Murdering Journalists … Them and Us

After Paris, condemnation of religious fanaticism is at its height. I’d guess that even many progressives fantasize about wringing the necks of jihadists, bashing into their heads some thoughts about the intellect, about satire, humor, freedom of speech. We’re talking here, after all, about young men raised in France, not Saudi Arabia.

Where has all this Islamic fundamentalism come from in this modern age? Most of it comes – trained, armed, financed, indoctrinated – from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. During various periods from the 1970s to the present, these four countries had been the most secular, modern, educated, welfare states in the Middle East region. And what had happened to these secular, modern, educated, welfare states?

In the 1980s, the United States overthrew the Afghan government that was progressive, with full rights for women, believe it or not , leading to the creation of the Taliban and their taking power.

In the 2000s, the United States overthrew the Iraqi government, destroying not only the secular state, but the civilized state as well, leaving a failed state.

In 2011, the United States and its NATO military machine overthrew the secular Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi, leaving behind a lawless state and unleashing many hundreds of jihadists and tons of weaponry across the Middle East.

And for the past few years the United States has been engaged in overthrowing the secular Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. This, along with the US occupation of Iraq having triggered widespread Sunni-Shia warfare, led to the creation of The Islamic State with all its beheadings and other charming practices.

However, despite it all, the world was made safe for capitalism, imperialism, anti-communism, oil, Israel, and jihadists. God is Great!

Starting with the Cold War, and with the above interventions building upon that, we have 70 years of American foreign policy, without which – as Russian/American writer Andre Vltchek has observed – “almost all Muslim countries, including Iran, Egypt and Indonesia, would now most likely be socialist, under a group of very moderate and mostly secular leaders”. Even the ultra-oppressive Saudi Arabia – without Washington’s protection – would probably be a very different place.

On January 11, Paris was the site of a March of National Unity in honor of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose journalists had been assassinated by terrorists. The march was rather touching, but it was also an orgy of Western hypocrisy, with the French TV broadcasters and the assembled crowd extolling without end the NATO world’s reverence for journalists and freedom of speech; an ocean of signs declaring Je suis Charlie … Nous Sommes Tous Charlie; and flaunting giant pencils, as if pencils – not bombs, invasions, overthrows, torture, and drone attacks – have been the West’s weapons of choice in the Middle East during the past century.

No reference was made to the fact that the American military, in the course of its wars in recent decades in the Middle East and elsewhere, had been responsible for the deliberate deaths of dozens of journalists. In Iraq, among other incidents, see Wikileaks’ 2007 video of the cold-blooded murder of two Reuters journalists; the 2003 US air-to-surface missile attack on the offices of Al Jazeera in Baghdad that left three journalists dead and four wounded; and the American firing on Baghdad’s Hotel Palestine the same year that killed two foreign cameramen.

Moreover, on October 8, 2001, the second day of the US bombing of Afghanistan, the transmitters for the Taliban government’s Radio Shari were bombed and shortly after this the US bombed some 20 regional radio sites. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the targeting of these facilities, saying: “Naturally, they cannot be considered to be free media outlets. They are mouthpieces of the Taliban and those harboring terrorists.”

And in Yugoslavia, in 1999, during the infamous 78-day bombing of a country which posed no threat at all to the United States or any other country, state-owned Radio Television Serbia (RTS) was targeted because it was broadcasting things which the United States and NATO did not like (like how much horror the bombing was causing). The bombs took the lives of many of the station’s staff, and both legs of one of the survivors, which had to be amputated to free him from the wreckage.

I present here some views on Charlie Hebdo sent to me by a friend in Paris who has long had a close familiarity with the publication and its staff:

“On international politics Charlie Hebdo was neoconservative. It supported every single NATO intervention from Yugoslavia to the present. They were anti-Muslim, anti-Hamas (or any Palestinian organization), anti-Russian, anti-Cuban (with the exception of one cartoonist), anti-Hugo Chávez, anti-Iran, anti-Syria, pro-Pussy Riot, pro-Kiev … Do I need to continue?

“Strangely enough, the magazine was considered to be ‘leftist’. It’s difficult for me to criticize them now because they weren’t ‘bad people’, just a bunch of funny cartoonists, yes, but intellectual freewheelers without any particular agenda and who actually didn’t give a fuck about any form of ‘correctness’ – political, religious, or whatever; just having fun and trying to sell a ‘subversive’ magazine (with the notable exception of the former editor, Philippe Val, who is, I think, a true-blooded neocon).”

Dumb and Dumber

Remember Arseniy Yatsenuk? The Ukrainian whom US State Department officials adopted as one of their own in early 2014 and guided into the position of Prime Minister so he could lead the Ukrainian Forces of Good against Russia in the new Cold War?

In an interview on German television on January 7, 2015 Yatsenuk allowed the following words to cross his lips: “We all remember well the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. We will not allow that, and nobody has the right to rewrite the results of World War Two”.

The Ukrainian Forces of Good, it should be kept in mind, also include several neo-Nazis in high government positions and many more partaking in the fight against Ukrainian pro-Russians in the south-east of the country. Last June, Yatsenuk referred to these pro-Russians as “sub-humans” , directly equivalent to the Nazi term “untermenschen”.

So the next time you shake your head at some stupid remark made by a member of the US government, try to find some consolation in the thought that high American officials are not necessarily the dumbest, except of course in their choice of who is worthy of being one of the empire’s partners.

The type of rally held in Paris this month to condemn an act of terror by jihadists could as well have been held for the victims of Odessa in Ukraine last May. The same neo-Nazi types referred to above took time off from parading around with their swastika-like symbols and calling for the death of Russians, Communists and Jews, and burned down a trade-union building in Odessa, killing scores of people and sending hundreds to hospital; many of the victims were beaten or shot when they tried to flee the flames and smoke; ambulances were blocked from reaching the wounded … Try and find a single American mainstream media entity that has made even a slightly serious attempt to capture the horror. You would have to go to the Russian station in Washington, DC, RT.com, search “Odessa fire” for many stories, images and videos. Also see the Wikipedia entry on the 2 May 2014 Odessa clashes.

If the American people were forced to watch, listen, and read all the stories of neo-Nazi behavior in Ukraine the past few years, I think they – yes, even the American people and their less-than-intellectual Congressional representatives – would start to wonder why their government was so closely allied with such people. The United States may even go to war with Russia on the side of such people.

L’Occident n’est pas Charlie pour Odessa. Il n’y a pas de défilé à Paris pour Odessa.

Some thoughts about this thing called ideology

Norman Finkelstein, the fiery American critic of Israel, was interviewed recently by Paul Jay on The Real News Network. Finkelstein related how he had been a Maoist in his youth and had been devastated by the exposure and downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976 in China. “It came out there was just an awful lot of corruption. The people who we thought were absolutely selfless were very self-absorbed. And it was clear. The overthrow of the Gang of Four had huge popular support.”

Many other Maoists were torn apart by the event. “Everything was overthrown overnight, the whole Maoist system, which we thought [were] new socialist men, they all believed in putting self second, fighting self. And then overnight the whole thing was reversed.”

“You know, many people think it was McCarthy that destroyed the Communist Party,” Finkelstein continued. “That’s absolutely not true. You know, when you were a communist back then, you had the inner strength to withstand McCarthyism, because it was the cause. What destroyed the Communist Party was Khrushchev’s speech,” a reference to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 exposure of the crimes of Joseph Stalin and his dictatorial rule.

Although I was old enough, and interested enough, to be influenced by the Chinese and Russian revolutions, I was not. I remained an admirer of capitalism and a good loyal anti-communist. It was the war in Vietnam that was my Gang of Four and my Nikita Khrushchev. Day after day during 1964 and early 1965 I followed the news carefully, catching up on the day’s statistics of American firepower, bombing sorties, and body counts. I was filled with patriotic pride at our massive power to shape history. Words like those of Winston Churchill, upon America’s entry into the Second World War, came easily to mind again – “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations would live.” Then, one day – a day like any other day – it suddenly and inexplicably hit me. In those villages with the strange names there were people under those falling bombs, people running in total desperation from that god-awful machine-gun strafing.

This pattern took hold. The news reports would stir in me a self-righteous satisfaction that we were teaching those damn commies that they couldn’t get away with whatever it was they were trying to get away with. The very next moment I would be struck by a wave of repulsion at the horror of it all. Eventually, the repulsion won out over the patriotic pride, never to go back to where I had been; but dooming me to experience the despair of American foreign policy again and again, decade after decade.

The human brain is an amazing organ. It keeps working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 52 weeks a year, from before you leave the womb, right up until the day you find nationalism. And that day can come very early. Here’s a recent headline from the Washington Post: “In the United States the brainwashing starts in kindergarten.”

Oh, my mistake. It actually said “In N. Korea the brainwashing starts in kindergarten.”

Let Cuba Live! The Devil’s List of what the United States has done to Cuba

On May 31, 1999, a lawsuit for $181 billion in wrongful death, personal injury, and economic damages was filed in a Havana court against the government of the United States. It was subsequently filed with the United Nations. Since that time its fate is somewhat of a mystery.

The lawsuit covered the 40 years since the country’s 1959 revolution and described, in considerable detail taken from personal testimony of victims, US acts of aggression against Cuba; specifying, often by name, date, and particular circumstances, each person known to have been killed or seriously wounded. In all, 3,478 people were killed and an additional 2,099 seriously injured. (These figures do not include the many indirect victims of Washington’s economic pressures and blockade, which caused difficulties in obtaining medicine and food, in addition to creating other hardships.)

The case was, in legal terms, very narrowly drawn. It was for the wrongful death of individuals, on behalf of their survivors, and for personal injuries to those who survived serious wounds, on their own behalf. No unsuccessful American attacks were deemed relevant, and consequently there was no testimony regarding the many hundreds of unsuccessful assassination attempts against Cuban President Fidel Castro and other high officials, or even of bombings in which no one was killed or injured. Damages to crops, livestock, or the Cuban economy in general were also excluded, so there was no testimony about the introduction into the island of swine fever or tobacco mold.

However, those aspects of Washington’s chemical and biological warfare waged against Cuba that involved human victims were described in detail, most significantly the creation of an epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981, during which some 340,000 people were infected and 116,000 hospitalized; this in a country which had never before experienced a single case of the disease. In the end, 158 people, including 101 children, died. That only 158 people died, out of some 116,000 who were hospitalized, was an eloquent testimony to the remarkable Cuban public health sector.

The complaint describes the campaign of air and naval attacks against Cuba that commenced in October 1959, when US president Dwight Eisenhower approved a program that included bombings of sugar mills, the burning of sugar fields, machine-gun attacks on Havana, even on passenger trains.

Another section of the complaint described the armed terrorist groups, los banditos, who ravaged the island for five years, from 1960 to 1965, when the last group was located and defeated. These bands terrorized small farmers, torturing and killing those considered (often erroneously) active supporters of the Revolution; men, women, and children. Several young volunteer literacy-campaign teachers were among the victims of the bandits.

There was also of course the notorious Bay of Pigs invasion, in April 1961. Although the entire incident lasted less than 72 hours, 176 Cubans were killed and 300 more wounded, 50 of them permanently disabled.

The complaint also described the unending campaign of major acts of sabotage and terrorism that included the bombing of ships and planes as well as stores and offices. The most horrific example of sabotage was of course the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner off Barbados in which all 73 people on board were killed. There were as well as the murder of Cuban diplomats and officials around the world, including one such murder on the streets of New York City in 1980. This campaign continued to the 1990s, with the murders of Cuban policemen, soldiers, and sailors in 1992 and 1994, and the 1997 hotel bombing campaign, which took the life of a foreigner; the bombing campaign was aimed at discouraging tourism and led to the sending of Cuban intelligence officers to the US in an attempt to put an end to the bombings; from their ranks rose the Cuban Five.

To the above can be added the many acts of financial extortion, violence and sabotage carried out by the United States and its agents in the 16 years since the lawsuit was filed. In sum total, the deep-seated injury and trauma inflicted upon on the Cuban people can be regarded as the island’s own 9-11.

Notes

1. US Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 223, 232
2. Counterpunch, January 10, 2015
3. , the UK’s leading organization promoting freedom of expression, October 18, 2001
4. The Independent (London), April 24, 1999
5. “Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk talking to Pinar Atalay”, Tagesschau (Germany), January 7, 2015 (in Ukrainian with German voice-over)
6. CNN, June 15, 2014
7. See William Blum, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, chapter 3
8. Washington Post, January 17, 2015, page A6
9. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 30, for a capsule summary of Washington’s chemical and biological warfare against Havana.
10. For further information, see William Schaap, Covert Action Quarterly magazine (Washington, DC), Fall/Winter 1999, pp.26-29

Condemn Islamic Terror and Shield Zionist Atrocities

Surviving in a world of offensive double standards comes easy for people who lost their moral compass. Most culturally deficient pawns have such limited intellectual capacities and ethical fortitude to apply the same critical standards to zealots, who practice and defend barbarism no matter where it is committed. The narration that masquerades as objective news reporting out of the mass media, acts as a gatekeeper to provide political cover for Zionist protection. If the eternal struggle between Muslims and Jews was the supreme existential conflict, why would Christians take sides, when the purported feud between cousins, drips blood no matter whose hand holds the sword?

Oh how dare equivocate between both pseudo religious cultures, when both are engulfed in political warfare as their primary tenant. If moral principle was the essence of either society, this obscene charade of state sponsored terrorism would be exposed for what it really represents. Now before the do-gooder Christians bask in their own moral superiority, your own secular humanism surrender does not bode well for your final judgment.

The point is that unholy religious and politically inspired violence against a perceived enemy to achieve an atmosphere of panic is simply wrong. When government special operations, globalist intelligence interests and elite NWO sociopaths plan, fund, recruit, direct and cover-up false flag attacks, designed to complete a global despotism; all citizens of exploited countries lose their rights and become duped into thinking insecurity stems from radical psychopaths. The collective mental health of most societies is in a crisis of terminal proportions.

Ponder the linkage of France’s lower house of parliament votes 339 to 151 in favor of symbolic motion to recognize statehood of Palestine and Netanyahu’s Chilling Threat To France Prior To The Charlie Hebdo Tragedy. Surely, a coincidence in what is widely seen as consistent with a pattern of a sponsored Mossad scenario, the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris has the world primed for even more draconian measures that in fact, extinguishes genuine security.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest ruse to advance the victimhood claim is transparent.

The real reason Bibi wants French Jews to move to Israel reports “By calling on France’s Jews to move to Israel, Netanyahu is promoting a worldview in which there is no national conflict, no occupation and no Palestinian people. There are only Jews and radical Muslims.”

“The leader of a country that is constantly in a state of war, and that every few years actually goes to war, is imploring France’s Jews to leave their country in the wake of two terrorist attacks (one of which was not directed at a Jewish target), and move to Israel. Even if we ignore the downright chutzpah of his demand vis-a-vis the French government (try imagining a leader of a Western state calling on Israelis to immigrate to his country because of the security situation in Israel), no one doubts that French Jewish immigrants will be in much greater danger living in Israel. Perhaps our foreign minister would do well to update Netanyahu on the travel warnings issued fairly often for our country?”

The insecurity hysteria that infects Western countries from the Zionist bias media about a terrorist under every bed refuses to speak the truth. Honest reporting would require coverage of the following. The same old story, Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, but where in the controlled propaganda and fantasy viewpoint of corporatist political correctness, will such factual Zionist atrocities be reported and condemned?

Once upon a time fair play was a well established standard in international affairs. Even if it was often ignored in practice, the objective was seen as a condition that established moral authority. The reality is that governance of Israel maintains a hostility that sabotages any attempts for coexistence. EXAMPLES OF HATE SPEECH BY ISRAEL AGAINST PALESTINE illustrates the savage attitude that earns world enmity for the Zionist apartheid state. Watch the chilling documentary video,  which supports righteous outrage.

The boycott Israel movement may not have taken off to a level that its proponents hoped. Yet, such non violent opposition goes unnoticed with all the hype about terrorism. The Boycott Israel Campaign provides a list of companies and answered frequently asked questions about their efforts. If this cause gained traction, the screams would be deafening from media sentinels.

In order to maintain the storyline of extreme Islamophobia terrorism, it is necessary to eliminate any debate that analyzes the established policies that foster “Greater Israel” dominance in the Middle East. Just examine the Saudi Israeli alliance forged in blood.

