In the Occupied Territory, Two Kinds of Justice

Originally published in CounterPunch Magazine December 25, 2017

by Stanley L. Cohen

Many take their liberty for granted even as they have endless time to rail on and on about how “they” are coming for us. Be it the “coup”, apparently now underway, or the spread of domestic McCarthyism that seeks to cower us into silence, or the baffling, sudden, corrupt reach of the Department of Justice, for most white men here we enjoy a privilege that says not us. Typically, it works.

A world away, liberty is less a race-based edge than it is the benefits you gain by the day of the week you celebrate your faith. For those who get directions from god on Saturdays, there appear to be no limits to the dispensation to which you are entitled; be it the execution of an unconscious prisoner, the mass arrest of a family with the temerity to fight for their land or a Prime Minister protected by legislative fiat empowered well beyond the reach of mere mortal law.

Israel has long preached justice and equality to the world. How often have we heard its mantra about democratic ideals and traditions as so much a unique historical tenet of its travel… a journey for the chosen that get to choose who the beneficiaries are… and are not.

For those of us in the US, either schooled in the classic process of the law or victimized by its aim, we’ve grown spoiled by its safeguards even though they remain but abstract and elusive for those many in the prisoner dock of  “wrong” color, with but coins in their pocket or militant politics in their gait.

Yet, despite the betrayal of equal hope for all, the march from investigation to arrest to trial and result knows no formal de jure distinction along the way. Of course, one would be so much a fool to argue that justice is blind, or little more than a commodity for purchase, or the skill of one’s advocate, or the luck of one’s judicial draw. Yet these damning imperfections leave hope along the way that justice may, on occasion, just slip and fall into ones lap despite a long and tarred drop.

That is not the case in Israel. Israel has two systems of justice… one for Jews and the other for Palestinians be they Muslim, Christian or atheist. Nowhere is that more apparent or destructive than it is in the Occupied Territory.

The Detention of Children

Several days ago, 16 year old Ahed Tamimi was arrested, by heavily armed Israeli soldiers, during a violent pre-dawn raid on her home. It followed a video, since gone viral, of her slapping a soldier on the face and arm and pushing another soldier, standing nearby, who she was ushering away from the family home… this, after her 14-year-old cousin, Mohammed,  had been shot by an Israeli rubber coated bullet that entered through his mouth and lodged in his brain.

For Ahed, it was not the first time that her challenge to the occupation received international attention and acclaim.  As an 11 year old, she was video recorded confronting soldiers with clenched fist. She did not back down.  At 13, she helped to wrestle her 11 year old brother, his arm in a cast, from the clutches of an Israeli soldier who was physically assaulting him during a standoff near her family home. For that, she was the recipient of the Handala Courage award in Turkey.

Not long after Ahed’s current arrest, Nariman Tamimi was seized when she went to the local police station to check on her daughter. After attending his daughter’s initial military court appearance, Bassem Tamimi, a prominent land defender and non-violent organizer in the village of Nabi Saleh, was also taken into custody. He has been arrested numerous times by Israeli forces. In 2012, he was termed a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International during one of his several detentions in an Israeli prison.

Later that night, soldiers seized a family cousin, Nour Tamimi, a 21 year old journalism student, from her own family home.

Mother, father, daughter, and cousin arrested after another cousin shot… all within a matter of a few days.  Welcome to Palestine. Welcome to the Occupation.

Liberty means more than the freedom to walk in and out of your home with the approval of those who occupy the streets that lead to it. 

Though the arrest of Ahed has captured the attention of many, it is as much the force of her charisma as it is the call of justice that has produced it. Since 2000, over 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in an Israeli military system devoid of any meaningful protection for the most vulnerable and traumatized among those that have known nothing but the bark of occupation their entire lives.  It is a military justice process notorious for the systematic ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children.

The majority of these children have been seized in middle of the night raids by heavily armed Israeli soldiers. By now, military kidnappings have become so much the expected norm that Palestinian teens sleep with their clothes on to maintain their modesty when the doors to their bedroom are kicked in with the shouts of “get up get up” by heavily armed soldiers.

Dragged out the door to the screams of their powerless parents, for most, it will be the last they will hear from them without the watch and eavesdrop of prison guards for the many months of detention to follow.

Several hours after their arrest, children arrive at an interrogation and detention center alone, tired, and frightened.

All Interrogations, by their very nature, are inherently coercive no matter the age or experience of its target.  None are more so than for an often bruised and scared child forced to go through the process without the benefit of counsel or the presence of parents who are never permitted to participate.

Israeli law provides that all military interrogations must be undertaken in a prisoner’s native language and that any statement made by them must be reduced to writing in that language. Despite this prohibition, detainees are typically coerced into signing statements, through verbal abuse, threats, and physical violence, that are written by police in Hebrew… which most cannot understand. These statements usually provide the main evidence against these children in Israeli military courts.

By virtue of the military court process, as of the end of this past summer there were 331 Palestinian minors held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners, including 2 administrative detainees.

The Military Court Process

The military courts, themselves, are held inside military bases and closed to the public… and usually family members of the accused.  Within these courts, military orders supersede clear Israeli and international law.  The court proceedings reduce the prospect of any justice to little more than a military dress parade where soldiers exhibit their uniform without any independence or skill attached to it whatsoever.

In military courts, all parties to the proceeding… the judge, prosecutor and translators… are members of the Israeli armed forces. The judges are military officers with minimal judicial training and, by-in- large, served as military prosecutors before assuming the bench

The prosecutors are Israeli soldiers appointed to the position by the Area Commander.  Some of them are not yet certified as attorneys under the Israeli Bar Association.

Under the rules of occupation, all defendants in military courts are Palestinian… with the jurisdiction of the Israeli military court never extended to some eight hundred thousand Jewish settlers living in the West Bank.  They are accorded the full benefit and safeguard of Israeli civil law.

Under Israeli military orders, a Palestinian can be held without charge, for the purpose of interrogation, for a total period of 90 days during which he or she is denied the benefit of counsel. These detention periods can be extended without limit and require but an ex parte request of military prosecutors.  By comparison, an Israeli citizen accused of a security offense, within the Occupied Territory, can be held without indictment within the civil process for a period of 64 days during which time counsel is available at all times.

Though Palestinian detainees are entitled to trials in military proceedings which must be completed within eighteen months, if the trials have not concluded within that time frame, a judge from the Military Court of Appeals can extend the detention of a Palestinian by multiple six-month increments… indefinitely. It is this process which has left thousands of Palestinian political detainees imprisoned for years on end without the benefit of counsel, formal charges, or trial. The comparable time limit for detainees before Israeli civilian courts is nine months.

While criminal liability begins at age 12 for Palestinians and Israelis alike, under the military system Palestinians can be tried as adults at age 16. For Israelis, the age of majority for trial as an adult in a civilian court is 18.  This two year difference, without physical distinction of consequence, can mean the difference of many years in sentence should a conviction ensue.  In some cases, it can literally mean a variance between a few years in prison versus decades upon conviction.

For those Palestinian detainees who have been accorded a military trial in the Occupied Territory, the conviction rate is but a bit short of 100%. All military trials are undertaken by a judge and not a jury.

Although the United Nations has repeatedly held that the military justice system in the Occupied Territory violates international law, it has done nothing to ensure equal protection to hundreds of thousands denied justice by virtue of being Palestinian and nothing else.

Detention as a Political Weapon

For fifty years, the justice system in the Occupied Territory has been the exclusive domain of the Israeli army… completely removed from any oversight by civilian laws, courts, and safeguards. It’s been estimated that, during this time, several hundred thousand Palestinians have been sentenced for a wide range of “security violations” as defined by arbitrary military fiat on a case by case basis. It has been reported that 20% of the Palestinian population have been swept up and detained by the military during this time.

While Israel has tried to portray its exercise of judicial authority in the Occupied Territory as one largely concerned with traditional criminal offenses or serious acts of “violence”, in point of fact, most of those seized have been detained for little more than non-violent political activity.

Designated as “Hostile Terrorist Activity,” these offenses often target speech, association, cultural expression, “unauthorized” assembly and movement, non-violent protest, and political activity carried out by elected representatives of local Palestinian government entities.

Others have been detained for “incitement” or membership in “illegal associations” as determined by the local Israeli military commander… or for “leaving the area without permission.”

Journalists have been arrested because of their critical coverage of the military at demonstrations or for reporting about the occupation in general. One was arrested for making a Facebook comment on another arrested Palestinian’s mugshot: “your smile will end the occupation.”

Troops have raided and shut down several broadcast outlets for six months on the grounds of incitement including the Manbar al-Hurriya radio station and eight local outlets operated by PalMedia, Ram Sat and Trans Media.

Documentation of almost two dozen Palestinians, in the West Bank, detained by the Israeli military for nothing more than Facebook posts or exchanges is claimed by 7amleh, the Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement. Additionally, Israel’s security system handed over a list of 400 other Palestinians, having posted to Facebook, to the security of the Palestinian Authority, who arrested them.

Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) have been arrested and detained for carrying out a population census in occupied East Jerusalem which the military deemed as “illegal work” with the Palestinian Authority.

Although International law prohibits interference with the free exercise of one’s political opinions, the Israeli military has sought to suppress the Palestinian political process, as a whole, for decades. Palestinian political leaders and activists are routinely arrested and detained.

In July of 2014, a high of 38 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council were detained for political activity. As of November 2017, the current number is 11 members.    Others have been prevented from travelling outside the Occupied Territories.  A number of Legislative Council members had their residencies in Jerusalem revoked and were forcibly deported to other parts of the Occupied West Bank.

70 lawmakers from the Palestinian Legislative Council have been arrested since 2002 for political activity and little else, including a number that have been detained on multiple occasions.

Among the current members of the PLC in Israeli detention is 55-year-old Khalida Jarrar, a female legislator and senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Head of the Prisoners’ Commission of the PLC and vice-chairperson of the board of directors of Palestinian Prisoners’ Rights Group, Jarrar, who was last released from Israeli detention a year ago, was accused of “promoting terror activities”.

For seventy years, Israel has held itself out as a nation under siege.  It has used this talisman to evade and avoid the clear mandate of international law. Nowhere is that more readily apparent and painful than in the Occupied Territory which, with the passage of time, has become illegally annexed and policed by military force of law.

