Saturday 27 March 2010

US Softens Sanction Plan Against Iran

US Softens Sanction Plan Against Iran

WSJ, Via the RFI/ here

The all-too-predictable dynamics surrounding a potential new Iran sanctions resolution in the United Nations Security Council continue to play out just as we have anticipated. As some commentators are leaping on media stories that one of China’s diplomats took part in a P-5+1 conference call yesterday about a possible resolution, The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Obama Administration is already backing away from a number of the “tougher” measures that it originally included in the current draft resolution, primarily to maximize chances for winning Russian support and Chinese acquiescence (at least) for a watered-down resolution. According to the WSJ,
“Among key provisions removed from the original draft resolution the U.S. sent to key allies last month were sanctions aimed at choking off Tehran’s access to international banking services and capital markets, and closing international airspace and waters to Iran’s national air cargo and shipping lines…The cargo sanctions initially named Iran Air and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines and demand a blanket ban of their airplanes and ships from other countries’ airspace or territorial waters.”
As the WSJ points out, these measures “would have made it difficult for Iran to insure imports and exports of oil and other essential commodities, by barring foreign insurers from serving international transport contracts from Iran.” Other provisions deleted from the original draft text would “have barred Iran’s access to international capital markets by prohibiting foreign investment in Iranian bonds.”
According to the WSJ, the current draft still contains a prohibition against states offering financial assistance or credits for trade with Iran as well as a comprehensive international arms embargo against Iran. Furthermore, the current draft contains provisions specifically targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In particular, the current draft
“would force an international freeze on the assets of the entire Revolutionary Guard and ‘any individuals or entities acting on their behalf or at their direction,’ and on ‘entities owned or controlled by them, including through illicit means’…If enforced, the proposed sanctions could force the Revolutionary Guard to divest itself of some holdings to prevent major disruptions in the economy. The Revolutionary Guard’s affiliation with the country’s telecom operator, for example, could prompt foreign partners to stop connecting international calls.”
We would anticipate that some, if not all of these provisions would be watered-down or perhaps even eliminated before a final text of a new sanctions resolution could move ahead. Obama Administration officials remain relatively confident that they can win Russia’s support for a new sanctions resolution, but they will almost certainly have to give up more on the extent and rigor of the specific measures included in the resolution to guarantee Moscow’s backing. Russia, for example, has consistently insisted that proposals for an international arms embargo against the Islamic Republic be excluded from previous sanctions resolutions. Getting Beijing to abstain, at least, is essential for any resolution to move forward—and that, too, is likely to require more concessions on substance from Washington and its European partners. It seems unlikely that China (or even Russia, for that matter) would ultimately endorse a blanket prohibition on dealing with the Revolutionary Guard and U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey’s “hit list” of Revolutionary Guard affiliates and asset holdings—including in the Islamic Republic’s all-important energy sector.
And, of course, the United States and its European partners continue to face an uphill battle to get Brazil and Turkey (two of the Security Council’s most important rotating members) to support a new sanctions resolution against Iran. But this, too, will be necessary to get to what Obama Administration officials identify as their goal of a 14-1 vote in New York in favor of additional sanctions. (The Administration privately acknowledges that Lebanon is unlikely to do more than abstain.)
Looking ahead, the most probable endgame will play out along the lines we have anticipated: the United States and its European partners will get a new sanctions resolution, but it will be greatly watered-down from the measures they originally proposed. Moreover, the Obama Administration is likely to fall short of its goal of a 14-1 vote in the Council, which will mean that this resolution will be passed by a more divided Security Council than any of the three previous sanctions resolutions adopted against Iran. And, it’s much more likely to be June, rather than April, before we get there.
So what, exactly, is all of this going to do to advance U.S. interests? In an article this week in Time, Tony Karon recounts Secretaryy of State Hillary Clinton’s pledge to “prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” Reviewing the state of play on international sanctions, Karon then argues that,
“The actual level of progress on the Iran sanctions front, however, has not yet caught up with Clinton’s tough talk — and there’s little sign that any of the pressure being mustered will realistically stop Iran from slowly acquiring the means to create a nuclear bomb (though the U.S. believes Tehran has not yet decided to actually build such weapons).”
Posted by G, Z, or B at 6:59 PM
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Six years and sixty years.


Frustrated Arab's Diary

http://www.minnesotamajority.org/Portals/0/images/ObamaCare.jpg

Dr. O´bama , MD


About 30 million American citizens
shall now also be covered by a Health Insurance
as from now on.