“The attack on Gaza comes by Saudi Royal Appointment. This royal warrant is nothing less than an open secret in Israel, and both former and serving defense officials are relaxed when they talk about it.  Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz surprised the presenter on Channel 10 by saying Israel had to specify a role for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the demilitarization of Hamas. Asked what he meant by that, he added that Saudi and Emirati funds should be used to rebuild Gaza after Hamas had been defanged.”

Reports: Saudis Looking for Alliance With Israel presents a chilling prospect for the beleaguered Palestinians.

“Given the successes of the radical Sunni Islamic State (formerly ISIS), the lingering threat of the Muslim Brotherhood (which birthed Hamas), and the rising Shiite power in Iran, Riyadh is seen as more keen than ever to complete that process so it can formerly align with Israel, and thereby gain the advantage of its military and economic might.

The only problem is that the Saudis want to solve that “minor conflict” by asking Israel to take severe security risks by surrendering strategic positions to a Palestinian populace that has sadly proved its unwillingness to eradicate the violent anti-Israel elements within.”

Well, there you have it. Those radical Palestinian elements are dedicated terrorists, while the Saudi’s benefactor funds their barbaric wahhabi client fanatics, who miraculously never have a map to locate Israel.

If you are not allowed to discuss who really is behind the ISIS band of cutthroats, fall back on a proven tactic of diversion. in a U.S. courtroom. “The victims allege that the Palestinian groups violated the US Anti-Terrorism Act by giving money and weapons — and employment — to terrorists in the attacks that occurred between 2001 and 2004.”

Do not hold your breath waiting for a similar suit against Saudi financiers must less about U.S. covert agencies supplying arms and coordination to their new best friend, ISIS hit squads.

In this obscene world of select memory, a terrorist is your friend if they are killing an enemy of Israel, especially if a high profile attack can garnish mass public opinion support to keep the phony “War of Terror” rolling along.

When it comes to actual non state sponsored terrorism, the number of definite instances can be disputed. The GTD Global Terrorism Database lists information on over 125,000 terrorist attacks. A search of Jewish Terrorists provides results of well over 100 instances. The JDL, Jewish Defense League is a leading “Perpetrator” with a long list of crimes within the United States. The savage legacy of Rabbi Meir Kahane has a long record of terrorism to use as inspiration.

Past Zionist-Jewish Terrorism – Some Historical Facts provides both Israeli Defense Force missions and the tactics used during the formatting years of the Zionist State. Such examples seldom get a whisper of notice much less coverage in the Newspeak media. The Jewish ownership and financial control of the establishment media allows for a self prophecy of inevitability if one believes the distortions, omissions and outright lies.

Imbalance in culpability that condemns terrorist with the same intensity and blame, no matter who is responsible for the violence, will never allow for a peaceful resolution to the mutual hate that propels the globe towards oblivion.

Pat Buchanan makes a profound point in the essay, To Die for Charlie Hebdo?

“As for the “glorification of terrorist acts,” Israel’s Menachem Begin, the ANC’s Nelson Mandela, and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat were all credibly charged with acts of terrorism in their liberation struggles.

And all three won the Nobel Prize for Peace.”

His observation is not that terrorists are rewarded by the World Community, but that the hypocrisy of the establishment fabrication that makes heroes out of thugs with blood stained hands goes with the political objectives to demonize your enemy,   while crowning the butchers.

Islamic bombers who eagerly evaporate themselves as long as they can kill others, is a sickness that no authentic religion could justify.  Governments that employ aerial bombing to obliterate entire neighborhoods, and have an official policy, that kills children; practices true terrorism.

If the Christian West is ever to regain its moral foundation, their governments must no long encourage continued terrorism because of their insane foreign policies. Abandoning the teaching of Jesus Christ, a Jew, and Son of God has allowed the apocalyptic demons to run wild. Looking for a rapprochement between Muslim and Jew will never be realized until the final carnage and tribulation is stopped with His Second Coming at the end of this satanic age.

“Brutality Gone Wild”: America Now Sheds More Blood Than Attila

In this article, I had first wanted to claim that America’s military-industrial complex has shed more blood in the last 53 years than anyone else in the history of the world, even Attila the Hun!  But then I remembered World War I and World War II in all their grisly splendor.  At the battle of Verdun alone, approximately 300,000 people died brutal and violent deaths.  And at Hiroshima, there were approximately 100,000 dead.  However, my point here is still legit — that American taxpayers have been paying for a whole big bunch of bloodshed during the last 53 years.

Human blood.

Approximately seven trillion dollars worth of human blood.

Seven trillion dollars can certainly buy you a whole lot of bloodshed.  Rivers and oceans of blood.  “Attila the Hun would be so-o-o jealous!”  Let’s just look at the record.

It all started way back on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower very urgently and emphatically warned all of us — publicly on black-and-white TV — about the extreme dangers of allowing a massive military-industrial complex to keep growing larger and larger in America.

“In the councils of government,” President Eisenhower warned us, ” we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” 

And nobody in America listened.  I repeat.  Nobody listened.

Shortly thereafter, Robert McNamara invented the bloody Vietnam war.  And Americans happily let McNamara, President Johnson and Congress get away with it.  Enough said about that.  

Next came all those made-in-America mini-slaughters that took place in — I forget where.  East Timor?  Guatemala?  Chile?  Grenada?  South Africa?  Lebanon?  Iran?  Haiti?  Nicaragua?  The Philippines?  Yeah, right, that was Reagan.  And all funded by American taxpayers.  All involving a whole big bunch of blood.  Red Cross blood banks would have loved to have had that many donors!

Then George H.W. Bush trumped up that stupid Gulf War which killed thousands of Iraqis.  Then Clinton tried to out-do Pappy Bush by killing hundreds of thousands more Iraqis with sanctions (400,00 dead children), followed by the Kosovo slaughters (6,000 dead from NATO bombings).  “Not my fault!” cried Clinton.  “We were only trying to stop more blood from being shed.”  You just keep telling yourself that.

Then there was Afghanistan back in 2001.  And Afghanistan is still bleeding.  A lot.  Attila would be uber-jealous!

But then the American military-industrial complex really got down to business in Iraq in 2003.  Lots of slaughter.  Brutality.  Blood running in the streets like water. Think Fallugah.  Think Baghdad burning.  And you can’t even blame Baby Bush for that one either — he was just an unthinking pawn of Wall Street and War Street (but of course I do blame GWB anyway.  Why isn’t that man in jail?).

One million dead on Bush Jr’s watch?  That’s a war crime almost in the same league with Stalin and Hitler.  Stalin and Hitler too would be jealous.

And wasn’t there a whole big bunch of unnecessary and brutal blood shed in Libya recently too?  Benghazi comes to mind.  We gotta thank President Obama for that one — just following orders from the military-industrial complex.  “We are in a recession.  War is good for business.”  Especially if there is blood involved.  And there was lots of blood involved in Libya when NATO illegally overturned Gaddafi.

And Libya to this day is still bleeding out. 

By now, America has not only turned Attila the Hun green with envy — but also Count Dracula and the entire cast of “True Blood”.

Red is such a lovely color, don’t you think?  You had better.  After all, you are paying for it — instead of for schools and hospitals and infrastructure and jobs and whatever.  You had better like the color of blood a lot.  It’s basically all we have left.

But then on the other hand, we are all such red-blooded Americans that clearly most of us have never even stopped to think for one minute that perhaps all this blood-shed just might be immoral and wrong.  “We are Christians!  Christians shed blood.  It’s what we do,” Americans cry.  Jesus wept.

And then America’s military-industrial complex went on to encourage, weaponize and train ISIS to kill a whole big bunch more women and children in Syria — in a stupid, unnecessary invasion of a country that was pretty much minding its own business (140,000 now dead in Syria, 7,000 of them children).

“They may have minded their business over in Syria, but they weren’t minding our business — and our business is war!” screamed Wall Street and War Street.  And boy are these guys ever good at the business of war.  Eisenhower nailed it!

And we American taxpayers get to pay for this brand new blood supply too.  And pay.  And pay.  And pay.

In Ukraine, the blood also now runs like wine — and this vintage is being paid for by American taxpayers too.  Of course.  “2014 is a very good year for blood!”  And the American military-industrial complex paid five billion of our U.S. dollars to Ukrainian neo-Nazis to get this blood-bath to start brewing last February.  “A very good year.”  

In Ukraine, everybody remembers Attila.

And guess what else?  “Attila, Dracula and even Eric Northman will be happy to know that we’ve found a whole new blood bank over in Gaza!”  And it is costing U.S. taxpayers a whole lot more blood-money too.  “Yippee!”

Now Attila’s rotting skull would be practically grinning in its grave — except for one thing.  Jealousy.  “That blood-sucking Netanyahu is trying to take over my reputation!” screams Attila’s ghost.

“I’ve killed more people on my List,” brags Netanyahu, “than that punk Oskar Schindler ever even thought about saving on his!”  And here’s Netanyahu’s List to prove it:  

“What do you think this is, Attila?  Some kind of game show where the contestant who spills the most blood wins?”  Nope, not at all.  You may have slaughtered more civilians back in the day, bossy-pants, but Netanyahu-the-Hun has done it with more flash and charm.  Anyone can wield a sword and ride a horse — but it takes real panache to vaporize 373 little kids by just pushing a button.

“But Gaza has a right to defend itself!” some bleeding-heart liberals might say at this point.  Talk to the hand.

The American military-industrial complex has the God-given right to shed blood anywhere in the world that it wants to — in any invasion, covert action, “war” or proxy war that it chooses.  And to use our money to do it with too.  “Brutality Gone Wild!” is the name of this reality show.  Get over it, Attila.

PS:  During its last 53 seasons of continuous production, the American military-industrial complex’s big hit reality show, “Brutality Gone Wild,” has been out on location, shedding blood everywhere on the planet so far — except for only one place that has been left unbloodied.  You guessed it.  “America.”

Attila the Hun never really had time to discover the New World, but not to worry.  The guys who run Wall Street and War Street now know where we live too.  And that we still have a whole big bunch of un-shed blood to tap into here as well.  “Soon, very soon, it will be time to bring it all back home!” they cry at night from their crypts deep in the bowels of New York and Washington.  “Bottoms up!”

And don’t say that you haven’t been warned — since way back in 1961.

Globalists Push EU-style “Union” For Middle East

As if globalist scheming had not yet caused enough death and destruction in the Middle East, the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations and various outfits associated with the secretive Bilderberg group are now pushing a radical new plot for the region: a European Union-style regional regime to rule over the Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, and other peoples who live there. The sought-after “Middle Eastern Union” would put populations ranging from Turkey and Jordan to Libya and Egypt under a single authority.

If the plot moves forward, like in other areas, it would usurp from the peoples of the region their right to self-government and national sovereignty. It would also advance the longtime establishment goal of setting up regional regimes on the path to a more formal system of “global governance.” Already, the peoples of Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and other regions have had self-styled regional “authorities” imposed on them against their will. In the Middle East, numerous similar efforts such as the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League have been making progress, too.

A true “union” to rule over the broader Middle East and North Africa, though, would represent a major step forward in the ongoing regionalization of power around the world. Using a wide range of pretexts to advance the scheme, top globalist outfits and mouthpieces claim such a regional government would solve myriad real and imagined problems. However, with the plot being pushed hard by the CFR and various globalist propaganda organs such as the Financial Times, a U.K. newspaper that is always well represented at the shadowy Bilderberg summits, there is good reason to be skeptical at the very least.

“Just as a warring [European] continent found peace through unity by creating what became the EU, Arabs, Turks, Kurds and other groups in the region could find relative peace in ever closer union,” claimed Mohamed “Ed” Husain, an “adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies” at the CFR, in a piece published in the Financial Times and on the CFR website last month. “After all, most of its problems — terrorism, poverty, unemployment, sectarianism, refugee crises, water shortages — require regional answers. No country can solve its problems on its own.”

Of course, the notion that Europe “found peace through unity” — in reality it was globalists surreptitiously crushing national sovereignty and foisting an unaccountable regime on the peoples — is fashionable among establishment types. In truth, though, “peace” hardly requires giving up self-government. Plus, many of the wars in Europe over the last century were actually fomented by the very same forces that imposed the EU on the continent. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, for example, was a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) party before going on to create Bilderberg, which attendees openly boast has played a crucial role in imposing the Brussels-based super-state that now dominates Europe.

Plenty of actual examples also refute Husain’s claims about the supposed necessity of a regional regime to solve national problems. The Swiss, for instance, have had peace for centuries, yet they have consistently and overwhelmingly refused to surrender their sovereignty to the EU or any other outfit. Switzerland also has virtually no terrorism, poverty, unemployment, sectarianism, refugee crises, or water shortages, yet it never sought “regional answers.” In fact, contrary to Husain’s factually challenged argument, the Swiss have done better than virtually any other people in solving their problems on their own. Perhaps Husain views Middle Easterners as less capable, but more likely, he knows full well that a country could solve its problems on its own.

“Most in the Middle East no longer feel the dignity of their ancestors,” continued the CFR’s Husain without citing any data or surveys. “What Plato called thymos is desperately missing: the political desire for recognition and respect as dignified peoples. A Middle Eastern Union could recreate it.” How being ruled by an unaccountable and autocratic EU-style leviathan would give the peoples of the Middle East “dignity” or “thymos” was not immediately clear. Plato, of course, like bigwigs at the CFR and their fellow travelers, believed the masses should be lorded over by their superiors — Plato called them “philosopher kings.”

Rather than allowing Middle Easterners to create their own union, Husain makes clear that Western globalists should take the lead. “Will the west wait until Islamists and radicals are powerful enough to create their own Middle East, one opposed to us?” he asked, conveniently failing to mention the gigantic role of the Western and globalist establishment in fomenting Islamic extremism and terror. “Or will we help our partners in government harness this momentum? This is the moment to create multilateral institutions that could implant pluralism across the region.” Husain also called for the EU and the U.S. government to lend “bureaucratic experience” to “voices in the region who want greater integration.”

“A complete change of psychology is needed,” he added without elaborating on how such a transformation in people’s views and beliefs would be achieved.

Of course, Husain at the CFR is not alone. In 2011, the Islamist president of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, also called for an EU-style regime to rule the Middle East. Speaking in the United Kingdom, Gül claimed “an efficient regional economic cooperation and integration mechanism” was needed for the region. “We all saw the role played by the European Union in facilitating the democratic transition in central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he claimed. Islamic Turkey is also working to join the EU.

Various Middle Eastern tyrants have echoed the calls for a regional regime, too — the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, for example. As Husain pointed out, the radical Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist group Hamas are also working to unify the Middle East under one single tyrannical government of gargantuan proportions.

Already, AstroTurf groups working toward such a union are popping up across the region, too. “We dream of a Middle East that is empowered, free, and governs for all it’s [sic] peoples at the highest level of being in a new world where the Middle East Union is an important integral part of a greater global community that pledges its allegiance to the earth and every human on it,” declares the newly created “Middle East Union Congress” on its website.

By 2050, the new Congress aims to shackle some 800 million people from Pakistan in Asia to Morocco in Northwest Africa under a single regime with a single euro-style currency. The outfit also wants to create a new capital city for the union named aftercommunist revolutionary Nelson Mandela, whom it described as “the 20th century’s greatest global citizen.” From “Nelson Mandela City,” the new regime would “eco-govern” all of the nations and peoples of the union as “a model for the new global paradigm that honors and respects mother earth.”

One of the primary selling points for the “union” plot is the notion it would help rein in radicals — most of whose organizations were either created, armed, trained, financed, or all of the above by Western governments and the Soviet Union. Ironically, though, just a few years ago, Husain was touting al-Qaeda’s key role in furthering the globalist plan to oust Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad. “The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results,” gushed Husain, a Sunni Muslim, in a 2012 piece for the CFR. “In short, the [Obama/CFR/Bilderberg/Goldman Sachs-backed Free Syrian Army] needs al-Qaeda now.”

Before joining the CFR, meanwhile, Husain spent years working with Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical Islamist group pushing for an Islamic Caliphate — a vast, totalitarian “Middle Eastern Union” of sorts — based on sharia law. The outfit also promotes the death penalty for apostates and has been accused by various governments of involvement in jihad terrorism. Husain, though, is hardly the only figure at the globalist outfit with a history of extremism. CFR Latin America boss and Castro apologist Julia Sweig has even been identified by a senior U.S. intelligence officer as a probable “agent of influence” for the terror-sponsoring communist regime enslaving Cuba.

