that the Israeli policy of demolishing homes was one of the methods pursued to evacuate the city of its indigenous inhabitants.

The MP warned that occupied Jerusalem was in real danger in the reign of the new Israeli far-right government.

He proposed Palestinian moves on all levels to check the Israeli judaization of the holy city and to impose sanctions on Israel to force it to halt its settlement drive.

Efforts should be focused on exposing the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is pushing the region into confrontation with its denial of the Palestinian people’s rights, Barghouthi underlined.

He urged all Palestinian parties to bypass marginal issues and to concentrate on the main question mainly confronting the Israeli occupation authority’s’ plots to liquidate the Palestinian national project. He called for the immediate restoration of national unity to confront the dangers of the current stage.

More from the Donkey playing from yankeeville

Will the U.S. Punish Lebanon For Electing The Opposition?

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Elections, Hizbullah, Lebanon Tags: Hizbullah, March 8, Lebanese elections, Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton popped over to Beirut yesterday to say hello to old friends, snap a few pictures, visit Rafiq Hariri’s tomb, and grab a quick falafel sandwich at Sahyoun’s. The aim of her visit was to reassure everyone that the United States is not planning to sell Lebanon down the river:

“There is nothing that we would do in any way that would undermine Lebanon’s sovereignty,” Clinton told a press conference in Baabda after meeting Lebanese President Michel Suleiman.

“So I want to reassure any Lebanese citizen that the United States will never make any deal with Syria that sells out Lebanon or the Lebanese people.”

Elbowing aside the dozing reporter from an-Nahar, I managed to catch Mrs. Clinton’s attention.

Hillary: Yes, you there. The tall dark and handsome fellow with the hand raised…

QN: Ahh, yes thank you Madame Secretary. Qifa Nabki, from qifanabki.com. I just had a question about what you mean when you say “never make any deal with Syria that sells out Lebanon…”

Hillary: I’m glad you asked that, Qifa. Because I feel like this point really needs to be underlined.

QN: So there’s no chance of any kind of a return to the situation that obtained in the 90’s…

Hillary: Ancient history, my dear Qifa. Look, what could Syria possibly offer us that would make us give up Lebanon? Some kind of “grand bargain” which fundamentally changes the strategic balance in the region in Israel’s favor by flipping Syria away from Iran and disarming Hizbullah? Pshaaww… They’re going to have to do a lot better than that…

QN: Umm, ok. Thanks!

Hillary gets a load of Mutassim Qaddafi

Isn’t it funny how the job of Secretary of State is often indistinguishable from that of a motivational speaker. Joshua Landis has a great post over at Syria Comment in which he addresses the paranoid complaints of some Syrians who were hoping for a little more love from the top U.S. diplomat. One friend reportedly wrote to him: “Clinton has finally made her move, and how predictable it is? Forget it. They will never give Syria what it wants. The status quo is back. Obama is no different from any previous president.”

I mean, grow up already. What did they expect Hillary to do, desecrate Hariri’s tomb and french kiss Wiam Wahhab on Syrian national television? I think it’s pretty clear that the U.S. posture toward Syria has already begun to change drastically, and things under Obama are a heck of a lot better than they were under Bush. If Bashar keeps playing his cards right, I believe that some sanctions will begin to be peeled away within the year.

But the broader point should be addressed, namely: what is likely to be the U.S. reaction to a March 8 victory in the Lebanese elections? I think that this is a complicated issue, and its very premise is flawed, as I’ve written here before. In general, I think Joshua is right when he argues:

Michel Sleiman gets a load of Hillary.

“if the Lebanese defy the US and vote for March 8 anyway, the US can cut aid but continue to finesse the situation by allowing the French and British to step forward and engage the new Lebanese government. Britain has begun a direct dialogue with Hizbullah. France has stated that it can live with any outcome of the elections so long as powersharing is respected in the new government. Both Britain and France have made it clear that they are willing to accept Lebanon’s democratic results without a major tantrum if their prefered party doesn’t win.

The US manages to shut its eyes to Hizbullah’s presence in Lebanon’s government today. What is to stop it from doing this even if March 8 wins? Eye shutting will admittedly be harder to do if March 8 forms the next government; but March 8 has already made a number of suggestions about how pro-American elements can play a big role in any new government. This compromise could be used as a basis to assuage US anger and mollify any desire on the part of Washington to pick up its marbles and go home.”

Couldn’t agree more. As discussed recently, a March 8th win is really going to be all about the Free Patriotic Movement. No matter how Fox News spins it, the reality is that the onus has been placed entirely upon Michel Aoun’s Change & Reform bloc to pony up the seats to push the opposition over the top. And while there may be a congressional effort to introduce something like a Lebanon Accountability Act, I just can’t see a politically expedient reason to do it if the Syrians are adding value to Obama’s Mideast efforts.