Jails do not break the back of resistance. They firm it with the price expected for the cost of freedom. In Palestine, it is a price willingly embraced by both the young and those who have aged with the slam of the prison gate.

Perhaps one day, Israel will awaken to the truth that the siege it fights is the very one it promotes. Until then, neither the military nor its sham courts will quell the taste of freedom or the natural beckon for it.

Seattle Protestor Says ‘We Need to Start Killing People’

Posted on February 3, 2017

by Richard Edmondson

Warning: the language is graphic. The protest reportedly took place in Seattle. The woman with the bullhorn engages in a five-minute tirade against white people, an outburst that includes the words, “We need to start killing people.” She also says, “The White House must die.”

It is unclear whether the woman is officially connected with Black Lives Matter, but if you watch the video  closely you will see that she is wearing a t-shirt that reads “Black Lives Matter” on the back. She also, during her speech, identifies herself as a pre-school teacher.

A Fox News report on the protest can be found here. Unfortunately, however, the article does not identify the woman by name.

Below is an edited version of the video without all the annoying screen pop-ups, and which also includes subtitles. Basically it just gives a clearer picture. I put up a post yesterday discussing the “mass insanity” currently sweeping America. This woman would seem to be another prime example. (H/T Jill rowan)

Appeal Aimed at Fordham University: ‘Don’t Ban Students for Justice in Palestine!’

 

Posted on January 31, 2017

by Richard Edmondson

[ Ed. note – Imagine a student organization at a major American university–(where such lofty ideals as academic freedom and free speech presumably are held dear)–being banned before it even gets organized or holds its first meeting.

Well, that’s what happened at Fordham University with the local Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.

The school’s dean of students, Keith Eldredge, vetoed a measure approved by the University Student Government association which would have recognized the SJP group. Eldredge announced his decision in a December 22 email sent out to the young student activists who had applied for permission to form the organization on campus.

“After consultation with numerous faculty, staff and students and my own deliberation, I have decided to deny the request to form a club known as Students for Justice in Palestine at Fordham University,” he wrote. “While students are encouraged to promote diverse political points of view, and we encourage conversation and debate on all topics, I cannot support an organization whose sole purpose is advocating political goals of a specific group, and against a specific country, when these goals clearly conflict with and run contrary to the mission and values of the University.”

So in other words opposing an apartheid state and calling for an end to a decades-long occupation runs against the “mission and values” of Fordham University? What’s disgusting about this is that Fordham is, at least nominally, a Christian university that was founded by the Catholic diocese of New York. So is Eldredge trying to imply that SJP’s support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement somehow violates the teachings of Jesus?

“There is perhaps no more complex topic than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is a topic that often leads to polarization rather than dialogue,” Eldredge goes on.

So Jesus–a man who called the Pharisees hypocrites, turned over the tables of the money changers, and accused the Jewish scribes of turning his Father’s house into a den of robbers–was somehow timidly averse to being polarizing when a clear need presented itself?

“The purpose of the organization [SJP] as stated in the proposed club constitution points toward that polarization,” the dean continues. “Specifically, the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel presents a barrier to open dialogue and mutual learning and understanding.”

Thank you, Dean Eldredge, and I’m sure the Zionist settlers in the West Bank are also aware of the dire need for “open dialogue and mutual learning and understanding”

Maybe the occupation of Palestine is a “complex topic” to the deans at Fordham University, but of course for most of the rest of us, it’s really not that hard to figure out.

The current president of Fordham is the Rev. Joseph M. McShane. If you follow one of the links below you will find a letter addressed to McShane written by Palestine Legal, whose mission is to protect “the civil and constitutional rights of people in the US who speak out for Palestinian freedom.” Quite a big job obviously and probably about to become even more challenging.

Also below you will find an appeal addressed to Fordham University by the Friends of Sabeel North America. I must say I admire their diplomacy. It’s probably more than I could have mustered. FOSNA, by the way, is a Christian ecumenical group affiliated with Sabeel, an international peace movement launched by Palestinian Christians. ]

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After subjecting Palestinian student activists to an extensive and abnormally elongated vetting process that lasted over a year, Fordham University in New York City has banned its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights stated that the ban “blatantly violates [the University’s] promise to guarantee freedom of inquiry on campus,” calling on Fordham’s administration to “immediately permit and facilitate the formation of SJP.”

On Monday, FOSNA Executive Director Tarek Abuata sent an open letter to Fordham’s administration urging them to reinstate the chapter.

Help us tell Fordham University that as people of conscience, now more than ever, we have a responsibility to take action and support Palestine solidarity efforts.

Please call, write, or e-mail:

President Rev. Joseph M. McShane
president@fordham.edu

Keith Eldredge, Dean of Students
eldredge@fordham.edu

Office of the President, Fordham University
441 East Fordham Road
Bronx, NY 10458
Tel: 718-817-3000

Free debate and open inquiry are hallmarks of university study. Help us ensure that Fordham University gives students who seek to debate, organize, and advocate for justice in Palestine and Israel the opportunity to do so as part of their educational experience.

Support our work by donating

Letter in support of Fordham Students for Justice in Palestine:

President Rev. Joseph M. McShane
Keith Eldredge, Dean of Students
Office of the President, Fordham University
president@fordham.edu
eldredge@fordham.edu
441 East Fordham Road
Bronx, NY 10458
Tel: 718-817-3000

Dear President Rev. McShane and Dean Eldredge,

Friends of Sabeel North America is a Christian ecumenical organization seeking justice and peace in the Holy Land through nonviolent advocacy and education. As executive director, I write to express deep concern that Fordham University has decided to prohibit students from organizing a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on your campus.

You may have seen this week’s statement from the Catholic Bishops of the 2017 Holy Land Coordination. This statement provides an urgent plea for the people of the world (and Catholics in particular) to pray and act for justice in the Holy Land:

Fifty years of occupation demands action.

For fifty years the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza have languished under occupation, violating the human dignity of both Palestinians and Israelis. This is a scandal to which we must never become accustomed.  Our Coordination has called for justice and peace every year since 1998, yet the suffering continues. So this call must get louder. As Bishops we implore Christians in our home countries to recognise our own responsibility for prayer, awareness and action.

So many people in the Holy Land have spent their entire lives under occupation, with its polarising social segregation, yet still profess hope and strive for reconciliation. Now, more than ever, they deserve our solidarity.

(See the signatories and full text)

We implore you to encourage your students to become active for justice and peace in Palestine and Israel by allowing the SJP chapter to form. As you know, throughout history students have been at the forefront of debating and organizing for justice causes (women’s rights; abolition of slavery; equality in racial, ethnic, and economic matters; opposition to war and to the apartheid regime in South Africa).

The First Amendment protects free speech as a hallmark of our democracy. Free debate and open inquiry are hallmarks of university study. Please give to the students who seek to debate, organize, and advocate for justice in Palestine and Israel this fundamental opportunity as part of their educational experience at Fordham University.

Friends of Sabeel North America has worked closely with SJP groups across the country. We find they are composed of bright, compassionate, highly conscientious students. SJP chapters are usually comprised of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular students. They represent a cross-section of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity.

Please allow your Fordham students the freedom all Americans hold dear. Encourage rather than prohibit their work for justice in Palestine and Israel as the Catholic Bishops of the 2017 Holy Land Coordination have urged.

With warm regards,

Tarek Abuata, Executive Director

Friends of Sabeel North America

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Fordham University’s Ban on Palestinian Rights Group Sets Dangerous Precedent

By Joe Catron | January 26, 2017

Mint Press News

NEW YORK — Nearly a hundred students and community members rallied on Fordham University’s Manhattan campus before marching to nearby Columbus Circle on Monday.

The protest marked the latest chapter in an ongoing effort by students at the Jesuit institution to found a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine on their campus.

SJP organizations, which take their name from a still-existing student group founded at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, already exist on over a hundred campuses in the United States, as well as several overseas.

A national organization using the same name organizes annual conferences attended by many of these loose affiliates, but maintains no formal relationship with them.

On Nov. 19, 2015, four students at Fordham applied with the university’s administration to register an SJP club at the school’s Lincoln Center campus.

By all accounts, they did not expect the grueling ordeal that lay before them.

Their plans finally ground to a halt on Dec. 22, 2016, when Keith Eldredge, dean of students at the Lincoln Center campus, informed several SJP activists in an email that he had overruled a vote by the school’s United Student Government to recognize the group a month earlier and denied it registration as a student organization.

“According to sources within student government, he has never even reviewed a club for veto, let alone actually vetoed one, in his entire ten years here at Fordham,” Sapphira Lurie, a senior and lead campus organizer for Fordham Students for Justice in Palestine, told MintPress News. “This is a clear example of the Palestine exception to free speech.”

“The Palestine exception,” a term popularized by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights in a 2015 report of that name, refers to barriers to free speech and organizing faced by Palestinian and solidarity activists in the US.

In a Jan. 17 statement on Fordham’s ban of SJP, Palestine Legal, a nonprofit organization that provides legal assistance and representation to Palestine activists, said it had responded to more than 600 attempts to repress their activities nationally since the start of 2014.

Of these, it said, “the vast majority” targeted students and faculty.

On campus, these efforts often include obstacles to student organizing, like challenges to event funding and space registration, or the unwarranted suspension of recognized groups, as well as the intimidation, and occasional termination, of faculty.

But Fordham’s preemptive ban of a student organization sets a dangerous new precedent, one students and other local activists are determined to fight.

“As far as we’re aware, this is the first time a college has summarily banned a group supporting Palestinian rights before students even held their first meeting,” Radhika Sainath, a Palestine Legal staff attorney and cooperating counsel at the CCR, told MintPress News.

‘Fordham breached its express promise’

Palestine Legal’s statement summarized a letter, sent by it and the CCR to Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., Fordham’s president, on the same day.

When they filed their application, the letter said, “[T]he students expected Fordham would approve their group within a few weeks so that they could start their educational programming.”

[[[ Read Palestine Legal’s letter to Fordham’s president Rev. Joseph M. McShane. ]]]

Instead, they faced months of stonewalling, punctuated by meetings at which administrators asked if they would consider a different name, expressed concern at their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and use of the word “apartheid,” and inquired about their willingness to work with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street, and Seeds for Peace.