All over the world, globalists are quietly but quickly foisting supranational regimes on hapless populations. In Africa, for instance, the African Union is now sending its troops all across the continent. In Latin America, the socialist-dominated Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) is working to “integrate” the region, alongside various other transnational outfits. Even in North America, top CFR and Bilderberg globalists are doing the same. “After America comes North America,” boasted ex-general and CFR/Bilderberg bigwig David Petraeus this year.

Of course, the Council on Foreign Relations, despite its operatives’ anti-sovereignty extremism, remains immensely influential in terms of U.S. foreign policy. “We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CFR bosses in Washington. The CFR’s affiliates around the world hold similar influence. Bilderberg, meanwhile, brings together many of the world’s top globalists, communists, government officials, media barons, and more.

For the sake of liberty, peace, self-government, national sovereignty, and prosperity, humanity should resist the globalist regionalization agenda from Europe to the Middle East and beyond. The alternative is literally global tyranny.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at. Follow him on Twitter .

Source: Alex Newman | The New American

Internationalists Are Pushing The World Towards Globally Engineered Economic Warfare

Over a year ago I published an essay entitled ‘The Linchpin Lie: How Global Collapse Will Be Sold To The Masses’. This essay addressed efforts by the ever malicious Rand Corporation to create a false narrative surrounding the possibility of global collapse. Linchpin Theory, as it was named by it’s originator and Rand Corp. employee, John Casti, is I believe the very future of propaganda. Every engineered crisis needs a clever cover story, and in Linchpin Theory, we are told that all human catastrophe is a mere natural product of the “overcomplexity” within various systems. Yes, there is no accounting of false flag geopolitics or elitist conspiracy, no acknowledgment of deliberately initiated chaos; such things do not exist in the world of “linchpins”. Rather, the Rand Corporation would have us believe that the world is a massive game of Jenga, and the supporting pieces just remove themselves from the teetering structure by magical and coincidental causality.

Today, the linchpin lie is now being carefully inserted into the mainstream narrative. I can’t say I was shocked to hear Alan Greenspan use its basic premise when he recently stated that:

“I have come to the conclusion that bubbles…are a function of human nature. We don’t have enough observations, but my tentative hypothesis to what we’re dealing with is that both a necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of a bubble is a protracted period of stable economic activity at low inflation. So it is a very difficult policy problem. I do believe that central banks that believe they can quell bubbles are living in a state of unrealism.”

It is important that we understand what Greenspan is actually doing here. The former Fed chairman is asserting that economic bubbles like the derivatives bubble of 2008 are a “natural function”, like the seasons, and are out of the control of central bankers. The truth is that central bankers have never tried to “quell” economic bubbles, they have been deliberately creating them in order to position the global economy into a crisis which they can then exploit. Greenspan is not only diverting blame for all the past and future economic crashes central banks have engineered, he is also setting the propaganda stage for a great change in the dynamic of the central banking concept – what the IMF’s Christine Lagarde calls the “global economic reset”.

The current central banking structure gives the illusion of separation and sovereignty. Most people who have not researched the nature of the international banking cartel believe that the Federal Reserve, for instance, is a separate national entity from the Central Bank of Russia, or the Central Bank of China. They believe that these institutions act of their own accord rather than in concert with each other. The reality is, there is no Federal Reserve. There is no Central Bank of Russia. There are no separate entities. There are no Western banks and there are no BRICS. All of these banking edifices are merely front organizations for global financiers, as Council on Foreign Relations insider (and friend to the Rockefellers) Carroll Quigley made clear in his book, Tragedy And Hope:

“It must not be felt that the heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up, and who were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks. “

A “global economic reset”, I suspect, will consist of a grand shift away from covert cooperation between central banks to an OPENLY centralized one world banking system, predicated on the concepts put forward by the IMF and led by the Bank of International Settlements, which has always been behind the scenes handing down commandments to the seemingly separate central banks of nations.

In order for this “reset” to be achieved, however, the establishment needs a historically monumental distraction. A distraction so confounding and terrifying that by the time the public has a chance to examine the situation rationally, the elites have already tightened the noose.

I have been warning ever since the beginning of the derivatives/debt collapse of 2007/2008 that the international financiers and globalists who created the artificially low interest rates and fiat lending bonanza would one day be required to fashion a considerably dangerous event in orderto trigger the final collapse of the dollar based monetary system and replace it with a new currency (or basket of currencies), along with a new centralized financial authority.

This distracting event would have to rely on three very important strategies in order to succeed –

1) The use of what I call the “scattershot effect”; a swarm of smaller crises growing exponentially until it blurs together to create one dynamic calamity.

2) The use of multiple false paradigms in order to confuse the masses and pit them against one another in an absurd fight over fake and meaningless causes.

3) The use of deceptive benevolence on the part of the financial elite as they tap dance in to act as global “mediators”, ready to save the public from itself.

The end result would be a new brand of “world war” rather unique to history.

When most people imagine WWIII, they immediately envision images of nuclear bombs and mushroom clouds, however, I believe that when world war erupts, it may progress far differently from our cinematic assumptions. Regional conflicts are very likely, there is no doubt, but if one places himself in the shoes of the elites, one realizes that all out mechanized nuclear Armageddon is not really necessary to achieve the desired result of global governance.

Economic warfare alone could be extremely effective in initiating full spectrum fiscal implosion as well as mass starvation, mass panic, and mass desperation. All the signs lead me to believe that financial combat and 4^th generation warfare will be used in the place of large armies and missiles.

The Scattershot Effect

Consider the sheer scope and number of crisis situations that have reached explosive proportions just in the past six months.

Syria continues to destabilize due to ISIS insurgents supported by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel; it is a horrifying storm which is now bleeding into other nations such as Iraq.

Iraq is on the verge of complete disintegration as the same western organized ISIS movestowards the outskirts of Baghdad.

Libya has imploded, with the American embassy evacuated, as well as the French and British, as various militias battle for supremacy.

The Ukraine crisis is nearing mutation into another beast entirely after the attack on Malaysian flight MH17. In just the past week, the EU has instituted sanctions against Russia, fighting has become even more fierce around Donetsk, Russia has been accused of firing artillery into Ukraine, and the U.S. now claims that Russia has violated the terms of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty.

In the meantime, the Federal Reserve continues to taper QE3 while ignoring the unprecedented equities bubble they have birthed in the stock market, as well as refusing to answer the question as to who will actually buy U.S. Treasury debt if they do not? Our secret friend from Belgium? And what if this secret friend is, as I suspect, actually the IMF/BIS global loan shark duo? What then? Do we become yet another third world African-style debtor owing our very infrastructure to a financial bureaucracy on the other side of the world?

And what about the Baltic Dry Index, one of the few measures of global shipping demand that cannot be manipulated by outside money interests? Well, the BDI is back down to historic lows,falling 65% since January, signaling that the so-called “economic recovery” is not at all what it is cracked up to be.

Add to this the deluge of illegal immigration on the southern border, aided by the Obama Administration, as well as possible presidential impeachment and lawsuit proceedings, and you have a recipe for total chaos of the fiscal variety.

If the first six to seven months of 2014 have been this frenetic, how bad will the next six months be?

False Paradigms

We are all aware of the prevalence of the false Left/Right paradigm in American politics. Hopefully most people in the Liberty Movement understand, for example, that any impeachment or lawsuit proceedings against Barack Obama will be nothing more than a crafted circus designed to accomplish nothing – a con game to placate conservatives with useless top-down solutions while the country burns around their ears.

There are other false paradigms that are not so clear to some, though…

The false Israel/Hamas paradigm has certainly duped a particular subsection of Americans and even a few patriots, even though it is historical fact that the creation of Hamas itself wasfunded and supported by the Israeli government. Why do Israeli politicians put money and arms at the disposal of Muslim extremist groups like Hamas and ISIS, only to enter into brutal conflict with them later? Could it be that the Israeli government does not have the best interests of the Israeli people at heart? Could it be that Israel is being used by internationalists as a catalyst for chaos? It is vital that we question the intentions behind such contrary actions in the Middle East.

Why has the U.S. government , Saudi Arabia, and Israel put support behind the ISIS caliphate in Iraq after spending decades of time, billions in resources, and thousands of lives, attempting to overrun and dominate the region? Why are these governments creating enemies that will later try to harm us?

It is all about false paradigms; dividing the masses into numerous conflicting sides and pitting them against each other when they should be fighting against the elites.

The false East/West paradigm is perhaps the most dangerous lie facing free men today. It is a lie that may very well define our generation if not our century. I have outlined in multiple articlesthe substantial evidence that proves beyond a doubt that Russia and China are members of the globalist agenda, and that the tensions between our two hemispheres are completely fabricated.

The latest announcement of a BRICS bank to rival the IMF is yet another scheme to perpetuate the illusion that the elites of these nations are at odds. In fact, the BRICS conference mission statement makes it clear that developing nations have no intention of breaking from the IMF (and certainly not the BIS). Instead, the BRICS bank is meant to provide “leverage” to “force” the IMF to become more inclusive, and hand over more power and participation. Vladimir Putin had this to say at the latest summit:

“In the BRICS case we see a whole set of coinciding strategic interests. First of all, this is the common intention to reform the international monetary and financial system. In the present form it is unjust to the BRICS countries and to new economies in general. We should take a more active part in the IMF and the World Bank’s decision-making system. The international monetary system itself depends a lot on the US dollar, or, to be precise, on the monetary and financial policy of the US authorities. The BRICS countries want to change this.”

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff insisted that  from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund:

“On the contrary, we wish to democratize it and make it as representative as possible…”

Putin and the BRICS commonly rail against the “unipolar” financial system revolving around the U.S. dollar, but in the end they are only controlled opposition, and their solution is to place even more power into the hands of the IMF (a supposedly U.S. government controlled institution), creating a truly unipolar world order.  If the U.S. loses its IMF veto status this year due to lack of allocated funds, and the BRICS dump the dollar as world reserve, this may very well happen.

As sanctions between Russia and the U.S. snowball, a perfect rationalization for a dollar decoupling will be created that very few people would have believed possible only a few years ago.  It is only a matter of time before fiscal warfare escalates to destructive levels. Russia will inevitably cut off gas exports to the EU, and the BRICS will inevitably drop the U.S. dollar as a world reserve standard.

The U.S. relationship to the EU is also currently being presented as dubious, and this is not by accident. Failing relations between America and Germany are yet more theater for the masses to chew on. Western allies have been spying on each other for decades, but somehow the exposure of CIA activities in Germany is shocking news? The NY Fed suddenly attacks Deutsche Bank, seeking expanded monitoring and regulation? Germany’s business interests are highly damaged by U.S. sanctions against Russia? It would seem as though someone is trying to create an artificial divide between elements of the EU and the U.S.

I believe that the narrative is being prepared for a faked financial breakup between the U.S. and many of its former allies, isolating the U.S., and destroying the dollar, but to what end? To answer that question, we must ask WHO ultimately benefits from these actions?

The Rise Of The Hero Bankers

In June of last year, the Bank of International Settlements, the central bank of central banks whose history began with the financial support of the Third Reich, released a statementwarning that “easy money” from central banks was creating a dangerous bubble in stock markets around the world.

The IMF too has been pushing warnings of stock bubble collapse into the mainstream.

In June of this year, the BIS, a normally obscure and secretive organization, released another statement pronouncing that government had been led into a “false sense of security” by easy monetary policy and low interest rates, making the world economy perpetually unstable.

For an organization so covert and occult, the BIS sure has become rather candid lately. Frankly, I agree with everything they have said. However, I do not agree with the hypocrisy of the BIS, which dominates the decisions of all of its member banks, publicly criticizing policies which it most likely scripted itself. Why would the BIS suddenly denounce fiscal methods it used to promote? Because the BIS is setting itself up as the great prognosticator of a collapse that IT HELPED ENGINEER.

After the great financial war has subsided, and the people are suitably poverty stricken and desperate, it will be institutions like the BIS and IMF that swoop in to “save the day”. Their offer will be to consolidate economic control into the hands of an elite group of bankers “not affiliated” with any particular nation state, thereby insulating them from “political concerns”. The argument will be that national sovereignty is a bane on the back of humanity. They will claim that the catastrophe will continue until we “simplify” and streamline our economic and political systems. They will present themselves as the heroes of the age; the ones who predicted the crisis would occur, and the ones who had a solution ready to save the day (after sufficient death and destruction, of course).

As long as people remain obsessed with false paradigms and faux enemies, the establishment’s goal of complete centralized dominance will be predictably attainable. If we change our focus to the internationalists as the true danger instead of playing their game by their rules, then things will become far more interesting…

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

A Nail In Zionism’s Coffin?

The Slaughter Must End…

The 72-hour ceasefire was supposed to get under way on 8/1/14 starting at 8 a.m. local time—but no sooner had it begun than it appeared to collapse. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 30 Palestinians were killed, and dozens more injured, in an Israeli attack near the southern town of Rafah.

If, against all odds, a genuine ceasefire were to actually take place, the pause would allow time for both sides’ fighters to regroup and re-arm. But what of the civilian population of a now substantially destroyed Gaza? Presumably many will try to visit their bombed homes to retrieve some belongings, as we have seen in Syria and Iraq, and many will try finding a place to hide, say, perhaps, a UN school—well, maybe that’s a bad choice. Others may simply stay in their homes and wait to die.

For the invading Zionist forces, they are insured of plenty of munitions both during and after any ceasefire—because the Obama Administration is supporting Israel’s aggression in the Gaza Strip, and it is doing so, in part, by allowing it to tap into local US arms stockpiles. The Israelis will be able to resupply themselves with 40mm grenades and 120mm mortar rounds, stocks that the Pentagon claims “need to be refreshed,” this according to Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon’s press secretary, who rejected out of hand this week’s Amnesty International demand that “the US government immediately end its ongoing arms deliveries to Israel, which are providing the tools to commit further serious violations of international law in Gaza.” And not only that. Earlier, the US Senate, by a vote of 100 to 0, passed a resolution drafted by AIPAC expressing support for Israel’s attack on Gaza, a resolution reading in part, “The United States Senate reaffirms American support for Israel’s right to defend its citizens and ensure the survival of the State of Israel”—and which says not a single word about Palestinian deaths.

Additionally, US politicians are working to provide millions of dollars in supplementary funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile shield. The US Senate Appropriations Committee added $225 million for Iron Dome to a spending bill mainly intended to provide money to handle an influx of thousands of Central American children across the US-Mexico border.

“It is not that Iron Dome is all that effective, it fails 75% of the time,” said one Congressional staffer in an email to this observer earlier this week. “But Congress is under pressure to be seen as supporting Israel, and we’ve got to be seen doing something before we adjourn for five weeks.”

And likewise, as a sop to AIPAC, the White House announced on 7/31/14 that it “strongly opposes” a Republican-crafted emergency spending bill, in part because it contains no funds for Israeli missile defense and other presumed necessities. Earlier in the day the Senate had begun debating a $3.5 billion auxiliary spending measure that included the $225 million in additional funding for Iron Dome when suddenly the White House voiced its opposition to the House version, claiming it “does not include funding for the Department of Defense to support the government of Israel’s request for critical defense needs.”

It was also on 7/31/14, that Brian Wood, Head of Arms Control and Human Rights at Amnesty International, reminded Mr. Kirby, the illustrious rear admiral, of an unpleasant truth, one that doesn’t normally penetrate Washington’s deaf-dumb-and-blind bubble: “It is deeply cynical for the White House to condemn the deaths and injuries of Palestinians, including children, and humanitarian workers, when it knows full well that the Israeli military responsible for such attacks are armed to the teeth with weapons and equipment bankrolled by US taxpayers.”

But despite all the American government’s massive support for Israel, survival of the apartheid regime is not at all assured. Recently expressed antipathy toward the Zionist state from notables in Europe, South America and parts of Asia seems to be considerably more than just bluster. Israelis are correct in thinking they can no longer count on public opinion, not in Europe or even, to a lesser extent, perhaps, from the American public either. Increasingly the latter are pressuring their Zionist-bought politicians, admittedly on a modest scale still at this point, but in a manner causing them to ponder their electability as Israel continues its descent into a pariah state. A recent Gallup poll found a majority of Americans less than 30 years of age believe Israel’s actions in Gaza to be unjustified and criminal. This is because younger Americans have grown up witnessing a US-armed-and- propped-up Israel brutally occupying the West Bank, killing Palestinians, while also invading Lebanon in numerous, periodic attacks that claimed more than 30,000 lives between 1948 and 2006.