That is as much people as the whole population
of Iraq and Palestine and it was delayed untill now
mainly for the financial-burdon.

But......!!

If there were  no invasion of Iraq
the USA could have afforded this health insurance
six years ago

And.....

If there were no State of Israel
the USA could have afforded  this total health insurance
sixty years ago.


Never mind my comparative- sarcasm.
I congratulate the American-government and Congress ,
because they both have just started resembling
to the human-goverments of Europe.

My Dutch-health- insurance pays even my Taxi
to and from my Doctor 
or pays even my parking-fees if I use my car.
It is because the Netherlands does not "export democracies"
and it has also stopped colonialism since 1975.(Suriname)



Sherlock Hommos
A doctor each day , keeps the revolutions away !!
Posted by Тлакскала at 3:16 PM
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Have a Nice World War, Folks

Via Silver Lining

Posted on March 26, 2010 by realistic bird

by Khaled Qataa'
By John Pilger

March 25, 2010 “Information Clearing House” – Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.

Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.

Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent.”

This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a “partner”. We should interrupt their fun.
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Sharon's 'man': "Netanyahu should have taken into account the change within the American Jewish community,"

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

Haaretz/ here
"Changes" not recognized by Netanyahu in both Washington & Ramallah ... a MESS report in
"... Now, the U.S. is finally putting this demand into effect. Moreover, Netanyahu must also recognize the changing reality on the Palestinian side. Until 2004, the Palestinian Authority was led by Yasser Arafat, who was perceived by the Americans and Europeans as a terrorist. Now, the Palestinian leaders are viewed in Washington and within the EU as true partners in the peace process and in the effort to create a Palestinian state. It is Israel's leaders - specifically Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Likud Minister Benny Begin and Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon - who are far from being perceived in that way. In the past, the U.S. saw settlement construction as a "stick" used to deter Palestinian terror, but today it is viewed as an obstacle. .......

"Netanyahu should have taken into account the change within the American Jewish community," Dov Weisglass, a senior adviser to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told the MESS Report. "Their support for Israel is decreasing and they will defend Israel in the face of the administration only on matters where there is a real threat to Israel. I have serious doubt that U.S. Jews see the Netanyahu government's territorial aspirations in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and the Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem as an existential matter." ..........

There was something extremely pretentious about Netanyahu's speech at the AIPAC policy conference in Washington. He descended upon the American capital and, on the eve of his meeting with the U.S. president, emerged with a display of power (and an impressive one at that) in declaring that Jerusalem is not a settlement. As expected, his speech was met with a harsh but proportionate response from Obama. To add to his transgressions, Netanyahu insisted on meeting Obama without any real preparation for such high-level talks.


Obama's reaction is not a result of his victory in passing health care reform. The American president doesn't need to be strong to offend an Israeli prime minister over a matter such as settlements. And despite the hopes of some in Israel, it doesn't appear that the U.S. Jewish community will go out of its way to defend Israel on the settlement issue either.
"The current Israeli government, which was founded on different guiding political principles and does not recognize the Road Map, essentially abandoned the doctrine outlined in Bush's letter. Israel brought the subject of settlement construction back to square one - and the Americans obliged them by returning to their default stance that Israel cease building beyond the Green Line."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 3:10 PM
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Awarta defies IOF decision turning the village into closed military zone


PIC

[ 27/03/2010 - 10:20 AM ]

NABLUS, (PIC)-- Hundreds of Palestinian citizens from the village of Awarta, southeast of Nablus, participated in a peaceful silent march in protest at the crimes of killing two boys from the village days ago at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) and settlers.

The villagers marched from the central area of their village towards its eastern side near the settlement of Itamar, where two children under age 18 from the family of Qawarik were killed by Israeli settlers.

Israel had claimed then that its troops killed the boys after they tried to stab soldiers in an attempt to cover up the responsibility of settlers.

The villagers challenged the Israeli decision to consider the area a closed military zone, and reached the area where the two young victims were killed and confirmed their determination to resist the Israeli occupation until it leaves their village.

River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Samson and the 2nd Nakba - A Short Study of the Jewish Hercules By Gilad Atzmon

As much as many of us enjoyed watching the humiliation of Israel and PM Netanyahu in Washington this week, I am reluctant to suggest that the emerging crisis between America and Israel may also be a red light warning for all of us. The current crisis may lead to some devastating consequences as far as Palestine, Iran and the Middle East are concerned.