The administrators also inquired whether an anti-BDS resolution passed by the New York City Council or an executive order and blacklist opposing the movement issued by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, all last year, should preclude SJP’s recognition by the university.

As the USG decision on Nov. 17 neared, one administrator, Dorothy Wenzel of the university’s office of student leadership, who had previously admitted to polling Jewish faculty on whether SJP should be allowed to register at Fordham, instructed a USG officer to notify the school’s Jewish Student Organization of the pending vote.

Continued here

Bahrain …. toward the resistance البحرين… الى المقاومة

Bahrain …. toward the resistance

يناير 27, 2017

Written by Nasser Kandil,

Six years ago, the people of Bahrain were facing all the provocations of Al-Jazeera shield led by Saudi Arabia, but they remained sticking to the peaceful path. The people of Bahrain who are led today by Islamic movement have sacrificed a lot in all stages, under the banners of Liberalism in the forties, when they were demanding of elections, under the banner of Gamal Abdul Nasser in the fifties, when they were demanding of liberation, and under the banner of the Left, when they were leading the struggle of the trade union which is the most avant -grade in the Arab world. The people of Bahrain did not leave the arenas and no one can call their revolution as the sectarian awakening.

The people of Bahrain insist on the peaceful path despite the cascade of blood that is shed by the Saudi intervention and despite the semi-complete negligence of what is so-called the International Community, comparing with the allegations of the defense for the human rights where the West has interests, so the killers of Al-Qaeda organization become martyrs and its fighters become the heroes of freedom as described by Laurent Fabius the Former French Foreign Minister on the Turkish-Syrian borders. Here the insistence is more than a historic patience; it is a strategic choice and may be it reaches its final stages.

What has happened in Bahrain as a remorseless killing, a felony that did not get an investigation or a trial of youths who were arrested in the movement of the Bahraini street; they were accused of bombing a vehicle of Al-Jazeera Shield’s vehicles, and a summary execution  without an actual trial said that Saudi Arabia which has ordered of killing is drawing a red line for accepting the settlements in the region, it is the recognition of making the people of the Gulf countries slaves for the family of Saud as a precondition for settlements outside the Gulf, otherwise there is no objection by Saudi Arabia from keeping the agitating wars and spending all the money to bring the extremists and the mercenaries to wage them. This means the transformation of Saudi Arabia to a greater opportunity for the dominance of ISIS practically and gradually.

The dominance of ISIS on Saudi Arabia geographically, demographically and militarily as well as the rootedness of its project in it seems as a salvation of ISIS in the light of the defeats which affected it in Iraq, and the difficulty of resilience in the war of Syria, and in the light of the European Russian race to prevent ISIS from the stability in Libya as an expected substitute for ISIS after Iraq and Syria. So it is logical that ISIS will aspire to Saudi Arabia for the next two years. It seems that the rulers of Saudi Arabia do not mind that or they are not aware of it, on the contrary they say to the world; you have to choose between our dominance with our savagery on oil and ISIS’ dominance on it with its brutality.

Saudi Arabia puts the region and the world between the two options of the recognition of humiliated bondage for the people of the Gulf or giving the sources of oil to ISIS. The comparison between what has happened in Iraq and what might happen in Saudi Arabia makes the matter logical, since the background is ready popularly and the devotions to extremism, atonement, and the blood according to the sheikhs of Wahhabism are shown through their public fatawas.

Between the two parts of this duality, it is no longer possible for anyone to address the people of Bahrain by asking them to be patience and to endure. The resistance has become an option that no one can denounce it or considered it a haste or emotion. If the Saudis want to weaken the influence of Iran in the Gulf, they are succeeding because they make the people rebel against the advices of Iran to be calm and sticking to the peaceful path because they kill every call for wisdom.

Translated by Lina Shehadeh,

البحرين… الى المقاومة

ناصر قنديل

– منذ ست سنوات يقف شعب البحرين في الشوارع يواجه كل استفزازات درع الجزيرة بقيادة السعودية، متمسكاً بالمسار السلمي. وشعب البحرين الذي تقوده اليوم حركة إسلامية لم يبخل على النضال العربي بالتضحيات في المراحل كلها. فكان تحت شعارات الليبرالية في الأربعينيات يطالب بالانتخابات، وتحت لواء جمال عبد الناصر في الخمسينيات يطالب بالتحرر، وتحت لواء اليسار يقود النضال النقابي الأشدّ طليعية في العالم العربي، فشعب البحرين لم يغادر الساحات ولا يمكن لأحد تسمية ثورته بالصحوة الطائفية.

– بقي إصرار شعب البحرين على المسار السلمي، رغم شلال الدم المسال بتدخّل سعودي، ورغم التجاهل شبه التام لما يُسمّى بالمجتمع الدولي قياساً بمزاعم الدفاع عن حقوق الإنسان حيث للغرب مصالح، فيصير قتلى تنظيم القاعدة شهداء ويصير مقاتلوها أبطال حرية، كما وصفهم لوران فابيوس وزير خارجية فرنسا الأسبق على الحدود التركية السورية. وهذا الإصرار أكثر من صبر تاريخي، بل هو خيار استراتيجي، ربما يكون قد بلغ مراحله النهائية.

– ما جرى في البحرين من قتل بدم بارد بجرم لم ينل تحقيقاً ولا محاكمة لشبان اعتقلوا من حراك الشارع البحراني، ووجّهت لهم الاتهامات بتفجير آلية من آليات درع الجزيرة، وتنفيذ حكم الإعدام بهم من دون محاكمة فعلية، يقول إن السعودية التي أمرت بالقتل ترسم خطاً أحمر لقبولها بالتسويات في المنطقة. وهو التسليم بجعل شعوب بلاد الخليج عبيدا لآل سعود كشرط مسبق لتسويات خارج الخليج، وإلا فلا مانع لدى السعودية من بقاء الحروب مشتعلة وإنفاق كل المال والمجيء بكل المتطرفين والمرتزقة لخوضها. وهذا يعني تحويل السعودية عملياً وتدريجياً إلى أكبر فرصة لسيطرة داعش.

– سيطرة داعش على السعودية جغرافياً وسكانياً وعسكرياً، وتجذُّر مشروعه فيها يبدو خشبة خلاص داعش في ضوء الهزائم التي يُمنَى بها التنظيم في العراق، وصعوبة الصمود عندما تدور آلة الحرب عليه في سورية، وفي ضوء التسابق الأوروبي الروسي على منع داعش من الاستقرار في ليبيا، كبديل متوقع لداعش بعد العراق وسورية، فيصير المنطقي أن يبني التنظيم خطته نحو السعودية للسنتين المقبلتين، ولا يبدو أن حكام السعودية يمانعون بذلك أو لا يدركونه، بل يقولون للعالم عليكم أن تختاروا بين سيطرتنا بهمجيتنا على النفط، أو تسليمه لداعش بوحشيته.

– السعودية تضع المنطقة والعالم بين خيارَيْ التسليم بعبودية ذليلة لشعوب الخليج أو تسليم منابع النفط لداعش. والمقارنة بين ما جرى في العراق، وما قد يجري في السعودية يصير الأمر منطقياً. فالبيئة جاهزة شعبياً والولاءات للتطرف والتكفير والدم لدى مشايخ الوهابية تُظهرها فتاوى علنية.

– بين حدَّيْ هذه الثنائية لم يعد ممكناً لأحد مخاطبة شعب البحرين بطلب الصبر والتحمّل. فالمقاومة صارت خياراً لا يمكن لأحد استهجانه واعتباره تسرّعاً أو انفعالاً، وإذا كان السعوديون يريدون إضعاف نفوذ إيران في الخليج فهم ينجحون، بأن يجعلوا الشعوب تتمرّد على نصائح إيران بالتهدئة والتمسك بالسلمية، لأنهم يغتالون كل نداء للحكمة.

 

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US Court: Jewish baby is worth US$178.5 million

Rehmat

Posted on January 13, 2017

On Tuesday, Washington DC District Court ruled that Tehran and Damascus have to pay US$178.5 million compensation to parents of Chaya Zissel Braun, the 3-month old Jewish baby killed in a car accident in occupied Jerusalem in a 2014 vehicular accident.

The vehicle was driven by Abdelrahman al-Shaludi from East Jerusalem who happened to be released from Israeli prison after 14 months on charges of being sympathizer of Gaza-ruling Hamas.

Braun’s parents hold the US-Israel dual citizenship. Such Americans become a national threat once they hold some higher administration or media position in United States such as Michael Chertoff, former head of DHS, Michael Mukasey, former attorney-general, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Larry Franklin, Douglas Feith, and The Atlantic magazine’s new editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, a former Israel’s army prison guard.

Since Hamas government in Gaza has no assets, frozen or otherwise, in United States – Israeli government founded law firm Shurat HaDin sued anti-Israel regimes in Damascus and Tehran to pay the compensation.

How much you think a US court demand Israeli government to pay compensation to the family of Abdel Fateh al-Sharif, an unarmed wounded Palestinian youth shot to death by Israeli soldier Elor Azaria (see cartoon above) in March 2016?

If you think that’s is ridiculous – in March 2016, a lawsuit initiated by Shurat HaDin, a Manhattan federal court ruled that Tehran must pay $10.5 billion to the families of the disputed victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which has been proven to be work of the Zionist regime.

In February 2015, a lawsuit initiated by the Israeli lawfare firm Shurat HaDin led to the conviction of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization of liability for terrorist attacks in Israel between 2000 and 2004. The New York Federal jury awarded damages of $218.5 million, but under a special feature of the Anti-Terrorism Act the award was automatically tripled to $655.5 million.

Now you know how the Holocaust Industry has succeeded in sucking trillions of dollars from the US, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, and other western taxpayers.

American Jewish writer, author and radio-talk host, Stephen Lendman commented on this Jewish highway robbery, saying: “Israel calls wars of aggression, lethal shootings of Palestinians, and other barbarous acts self-defense. It considers legitimate resistance against brutal occupation harshness terrorism – a knee-jerk response to all incidents, Palestinians automatically guilty by accusation. The family in question has dual Israeli-American citizenship. Their three-month-old infant was killed  when Palestinian Abdel Rahman Shaludi’s vehicle struck people at Jerusalem’s Ammunition Hill light-rail station in October 2014. Israel accused him of ties with Hamas, illegally called a terrorist organization. It’s Palestine’s legally elected government. Parents of the deceased child sued in the US district court, awarded a default judgment, the entire procedure a sham, a scheme to denigrate and punish Iran and Syria illegally (here).”