In aggregate, Americans still see Israel favorably…but in smaller numbers, while more are viewing it as illegitimate, as a 19^th century colonial enterprise with no legitimate place in a civilized international society. “Delegitimisation,” says Einat Wilf, a former Israeli parliamentarian and one of the authors of an as-yet-unpublished study of the topic at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) in Jerusalem, is becoming “a strategic threat”.

As Robert Fisk pointed out this week, “Gaza, which is being so graphically covered by journalists that our masters and our media are suffering a new experience: not fear of being called anti-Semitic, but fear of their own television viewers and readers – ordinary folk so outraged by the war crimes committed against the women and children of Gaza that they are demanding to know why, even now, television moguls and politicians are refusing to treat their own people like moral, decent, intelligent human beings.”

From Antwerp to Warsaw, demonstrators’ placards have ranged from criticism of Israeli policy (“1,2,3,4, Occupation No More”) to condemning Israel itself (“5,6,7,8, Israel is a Terror State”). A growing percentage of the world’s population is coming to the conclusion that the regime occupying Palestine is a mistake and that history must be corrected. As The Economist recently reported, France is experiencing major unrest, which may be no surprise given that it claims the largest Jewish and Arab populations in Europe, but the extent of the tensions in France, including attacks on synagogues and raids on Jewish shops, has been shocking nonetheless. Even in normally sedate Oslo, the Jewish museum closed its doors.

Frankly, it comes as no great surprise then that many Jews feel that the world is against them, and view criticism of Zionist apartheid Israel as a mask for animosity towards Jews. In this they are very wrong. Let them visit the Middle East, in peace, and they will learn quickly that the rejection here is not at all about Jews, but only about Zionism as a fascist, racist creed. What people of good will reject, in the Middle East as elsewhere, is an antiquated movement that promotes a chosen people’s right to steal land belonging to others while ethnically cleansing an indigenous population; a movement that encourages chants of “Death to Arabs” among school children, whose settlers organize ‘fun-days,’ gathering as spectators to observe Zionist forces slaughtering Arab children in Gaza, as teachers hand out balloons and ice cream while leading the children in hate filled songs.

International public opinion matters. And much of it relating to the carnage being inflicted by those illegally occupying Palestine is right. The international public is increasingly aware that what is happening in Palestine today is not really about Hamas; it is not about rockets; it is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom, and sovereignty.

Having created a huge open-air prison in Gaza, PM Netanyahu now claims that Israel cannot relinquish security control of the West Bank for fear of Islamist attack—meaning that the Zionist occupiers intend to consolidate their illegal occupation, thus withdrawing all hope from Palestinians.

This region, and increasingly the global community as a whole, is planning for a post-Zionist Middle East and how best to achieve it without further suffering. The Zionist regime can stop the slaughter in Gaza; it can withdraw from Palestinian lands through agreement with international norms and UN resolutions, or, sooner or later, it will very likely cease to exist.

Blockading The Truth: Obama’s Big Lie About Gaza

(1) It is simply a lie that Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is a response to an “unprovoked attack” by Hamas. Not only is it a lie, it is a transparent, brazen lie, whose falsehood is glaringly apparent to anyone who had given even a cursory look at coverage of the Israeli government’s response to the murder of three Israeli teenagers in June.

At that time, we were told in many news reports about an Israeli “crackdown” in Gaza, including mass arrests, military operations and, finally, the killing of six Hamas members. It was after these operations and these killings — which were clear breaches of a ceasefire which Hamas had been honoring for 19 months — that Hamas began its retaliation against Israel’s unprovoked attacks.

(And no, the murder of the teenagers was not a “provocation” by Hamas, which disclaimed all connection to the crime. It was almost certainly carried out a rogue clan which has often — conveniently — staged provocations whenever it seems that some small movement toward peace might be made, and has been a thorn in Hamas’ side for a long time. What’s more, as Max Blumenthal reported, the Israeli government knew the teenagers had been murdered almost immediately, and who the likely culprits were; but the Netanyahu regime chose to wage a worldwide campaign of mendacity — and torment the boys’ parents — by claiming they might still be alive, and launching “search” missions for them.)

These are all undisputed facts. The narrative that dominates the Washington media and political discourse — “plucky Israel attacked without motive by demonic foes” — is, again, an obvious lie. But that has not stopped it from being repeated endlessly, all across the political spectrum and in every form of media, day after day after day.

It is impossible that Barack Obama does not know these undisputed facts. Standing at the apex of history’s most all-pervasive intelligence system — and receiving daily digests of news reports on volatile areas like the Middle East — he of all people knows that the Hamas rocket fire was a response to an Israeli military action, an Israeli violation of a long ceasefire.

It is also impossible that a majority, if not all, of the 100 U.S. Senators who voted to endorse the Israeli slaughter in Gaza — including stalwart “progressives” like Al Franken and “socialist” Bernie Sanders — did not know the truth when they cast their ballots. It is impossible that the editors and reporters of the nation’s leading media organizations do not know these facts — which they themselves reported only a few weeks ago.

Yet day after day after day, from the commanding heights of our “culture” (if the debased goon show of our public discourse deserves such a word), the Big Lie thunders forth. What’s more, Obama is putting his money (or rather, our money) where his mendacious mouth is, tacking $225 million for Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system into a bill ostensibly meant to deal with the influx of child immigrants. Obama and the Senate Democrats are making political pawns out of these children — most of whom are fleeing Central American hellholes created in no small part by decades of bipartisan military and political backing for repressive oligarchs. (Including, of course, Obama’s support for an oligarch-militarist “regime change” coup in Honduras early in his presidency.) With the new money for Israel’s military, the Democrats hope to sucker the Republicans into voting for the emergency immigration bill (from which they cut $1 billion — hey, you don’t want to coddle those kids!), or else put them in a political bind if the immigrant-hating GOP votes against the bill: “You aren’t supporting plucky little Israel!”

A very cynical ploy, yes, but no matter: even if it fails and the children are left to languish, some other way will be found to get the money to Israel and, most importantly, show the world that America fully supports the massacre — more than 800 Palestinians killed so far, including whole families, refugees at a UN shelter, patients in hospitals and other prime military targets.

Eight hundred dead — and Obama gives the IDF a $225 million bounty. Maybe when the death count reaches a thousand, he’ll buy Netanyahu a pony or something.

2.
James Marc Leas lays out the timeline leading up to the operation in this succinct marshaling of the facts in CounterPunch. You should read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts:

The July 8 ITIC report also divulged why Hamas launched its first rocket fire at Israel in more than 19 months on July 7: On that night Israeli forces had bombed and killed 6 Hamas members in Gaza. The ITIC report includes a picture of the six Hamas members. Thus, a report from an authoritative Israeli source described the provocation for the resumption of rocket fire: Hamas rocket fire began only after Israeli forces had engaged in nearly a month of military operations in violation of the ceasefire agreement and had killed 6 Hamas members in Gaza. …

The facts show that Israeli forces had to work quite hard to get Hamas to end its cease-fire. The killing of the six Hamas members was not an isolated event. Israeli forces and settlers had gone wild on the West Bank starting on June 12 after the kidnaping of three Israeli teens. Israeli forces had also attacked 60 targets in Gaza during those three weeks of June. Then, on the night of July 7, 2014, the Israeli Air Force had attacked approximately 50 more “terrorist targets” in the Gaza Strip, as described in the ITIC report.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on July 3:

Israel’s military operations in the West Bank following the abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers have amounted to collective punishment. The military operations included unlawful use of force, arbitrary arrests, and illegal home demolitions. … Giving more details, several of the weekly reports from the Palestine Center for Human Rights (PCHR) indicate that Israeli forces and settlers killed 11 Palestinians and wounded 51 during 369 incursions into the West Bank between June 12 and July 2 and that Israeli forces raided hundreds of houses on the West Bank each week.

110 bombing raids, a military incursion, 17 killings, mass arrests — all before Hamas fired a single rocket. This is what Obama — and every single member of the United States Senate — call an “unprovoked attack.” They say it with a straight face — nay, with long, somber, pious faces — but they know it’s a lie.

3.
But let us imagine, just for a moment, that their deceitful narrative was true. What if Hamas just woke up one fine, clear peaceful morning and said, “Hey, let’s start firing missiles at Israel, fellas! Won’t that be a hoot?” The fact is that even in that scenario, it would not be an “unprovoked attack,” but a legitimate act of self-defense.

How do we know this? Because one of Israel’s most honored statesmen told us so. As Jonathan Schwarz notes, Abba Eban, one of the founding fathers of Israel, used his renowned eloquence to defend Israel in the UN from charges of aggression for striking first in the 1967 Six-Day War. Rising to address the global body — where he had once served as vice-president of the General Assembly — Eban put forth his case. The surprise attack was justified, he said, because Egypt had blockaded an Israeli port:

The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through armed violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side. From May 24 onward, the question who started the war or who fired the first shot became momentously irrelevant. There is no difference in civil law between murdering a man by slow strangulation or killing him by a shot in the bead. From the moment at which the blockade was imposed, active hostilities had commenced and Israel owed Egypt nothing of her Charter rights. If a foreign power sought to close Odessa or Copenhagen or Marseilles or New York harbour by the use of force, what would happen? Would there be any discussion about who had fired the first shot? Would anyone ask whether aggression had begun?

As Schwarz points out — and which the entirety of the American political-media establishment perpetually fails to point out — Gaza has been subject to a stringent and ruinous blockade by Israel since 2007. As noted here the other day:

Israel has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a stateless limbo while carefully controlling almost every aspect of their lives, including what medicines they can have, what manufacturing and building materials they are allowed and even, at times, how much food they are allowed to eat to keep the population weakened but just above malnutrition levels. This brutal regimen in daily life is of course punctuated with regular night raids, bombings,  kidnappings, “disappearings” and almost weekly civilians deaths at the hands of Israeli overseers. This has gone on year after year.

Eban said Israel was justified in retaliating with military force when Egypt had blockaded a port for a few weeks. How much more justified would the Palestinians be in retaliating against a total blockade — by land, sea and air — that has lasted almost eight years?

I don’t agree with lobbing missiles into cities. I believe it’s wrong. But I also realize that I have the great luxury of pondering these moral and legal and philosophical questions at my leisure, in comfort and safety. I haven’t seen my family half-starved, my children’s growth stunted, my friends and relatives blown to bits. I haven’t been trapped in stateless limbo, with no passport, no freedom, no opportunity, under threat of violent death or arbitrary arrest every moment of my life. I don’t know what I would do if that was my reality. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw my loved ones suffer that way, year after year. I might somehow hold on to the ideal of non-violent resistance — or I very well might not.

But I do know that by the terms of the world’s great and good — who speak portentously of the “laws of war” and analyze in great detail the “justifications” for violent conflict — the Palestinians have a right to resist the “slow strangulation” of the blockade … and the “shot in the head” (and the missile in the crib) that they are now being subjected to. By Abba Eban’s own reasoning, from the very first day of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, “the question who started the war or who fired the first shot became momentously irrelevant.”

Source: http://chris-floyd.com

Obama & Congress: Spending Our Money To Kill Babies

[Author’s note:  Yes, I know that I should be grateful that John McCain wasn’t elected in 2008 because he would have had America in the middle of WW III by now and there probably would have been bunkers and anti-aircraft missile launchers (and also lots of American dead babies) outside my bedroom window instead of just robins, but still…we are already up to our necks in wars, proxy wars and dead babies as it is — and I’m sick of it.]

President Obama and Congress may hate each other’s guts regarding a whole lot of domestic issues — but with regard to foreign policy, Obama and Congress just can’t kiss each other’s butts fast enough when it comes to agreeing to kill as many babies as humanly possible in as many foreign countries as they possibly can.  And ASAP.

Obama and Congress spend American taxpayers’ money on killing babies in foreign lands like there is no tomorrow; as if all our hard-earned money could just magically and automatically replenish itself overnight like some magical ATM that never stops working, an inexhaustible resource that has no limits or end.

“Seven trillion dollars gone forever?  No problem.  It’ll grow back.  The important thing here is to keep producing all those dead babies.”  Can’t stop now.  There are still a few left alive.

In Haiti, dead babies.  “They all would have died in fifty or sixty years anyway.”

In Ukraine, dead babies.  “But those babies were rebels, clearly red-diaper babies!”

Afghanistan’s dead babies keep piling up like cordwood.  “We thought they were Taliban!  Diapers, not head-cloths?  Nah.”

Dead babies in Iraq, murdered by ISIS, weaponized and trained by Obama and Congress.  “Just collateral damage that got in the way of the oil.  Again.  Pesky babies.”

Dead babies in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and, hopefully, Iran next.  “Those babies possessed WMDs!”

Dead babies in Libya, Egypt, Africa and Palestine.  “Ah, the smell of dead babies in the morning.” Dead babies in Honduras.  “They won’t be camping at our borders any more — because they are dead.”

And don’t forget poor bleeding Syria, where Congress and Obama happily released the Kraken, er, ISIS on all kinds of babies that used to be living.  “Those babies were dictators!  They had to go!”

And now Obama and Congress have solemnly shaken hands and agreed that Palestine and Gaza both need more dead babies too.

“The only difference between the “shooting fish in a barrel” attack on the USS Liberty and the “shooting fish in a barrel” attack on Gaza is that there were no babies on board the USS Liberty.  What a waste.”

And even as we speak, Obama and Congress still tirelessly continue to work together, constantly dragging gigantic bags of gold coins over to the Pentagon; hundreds of thousands of black bags that contain over half of all the money that we Americans will ever earn in our lifetimes — huge black bags of gold, all clearly labeled “Dead Baby Fund”.

I want no part of any of this.

Do you?

Zionist Israel An International Pariah

Gaza has become a slaughter zone for the eradication of Palestinians with the most advanced military technology that Israel posses. In comparison the blaming of Hamas for this latest barrage of rockets, fails to recognize any proposition in the mutual savagery. Depending on one’s view just who is the unlawful belligerent, sympathy and condemnation follows. This eternal struggle will never end peacefully. Debating international law, dissecting historic claims, strategizing military options, analyzing diplomatic intentions, and especially honoring superior doctrine among conflicting religious beliefs is a formula that offers no solutions. Yet, Israel is wedded to an expansionist political objective. Extending settlements prevent any permanent settlement agreement.

Gaza is an Engineered Flashpoint for WW3	Zionist Terror in Gaza Free Gaza and Free the World

 
With the follow blown invasion of Gaza, the IDF proves once again that annihilation and ethnic cleansing is the cornerstone of Israeli imperium. For a perspective on the Gaza campaign that you will not hear in the controlled Zionist media, view  video. Then if you have the courage to face the truth, , YouTube is a must watch.The notion that the government of Israel has some special right to be an apartheid state, only for Zionists, is the source of perpetual war. Strip away the heretical religious entitlements that only serves to rationalize the bogus legitimacy of a rogue regime, and what you have left is an aggressor tribe of Khazarian outlaws, who allege to be Jewish when it is politically expedient. This charade keeps the naive and uninformed Christian-Zionists pouring out their support for the high cost of claiming: CHOSEN.

No wonder that AIPAC Zionists are in control of American Middle East foreign policy, which is destroying the region for the betterment of Israeli zealotry. Even if you view Palestinians as a conquered people, confined to a leper colony by walls and checkpoints, how can any student of world politics conclude that this experiment of incremental death camps will ever bring peaceful co-existence?Are Zionists the only people who have a right for self-defense? The iron dome that knocks down, the projectiles based on the Chinese “Weishi-2″ or WS-2 rockets is effective in stopping these primitive missiles. “The al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, boasts on its website that it can make its own version of the M-302 – named the R-160 after one of its leaders, Abdel Rantisi, who was killed last decade.” Contrast these weapons with Operation Samson: Israel’s Deployment of Nuclear Missiles on Subs from Germany.

The essay, USrael and Armageddon, references the Samson Option and cites Colonel Warner D. “Rocky” Farr, from THE THIRD TEMPLE’S HOLY OF HOLIES: ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

“Israel is a nation with a state religion, but its top leaders are not religious Jews. The intricacies of Jewish religious politics and rabbinical law do affect their politics and decision processes. In Jewish law, there are two types of war, one obligatory and mandatory (milkhemet mitzvah) and the one authorized but optional (milkhemet reshut). The labeling of Prime Minister Begin’s “Peace for Galilee” operation as a milchemet brera (“war of choice”) was one of the factors causing it to lose support. Interpretation of Jewish law concerning nuclear weapons does not permit their use for mutual assured destruction. However, it does allow possession and threatening their use, even if actual use is not justifiable under the law. Interpretations of the law allow tactical use on the battlefield, but only after warning the enemy and attempting to make peace. How much these intricacies affect Israeli nuclear strategy decisions is unknown.”

 

The video,  by Brother Nathanael indentifies the actual threat that Israel posses to the rest of the planet. However, in Gaza the potential becomes the immediate. Based upon the long record of Israeli atrocities, would any prudent person ignore the expected predictability that Zionist warmongers would use any weapon at their disposal to retain their regional power? Like the treasonous American politicians, the Israeli Knesset and Cabinet oversee tyrannical and despotic policies, which push the world to the brink of Armageddon.

Tanya Reinhart makes the argument that The Hamas Government Should be Recognized.

“The U.S. and Europe decided, despite Israel’s opposition, to permit the Palestinian people to hold democratic elections.

In a just and well-ordered world, it would be unthinkable for a government that was elected in this way to be disqualified because Israel does not like the choice of the electorate in question. But in a world in which the U.S. rules, might is right, and might can define democracy as it chooses. Thus, it was announced that the outcome of the Palestinian elections would not be recognized until the three “mantras” were fulfilled: Hamas must renounce terror, honor previous accords, and recognize the State of Israel. Meanwhile the Palestinian people would be punished and starved through an economic boycott, in the hope that this will lead to the collapse of the elected government.”

Nonetheless, in a Haaretz editorial, Israel’s refusal to deal with the Fatah-Hamas coalition is both puzzling and damaging, places blame where it is warranted.

“The Palestinian government to be formed is the result of the reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and reflects Hamas’ recognition of the Palestinian Authority, which was born of the Oslo Agreements that Hamas had opposed with all its might. This reconciliation is the result of heavy Arab pressure, is supported by all the Arab states and by most of the Palestinian public, and has the backing of several European leaders. Israel, which invested great effort in foiling the diplomatic negotiations, is now citing the Palestinian reconciliation as a decisive reason for freezing the talks, as if before the reconciliation it was rushing to continue the process. Israel’s refusal to recognize this government is liable to portray it once again as the party refusing to give the diplomatic channel a chance.”

Israel is a social outcast for much the same reason that the United States government has become a threat to its own people. Alan Hart back in 2011 writes in the article, 

“A short and fairly accurate description of the ideology Netanyahu was raised on is something like this. “The world will always hate Jews. Zionism must therefore do whatever is necessary to build and secure Israel as a refuge of last resort for Jews everywhere. And if that means telling the world to go to hell, so be it.” (That’s actually why David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan and others insisted that Israel should possess nuclear weapons – to have the reinforced ability to tell the world, not just the Arabs, to go to hell if necessary).”

Mr. Hart end the essay with a profound question for all Israelis.

“Is it possible that a global perception of them as citizens of a pariah state and the possibility of real sanctions will alarm enough Israeli Jews to the point where they will take to the streets in significant numbers to demand that their leaders be serious about peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept?”

 

Watch the compelling interview video, , for an honest answer. When orthodox Jews admit the sacrilege of the pretenders that rule the state of Israel, you find hope that the conscience of honest Jewry will stand up and oppose a Zionist government that defies YHWH. Fast forward to the recent pronouncement from the Eidah Chareidis Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem Condemns Murder of Palestinian Boy, as Abbas urges UN to investigate alleged revenge killing of Arab boy by Jewish extremists.

“With pain and shock, the chief rabbi and the members of the rabbinical court heard about the heinous and foolish crime, the murder of a Palestinian boy here in Jerusalem, by people of Jewish descent. To make matters worse, according to current reports, the murder was committed by Jews in religious dress, may G-d spare us. It is understood and obvious to every Jew and every keeper of the Torah and its commandments that such an act is forbidden by the Torah, and Heaven forbid that a Jew should spill blood. And during our bitter exile, we have been commanded by the holy Torah and our Sages, and by our most recent rabbinic leaders, to bear the yoke of exile, not to provoke the other nations, Heaven forbid, and to wait for the complete redemption by the messiah, not by human intervention. All the more so when this act could lead to unknown consequences, Heaven forbid.”

When will the Israeli government declare its own condemnation, or will the deadly air raids on defenseless Gaza homes become its routine response for perfecting the murder of countless Palestinians noncombatants? As bombs fall on Gaza, take action: Endorse the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

Sameer Bhat, in the Kashmir Reader, artfully expresses the proper synopsis, Condemn Zionists, not Jews. “Please resist linking Zionism (the terrible ideology practiced by the state of Israel) with Judaism. What Israel is doing in Palestine is a direct outcome of its occupational policies because of Zionism, a despicable colonialist and racist idea that denies rights to Palestinians and advocates their dispossession and expulsion. It is from the pot of Zionist hubble-bubble, filled with the blood of innocents, that Israel draws its strength from. We must criticize and denounce this fascist thought. And yes, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.”

Bibi Netanyahu, Palestine’s Next King Herod?

How can I say this politely?  Not really sure, but here goes.  “Bibi Netanyahu certainly has killed a whole bunch of children in Palestine lately.  Does that remind you of anything that happened in the Bible, in this same Palestine, except years ago?  ‘When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old or under.’  Does Matthew 2:16-18 come to mind?”

How many kids has Netanyahu killed in Palestine over these past five years?  I have no idea.  Has he killed more babies than Herod?  Is this some sort of competition to see how many mothers’ tears can be shed?   It certainly looks like it.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”  Has Netanyahu outdone even Herod?  We may never know, but from the latest reports on NBC and CNN, it looks like Bibi has won this competition for sure!  

“But, Jane,” you might say, “Bibi Netanyahu has such a strong advantage.  Herod didn’t have access to Patriot missiles or whatever those phallic-looking ICBM thingies that Bibi has.”  All too true.

According to the Global Security Netwire, “Israel manufactures and deploys technologically sophisticated and diverse ballistic missile, cruise missile, and missile defense systems.  Several overarching themes characterize Israel’s missile program.   First, Israel’s strategy of maintaining a ‘qualitative military edge’ over potential adversaries motivated the country to rapidly develop one of the region’s [and the entire world’s] most capable missile production infrastructures, and to deploy the region’s [and the world’s] most advanced missile systems.”  

And with American taxpayers paying for all these hot new baby-killers, Netanyahu is sure to have the edge.  Roman-era swords simply can’t compete with all that.  Old Herod had better step up his game!

And Hamas’s funky short-range bottle-rockets also suck eggs.  They haven’t even killed not even one child.  But then Hamas isn’t out to kill kids like King Herod was — or like Bibi.

But actually, my money is on Netanyahu for winning the baby-killing contest right now.  Back in Herod’s day, Jesus, Joseph and Mary were able to escape off to Egypt — but now even the Rafah crossing is closed.  For Bibi right now, “slaughtering innocents” is like shooting fish in a barrel.  If you are a child in Gaza today, you are trapped — and it’s not a matter of if you are going to die but when.  I’d say that Bibi definitely has the edge.  

To quote Seumas Milne in The Guardian, “For the third time in five years, the world’s fourth largest military power has launched a full-scale armed onslaught on one of its most deprived and overcrowded territories.  Since Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip began, just over a week ago, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed.  Nearly 80% of the dead are civilians, over 20% of them children….  The idea that Israel is defending itself against unprovoked attacks from outside its borders is an absurdity.”   

Yet how come Herod is considered a vile and cowardly villain for killing so many babies, yet Netanyahu is considered a hero for doing the exact same thing?  I truly do not understand.

The Fateful Triangle: Russia, Ukraine And The Jews

The erotic reliefs of Hindu temples with their gravity-defying and anatomy-challenging positions have found a new modern competitor in the Ukrainian crisis. Each party wants to get the Jews on their side, while claiming that the other side is anti-Jewish and a Jewish puppet at once. This impossible, Kama-Sutraesque position is the result of extremely confusing alliances: the Kiev regime lists devout Jews and fiery antisemites among its mainstays. The leading figures of the regime (including the president-elect) are of Jewish origin; strongman and chief financier Mr. Igor (Benya) Kolomoysky is a prominent Jewish public figure, the builder of many synagogues and a supporter of Israel. The most derring-do and pro-active force of the regime, the ultra-nationalists of the Svoboda party and the Right Sector, admire Hitler and his Ukrainian Quisling, Stepan Bandera, “liberators of Ukraine from the Judeo-Muscovite yoke”. Jews are ambivalent, and the sides are ambivalent about them, and a most entertaining intrigue has been hatched.

The Russians tried to pull Israel and American Jews to their side, with little success. President Putin condemned the antisemitism of the Svoboda party; he mentioned the desecration of the Odessa Jewish cemetery in his important talk. The Russians re-vitalised the World War Two narrative, fully identifying the Kiev regime with the Bandera gangs and the Nazi enemy. Still, this rhetoric is not taken seriously by Jews who refuse to feel threatened by cuddly Kolomoysky. “These Nazis are not against Jews, they are against Russians, so it is not a Jewish problem”, they say.

The Kiev regime mirrored the Russian attitude, if not Russia’s tactics. Being rather short of facts to brandish, they faked a leaflet from Donetsk rebels to local Jews calling upon them to register and pay a special poll tax “for the Jews support the Kiev regime”. This rude and improbable hoax was immediately and convincingly disproved, but not before it was used by, no less, Barak Obama and John Kerry. The American Jewish newspaper of record, The Forward, obfuscated the issue by saying that Russians and Ukrainians are antisemites by birth and their denials are to be taken with a grain of salt. This mud-slinging was effective – the hoax has made the front pages, while its debunking was published on the back pages.

The Russians had the facts on their side, and the West knew that: the US refused entry to Oleg Tyagnibok and other Svoboda leaders (now members of Kiev government) because of their antisemitism as recently as in 2013. But Russian appeals to Jewish and American sensitivities failed to make an impact. They know when to feign indignation and when to hush. Pro-Hitler commemorations are frequent in Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, and cause no lifting of a censorious brow, for these countries are solidly anti-Russian. In March of this year, the Obama administration’s special envoy on anti-Semitism, Ira Forman, flatly denied everything and said to the Forward that Putin’s assertions of Svoboda’s antisemitism “were not credible”. The US wants to decide who is an antisemite and who is not; like Hermann Goering wanted to decide who is a Jew and who is not in the Luftwaffe. In the Ukrainian crisis, the Jews remain divided, and follow their countries’ preferences.

Israel is neutral

Recently Prime Minister Netanyahu called President Putin. Putin is always available for and always courteous to Netanyahu, as opposed to President Obama, who shows signs of irritation. (Admittedly Obama has to listen to Netanyahu much more often and for hours.) Netanyahu apologised that he wouldn’t be able to come to St Petersburg for Israeli Culture Week; instead, old reliable Shimon Peres, Israel’s President, will make the trip. He apologised for leaking the news of this visit cancellation to the media, as well.

This is quite typical for the Israeli PM: at first, he asks for an invitation, Russia extends it, then he cancels his visit and leaks it to the press, thus earning brownie points with the Americans. He did it at the Sochi Olympic games, and now again, in St Petersburg. This is his way of expressing Israeli neutrality.

Israel is explicitly neutral in the Ukrainian crisis. Israelis walked out and did not vote on the UN GA Crimea resolution at all, annoying its American sponsors. The Israelis had a flimsy excuse: their Foreign Office was on strike. The Americans weren’t satisfied with this explanation. Strike or not, vote you must!

We learned from our Israeli colleagues the details of the Putin-Netanyahu phone conversation, which elaborated the reasons for Israeli neutrality. Israel is worried that as an asymmetric response to the US sanctions, Russia would deliver its potent air defence systems to Iran and Syria. Iran and Russia had signed a weapons supply contract a few years ago, Iran duly paid; then the shipment was suspended. Iran went to court demanding a massive compensation for the breach of contract. Likewise, the Syrians were supposed to get the S-300 surface-to-air missile system, able to protect its skies from Israeli raids. The deliveries commenced; PM Netanyahu beseeched Putin to put it on hold. Initially Putin objected, stressing the defensive nature of the system. Netanyahu told the Russian president that the S-300 would allow the Syrians to cover the whole North of Israel, at least all the way to Haifa, rendering important airfields unusable and endangering civil aviation as well. Putin agreed to stop the deliveries.

Vladimir Putin is friendly to Israel. He promised he would not allow the destruction of Israel; he promised to save its population if the situation should become truly dangerous. During the recent visit of PM Netanyahu to Moscow, Putin was not carried away by Netanyahu and Liberman’s hints of possible Israeli re-alliance with Moscow instead of Washington. He told the Israelis that their ties with the US are too strong for such a re-alliance being conceivable. Putin said that Russia is satisfied with the present level of friendship and does not demand that Tel Aviv weaken its ties with Washington. Putin visited Israel a few times, he received the Israeli PM in Kremlin. The Israeli ambassador Mme Golender sees Putin more often than do her American or French counterparts.

This friendly attitude has a down-to-earth reason: Putin is not fluent in English or French, while Mme Ambassador speaks Russian to him, eliminating the bothersome need of an interpreter. A deeper reason is Putin’s background: a scion of liberal elites, brought up in St Petersburg, schooled by ultra-liberal Mayor Sobchack, anointed by Boris Yeltsin, Putin is naturally friendly to Jews and to Israel. This friendly attitude annoyed some Russian ultra-patriots, who excitedly circulated his photo taken in the obligatory kippahnear the Wailing Wall. They also counted and recounted the names of Jewish oligarchs in Moscow.

True, some of them – Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Hodorkovsky – had to flee their Russian homeland, but the Russian president is surely not the Jewish-tycoons-Nemesis and the-new-Hitler he is sometimes made out to be. Abramovich and Friedman, to name just two, retain his trust and access. Putin does not mind any oligarch (Jewish or Gentile) – as long as he stays out of politics.

Putin is also friendly with Jewish intellectuals and gentlemen-of-the-media, even if they are outright hostile to him. Masha Gessen, Jewish Lesbian Putin-hater and magazine editor; Alexey Venediktov, Jewish chief editor of Echo Moskvy, a popular liberal medium that attacks Putin every day; many others enjoy access to Putin, – while no Russian nationalist including Dr Alexander Dugin can boast of having met with the president privately.

Putin’s affability does not turn him into a bountiful source for every Jewish initiative. He stopped S-300 deliveries to Iran, but rejected all Israeli overtures asking him to ditch Iran, or Syria, or Hamas. In the course of their last phone conversation, Netanyahu claimed the Israelis discovered proofs of Iranian nukes. Putin politely expressed his doubts and re-addressed him to IAEA. He agreed to receive the Israeli “experts” with their proofs in Moscow, but nothing came of it. Russia’s support for Palestine is unwavering, – there is a Palestinian embassy in Moscow, too.

Putin supported building of a spacious Jewish museum in Moscow and personally contributed to its budget – but Russian street advertising proclaims the Resurrection of Christ, Eastertide, and His Nativity at Christmas. No “season’s greetings”, but open affirmation of Christianity. Russia is not like the US or EU, where external signs of Christian faith are forbidden, Easter and Christmas can’t be mentioned and whatever Jews request must be done immediately. Western Jews are annoyed (so their organisations claim) by public displays of Christian faith, but Russian Jews do not mind; moreover, they intermarry, convert and enter the Church in previously unheard of numbers. They are not strongly pro-Israeli, those that were already left for Israel.

So the Jews of Russia are not an influential factor to the Russian President. Putin will do what is right according to the Christian faith, and what is good for Russia, as he understands it — and he can’t be convinced to give up really important points. Other considerations – such as friendship with Israel – would normally take a much lower place in his priorities. However, in the midst of the Ukrainian crisis, as the Russians are worried by sanctions and by threats of isolation, they try to pull Jews to their side. This makes them increasingly susceptible to Israeli manipulation, whether state-authorised or a private venture.

Last week, Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld visited Moscow. In 2003, he famously threatened Europe with nuclear destruction (the “Samson Option”), saying “Israel has the capability to take the world down with us, and that will happen before Israel goes under”. Now he has explained to Russians Israel’s new policy: While the US enters the period of its decline, Israel must diversify and hedge its bets by drawing close to Moscow, Beijing and Delhi, he wrote in Izvestia daily. Perhaps, but without going too far. A flirt – yes, switching sides – not yet.