Deterioration of Interracial Relations During Barack Obama’s Presidency

South Front

Inter-racial conflict in the US continues to escalate despite the fact that a black president has been leading the country for 8 years. All of the various ethnic groups that comprise American society, hoped that Barack Obama would be able to “sew” together the fabric of a nation torn by racial and social divisions, but racism is still on the rise. This poses a significant threat to US homeland security. Government institutions and big business continue to be controlled by the white elites and the perilous social situation of ethnic minorities continues to be accompanied by an increase in crime. This causes growing racial intolerance at all levels. People are frustrated by the lack of change in inter-racial relations, which has led to a new round of racial violence.

The most striking example of the exacerbation of racial conflict is the situation prevailing around so-called police violence. Every case of the killing of an unarmed African American in recent years becomes an occasion for demonstrations, which very often degenerate into riots. The new mass protest movements are thriving and growing in influence, aided by social media. For example, “Black Lives Matter,” which is compared to the ‘Black Panthers’ of the 70s. Despite the lack of talented leaders and clear programs, in such associations, their ongoing radicalization is evident. That was demonstrated by the riots in Ferguson of 2014 and the case of the murder of police officers in Baton Rouge.

The indignation of the colored population at police actions is justified. The level of police violence in the United States is quite high. It is known that American cops kill 5 times more people than Canadian police, 40 times more than German police, and 140 times more than  police in England and Wales.

All segments of the American population are suffering from a disproportionate use of force by police. According to the resource “Mapping police violence”, from the 1^st of  January, 2013 to the 31^st of December 2015, 3,486 people were killed by police, or approximately 1100 people per year. Of these, 571 were Hispanic (16%), 949 African-American (27%) and 1522 (43%) were White. These figures must be compared to the fact that Whites are 64% of the US population, African-Americans are 13% of the overall population, while 16% are Hispanic. However, the divergent behavior of the white population is much rarer due to a higher level of income and social stability.Of course, most of those killed by police were carrying weapons, and the lives of the policemen were in danger. But it is generally thought that US cops are more willing to open fire on people of color, because the policemen believe that the level of criminality and readiness for violence of Hispanics and African Americans is much higher. Additional factors which lead to an increase in racial tensions are racial prejudices and the established practice of cops consistently being acquitted by the U.S. court system.

Largely because of the actions of the US ruling elites, there now exists a group of people who are above the law whose members have a license to kill. Shooting at unarmed people, including children and teens, beating of pregnant women, shooting at people with disabilities and other “controversial” actions of American cops all are commonplace occurrences in the United States. The Members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) noted that in the United States there exists such inhumane methods as testing experimental medicines on inmates (predominantly African American) in prisons, the forced sterilization of minority women, and numerous incidents of police abuse of power directed towards the non-white population. However, the increased use of cameras amongst both the civilian population and police departments has facilitated increasingly frequent recordings of such cases of violence and has helped in gaining them publicity. That increased awareness that, in turn, has led to the outrage of the African-American population.

Many US police forces continue to subject African Americans to more thorough searches and more forceful tactics during arrests. Unofficially, they explain these practices by referring to statistical data presented by such sources as American Renaissance and Daily Stormer. For example, blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. They are also three times more likely to use a hand gun, and twice more likely to use a knife. A number of police officers believe that “special attention” to African American citizens improves crime detection rates. However, it has a significant impact on the rise in police dissatisfaction. Although the number of attacks on police and their killings has declined in recent years, experts explain it by the fact that US police are increasingly avoiding “black” neighborhoods, where they can be particularly vulnerable.

Moreover, a large part of the US population is puzzled with the public position of President Obama who invariably condemns the actions of the police and grieves for the black victims of police violence, but is silent about the cases of murder of police officers in the course of discharging their official responsibilities. Such a situation leads to an increase in real crime, which is not reflected in official statistics. We should not forget that the number of firearms in the United States recently surpassed the number of inhabitants and according to various estimates there are more than 320 million guns in the US, of which more than 270 million are in the hands of the civilian population. Therefore, a further escalation of violence in the American society, at any time, can lead to very dire consequences.

In general, ethnic tensions peaked since the beginning of the Barack Obama presidency. Thus, according to the official FBI statistics, in 2015 the number of white-on-black murders and vice versa reached their highest levels in 2008. The number of white-on-black murders has increased by 12%, while the number of black-on-white murders increased 22%.

According to the report of the Chair-Rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent Ricardo III Sunga (Philippines), the US maintains “structural racism”. It is a correct assessment of the situation. Despite the fact that the police officers are under the special protection of the state, laws aimed at fighting race discrimination, have the opposite effect of reverse discrimination, harming ordinary Americans. The use of unofficial, but very real quotas for the appointment of people of color at schools and businesses sometimes does not allow qualified “white” experts to get jobs or promotion. In case of conflicts of a civil nature between people with different skin color, they are usually subjected to racial profiling. At the same time, public opinion and the Supreme Court often find themselves on the side of national minorities.

On the other hand, the US still has a low level of political representation of ethnic minorities. As of November 2015, there have been a total of 1,963 members of the United States Senate, but only nine have been black, including Barack Obama. Out of 10,884 US Representatives, only 131 have been black. At present, there are no black governors at all. This lack of political representation also leads to more social tension.

No improvement has been observed during the final year of the first US African American presidency, instead, considerable aggravation of interracial conflict has been noted, to the point of it becoming one of the most dangerous threats to homeland security. Obama failed to cope with social problems, although he managed to stabilize the economy following the crisis. Still, 27% of African Americans continue to live below the poverty line, an average of 12% do not have steady employment. In some cities this figure reaches 40% and even as high as 50%. The level of culture, education and labor skills is also low. All this leads to an increase in crime among African Americans, and thus foments racist sentiment in society at large. This also leads to an exacerbation of black on black crime. For example, in Chicago, over the past 3 years, 75% of murder victims are young black males and 72% of murder perpetrators are also young black males. Social conditions in such places are affected by the fact that a large percentage of children grow up in broken homes.

As far as inter-party competition is concerned, it is obvious that in spite of the election of a black president, the Democrats failed to improve the lives of African Americans. Their criticism of the GOP’s harsh race rhetoric in order to attract voters, this is also an attempt to hide the fact they are not interested in changing the status quo. Paradoxically, only Republicans with their strict “law and order” approach are truly interested in the implementation of certain changes. Although the consequences of their policies in the event of capturing the White House, remain to be seen.

Summing up President Obama’s activities in the sphere of interracial relations, we can say that he has not developed a new national idea in order to deal with the problem of racism. US history will remember the first black president not as an idealist fighting for the rights of the oppressed, but as a servant of the ruling white elite and its interests.

Video: Israeli Soldiers Throw Stones at Palestinian School Children

Posted on October 29, 2016

by Richard Edmondson

[ Ed. note – This video surfaced one day after an Israeli court dismissed criminal proceedings against two Israeli security guards implicated in the slayings of Maram Salih Hassan Abu Ismail, 23, and her 16-year-old brother, Ibrahim Taha (see my post from yesterday). I’m guessing these soldiers probably knew they were being filmed and didn’t care–which would suggest they no longer care what the world thinks of them. What other military of any other country in the world has ever been filmed throwing rocks at children? ]

Electronic Intifada

This video shows Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank throwing stones at Palestinian schoolchildren in the village of al-Tuwani on 27 October.

According to the video’s captions, the Israeli soldiers are supposed to protect the children from attacks by Israeli settlers in the area.

But instead, as the video shows, the soldiers lob stones towards the children, including with a slingshot.

The soldiers also failed to come to the designated point to meet the children, according to the video, and “checked one child’s bag and stopped another one without a clear reason.”

Al-Tuwani is a village in the South Hebron Hills area of the occupied West Bank, where thousands of Palestinians living in dozens of small communities are resisting expulsion or the loss of their land from encroaching Israeli settlements.

Settlers from the nearby colony of Havat Maon habitually attack Palestinians.

In one such incident last November, masked, rock-throwing Israelis injured a 6-year-old Palestinian girl in the head.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has regularly documented settler attacks, including a days-long rampage in Hebron a year ago while Israeli forces looked on and did nothing.

In other cases, Israeli occupation soldiers have been filmed protecting and assisting settlers as they attack Palestinians.

While Israeli soldiers and settlers enjoy near-total impunity for violence against Palestinians, Israel has recently toughened penalties for Palestinians, including children, accused of throwing stones.

Five Palestinian youths from the village of Hares are currently serving 15-year sentences imposed by Israeli military courts on accusations of stone-throwing that they deny. All five were children when they were arrested in 2013.

The video above was published online by Operazione Dove, an international group of peace volunteers that maintains a presence in al-Tuwani.

Note: An earlier version of this post stated that the incident in al-Tuwani occurred on 25 October, based on a caption in the video. However, Operation Dove has since confirmed to The Electronic Intifada that the incident occurred on 27 October and the date in the caption is an error.

For Goy Hatred on Speed Please Subscribe to the Forward

August 24, 2016  /  Gilad Atzmon

The Jewish Forward calls Trump’s supporters a bunch of bullies and  losers

By Gilad Atzmon

If you want to grasp the level of contempt American ‘progressive’ Jews hold towards their host nation all you have to do is subscribe to the Forward.

Jay Michaelson, a contributing editor for the kosher outlet, proclaims that Donald Trump is the candidate of “the losers.”

The fact that progressive Jews don’t like goyim, especially when they appear in white, is not new, but Michaelson takes Jewish bigotry to a new level.

“As is now well known,” Michelson writes, Trump’s “core supporters are white, undereducated men who have been left behind by technology, globalization and the attendant erosion of America’s manufacturing base. Moreover, their days of white supremacy are coming to a close, and they’re mad as hell about it.”

Why does it seem natural for a Jew to label about half of the American people as ‘white supremacist’ i.e., rabid racists.

Jay Michaelson:  Donald Trump is the candidate of the ‘white undereducated’ and the ‘losers.’