Israel prefers to stick to its neutrality. This is easy, as the Israeli populace (excepting its Russians) is not interested in Russian/Ukrainian affairs, does not know the difference between Russia and the Ukraine and is rather unfriendly to Russians/Ukrainians. This goes for both the Left and Right; the Israeli Left is even more pro-American than the Israeli Right. As for Russian Israelis, they are equally divided between supporters of Russia and supporters of Kiev regime. While observing niceties towards Russia, Israel does not intend to side with Moscow. The Jewish oligarchs of Ukraine – Kolomoysky, Pinchuk, Rabinovich – are integrated within the Kiev regime, and they support Israeli right-wing on a large scale. Israeli businessmen are invested in the Ukraine, and the oligarchs are invested in Israel. Kolomoysky controls YuzhMash, the famed missile construction complex in Dnepropetrovsk, and holds the secrets of the Satan ballistic missile, the most powerful Russian strategic weapon. He allegedly intends to share these secrets with the Israelis. If Israel were to side with Moscow regarding Ukraine, the breach with Washington would be unavoidable, and Israel does not intend to provoke it.

Some marginal Israeli right-wingers support Russia; they claim that they represent Israeli public opinion and government. They try to collect on their promises before they deliver. However, this is not an ordinary scam: they are trying to turn Russia into a supporter of right-wing Zionism.

Consider Russian-Israeli far right activist Avigdor Eskin. He impossibly claims that the Israeli government has already decided to jump from the US train to join the Russian one, that Israeli commandos are on their way to fight for the Russians in Donetsk, that Israeli authorities intend to strip Mr Kolomoysky of his Israeli citizenship. Naturally, all that is a load of bunkum, but Russians swallow it hook, line and sinker.

Avigdor Eskin is a colourful personality: a convert to Jewish faith (his mother is not Jewish), an observant Jew, an ex-Kahanist who was arrested in Israel for an alleged attempt to desecrate Al Aqsa mosque and a Muslim cemetery, and who served two or three years in Israeli jail; he styles himself a “Rabbi” and wears a full beard. After serving his time in jail, he moved to Russia and built a network of Israel supporters among the Russian far right. His message is “Israel is a true friend of Russia, while Muslims are Russia’s enemies”. He also adds that Israeli settlers are anti-American and pro-Russian. (If you believe that, the tooth fairy is the next step.)

Recently he claimed that the Aliya Battalion of “experienced Israeli commandos and sharpshooters” came to warring Donbass to fight on the Russian side against the Kiev regime troops. The Aliya Battalion is a battalion in the sense Salvation Army is an army. This is an Israeli NGO, established by Russian Israelis of far-right Zionist persuasion and of some Russian military background. It is not a part of Israeli Army. For a short while, the NGO provided guards for Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, but the settlements stopped using them as they were extremely unreliable. They boasted of murdering Palestinian civilians, of torturing and killing children, but this was just a sick sadist and racist fantasy, people say. Afterwards, the Battalion leaders turned its name into a profitable scam, roaming American Jewish communities and collecting donations for their supposedly secret activities. As this scam was exposed by Israeli TV (RTVI network; it is available on the ), they had disappeared from the public eye. Now Avigdor Eskin resurrected the old scam, and made a lot of headlines in the Russian media.

Eskin found a soulmate in prominent Russian media man Vladimir Solovyev. The Solovyev is of partly Jewish origin, lived abroad, then returned to Russia; he runs an important political show Sunday Eveningon Russian TV. The Saker (a well-known blogger) described him as follows: “This show is hosted by a famous personality, Vladimir Solovyev, who is a very interesting guy. Solovyev is a Jew, and he is not shy about reminding his audience about it, who was even elected as a member of the Russian Jewish Congress. He is also a Russian patriot, and he is an outspoken supporter of Putin and his policies. His position on the Ukraine is simple: he as a Jew and as a Russian has zero tolerance for Ukrainian nationalism, neo-Nazism or Banderism. He is a determined and total enemy of the new Kiev regime.”

It is possible Solovyev is going through some personal identity crisis: from celebrating his Russian roots, he moved to proclaiming his Jewish origin. Alternatively, it is possible (and more likely) that the Russian decision-makers want to pull Jews on their side, and Solovyev is acting with US Jews in mind. Stalin did it, so Putin could repeat the trick. In 1942, as Nazi onslaught threatened Russia, Stalin had sent some Russian Jews to the US, to speak Yiddish to Jewish communities and lobby for the USSR. The American Jewish community surely carries some clout… Now Solovyev and others are trying to influence Jews abroad; or at least to show to their superiors they are trying.

The price Eskin extracts for his fantasy stories is high. In Solovyev’s prime time programme, he called for the destruction of al Aqsa mosque and for the building of the Jewish temple on its place. He called Palestinians “the people of Antichrist”. Even in Israel such statements can’t be voiced on public TV. In confused Moscow, Eskin was feted and given a place in another important political programme, that of Arcady Mamontov. Who is conning whom: is Eskin conning his Russian hosts, or are his media hosts using him to con their superiors, or are their superiors trying to con the Russian people? Or is Israel hedging its bets? Who knows?

Ukrainian Jews beg to differ

Jews came to the Ukraine a thousand years ago, perhaps from Khazaria. This is not a homogeneous community; rather, they represent several communities. A lot of them emigrated to Israel; even more moved to Russia. They speak Russian and usually do not speak Ukrainian, though they picked up the vernacular over last twenty years. Normally, they wouldn’t care about Ukraine’s independence, as Jews  traditionally side with the strong, be it Poles under Polish rule, with Russians under Moscow rule, or with Germans under Vienna or Berlin. Now many of them have decided to side with the US or EU. One of the reasons why so many people of Jewish origin do well is that the ruling ethnic groups trust the Jews and rely upon their loyalty to the powerful and lack of compassion for their Gentile neighbours.

Another reason is the vague definitions. For last three or four generations, Jews have intermarried freely; children of these mixed marriages are often considered ‘Jews’. These are the ‘Jews’ to the present regime; often they have only one Jewish grandparent.

Ukraine, following its independence in 1991, moved into the Western sphere of influence, but Eastern Ukraine (Novorossia) retained its Russian character and links. Jews did well in both parts. Mr Kolomoysky is a prominent member of the Jewish community, and a mainstay of the Kiev regime.  He is a ruthless businessman, famous for his raiding of others’properties and for his Mafia connections. Rumours connect him with many killings of business adversaries.

On the other side, in Kharkov, the Mayor and the district Governor (nicknamed Dopah and Gepah) are Jewish, and they can be considered pro-Russian. It was thought that Kharkov would become the centre of rising Novorossia; president Yanukovich fled to Kharkov hoping to find allies and supporters. But Dopa and Gepa disabused him, so he continued his flight all the way to the Russian city of Rostov. Their decision to remain loyal to Kiev did not work well for them: one was shot, and the second one has been imprisoned and his attempt to run for president thwarted.

Kharkov is also home to Mr. Hodos, a wealthy and prominent Jew who fought most valiantly against Habad, the Jewish spiritual movement of which Mr Kolomoysky is a prominent member. The Jews of Novorossia apparently support the general pro-Russian trend, though there are exceptions. Practically all Ukrainian Jews have relatives in Russia, and had Russian education.

Israel has a strong network of agents in the Ukraine. They snatched a Palestinian engineer and flew him to an Israeli dungeon, and that could not be done without support of Ukrainian security services. However, the stories of Israeli soldiers fighting in Ukraine are somewhat exaggerated: these are individuals of dual citizenship who act at their own will, not a state representatives.

US Jews are divided

US Jews are divided on the Ukraine, as they were divided on Palestine. Friends of Palestine, people with a strong anti-imperialist record and sound knowledge of East European history – Noam Chomsky and Stephen F. Cohen — recognised and renounced the US attempt to sustain their hegemony by keeping brazen Russia down. A subset of people, Gilad Atzmon aptly called AZZ (anti-zionist zionists), Trots and other faux-Leftist shills for NATO like Louis Proyect – called for American intervention and brayed for Russian blood.

The notorious Israel Lobby is strictly anti-Russian. The State Dept. official Victoria (“Fuck EU”) Nuland personally directed the Kiev coup; she handpicked the government and the president of the new American colony on the Dnieper River. Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a founder of FPI, the successor of infamous PNAC, the extremist Zionist think tank which promoted wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and pushed for a war with Iran. Now they attack Russia, but they do not forget about their support for Israel.

Consider a young American gender activist and journalist, James Kirchick. He entered the Neocon network by shilling for the Lobby. He pink-washed Israel (“Israel as the best friend of gays on earth, while the Palestinians are homophobes who deserve to be bombed”). After doing the Israeli stint, he moved on to fighting Russia. He worked for the CIA-owned and US Congress-funded Radio Free Europe; stage-managed the sensational Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation from the RT and protested alleged mistreatment of gays in Russia. His dirty tricks were revealed by Max Blumenthal, a Jewish American journalist, a known anti-Zionist (working together with a Palestinian Rania Khalek).

While Israel is neutral re Ukraine, Israeli friends in EU and US are hostile to Russia and supportive of American hegemony, while friends of Palestine stand for Russia’s challenge to the Empire. The French Zionist media philosopher Bernard Henri Levy is an example of the former, while Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research is a representative of the latter. Leading critical (“anti-Zionist”) websites Counterpunch, Antiwar, Global Research sympathise with Russia, while pro-Israeli sites are hostile to Russia.

Zionists are nasty and vicious enemies, but they make even worse friends. Edward N. Luttwak is friendly to Russia; he called upon the US to make up with Russia. Strategic union of Russia and America is necessary, he says. Who cares about Ukraine? And here is his pitch line: Russia should fight China for the US benefit. Another Zionist friend, Tony Blair, also calls for peace with Russia – so Russia can fight the Muslim world for Israel. Quite similar to Eskin who offers his pathetic support to Russia in order to neutralise her positive influence and defence of Palestine.

The bottom line: Israel remains neutral for its own reasons. While Jews as individuals differ on Ukraine, there is a correlation with their stand on Palestine and on Syria. Enemies of Putin in Russia, Ukraine, Europe and US do support Israel and are hostile to Palestine, to Syria of Bashar, to Venezuela of Chavez. And the most dangerous lot are those who support Israel and Russia, as they are surely plotting some mischief.

After Yugoslavia, Ukraine ?

Public opinion in Western Europe is wrong to regard the Ukrainian crisis as a showdown between Westerners and Russians. In reality, Washington’s goal is not to push the country into the arms of the European Union, but to deprive Russia of its historical partners. To do this, the United States is prepared to ignite a new civil war on the continent.

After having dismembered Yugoslavia during a ten-year civil war (1990-1999), has the United States decided to destroy Ukraine in a similar way? This is what could be inferred from the maneuvers that the opposition is poised to launch during the Sochi Olympic Games.

Ukraine has been historically divided between, in the West, a population turned towards the European Union and, in the East, a population oriented towards Russia, plus a small Muslim minority in Crimea. After the country‘s independence, the government gradually crumbled. Taking advantage of the confusion, the United States organized the «Orange Revolution» (2004) [1], which brought to power a mafia clan, also pro-Atlanticist. Moscow responded by lifting its subsidies on gas prices, but the Orange government could not rely on its Western allies to help pay the market price. Ultimately, it lost the 2010 presidential election in favor of Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt politician, and on again-off again pro-Russian.

On 21 November 2013, the government renounces signing the Association Agreement negotiated with the European Union. The opposition responds with protests in Kiev and in the western part of the country, which quickly take on an insurrectionary appearance. It calls for early presidential and parliamentary elections and refuses to form a government when approached by President Yanukovych and the Prime Minister resigns. The events are baptized Euromaidan, then Eurorevolution, by Radio Free Europe (run by the State Department).

The crowd control for the opposition is provided by Azatlyk, a group of young Crimean Tatars who returned from Jihad in Syria especially for the occasion [2].

The Atlanticist media champion the cause of the «democratic opposition» and condemn Russian influence. High-profile Western figures turn up to manifest their support to the protesters, including Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State and former Ambassador to NATO) and John McCain (Chairman of the Republican branch of the NED). For its part, the Russian press condemns protesters who have taken to the streets to overthrow democratically elected institutions.

Torch-lit march of 15,000 Nazis in Kiev on 1 January 2014.

At first, the movement seemed to be an attempt to orchestrate a second «Orange Revolution.» But on 1 January 2014 the power in the street changes hands. The Nazi «Freedom» party organizes a 15 000-strong torch-lit march in memory of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), the nationalist leader who allied himself with the Nazis against the Soviets. Since this event, the capital has been covered with anti-Semitic graffiti and people are attacked on the street for being Jewish.

The pro-European opposition is made up of three political parties:

•  The All-Ukrainian Union “Fatherland” (Batkivshchyna), led by the oligarch and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (serving a prison sentence following her convictions for embezzlement) and currently headed by lawyer and former Parliament speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk. It stands for private property and the Western liberal model. It garnered 25.57% of the vote in the 2012 parliamentary elections.
•  The Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (Udar), of former boxing world champion Vitali Klitschko. It claims to identify with Christian Democracy and picked up 13.98% in the 2012 elections.
•  The All-Ukrainian Union “Svoboda” (Freedom), led by the surgeon Oleh Tyahnybok. This political group sprang from the National Socialist Party of Ukraine. It promotes the denaturalization of Jewish Ukrainians. It won 10.45% of the vote in the 2012 parliamentary elections.

• These parliamentary parties have the support of:

•  The Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, a Nazi splinter group from the former NATO stay-behind networks in the Eastern Bloc [3]. A Zionist, he calls for the denaturalization and deportation of Ukrainian Jews to Israel. He received 1.11% of the vote in 2012.
•  The Ukrainian Self-Defense, a nationalist splinter group that sent its members to fight the Russians in Chechnya and Ossetia during the Georgian conflict. It got 0.08% of the vote in 2012.

In addition, the opposition has received the endorsement of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in revolt against the Moscow Patriarchate. Ever since the Nazi Party took over the streets, the demonstrators – many of them wearing helmets and dressed in paramilitary uniforms -have erected barricades and stormed government buildings. Certain elements of the police force have also displayed great brutality, going so far as to torture detainees. A dozen protesters were killed and nearly 2,000 were wounded. The unrest spread to the western provinces of the country.

According to our information, the Ukrainian opposition seeks to import military materials acquired on parallel markets. It is obviously not possible to purchase weapons in Western Europe and bring them in without NATO’s green light.

Washington’s strategy in Ukraine would appear to be a combination of proven “color revolution” recipes with others recently concocted during the “Arab Spring” [4]. Moreover, the United States makes no effort to hide it: it dispatched two officials, Victoria Nuland (deputy to John Kerry) and John McCain (who is not only a Republican senator, but also the chairman of IRI, the Republican branch of the NED [5]) to support the protesters. Unlike Libya and Syria, Washington does not have jihadists on hand to sow chaos (except for Tatar extremists, but they are only located in Crimea). It was therefore decided to lean on the Nazis with whom the State Department worked against the Soviets and has organized in political parties since independence.

The inexperienced reader may be taken aback by this alliance between the Obama administration and the Nazis. However, it must be remembered that Ukrainian Nazis were publicly honored at the White House by President Reagan, including Yaroslav Stetsko, Ukrainian Prime Minister under the Third Reich, who became the head of the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and a member of the World anti-Communist League [6]. One of his deputies, Lev Dobriansky, became U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, while his daughter Paula Dobriansky served as Under Secretary of State for Democracy (sic) during the George W. Bush administration. It is the same Ms. Dobriansky who for ten years sponsored a historical research with the aim of clouding the fact that the Holodomor, the famine that hit Ukraine in 1932-33, also devastated Russia and Kazakhstan, thereby reinforcing the myth that Stalin was determined to eliminate the Ukrainian people [7].

In fact, Washington, who had supported the German Nazi party until 1939 and continued to do business with Nazi Germany until the end of 1941, never had a moral problem with Nazism, not more than it has today in providing military support to jihadism in Syria.

Western European elites, who use Nazism as a pretext to harass firebrands – as seen with the „quenelle“ controversy over French comedien Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala [8] – have forgotten what it really is. In 2005, they closed their eyes to the rehabilitation of Nazism by the President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, as if it were trivial [9]. On the simple strength of statements in favor of the European Union, and wrapped up in their blissful Atlanticism, they now support their worst enemy. Civil war could start in Ukraine during the Olympic Games in Sochi.

Thierry Meyssan – French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian

Notes
[1] “Washington et Moscou se livrent bataille en Ukraine”, by Emilia Nazarenko and the editorial staff, Réseau Voltaire, 1 November 2004.

[2] “Jihadists in charge of crowd control in Kiev protests”, Translation Alizée Ville, Voltaire Network, 5 December 2013.

[3] This is the cesspool that the father of the “Orange revolution” alighted from. Cf. “La biographie cachée du père du président ukrainien”, Réseau Voltaire, 18 April 2008.

[4] “Coup in Western Ukraine: the Arab Spring unleashed in Europe”, by Andrew Korybko, Oriental Review/Voltaire Network, 27 January 2014.

[5] “La NED, vitrine légale de la CIA”, by Thierry Meyssan, Odnako/Réseau Voltaire, 6 October 2010.

[6] “La Ligue anti-communiste mondiale, une internationale du crime”, by Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 12 May 2004.

[7] See: L’Holodomor, nouvel avatar de l’anticommunisme « européen », by Professor Annie Lacroix-Riz, 2008.

[8] “The Bête Noire of the French Establishment”, by Diana Johnstone, Counterpunch/Voltaire Network, 5 January 2014.

[9] “Latvian President Rehabilitates Nazism”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 16 March 2005.

Source: Voltaire Network

Bias By Omission: In The Entire American Mainstream Media

“Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.” – Michael Parenti

An exchange in January with Paul Farhi, Washington Post columnist, about coverage of US foreign policy:

Dear Mr. Farhi,

Now that you’ve done a study of al-Jazeera’s political bias in supporting Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, is it perhaps now time for a study of the US mass media’s bias on US foreign policy? And if you doubt the extent and depth of this bias, consider this:

There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Can you name a single paper, or a single TV network, that was unequivocally opposed to the American wars carried out against Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam? Or even opposed to any two of these wars? How about one? In 1968, six years into the Vietnam war, the Boston Globe  surveyed the editorial positions of 39 leading US papers concerning the war and found that “none advocated a pull-out”.

Now, can you name an American daily newspaper or TV network that more or less gives any support to any US government ODE (Officially Designated Enemy)? Like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela or his successor, Nicolás Maduro; Fidel or Raúl Castro of Cuba; Bashar al-Assad of Syria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran; Rafael Correa of Ecuador; or Evo Morales of Bolivia? I mean that presents the ODE’s point of view in a reasonably fair manner most of the time? Or any ODE of the recent past like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Moammar Gaddafi of Libya, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti?

Who in the mainstream media supports Hamas of Gaza? Or Hezbollah of Lebanon? Who in the mainstream media is outspokenly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians? And keeps his or her job?

Who in the mainstream media treats Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning as the heroes they are?

And this same mainstream media tell us that Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, et al. do not have a real opposition media.

The ideology of the American mainstream media is the belief that they don’t have any ideology; that they are instead what they call “objective”. I submit that there is something more important in journalism than objectivity. It is capturing the essence, or the truth, if you will, with the proper context and history. This can, as well, serve as “enlightenment”.

It’s been said that the political spectrum concerning US foreign policy in the America mainstream media “runs the gamut from A to B”.

Sincerely, William Blum, Washington, DC

(followed by some of my writing credentials)

–

Reply from Paul Farhi:

I think you’re conflating news coverage with editorial policy. They are not the same. What a newspaper advocates on its editorial page (the Vietnam example you cite) isn’t the same as what or how the story is covered in the news columns. News MAY have some advocacy in it, but it’s not supposed to, and not nearly as overt or blatant as an editorial or opinion column. Go back over all of your ODE examples and ask yourself if the news coverage was the same as the opinions about those ODEs. In most cases. I doubt it was.

–

Dear Mr. Farhi,

Thank you for your remarkably prompt answer.

Your point about the difference between news coverage and editorial policy is important, but the fact is, as a daily, and careful, reader of the Post for the past 20 years I can attest to the extensive bias in its foreign policy coverage in the areas I listed. Juan Ferrero in Latin America and Kathy Lally in the Mideast are but two prime examples. The bias, most commonly, is one of omission more than commission; which is to say it’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. My Anti-Empire Report contains many examples of these omissions, as well as some errors of commission.

Incidentally, since 1995 I have written dozens of letters to the Post pointing out errors in foreign-policy coverage. Not one has been printed.

Happy New Year

–

I present here an extreme example of bias by omission, in the entire American mainstream media: In my last report I wrote of the committee appointed by the president to study NSA abuses – Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies – which actually came up with a few unexpected recommendations in its report presented December 13, the most interesting of which perhaps are these two:

“Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry secrets to advantage their domestic industry.”

“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems.”

So what do we have here? The NSA being used to steal industrial secrets; nothing to do with fighting terrorism. And the NSA stealing money and otherwise sabotaging unnamed financial systems, which may also represent gaining industrial advantage for the United States.

Long-time readers of this report may have come to the realization that I’m not an ecstatic admirer of US foreign policy. But this stuff shocks even me. It’s the gross pettiness of “The World’s Only Superpower”.

A careful search of the extensive Lexis-Nexis database failed to turn up a single American mainstream media source, print or broadcast, that mentioned this revelation. I found it only on those websites which carried my report, plus three other sites: Techdirt, Lawfare, and Crikey (First Digital Media).

For another very interesting and extreme example of bias by omission, as well as commission, very typical of US foreign policy coverage in the mainstream media: First read the January 31, page one, Washington Post article making fun of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba.

Then read the response from two Americans who have spent a lot of time in Venezuela, are fluent in Spanish, and whose opinions about the article I solicited.

I lived in Chile during the 1972-73 period under Salvadore Allende and his Socialist Party. The conservative Chilean media’s sarcastic claims at the time about shortages and socialist incompetence were identical to what we’ve been seeing for years in the United States concerning Venezuela and Cuba. The Washington Post article on Venezuela referred to above could have been lifted out of Chile’s El Mercurio, 1973.

[Note to readers: Please do not send me the usual complaints about my using the name “America(n)” to refer to “The United States”. I find it to be a meaningless issue, if not plain silly.]

JFK, RFK, and some myths about US foreign policy

On April 30, 1964, five months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was interviewed by John B. Martin in one of a series of oral history sessions with RFK. Part of the interview appears in the book “JFK Conservative” by Ira Stoll, published three months ago. (pages 192-3)

RFK: The president … had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.

MARTIN: What was the overwhelming reason?

RFK: Just the loss of all of Southeast Asia if you lost Vietnam. I think everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.

MARTIN: What if it did?

RFK: Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world. Also it would affect what happened in India, of course, which in turn has an effect on the Middle East. Just as it would have, everybody felt, a very adverse effect. It would have an effect on Indonesia, hundred million population. All of those countries would be affected by the fall of Vietnam to the Communists.

MARTIN: There was never any consideration given to pulling out?

RFK: No.

MARTIN: … The president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there …

RFK: Yes.

MARTIN: … And couldn’t lose it.

RFK: Yes.

These remarks are rather instructive from several points of view:

1. Robert Kennedy contradicts the many people who are convinced that, had he lived, JFK would have brought the US involvement in Vietnam to a fairly prompt end, instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years. The author, Stoll, quotes a few of these people. And these other statements are just as convincing as RFK’s statements presented here. And if that is not confusing enough, Stoll then quotes RFK himself in 1967 speaking unmistakably in support of the war.

   It appears that we’ll never know with any kind of certainty what would have happened if JFK had not been assassinated, but I still go by his Cold War record in concluding that US foreign policy would have continued along its imperial, anti-communist path. In Kennedy’s short time in office the United States unleashed many different types of hostility, from attempts to overthrow governments and suppress political movements to assassination attempts against leaders and actual military combat; with one or more of these occurring in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, British Guiana, Iraq, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil.

2. “Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world.”

   Ah yes, a vital part of the world. Has there ever been any part of the world, or any country, that the US has intervened in that was not vital? Vital to American interests? Vital to our national security? Of great strategic importance? Here’s President Carter in his 1980 State of the Union Address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America”.

   “What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.” – Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher

3. If the US lost Vietnam “everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.”

   As I once wrote:

   Thus it was that the worst of Washington’s fears had come to pass: All of Indochina – Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – had fallen to the Communists. During the initial period of US involvement in Indochina in the 1950s, John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower and other American officials regularly issued doomsday pronouncements of the type known as the “Domino Theory”, warning that if Indochina should fall, other nations in Asia would topple over as well. In one instance, President Eisenhower listed no less than Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia amongst the anticipated “falling dominos”.

   Such warnings were repeated periodically over the next decade by succeeding administrations and other supporters of US policy in Indochina as a key argument in defense of such policy. The fact that these ominous predictions turned out to have no basis in reality did not deter Washington officialdom from promulgating the same dogma up until the 1990s about almost each new world “trouble-spot”, testimony to their unshakable faith in the existence and inter-workings of the International Communist Conspiracy.

Killing suicide

Suicide bombers have become an international tragedy. One can not sit in a restaurant or wait for a bus or go for a walk downtown, in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or Russia or Syria and elsewhere without fearing for one’s life from a person walking innocently by or a car that just quietly parked nearby. The Pentagon has been working for years to devise a means of countering this powerful weapon.

As far as we know, they haven’t come up with anything. So I’d like to suggest a possible solution. Go to the very source. Flood selected Islamic societies with this message: “There is no heavenly reward for dying a martyr. There are no 72 beautiful virgins waiting to reward you for giving your life for jihad. No virgins at all. No sex at all.”

Using every means of communication, from Facebook to skywriting, from billboards to television, plant the seed of doubt, perhaps the very first such seed the young men have ever experienced. As some wise anonymous soul once wrote:

A person is unambivalent only with regard to those few beliefs, attitudes and characteristics which are truly universal in his experience. Thus a man might believe that the world is flat without really being aware that he did so – if everyone in his society shared the assumption. The flatness of the world would be simply a “self-evident” fact. But if he once became conscious of thinking that the world is flat, he would be capable of conceiving that it might be otherwise. He might then be spurred to invent elaborate proofs of its flatness, but he would have lost the innocence of absolute and unambivalent belief.

We have to capture the minds of these suicide bombers. At the same time we can work on our own soldiers. Making them fully conscious of their belief, their precious belief, that their government means well, that they’re fighting for freedom and democracy, and for that thing called “American exceptionalism”. It could save them from committing their own form of suicide.

Paid Hypocrites

Most “NGOs” fomenting regime-changes and color-coded revolutions, promoting “pride marches” and similar “human rights issues,” are in reality Western (mostly U.S.) funded conspiracies pursuing the agenda of their paymasters. That much has been known for years, but in recent days we have witnessed a particularly egregious example of their politically-motivated duplicity.

On December 17 Egypt’s military-backed government filed additional criminal charges against former president Mohamed Morsi, accusing him of being a party to a major terrorist plot that involved killing demonstrators and leaking state secrets to Iran. The authorities described the case against Morsi and several of his close advisors as the biggest of its kind in Egyptian history. Prosecutors additionally accused the former Muslim Brotherhood leader of having made illegal arrangements with the Hezbollah in Iran, with Hamas in Gaza, and with extremists whose goal is to establish an Islamic emirate in Sinai. The scheme allegedly involved smuggling arms into the country and arranging for Brotherhood activists to obtain military training from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Revolutionary Guards in Iran.

Human rights groups were quick to condemn the charges, calling them preposterous “because of their vast scale and complexity,” The New York Times reported a day later. “They are pretty fantastical, to say the least,” the NYT duly quoted one Sarah Leah Whitson, the North African Programs Director for Human Rights Watch, as saying of the accusations. “Through both legal processes and their control of the media, the government has been trying to generate this notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization carrying out violent acts, with the absence of any evidence, and these charges really underscore the extent to which the government is focused on exterminating the Muslim Brotherhood as a political opposition. It is an all-out campaign to destroy it.” Two weeks earlier, the same HRW official complained that the military in Egypt was illegally holding members of Morsi’s government in secret locations.

By contrast, the arrest, trial, and sentencing of hundreds of Turkish military officers on dozens of far more preposterous charges in recent years has passed almost unnoticed in the Western media, and was barely commented upon by the “human rights community.” They were accused of involvement in the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer plots, dating back to 2003-4. The result was the largest show trial ever in the non-Communist world. The charges, too, were worthy of Moscow 1937.

The Sledgehammer plot, the government alleged, was a military conspiracy which should have included bombings of historic mosques in Istanbul, an attack on a museum, and the provocation of military tensions with neighboring Greece, including air attacks on Greek islands by Turkish planes. Such acts of terrorism and outright military aggression were supposedly designed to plunge Turkey into utter chaos and provide an opportunity for the military to step in and remove the Islamist AKP government from power.

The Sledgehammer was connected to the earlier Ergenekon conspiracy, supposedly the Mother of All Plots, the mega-conspiracy in which the “Deep State”—a shadowy coalition of senior military officers, the intelligence services, the judiciary, and organized crime—allegedly planned terrorist attacks to foment unrest, also leading to a military takeover. Arch-secular nationalists, the prosecutors said, had been in bed with the Maoist PKK, the extreme-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party, the Islamist Hizbullah and Milli Görüþ, the ultranationalist Turkish Revenge Brigades, the Turkish Workers’ and Peasants’ Liberation Army, and the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Turkey.

Prime Minister Erdogan and other AKP leaders provided political support for the prosecutions. There were countless inconsistencies in the accusations, however. Dozens of entities—hospitals, NGOs, companies, and even military units—were referred to by names or acronyms which they acquired many years after the dates cited, in some cases as late as August 2009. The Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases were no “cases” at all, but a brazen attempt by the AKP regime to neutralize Turkey’s once-powerful military once and for all. The government’s specific objective was to discredit the officer corps, and thus facilitate the abolition of the Army’s traditional role as the guardian of the country’s secular political system.

In 2012, after what amounted to a show trial, over 300 of the 365 “Sledgehammer” suspects were sentenced to prison terms, and 34 suspects were acquitted. (The case is being appealed.) On 5 August 2013, final verdicts were announced in the Ergenekon case. A dozen “consecutive” or “aggravated” life sentences were passed, as well as over two hundred lengthy prison sentences. Only 21 of the 275 defendants were acquitted. All told, 640 were charged, 55 acquitted—impressive even by Soviet standards.

In view of its concern for Morsi and his cohorts, the reaction from Human Rights Watch to the spectacle in Turkey could not have been more different. In 2009, with the trial just starting, it announced that the Ergenekon case “gives Turkey a chance to make clear that it will hold security forces accountable for abuse, but that can only happen if the investigation follows the evidence wherever—and to whomever—it leads.” It did not comment on the course of the trial or the sentences. Remarkably, it did not comment on the “Sledgehammer Case” charges, trial, or sentences at all.

As for The New York Times, last August 6 it commented that “the Ergenekon trial played an important role in efforts to lay to rest a history of military meddling in democratic politics. Much of Turkey’s modern history has been dominated by a secularist military-bureaucratic alliance that regularly derailed the democratic process when confronted with governments or political movements that threatened its political control.” “Some saw the trial as no more than a witch hunt by the governing A.K.P. against its political opponents,” it noted curtly, and added, in sorrow more than anger, that an opportunity was missed “to prove those critics wrong by ensuring a scrupulous commitment to fairness throughout the process.”

As it happens, the Open Society Foundation—belonging to that noted philanthropist George Soros—is the primary donor of the Human Rights Watch, contributing $100 million of $128 million of contributions and grants received by the HRW in the 2011 financial year. And The New York Times is the flagship of America’s journalism.

UNRWA’s Bitter Winter Solstice

Damascus – It is Winter Solstice in the Levant. This is the day which astronomically marks the reversal of the gradual lengthening of nights and shortening of days—a day which, since ancient times, has been celebrated with festivals, gatherings, rituals, feasting, singing, dancing and bonfires. Historically it has been viewed as a significant annual event because communities were not certain of living through the winter and had to prepare during the previous nine months for dramatic rises in starvation, communicable diseases, and infant deaths due to hypothermia. For this reason, and because such deaths were particularly common, the first months of winter became known as “the famine months” in the northern hemisphere.

Preparing for a tough next few months is what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is doing these days, and the UN specialized agency is working in the face of daunting odds. UNWRA was founded in 1949, and for more than 60 years it has been plagued by harassments, intimidation, and countless conspiracies to close it down, efforts waged by the international Zionist lobby and designed to “put it out of its misery” as Prime Minister Netanyahu recently demanded from the US Congress.