In case you failed to get the message, the Jewish writer reiterates for you:

“Trump’s supporters are the losers of the new economy on the one hand, and of multiculturalism on the other.”

Trump supporters, pretty much like Bernie Sanders’s betrayed followers, have one thing in common: they crave a radical change. They long for a productive America, a country with a prospect of hope and a future.  They reject the narrative offered by Wall Street’s oligarchy that America is committed to one thing; Mammon. Does this make Americans into losers? Apparently so, in the eyes of the New York Jewish writer.  

The Forward calls Trump’s supporters a bunch of ‘bullies.’ And the losers always become bullies. At this stage, Michaelson realises that he’s gone a bit too far. After all, a Jew throwing gruesome insults at most of the American people can lead to some tragic consequences. The ‘progressive’ editor backtracks a bit. He concedes that Jews are also losers, yet, unlike Trump supporters, Michaelson explains, in the Jewish cultural heritage Jewish losers always prevail: 

“Of course, in each case, the(Jewish) ‘loser’ wins, enacting ancient Israel’s fantasies of triumph.”

And if you want to know why the Jews think they are so good at spotting injustice, Michaelson has the answer.

“Along the way, these biblical stories also instill a keenly felt sense of the injustice of bullying.”

The kosher progressive kindly allows a narrow outlet for criticism of Jewish bad behaviour.

“Often the Jewish state is not so different from what Trump’s would be, particularly in the past few years, as ugly racism has become mainstreamed in Israeli society, as Islamophobic rhetoric insists that ‘they’ are unlike ‘us.’”

This is a typical Jewish progressive spin. Israel is not an occasional mirror of an imaginary Trump America, Israel and Zionism were racist and plunderous from the day of inception. The 1948 Nakba was a barbarian act against the indigenous Palestinians driven by racist ideology that is deeply rooted in Jewish culture.

The Holodomor, the systematic starvation of Ukraine was perpetrated by “Stalin’s willing executioners” as the Jewish historian Yuri Slezkin refers to Stalin’s Jews in his monumental book The Jewish Century.  The Israeli ultra Zionist writer Sever Plocker repeated this line in the Israeli outlet Ynet admitting, “we mustn’t forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish.”  In 1936, justice driven revolutionary Jews traveled to Spain to fight ‘Fascism’ by killing Catholics and burning their churches. It took us three quarters of a century to admit that three quarters of the Spanish International Brigade were Jewish volunteers and the Lingua Franca of the Brigade was Yiddish. Time to ask why these moral interventionists always happen to burn Churches and kill Goyim.  Is this their ultimate sense of Justice?

And what about the Neocon school, another Zionist ideological precept that has inflicted global disaster in the name of ‘moral interventionism.’ Also, consider Wilhelm Reich, Marcuse and the cultural Marxists who used their sexualised interpretation of ‘socialism’ to weaken the West and destroy the unity of the labour movement beyond repair.

Michaelson’s Jewish progressive propaganda is consciously misleading. It isn’t just recent Israeli politics that shows a small problem with the notion of ‘Jewish justice.’ We have suffered a century of global disasters. Many of them were and still are driven by Jewish ideologies and political practices. Bolshevism, Cultural Marxism, Ziocons, Zionism, Mammonism a la Soros et Goldman Sachs are just different horrid faces of one tribal supremacy – an ideology that refers to the goyim as a bunch of losers and ‘white supremacists’, as Michaelson does in his Forward article.

Let ‘s examine this progressive Pro-Palestine comment in light of Jewish supremacism: moderate and contained anti Zionism is a maneuver used by the Jewish Left as a diversion. Instead of examining the breadth of disastrous global activity by Soros, Goldman Sachs, Cultural Marxism, Bolshevism and Neocons, we are permitted limited criticism of Israeli politics. Why do they allow us to reproach Israel? Because they know that Israel can easily take it.

Michelson ends his Jewish self loving rant, writing

“Judaism is proudly the religion of losers. It is a faith, and now a culture, of people who remind themselves every year — every day, even — that they were slaves, that might doesn’t make right, and that while it is human nature for the weak to bully the weaker, it is our divine nature to rise above it.”

These words make clear why Michaelson is afraid of the so-called American ‘losers.’ He knows that people who are oppressed by Wall Street’s mammonism and tired of neocon wars may well rise like the Jews and in the name of Justice identify those who bully them for more than a while.  

I do not think that Trump is capable of leading such a move. But Michaelson knows enough Jewish history to gather that the conditions for America’s awakening are ripe.  In fact the rise of the Americans is overdue.   Michaelson knows that Justice may prevail and he is surely aware of the meaning it may carry for himself and his people whom he outrageously labels as of “divine nature.”

“Here at our convention there will be no lies. We will honor the American People with the Truth”

Posted on July 22, 2016

by Richard Edmondson

By Richard Edmondson

Immediately after Donald Trump spoke those words at the Republican national convention last night, the massive crowd erupted into chants of “USA…USA…USA!”

Whenever I hear crowds yelling “USA” like that it always gives me a queasy feeling, for what it suggests is blind patriotism. Trump’s speech came three days after 20 civilians died in US airstrikes on the Syrian city of Manbij; two days after the French airstrikes that killed 120 more civilians in the village of Toukhan al-Kubra, just to the north of Manbij; and also two days after the emergence of a horrendously graphic video showing US-backed “moderate rebels” of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki movement beheading a young boy from Aleppo.

While plenty of people have expressed shock over the video and made note of the fact that the boy’s murderers were backed by the US, few have bothered to report the youngster’s name. According to Al Manar, his name was Abdullah Issa. He was 12 years old. The report also mentions that he suffered from Thalassemia, a blood disorder, and was abducted from a hospital after a brother of Omar Salkho, Nour al-Din al-Zenki’s Aleppo commander, was killed. Apparently this was sufficient cause for beheading a child.

A heartbreaking exchange is said to have taken place when Salkho reportedly asked the terrified young boy if he had a last wish.

“I wish to be shot dead,” Abdullah reportedly replied.

“You will not be shot dead,” the terrorist leader is said to have answered. “We are worse than ISIL.”

In the video below, Salkho is presumably the man in the green cap.

I hope that these killers are brought to justice–though not through random shelling upon the battlefield. I hope instead that they are captured alive and placed on trial, and during their trial, I would hope they would be questioned not only about beheadings and other crimes committed, but also as to what contacts they may have had with US or possibly Israeli officials. Did they, for instance, undergo training at a US training camp in Jordan or Turkey? According toWikipedia, Nour al-Din al-Zenki has received BGM-71 Tow anti-tank missiles from the US, and quite possibly they have received other assistance as well.

Perhaps the most unseemly performance of all was not so much the shouts of “USA” at the Republican convention but a comment given at the State Department by spokesperson Mark Toner, who, when told about Abdullah Issa’s beheading, remarked offhandedly,

“If we can prove that this was indeed what happened and this group was involved… it would give us pause about any assistance or, frankly, any further involvement with this group.”

The words “it would give us pause” raise serious questions about what value Toner places upon the lives of children living in countries torn and ripped apart by US regime change operations. Had the victim in this case been a 12-year-old Israeli boy, rather than Syrian, can we for a moment imagine Toner responding “it would give us pause” when told that such a child had been decapitated?

***

“But here at our convention, there will be no lies,” Trump orated in last night’s speech. “We will honor the American people with the truth and nothing else.”

“USA…USA…USA…USA…USA…”

So did Trump honor the American people with the truth about the beheading of Abdulla Issa or US support for terrorists who carry out war crime atrocities? No, he didn’t, sad to say. Well what exactly is the truth, according to Donald Trump? What “truths” came from the presidential contender’s lips during his acceptance speech?

Some of his truths are self-evident on their face. For instance:

• that 4 in 10 African-American children live in poverty while 58% of African-American youth are unemployed
• that the national debt has almost doubled under Obama, now standing at more than $19 trillion
• that Hillary Clinton pushed a “failed policy of nation building and regime change”–in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria–that should now be abandoned;

Other of his “truths” are a bit more subjective:

• the Iran deal will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever negotiated
• the Chinese are the greatest currency manipulators ever
• law enforcement (as it pertains to street crime) has been too lax under the Obama administration

And some are blatantly false:

• businesses are overregulated, particularly in the energy sector (presumably an endorsement for fracking, given the candidate’s reported choice forEnergy Secretary)
• our military is “depleted” and needs to be rebuilt
• Israel is our “greatest ally” in the Middle East

So yes, Trump spoke a few truths, mixed in with some partial truths, along with some outright untruths. Isn’t that what we have come to expect from the US political system? But the greatest truths, the truths most direly in need of being spoken–about the influence of the Israeli lobby, the control of virtually the entire mainstream media by just six corporations, the need to totally rearrange the system to eliminate the influence of money–these and other truths that direly need to be expressed were missing from the speech.

Some might take a little bit of heart from Trump’s criticism of Clinton for her regime change efforts in the Middle East, but it should be noted that in the very same speech the New York billionaire chastised Obama apparently over his refusal to launch an all-out war against the Syrian government in the wake of the Ghouta chemical attacks in 2013:

“Another humiliation came when president Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant absolutely nothing,” the candidate asserted.

Trump obviously believes that the Syrian Army carried out the chemical attack–a claim that has been thoroughly discredited but which the mainstream media continue to propagate nonetheless.

Controlled as it is by money, the US political system is a snake pit. The chances of a person of genuine integrity rising from such a system to become president are probably something like a million to one. Of course many people are naturally hopeful, and there is always a tendency to believe that this or that candidate is the one in a million exception to the rule. This is human nature. But the reality is that the snake pit is what produced the government we have now, a government that pursues a policy of arming terrorist head choppers, as well as State Department spokespeople capable of uttering, without barely a blink of an eye, that the beheading of a 12-year-old child might “give us pause.”

Trump or Hillary? Would Trump end up becoming the new “worst president ever”? Would Hillary be just as bad–maybe worse (maybe a hundred times worse)?  Should you vote for the Green Party or the Libertarian candidate? Maybe write in the name of your favorite poet, clown, or mathematician? It’s hard to say, and I’m not here to tell anybody how to vote, or whether to even vote at all or simply boycott the snake pit and stay home on election day. The decision is yours.

I’m only here to say that the choices aren’t good–but then you already knew that.

Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter

Posted on July 10, 2016

by Richard Edmondson

By Doug Hagmann | July 8, 2016

At 5:18 ET this morning, I received a call to my private number as a result of an email I sent to a Dallas, Texas police officer who I first met during my visit to that city earlier this year. Given the volatility and ongoing nature of the events taking place, the call came earlier that I anticipated but was met with welcome relief.

Thankfully, he was uninjured and not directly involved in the firefights that have so-far claimed the lives of five police officers (four from Metro-Dallas, one from DART), but knew two of the victims very well. He was broken up and the conversation was difficult, a stark contrast to our early-morning meetings over coffee for the better part of a week last March.

Sophistication of Attacks

I asked him for whatever information he might be able to offer about the attacks against the police during the hastily-planned “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) demonstration in downtown Dallas. He was quick to comply, as he said that the media is already in spin-mode, downplaying and even omitting many important facts.

He emphasized that this was a very well-planned and well-coordinated attackthat was executed with a disturbing level of precision. He described the attackers as utilizing body armor and having access to communications equipment, as well as a significant amount of weapons, ammunition and bomb-making materials and devices. He further emphasized that the planning of this attack had certain signatures of paramilitary or Muslim terrorist groups, although was careful not to make any direct linkage at this early stage. “It just had that feel,” he said.

This source stated that the methods used by the attackers in terms of “triangulation of targets” was both acknowledged and alarming, meaning that knowledge of the hastily-planned route used by the demonstrators was known and used by the perpetrators for “maximum damage.” In other words, he stated, “this [attack] against the police might have been planned before the event and adapted for use at this event, which goes back to having certain disconcerting ‘signatures’ as I just mentioned.”

Continued here

Bahrain: Unprecedented Summonings Campaign Against Shia Clerics

 

Local Editor

Bahrain’s ruling regime carried out on Thursday unprecedented summonings campaign against Shia scholars, in a new escalation against the Gulf Kingdom’s religious majority.

Local media reported that Bahraini authorities summoned the Head of Islamic Council of Scholars, Sayyed Majeed al-Mashal for investigation on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the authorities prevented the most prominent Friday prayers Imam in Bahrain, Sheikh Mohammad Sankour from performing prayers in Imam Sadeq Mosque in Diraz, according to local media.

Also on Thursday, the Bahraini authorities summoned chairman of a prominent religious group, al-Tawiyah Islamic Association, Sheikh Baqer al-Hawwaj, who was also summoned for investigation earlier on Tuesday.

The Bahraini regime also summoned Sheikh Hussein al-Mahrous, Sayyed Hashem al-Bahrani, Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ansari, Sheikh Taleb al-Daihi and Sheikh Abbas al-Haiki, local media in the Gulf Kingdom reported.

Pro-regime militias also carried out unlawful raid on the house of Sheikh Hasan al-Maliki.

The campaign on Thursday comes two days after the Bahraini authorities suspended activities of prominent opposition group al-Wefaq and dissolved al-Tawiya and al-Risala Islamic associations.

Commenting on the oppressive move by the Bahraini regime, religious scholars (Ulama) in the country considered the recent developments as a war declaration on the cultural and religious existence of the Shia sect in the country.

In a statement on Wednesday, the scholars said the “regime’s terrorist escalation reflects its illogical approach and sectarian as well as arrogant policy in face of the peaceful and oppressed people who moved to demand that the authorities grant them their legitimate rights.”

Source: Al Manar TV	16-06-2016 – 15:33 Last updated 16-06-2016 – 15:33

Hezbollah: Bahraini Developments Prove Autocratic Nature of the Regime

Local Editor

Hezbollah on Thursday strongly condemned as repressive the Bahraini regime decision to suspend activities of prominent opposition group al-Wefaq and to dissolve al-Tawiya and al-Risala Islamic associations.

In a statement released by Hezbollah Media Relations, the party said the Al-Khalifa regime move represents a flagrant violation to human rights and freedom.

The decision represents the “autocratic nature of the ruling regime in Bahrain,” the statement said, adding that this autocracy was clear through killing protesters, arresting  activists  and exerting all forms of oppression and blockade on civilians.

“These crimes have been targeting most of Bahraini people without taking the political, religious and ethical grounds into consideration.”

The statement added that the dissolved groups are not violent organizations, and that they did not adopt ideas that harm society.

“These associations do exert peace in both their ideas and activities, something which makes the regime’s crime more oppressive since it further stifles the popular movement and deepens the political and social crisis in the country.”

Meanwhile, Hezbollah slammed the international community “which claims to be keen to preserve freedom and adopt democratic slogans” over its silence regarding the Bahraini people’s rights to express itself and exert peaceful political activities.

In this context, the Lebanese resistance party called on the international community to hold its responsibility regarding this issue.

“Indeed, the  Bahraini regime would not dare to commit such oppressive actions without support from its sponsors, on top of which is the Saudi regime,” the statement said.

On the other hand, Hezbollah stressed that such repression will not break the will of the Bahraini people as it will not affect the peacefulness of the pro-democracy movements in the country.

Hezbollah salutes the steadfast people of Bahrain,” who taught the world how to be firm against all forms of oppression, stressing its right to use peaceful means in a bid to force the authorities to adopt the political solution” rather than relying on violent choices.

Source: Hezbollah Media Relations	16-06-2016 – 11:36 Last updated 16-06-2016 – 14:45

 

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Palestine and the Injustice of the World Community

 Thursday April 30, 2015 15:54 by Robert Fantina – Palestinian News Network (PNN)

In 2014, shortly after Hamas, the democratically-elected government in the Gaza Strip, and Fateh, the puppet government that takes its orders from Israel in the West Bank, agreed on a unification, three Israelis living illegally in the West Bank disappeared, and their bodies were soon discovered.

Although Israel learned within hours that they’d been killed, it continued house-to-house searches in the West Bank, terrorizing Palestinians and arresting hundreds. As soon as the news of their disappearance became public, governments around the world condemned this as a terrorist act. This rhetoric escalated when Israel finally announced that their bodies had been found. Within days, Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip, ostensibly to protect its own citizens from rocket fire from Gaza. It must be remembered that the Gaza Strip, blockaded for decades by Israel, is able to import very little. Its ‘rockets’ have been described by Jewish scholar and pro-Palestinian activist as ‘enhanced fire works’. Israel, on the other hand, has the most technologically advanced weaponry on the planet, some of it illegal under international law, all provided by the United States.

While the bombing of the Gaza Strip was ostensibly in response to ‘rocket fire’ from the Strip, Israel was extremely displeased with the announced governmental unification in Palestine, and it is likely that the bombing was actually in response to that, and not to any rocket fire.

Following a 51-day genocidal bombardment, a ceasefire agreement was signed. Since then, Israel has routinely violated the terms of that agreement, but the world has been mainly silent.

It is a rare day that goes by that one doesn’t hear of multiple Palestinians being arrested by Israel, often without charge. It is also an unusual day when an Israeli soldier doesn’t shoot at least one Palestinian, often fatally. There is no end to the news of Israeli settlers, living illegally in the West Bank, running over Palestinian children with their automobiles. These settlers also burn and uproot countless olive trees that Palestinians rely on for their subsistence. Such reports are shown on social media, and often appear in the leftwing press, but are rarely publicized by the corporate-owned news media.

One has to wonder why the disappearance of three Israelis, who were living in illegal settlements which any resident must know carries risks, was met with such universal shock, horror and condemnation, but the killing, kidnapping, assault and arrests without charge of numerous Palestinians, living on their own lands, in their own countries, is ignored.

There appear to be four possible reasons for this, none of them good:

Islamophobia. Although not all the residents of Palestine are Muslim, over 90% are. Muslims have long been considered, by western ignorance, as ‘different’ and unknown. Today, with the news media and the U.S. government highlighting every crime committed by a Muslim as an act of terrorism, and at least implying if not directly stating that Islam is a religion of violence, it is easy for society to view all Palestinians in that light.

Many U.S. citizens believed in 1995 that Muslims were responsible for the bombing that killed 168 people. It was only later when it was proven that that particular crime had been committed by home grown terrorists that that mistaken belief began to fade.

FOX News political analyst Andrea Tantaros said this in August of 2014 (please excuse the grammatical abominations; they are Ms. Tantaros’, not this writer’s): “If you study the history of Islam. Our ship captains were getting murdered. The French had to tip us off. I mean these were the days of Thomas Jefferson. They’ve been doing the same thing. This isn’t a surprise. You can’t solve it with a dialogue. You can’t solve it with a summit. You solve it with a bullet to the head. It’s the only thing these people understand. And all we’ve heard from this president is a case to heap praise on this religion, as if to appease them.” Such ignorance only adds to Palestinian suffering.

Lobby groups. In the United States, one of the most powerful lobbies is AIPAC, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee. In the last several decades, this organization has funneled tens of millions of dollars to U.S. politicians who are willing to protect Israel’s apartheid regime at all costs. In the U.S., the almighty dollar rules. This is why former First Lady, senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks of Israel in such glowing terms, and discusses visiting that nation many times, and talks about visiting ‘terrorist’ victims in the hospital. It must be remembered that any occupied nation has an international right to resist that occupation. Doing so is not terrorism. However, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t make such a distinction, and she has never once visited a victim of real terrorism in Palestine.

United States imperial power. As recently as December of 2014, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry make no less than fifty calls to various world leaders, begging them to vote down a United Nations resolution that would have mandated an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine by 2017. The vote failed by the huge margin of one, indicating a decrease in U.S. influence, at least on this topic.

Corporate ownership of the news media. There is speculation that at least 90% of the news media in the U.S. is owed by Zionists. One example is telling. In his memoirs, The New York Times (NYT) former executive editor Max Frankel stated the following: “I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert.” Can there be any doubt that this devotion influenced the stories the NYT printed? During the most recent mass genocidal invasion, ABC News correspondent Diane Sawyer showed footage of a grieving Palestinian woman, following an Israeli airstrike and identified the woman as an Israeli, suffering from a Palestinian air strike. A few days later, she corrected the mistake. But does this not show either the ignorance or the general bias of the media? If anyone is suffering, it must be an Israeli. One journalist, Juan Cole, said it succinctly during the early days of the Israeli onslaught last summer: “Reuters and other agencies (or their headline writers) routinely equate deadly Israeli airstrikes with sophisticated American fighter jets with small dumb rockets, some of them the sort of thing that could be made with an 8th grade chemistry set. And, of course, Palestinian lives are cheap and their 53 dead and (150) wounded don’t count. That no Israelis have been killed is not mentioned because it would interfere with the narrative of violent Palestinians and victimized Israelis.”