UNRWA has a regional headquarters in Beirut, opposite the Shatila Camp, and one in Damascus, on Mezzah Boulevard, where this observer is a regular visitor these days and where talk often inevitably centers upon the grim link between the Syrian crisis and the conditions of over half a million Palestinian refugees living in 57 UNRWA camps. Other major concerns for UNRWA are the nearly one million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war, as well as the more than one million refugees in Gaza suffering from climatic conditions exacerbated by the brutal Zionist occupation of Palestine.

The UNRWA Syria Regional Crisis Response Plan for 2014, published this week, sets out the agency’s hoped-for projects to strengthen the resilience of Palestine refugees, and to help them weather the current dangers of frigid temperatures and lack of heat and sanitation. This winter solstice the outlook for Palestine refugees from Syria is increasingly bleak in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, as communities, livelihoods, assets and support networks, painstakingly built over decades, are being destroyed.

Displacement among Palestinians is proportionally much higher than that of Syrians, and the threats to safe refuge in Syria, combined with severely restricted options for flight, has confronted Palestine refugees with unprecedented challenges. UNRWA emergency assistance is normally delivered as part of its well-established programs in health, education, community development, microfinance, relief, youth training and employment. Delivered by Palestinian staff, this support is a critical cornerstone, fostering resilience and continuity for both communities and families, in the face of growing hardship. Of the 540,000 Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA in Syria, about 270,000 are displaced within the country, and an estimated 85,000 have fled. Fifty-one thousand of these have reached Lebanon, 11,000 have identified themselves in Jordan, 5,000 are in Egypt, and smaller numbers have reached Gaza, Turkey and farther afield. Those who have managed to land in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt face risky legal limbos compounded with living conditions so difficult that many decide to return to the dangers of Syria.

Financial support to UNRWA has not kept pace with an increased demand for services caused by expanding need, deepening poverty, and the growing numbers of registered refugees. As a result, the agency’s general fund, which supports UNRWA’s core activities and is 97 percent reliant on voluntary contributions, begins each year with a large projected deficit. UNRWA officials cite an immediate need for US$417.4 million to respond adequately to the needs of Palestinian refugees in Syria; US$90.4 million for those in Lebanon; and US$14.6 for the ones in Jordan. An additional US$2.4 million is required for emergency response needs outside the purview of the UNRWA’s field offices, including token cash assistance for Palestinian families from Syria in Gaza.

Winter storm Alexa, the fiercest storm to hit Gaza and the West Bank in over 100 years, is still wreaking havoc and bringing misery to thousands. As of 12/19/13, some 40,000 people in Gaza have been driven from their homes due to extreme flooding. The situation has been exacerbated by the fuel crisis that has left people without power for up to 21 hours a day and forced raw sewage to flow through the streets. People’s lives and health are at grave risk. Gaza’s Hamas government said 4,306 in all had been evacuated to schools and other centers used as makeshift shelters in the past four days. The strip’s 1.8 million people, trying to survive in one of the most densely populated tracts on earth, have also endured blackouts of around 12 hours a day since the lone power plant was switched off last month due to a fuel shortage. The territory lacks much basic civil infrastructure and lives under an Egyptian-Israeli blockade curbing imports of fuel, building supplies and basic goods. Moreover, reports from UNRWA staff indicate that conditions are worsening due to severe Israeli restrictions on the camps. For instance, emergency responders cannot reconnect power lines downed due to the heavy snow, and the populace has little access to basic necessities such as running water. The crisis is deepening, and the problems are similar in virtually all of the vulnerable refugee camps. People face severe power outages, while some in the West Bank also face systematic attacks by the Israeli army.

Other problems weighing heavily on UNWRA include strikes and threats of strikes by UNWRA employees protesting claimed low wages. Dismay has also been expressed at what is widely perceived as the UNRWA’s weak humanitarian role in Gaza, where normal, day-to-day problems are compounded by the blockade and, most recently, the flood. The workers’ union at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza continued protests this week, calling for salary increases. One Hamas official has accused UNRWA officials of receiving exorbitant salaries, charging that the agency at the same time is not up to the tasks it is assigned to do. UNWRA officials who this observer spoke with denied this, but declined any information about any UNWRA salaries.

Like many aid agencies working in Syria, the UNRWA continues to lose staff. UNRWA teacher Suzan Ghazazweh, a popular and accomplished teacher at the Abbasyyeh School in Muzeirib, was killed by shrapnel when a shell struck her home on December 2, 2013. She is the tenth UNRWA staffer killed in Syria.

Enter Professor Alan Dershowitz!

Adding to UNWRA’s myriad problems is the fact that Professor Alan Dershowitz for some reason chose this winter solstice to retire after 46 years on the job at the Harvard Law School. Within hours, if he has not already done so, Alan will depart Harvard’s hallowed halls to devote more time to his current central cause, one which arguably poses his most difficult challenge—“saving Israel from itself and from UNWRA!” as he told a Harvard Crimson stringer on background recently.

The past few years Professor Dershowitz, apparently wanting to make a strong impression on his new students, would start off the beginning of semester classes by offering them his essential view of the law. During the first or second class meeting he reportedly often made references to some of the 13 out of 15 major cases he “won” for the likes of Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Jim Bakker, Claus von Bulow and O. J. Simpson to name a few. He would explain to his classes:
“All my big cases I won on a legal technicality! Those cases were lost causes. Otherwise, why would these clients come to me? The first thing to remember as you continue your legal studies is to forget what the law says or even what the facts of a case are! American appellate courts will decide the facts and the law of a case based on what the best advocate says they are.  That’s why I win!”
To one public international law class Professor Dershowitz is reported to have sneered, “And you can forget about claims of human rights based on international law and universal standards of morality. You’ll never win s— with that malarkey.”

As he begins preparation for his “legitimization case” on behalf of the last remaining 19^th century colonial enterprise—the Zionist theft and continuing illegal occupation of Palestine—Alan, some associates claim, plans to come out swinging against the UNRWA. Throughout his teaching career, Dershowitz has been a loyal supporter, and some say main instigator, of AIPAC. Little surprise, then, that he has joined the Zionist Lobby’s more than two decades of attacks on the UNRWA, seeking to have the agency’s funding cut off. But until now, he has not been “lead attorney of record.”

One source who meets with Professor Dershowitz from time to time in Washington claims that Alan insists that UNWRA is another one of Israel’s growing number of existential threats, this because the UN agency “keeps the Palestinian refugee issue alive and allows human rights types to keep the issue of wrongful dispossession of their homes and land before the global community and with no end in sight.”

Though he makes regular trips to Israel, Alan doesn’t come around Lebanon or Syria much, and frankly this observer has only met him a couple of times. He claims to have a photographic memory and maybe that is why he doesn’t seem to cotton much to this observer. Perhaps he remembers, and even holds a grudge of some kind, from our first meeting more than a quarter century ago. On that day, Alan came to see me in my Congressional House Judiciary office in the Rayburn building. I am not sure who referred him, but only an hour earlier, my boss, Congressman John Conyers, Chairman of Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, called to give me a last minute assignment. It was simple enough, and I had done it before. Congressman Conyers wanted me to escort a visiting judicial official from another country, in this case the chief justice from Egypt’s highest court, across the lawn from Rayburn for a meeting at the Supreme Court with our CJ, Warren Burger. An easy enough assignment it was, because Burger invariably was pleasant, with a southern style aura of gentility about him, but fifteen minutes before the Egyptian CJ was due to join me, an intense, smallish, fast-talking guy shows up, announces he is from the Harvard Law School, and must join “the Egyptian” during his meeting with Burger. Frankly it did not matter much to me one way or the other, but I did call my supervisor, Hayden Gregory, for advice. Basically his reply was, “Not a chance! No way!” Only later did I learn Alan had rubbed Hayden the wrong way over proposed “federal determinate sentencing guidelines,” an issue before our committee at the time.

Long story short, Alan would not take no for an answer. When I made it clear he was not invited and could not join the meeting he became angry and stormed off.

He may still remember, but with me it was not personal, and in any event all this is by way of saying that UNWRA had better baton down its hatches because they have more problems coming their way than they realize or are ready for.

Inside Emergency Damascene Shelters

Al Zahera neighborhood, south Damascus…

This brief update is not focused on the ever deteriorating grave conditions of Palestinians and Syrians displaced and often trapped inside dangerous areas in Damascus, where this observer had been visiting some of the 24 former Damascus public schools currently being used as shelters.

Rather it seeks to highlight the esprit de corps, solidarity, resistance, and good will among  Palestinians here is Damascus who were forced from Yarmouk and other camps and how they are huddled and preparing for a harsh winter which one senses these frigid nights is not far off.

This is not to gainsay that every shelter is a very fragile social existence for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) as aid agencies here refer to them. In the former schools there is no mazot (fuel oil) currently available to fire-up the furnaces and the among the needs at all the shelters are for “high-thermal” blankets, food, medicines  winters clothe and shoes and knitted caps for the kids trekking early in the morning to government schools in the neighborhoods.

Thanks to the continuing cooperation between the Syrian government, particularly the Ministry of Education (MOE), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) many former public schools have been made available as emergency shelters.  Additionally, the MOE has created double shift in many schools   offering youngster a 7 a.m. to noon shift followed by a noon to 5 p.m. shift.

Prior to the armed conflict in Syria, Yarmouk, a suburb just south of Damascus city, was home to over 160,000 Palestine refugees. In December 2012 and in the months since, armed conflict has caused at least 140,000 Palestine refugees to flee their homes in Yarmouk, as armed opposition groups established a presence in the area, with government forces controlling the periphery. Between December 2012 and June 2013, civilians could still access UNRWA assistance at the Zahera entrance to Yarmouk. However, from mid-July 2013, Palestine thousands of refugees have been trapped in the area, with little or no access to shops or freedom of movement.

At among the 4 school-shelters in south Damascus near Yarmouk camp and the 8 in the nearby neighbored of al-Vvahra, some of which this observer visited, “The Fayadeen”  elementary public school currently houses 56 families- half of them Palestinians totaling 260 people. At “Fayadeen” there is a clean large make-shift kitchen where

approximately half a dozen families use at one time based on a schedule.  The Syrian government and some NGO often deliver emergency food packages—most designed to feed a family of five for 15 days.  “Fayadeeen” school also has a heavy duty Italian electric washing machine donated by a Palestinian businessman and which is shared by all. There is a high level of sanitation and sheds housing toilet are clean.  Three times a week medical teams arrive to administer free government health care.  US sanctions have cut off some urgently needed medicines, particularly for cancer patients and cases where weekly doses of medicines are required but often only monthly doses are now available. Shelter rules are enforced. For example, if a family does not enroll their 6-15 year old children in local public schools they are evicted. This observer was briefed at length and shown around by two Syrian professions basketball players on the National team, Hani and Mohamad who have placed their careers and family life on hold to manage four school shelters in a south Damascus.

Several Palestinians in the school shelters have been asking this observer if he has news about their countrymen still trapped inside Yarmouk.  There is of increasing concern because their families report that desperately needed humanitarian assistance is still not able to be not delivered nor have repeatedly promised “humanitarian corridors” opened, This despite and despite UNRWA’s numerous appeals and efforts, 32,000 Palestinian civilians and others who remain trapped in Yarmouk have had little or no freedom of movement or access to humanitarian assistance and in addition to facing death and serious injury from the armed conflict, Yarmouk’s civilian residents are exposed to psychological trauma, malnutrition and a lack of health care. The UN Security Council’s Presidential Statement on the humanitarian situation on Syria adopted on 2 October, 2013, among other stipulations called on all parties to grant full humanitarian access and “to comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law.”

Hope among the more than 100,000 refugees displaced from Yarmouk camp rises and sinks with on again off again announcements that militia will leave the camp to civilian Palestinian administration. Just this week a claimed settlement involving intense negotiation mediated by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to end the fighting in Yarmouk camp suffered collapsed, after opposition fighters close to Hamas insisted that they be included among the groups that will subsequently manage the affairs of the camp. PLO officials had recently arrived at a preliminary agreement with the various Palestinian factions and opposition armed groups that would lead to a ceasefire but excluded Hamas and the PFLP-General Command led by Ahmed Jabril. Within 72 hours another and still showing life signs, another proposal was announced on 11/22/13. Under the terms of this “agreement”

Palestinian Popular Struggle Front Khaled Abdul Majid , that “the armed groups in the Yarmouk camp aka  the“Palestinian Resistance Alliance factions” would be withdrawing from the camp “very soon”. In statements to Al-Watan, Abdul Majid said: “What is happening in Yarmouk is that most of the armed factions have reestablished contact with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – The General Command, as well as the factions of the Palestine Resistance Alliance, after the initiative of the Palestine Liberation Organization (to solve the camp’s crisis) failed. These factions thus expressed their willingness to regulate their situation, handle the issue and withdraw from the camp.” He continued that the discussions with these groups were conducted via mediators, or in some cases through contacts with some of them.

This observer has witnessed the fact that since 11/17/13 almost complete calm has been prevailing over Yarmouk.  Services teams from the Palestine Aid Committee have been cleaning the camp’s streets and removing the dirt mounds.  This observer has been invited inside Yarmouk to witness this process. Government permission is required and date of entrance is not fixed.

Some refugees from Yarmouk  are hopeful but during interviews the past two days most expressed  doubt that this latest initiative will succeed any more than the previous dozen.  The coming few days will provide the answer.

Palpable fear is also evident because of the fast approaching winter with rumors of severe cold this year, A condition that will be much more severe among the 250 camps in the nearby Lebanese Bekaa valley particularly for the  25 plastic wall and roof  make-shift tents in  25 emergency refugee camps that are particularly flood-prone and shared by Syrian and Palestinian refugees.

Our brother and sisters keeper…

Hopefully subsequent updates on the Palestinian condition in Syra will allow for rather more detail regarding many examples of Palestinians helping Palestinians regarding community assistance to their sisters and brothers.  But a brief example about a wonderful family is fixed in this observers mind.

It relates to the Khalid al Jrahi family from Haifa now living in “Taher al Jazari” public school shelter.  Mr. al Jrahi granted permission to this observer to use his name publicly because he wants friends and relatives with whom he has lost contact since the events of December 17, 2013 which leveled some of his neighborhood in Yarmouk, to know that his family is alive and relatively well.

What a spectacular family.  Including five teen-aged and early 20’s girls and two boys. What deeply impressed this observer is the esprit among these sisters, their charisma, charm and dedication to helping others among the approximately 260 refugees sharing the school while eschewing complaints about the own plight.  The Al Jrahi family lives in a space probably ten feet wide and 20 feet long. Foam mattresses are neatly stacked along the walls and pillows and clothing stacked in the corners.  A clothes line runs along one side of the room which is walled by an UNHCR white and blue lettered plastic tarp separating their neighbors.  Shocking?  Yes, but inspiring certainly.  The girls, whose English is quite good explained why and how they set up a school for pre-K’s in this and one other shelter.  How organized it is. They showed me the ‘teaching manual’ they wrote and explained how they run their schools with occasionally donated pencils and crayons and notebooks for thee tots donated by a Palestinian NGO’s or even foreign visitors.

We did not discuss politics but two of the sisters reminded me of  Jane Austen’s character Eleanor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. Hala is the sensible and reserved eldest of al Jrahi family daughters. She is in charge of the lesson plans for the informal ‘sisters schools’ in the shelter and carefully instructs her younger impetuous Zeina on school rules for the children, trying to keep her  attention and her younger sister focused. Hala showed this observer her English grammar notes that she in learning from a tattered UNWRA grammar book. She points to her perfect cursive hand written notes and asks me about “present participles”, “dangling modifiers” and “past perfect tense”!  When I last even heard these terms it was half a century ago and I have no idea what the even mean– if I ever did which is questionable.

Her younger sister Zeina is all Austen’s character Marianne, and refuses to check her emotions and dramatically insists that she is ready to return to Yarmouk “despite the dangers even if I am killed going back home!”  Her mother Fatima grimaces and Hala is disapproving when Zeina insists that she should teach the children dancing in the street outside the closed in-shelter as well as tree climbing so they “can properly express themselves under the sky.”

Rather wistful and not wanting to leave this family or the shelter, this observer and his companion left the wonderful Al Jrahi family wondering if Ms. Sense or Ms. Sensibility would triumph or if these two remarkable sisters in fact constituted a good balance to one another as they serve their fellow countrymen in emergency shelters.

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