One asks what it will take for the world to wake up to the horrendous, unspeakable conditions under which Palestinians are victimized by Israel. Yet there is cause for hope.With the exponential expansion of social media, the general public no longer relies entirely on the evening, corporate-owned news. Anyone with a camera and an internet connection can broadcast to the world the injustices and sufferings of the Palestinian people. Several governments have voted to recognize Palestine; although these votes are, at present, non-binding, they are a significant change from just two years ago. Those who support the basic human rights of all people, including the Palestinians, must continue their efforts. Too much is at stake; the very existence of Palestine hangs in the balance.

Also of interest: New Pro-Settlement Legislation Pending in US Congress

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Rachel Corrie’s Family Protests Israeli Court’s Absolution of IOF Responsibility

Sarah, Craig and Cindy (R) Corrie, sister and parents of US peace activist Rachel Corrie who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer during a demonstration in Gaza in 2003, leave the Haifa District Court in the Israeli coastal city of Haifa on 28 August 2012. (Photo: AFP – Jack Guez)

Published Friday, February 13, 2015

The family of US activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer while protesting in 2003, have condemned the Israeli Supreme Court ruling that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) were not responsible, accusing Israel of shielding its military from blame.

“It will take some time before we have the ability to read the decision in English and to process all the court has said,” Corrie’s parents and sister wrote in a statement published Friday.

“Nevertheless, it is clear that this decision, affirming the August 2012 lower court finding, amounts to judicial sanction of immunity for Israeli military forces when they commit injustices and human rights violations,” they added.

The Israeli Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an appeal against the 2012 Haifa district court ruling rejecting a civil suit filed by the family.

It accepted the Haifa court’s finding that the site of the fatal incident, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, was a combat zone at the time.

“The ground-clearing actions during which Rachel was hit answer all criteria to categorize it as an action during wartime,” read a passage from the ruling, written in Hebrew by Justice Esther Hayut.

“The state is not liable for damages over an act committed by the Israeli Defense Forces [sic] during warfare,” the ruling stated.

According to eyewitness accounts, Corrie, 23, was killed while acting as a human shield with a group of activists from the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement to prevent troops from demolishing a Palestinian home.

The IOF report claimed “Rachel Corrie was not run over by an engineering vehicle but rather was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved.”

The family first brought the case up in 2005, accusing Israel of intentionally and unlawfully killing their daughter. A military investigation absolved the IOF of responsibility, leading the family to launch a civil case in Haifa which ruled the murder as an accident.

“Rachel’s case provides yet another example of how the Israeli justice system is failing to provide accountability,” the family statement said.

“We urge the international community, and not least the US government, to stand with victims of human rights violations and against impunity, and to uphold fundamental tenets of international justice.”

An internal investigation by the Israeli military in 2003 was concluded just four weeks after her death and cleared troops of any responsibility, saying the bulldozer crew did not see Corrie.

Corrie’s killing came at the height of the Second Intifada, which began late 2000 as a reaction to Israeli policies and international law violations. It was triggered by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa mosque, accompanied by around 1,000 police officers, during which he shouted “the Temple Mount is in our hands,” a phrase that was broadcast during 1967 war, when the Israeli army seized East Jerusalem. Palestinians reacted quickly to what they considered a threat to al-Aqsa, declaring the start of the uprising.

During the five-year Intifada, Israeli forces killed at least 4,973 Palestinian civilians. Among them were 1,262 children and 32 medical personnel attempting to administer aid to injured civilians. More than 10,000 children were wounded during the five years of violence, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

(Reuters, Al-Akhbar)

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In Memory of the great Anthony Lawson

January 31, 2015  /  Gilad Atzmon

 

World ‘silent’ when millions of Muslims killed

Source

World Bulletin- The world has been silent about the killing of millions of people in the Muslim world, Mehmet Gormez, Turkey’s head of religious affairs, said Tuesday.

“On one hand, (around) 12 million people have been massacred in the Islamic world in the last 10 years, and on the other hand, 12 people were brutally killed in Paris last week,” Gormez said. 

We saw people who did not speak up about the killing of millions show up at a rally against the murder of only 12 people, he added.

“The death of a human is the death of humanity,” Gormez said. “There is no difference in brutal killings, whether in Damascus, Baghdad or Paris.”  

If the world does not react to all killings and massacres in the same manner regardless of religion or location, then all humanity will be doomed, Gormez added.    

Gormez also said that the Paris terror attacks on Wednesday and Friday cannot be accepted by any Muslim or any sensible person.

All Muslims should condemn terror and violence and a livable world can be maintained after all pains and griefs are treated with compassion and justice, he added. 

“Violence cannot be removed with violence and blood cannot be cleaned with blood,” Gormez said. “The world’s security cannot be maintained by oppressing beliefs.” 

Turkish PM: Certain segments want all Muslims to take blame

Meanwhile, certain segments of society want to collectively blame on Turks and Muslims in Europe, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Tuesday .

He was referring to Rupert Murdoch’s tweet after the Paris attack, which read: 

“Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.”

Davutoglu spoke to reporters about the France attack and his official visit to Berlin on his plane returning from Germany.

“As we see in Murdoch’s remarks, when someone makes a mistake they act as if all Muslims and Turks played a part in that mistake,” he said.

The Turkish premier said he came to Paris and attended the unity march so that the Turkish people in France can respond to French people if they are ever subject to hostile gazes: “My prime minister was also present at the unity rally.”

“You must walk with your head held high. You are not guilty,” he said.

“Islam is permanent in Europe. It is not possible anymore to expel Muslims from Europe as if they are temporary migrants,” he added.

Davutoglu also visited the recently attacked Mevlana Mosque in Berlin during his visit, saying

“I wanted to give a message by visiting the torched mosque. I also told Merkel that if you make bilateral visits, it will also have a very positive impact.”

His visit to Germany came after an estimated two million people and scores of world leaders rallied in the French capital to protest against the recent deadly attacks in Paris.

Germany has the largest Turkish diaspora abroad, with an estimated three million people of Turkish origin living in the country.

Muslim organizations in Germany have held rallies in 2,000 mosques nationwide in protest against religious extremism and racist attacks targeting mosques and synagogues.

Twelve people were killed last Wednesday when masked gunmen attacked the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine known for printing offensive material, including derogatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in 2006 and 2012.

Said and Cherif Kouachi, the two suspected gunmen and brothers, were killed by police on Friday in a warehouse in Dammartin-en-Goele, a small town north of Paris.

Another gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in a separate attack in Paris on Friday.

The Year Ahead by Stephen Lendman

by Stephen Lendman

Understanding what’s ongoing is perhaps the best way to assess what’s coming. What’s happening in real time is grim.

So is next year’s outlook. More of the same and then some. Wars without end. Punishing neoliberal harshness.

Police state crackdowns on nonbelievers. Big Brother watching everyone. Freedom eroding in plain sight.

America bears full responsibility for horrific global conflicts. Rogue EU collaborators and Israel share it. Partners in high crimes against humanity.

Under or unreported. Largely out of sight and mind. Ongoing without end. In multiple war theaters. Washington’s dirty hands manipulating things.

Permanent war is official US policy. One country after another is attacked, ravaged and destroyed.

Turned to rubble. Killing millions. By wars and their aftermath. Including human exploitation. Deep impoverishment. Extreme deprivation.

Preventable diseases. Many lethal when untreated. Starvation. Daily post-war violence. Appalling human misery.

America is the greatest threat to world peace. The “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” said Martin Luther King.

Using its resources irresponsibly. Inordinately for militarism. War-making. Corporate handouts. Benefitting its super-rich. Trillions of dollars down a black hole. Unprecedented grand theft.

While essential homeland needs increasingly go begging. In the world’s richest nation. Including healthcare. A fundamental human right. Martin Luther King saying:

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Neo-Malthusaian and then some.

Mandating no public sphere. Unrestrained corporate empowerment. Controlling nonbelievers repressively.

Inside the bubble it’s paradise. Outside is dystopian hell. Ordinary people increasingly on their own out of luck.

In the United States of inequality. Bipartisan complicity mandates it. America increasingly a ruler-serf society. Neofeudalism and then some.

Casino capitalism replaced free enterprise. At the expense of fundamental human rights. Ordinary people are swindled.

Their welfare and futures stolen. Few benefit at the expense of most others. Hardwired injustice defines America. Beautiful for its privileged few alone.

Republicans and Democrats in lockstep. On issues mattering most. Washington’s criminal class is bipartisan. Public and private corruption is rampant.

In Obama’s first term, America’s top 1% got 95% of the gain in household income. Most others got lump of coal harshness. Protracted Main Street Depression conditions.

Getting worse, not better. Around 70 million Americans rely on Medicaid for healthcare. Expiration of the so-called Obamacare mandated “fee bump” means fewer services for enrollees.

For many when most needed. Because amounts paid participating doctors will be nearly cut in half. Many won’t accept new Medicaid patients. Some may abandon current ones.

Increasingly they’ll be on their own when ill. Unable to receive a fundamental human right when most needed.

Americans can have whatever they want. Based on the ability to pay. At increasingly higher costs. With stagnant or lower incomes in inflation-adjusted dollars.

America is the United States of I don’t care. Serving its privileged class exclusively. At the expense of all others.

Inequality is institutionalized. Families struggle to get by. Human suffering is real. Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, hunger, and despair affect growing millions.

The world’s richest country doesn’t care. Imperial priorities take precedence. So does redistributing wealth to bankers, other corporate favorites, and super-rich elites.

America was never beautiful. For sure not now. A year ago article said expect 2014 to be bloody. More global death, destruction and human misery.

Merchants of death profit more than ever. Corrupt politicians benefit at the expense of their constituents.

Polar opposite what Americans deserve. Democrats in lockstep with Republicans. On issues mattering most.

Pro-war. Pro-Wall Street. Pro-business. Pro-privilege. Pro-super-wealth. Anti-dissent. Anti-democracy.

Anti-civil and human rights. Anti-labor. Anti-environmental sanity. Anti-government of, by, and for everyone equitably and just.

Monied interests alone matter. In 2014, 3.6 million jobless Americans lost extended unemployment benefits. When most needed.

Expect millions more to lose theirs in 2015. On their own unable to find work. Highly touted recovery is fake.

Main Street Depression conditions persist. Bipartisan indifference makes things worse. Help when most needed is denied.

Obama is a serial liar. His yearend press conference repeated one canard after another. Ludicrously calling 2014 “a breakthrough year for America.”

His touted jobs recovery doesn’t exist. Numbers are fake. Manipulated to show more than actually created.

Available jobs are mostly low pay/poor or no benefit part-time or temp ones. The kinds most Americans shunned decades earlier. Two or more needed to get by.

As of December 30, the national debt exceeded $18 trillion. An all-time high. Increasing by $2.4 billion daily.

Paul Craig Roberts call Western economies and Japan’s “a house of cards.” Their economic policy opposite of what’s needed.

Supporting “over-sized banks, sovereign debt, and the US dollar.” While their “economies and the ability of populations to cope have deteriorated.”

Obama didn’t explain. Instead touted his Affordable Care Act. A healthcare rationing scheme. A boon for insurers, drug companies and large hospital chains.

Ripping off millions. Leaving many uninsured. Most underinsured. “(A)round the world, America is leading,” claimed Obama. Waging war on humanity he left unexplained.

Challenging Russia irresponsibly. Moscow considers US-dominated NATO a major threat.

Expanding east in violation of international law. Close to its border. Nuclear armed missiles target its heartland.

Three frightening Stop NATO reports should scare everyone. Headlined:

“Kiev: Poroshenko Signs Law Paving Way for NATO Absorption.” What Russia made clear it won’t tolerate.

“Ukrainian Official: Impose Martial Law, Join NATO.” Escalate war on Donbas. Challenge Russia belligerently perhaps.

“Mobilization: Ukraine Junta Prepares For ‘Continental War.’ ” Neo-Nazi national security and defense council head Okeksandr Turchynov intends greater mobilization.

Likely at Washington’s behest. Irresponsibly challenging Russia. Risking open confrontation.

Obama’s new friends are lunatics. In Europe’s heartland. One fascist regime supports another.

Is the unthinkable possible? Perhaps likely? Will global war erupt in 2015? Will Washington initiate it?

Will Americans experience homeland war for the first time since mid-19th century civil conflict? Will cities like New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles be destroyed?

Will millions of Americans die? Making the world safe for monied interests. In bunkers until things subside.

Perhaps a wasteland awaiting them. An irradiated one won’t sustain human life.

Washington already wages political and economic war on Russia. With illegal sanctions. Perhaps more to come.

Manipulating oil prices lower. Attacking the ruble. Henry Kissinger once said: “Control oil and you control nations. Control food and you control people.”

Maybe Obama intends starving millions of Russians to death. Maybe by irradiating arable land. Making crop yields toxic.

America plans global dominance through two pillars and one commodity:

• Unchallenged military power.
• The dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
• Global control of oil and other energy resources.

Waging permanent wars to achieve imperial aims. Risking mass annihilation. Perhaps humanity’s survival.

America is the real evil empire. Unmatched in human history. An out-of-control killing machine. Unrestrained. Ruthless. Run by lunatics. Stomping on people relentlessly.

One genocide follows others. Winning hearts and minds doesn’t matter. Death squad diplomacy eliminates nonbelievers.

At home and abroad. Madness defines US policy. Police state harshness criminalizes right over wrong defenders.

Democracy is America’s most dangerous export. Washington tolerates the real thing nowhere. For sure not at home.

Fear-mongering persists. Enemies are invented. Crime bosses make policy. Monied interests own them.

Rule of law principles don’t matter. Nor democratic values. Or fundamental human and civil rights. Or societies fit to live in.

Dominance assures capital’s divine right. Plunder guarantees obscene profits. Money is used to make more of it. A villainous cycle persists.

Expect more of the same in 2015. Perhaps worse than ever. Continued wars without end. Greater than ever wealth disparity.

A race to the bottom leaving ordinary people increasingly on their own. Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, hunger, homelessness and deprivation worse than ever in America.

Bipartisan complicity assures it. Social safety net protections increasingly eliminated. Freedom disappearing in plain sight.

The American dream is more illusion than reality. George Carlin once said you have to be asleep to believe it.

Expect no change for the better next year. Expect more of the same and then some.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

posted by Steve Lendman @ 3:41 AM

 

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Gunman Kills Two NY Police Officers in Brooklyn

Local Editor

An American gunman with an apparent grudge killed two New York police officers on Saturday, in an attack that left America’s biggest city reeling just days before Christmas.

The two uniformed officers were shot in the head through the window of their patrol car in broad daylight in Brooklyn on Saturday.

“Today, two of New York’s finest were shot and killed with no warning, no provocation,” said an emotional New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

“They were quite simply assassinated.”

Police named the shooter as 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who shot and seriously wounded his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore early Saturday before driving to Brooklyn to murder the two officers.

He shot himself in the head on the platform, where Bratton said a silver semi-automatic firearm was recovered near his body.

Wenjian Liu, a seven-year police veteran who got married two months ago, and Rafael Ramos, who leaves behind a 13-year-old son, were “ambushed and murdered” as they sat in the front seats of a marked NYPD police car, officials said.

Neither officer had a chance to draw his weapon before Brinsley opened fire with several rounds and fled to a nearby subway station.

Media reported that Brinsley, an African American, killed the officers in a cold-blooded attack after weeks of outrage over police killings of unarmed black men.

Cities across the United States have seen weeks of protests condemning a string of recent police killings of unarmed black men and decisions by grand juries not to press charges against the white officers responsible.

In July, Eric Garner, an unarmed black man father of six, died after police held him in a chokehold while he was being arrested for selling individual cigarettes illegally in New York.

Michael Brown, an 18-year-old  black youth in the Ferguson suburb of St Louis, Missouri, was shot dead by a police officer in August, sparking months of protests.

Grand jury decisions not to indict either white officer responsible triggered mass protests in New York and other US cities.

For his part, President Barack Obama “unconditionally” condemned the murders, saying in a statement: “Tonight, I ask people to reject violence and words that harm, and turn to words that heal.”

Source: AFP	21-12-2014 – 14:02 Last updated 21-12-2014 – 14:02

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Pro Israeli Jewish Terrorist Who Attacked George Galloway Is Jailed For 16 Months

December 12, 2014  /  Gilad Atzmon

http://www.presstv.ir/

A London court has sentenced a pro-Israel British man to 16 months in jail for attacking British lawmaker and Press TV presenter George Galloway earlier this year.

Judge Aidon Marron of the Isleworth Crown Court sentenced former BBC employee Niel Masterson on Thursday for assaulting the Bradford lawmaker in August.

Marron said during the sentencing that the assault on Galloway was a completely unprovoked and sustained attack, which involved kicking and repeated heavy punching.

Masterson attacked Galloway on a street in Notting Hill, west London, on August 29. The Bradford MP was taken to hospital for treatment of severe bruising on his face and head as well as a broken rib.

The assailant was wearing an Israeli military T-shirt when he was arrested by police officials nearby.

Commenting on the Thursday verdict, Galloway said if the court had not dropped the religiously aggravated part of the charges against Masterson, the jail sentence would have been considerably higher.

“It was no doubt it was religiously motivated. This man, Masterson, was a converted Jew who attacked me because he said I was a mouthpiece for Muslims,” Galloway told Press TV.

“He attacked me for explicitly political reasons, if a Muslim had attacked a pro-Israel MP, it would have been called what it was an attack of terrorism,” Galloway added.

The British lawmaker also criticized Prime Minister David Cameron and senior parliament officials for refusing to publically condemn the attack.

This is while the court also heard that after Masterson will be released from prison, he will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel from an unknown sponsor.

The attack on Galloway is believed to have been connected to his remarks censuring the Israeli regime for the atrocities it committed in its latest 50-day military onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip.

International Court: Israel’s ‘War Crimes’ are not our problem

Rehmat

Posted on November 9, 2014

On Thursday, under pressure from Obama administration, the so-called International Criminal Court (ICC), a Zionist-controlled judiciary circus, announced that it would not investigate Comoros’ (Muslim majority nation in Indian Ocean) request any further or lay criminal charges Jewish soldiers for killing ten unarmed (nine Turkish and one American) aid workers on board a Turkish ship while sailing to Gaza in international waters.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda even though admitted Thursday that there is a reasonable basis to believe that Israel committed war crimes in its attack on the Mavi Marmara vessel, echoing the findings of a 61-page report by ICC prosecutors. But Bensouda went on to state that the potential case or cases arising from such an investigation “would not be of ‘sufficient gravity’ to justify further action by the ICC.

“In the final analysis, I have, therefore, concluded that the legal requirements under the Rome Statute to open an investigation have not been met and I am announcing that the preliminary examination has been closed,” Besouda said.

According to the prosecution lawyers, the ICC decision proves that the Zionist entity has special status in regard to international law.

The Center for Constitutional Rights blasted the court’s decision:

“It is outrageous that the ICC is refusing to prosecute Israeli officials despite acknowledging that there’s a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes were committed. For the court to say the case ‘would not be of sufficient gravity’ to justify further action when the Israeli Defense Force attacked international vessels in international waters, killed nine people and seriously injured many more, defies any reasonable understanding of justice and international law.”

“Calling it a war crime is encouraging, but there is a factor of disappointment that they will not take this investigation further,” Ehab Lotayef of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition told Common Dreams. “Israel commits war crimes against unarmed civilians in many incidents, whether inside occupied territories in Gaza or the West Bank, whether against internationals or locals.”

The ICC’s falling over Israeli shoes is likely to bring outrage from Turkish public. In 2012, a Turkish court issued arrest warrants against four ex-Jewish Generals who ordered the assault on Mavi Marmara on May 31,  2010. Read also here.

Former UN special envoy for the occupied Palestine, American Jewish academic Dr. Richard Falk, has spent last eight years under Jewish Lobby’s knife for calling Israel a War Criminal in his every annual report to United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

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