“Netanyahu and Obama are at a point of no return” claims Haaretz writer Akiva Eldar. “As far as President Barack Obama and his senior advisers are concerned, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame for nothing less than damaging the standing of the U.S. in the Middle East and the Muslim world.”
It may be possible that the Americans have started to gather that there is no partner for peace in Israel. America clearly has had to shun its ‘kosher ally’. The American military and political elite already admitted this week that Israel is a strategic burden on the U.S. Seemingly, the only people who genuinely believe in the American Israel strategic bond are AIPAC and its list of obedient ‘Sabbath Congressmen Goyim’. But unfortunately, this is just one side of the story.

A deeper reading of recent events would suggest that the latest American Israeli rift is actually led by Netanyahu’s political partners. Interestingly enough, as much as America reveals growing disapproval of Israeli policy, the anti American attitude, demonstrated by Netanyahu’s allies at home, is overwhelming. It doesn’t take a genius to grasp that some of Netanyahu’s cabinet members are doing everything in their power to fire up a storm between Israel and its ‘closest ally’.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai, the man behind decisions that sparked the recent diplomatic crisis, said this week 'Israelis voted for this government's path, according to which, there will be no compromises on (the) Jerusalem issue'. He also used the opportunity to thank his creator for giving him “the right to be the minister who approves the construction of thousands of housing units in Jerusalem". Along with his latest disastrous visit to Washington, PM Netanyahu found time to consult with his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. According to Ynet, Lieberman advised his PM “not to capitulate in face of American pressure”.

I guess that most political analysts fail to understand the depth of the Israeli right wing expansionist and racist conviction. Unlike Sharon, Peres, Livni, Rabin, Olmert, Barak and even Netanyahu himself, who along the years, paid a limited respect to the West and the US in particular, Netanyahu’s cabinet is dominated by right wing Zionist hawks. They follow David Ben Gurion’s old mantra: “it doesn't matter what the Goyim (Gentiles) say, the only thing that matters is what the Jews do”. Netanyahu’s political partners are not willing to compromise or acquiesce to American conditions.

Netanyahu’s political allies are convinced that at least momentarily they will do better without Uncle Sam. They realise that the days of the ‘Jew-only state’ are numbered unless some radical moves are put into action. They grasp that unless the Jewish state implements measures that would push the entire Palestinian population out of Israel, the Zionist dream will come to its end and pretty soon.

Those hawks also realise that once Iran gets a hold of a nuclear capacity, Israel’s ability to maintain its status as a ‘regional terror-inflicting power’, would disappear overnight. Netanyahu’s cabinet members grasp that if Israel wants to survive as a Jewish ethnocracy and a regional super power, Israel must confront Iran soon and ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population, in an act that will complete the objectives of the 1948 Nakba. Israeli hawks who currently dominate Netanyahu’s government and Israeli politics realise that a bond with America can only restrict and even jeopardize their sinister plans for the region.

It is obviously hard to predict Israel’s next move. However it is crucial to remember that at the heart of the Zionist collective narrative we find Biblical stories like that of Samson, a tale of a suicidal genocidal character. Samson is the Jewish Hercules. He was granted some tremendous strength by God to combat the Jew’s enemies and to perform some ‘heroic’ feats unachievable by ordinary humans. He wrestles a lion, he slays an entire army with only a donkey’s jawbone and eventually when the time is ripe, he commits mass murder. Single handedly he crushes a Philistine temple killing thousands, including the elderly, women, children and himself.
I do not know whether Lieberman regards himself to be the new Samson. Looking at his recent picture, he is probably not fit enough to fight a lion. However, the genocidal tendency together with suicidal inclination is absolutely there.

"... Lest one think the Israelis might lay low for awhile ..."

Via friday-lunch-club

Jeff Stein now at the WaPo/SpyTalk-Blog/here

".... Odd, for a business that’s supposed to stay out of the news. Then again, that’s been the fate of spy services in recent years. A lot of what they do, from espionage and bribery to counterterrorism and hacking into computers, has ended up on the front page.....
But another of Mossad’s reason for being, as with all the world's spy services, is to make sure friends are really friends.
And judging by once sensitive FBI documents making the rounds in recent days, the Israelis have been at this task in Washington for a very long time.
The 21 documents, obtained by Grant F. Smith, a Washington, D.C. author who has made a career out of writing critical books on Israeli spying and lobbying, detail the FBI’s investigation into the theft of a confidential U.S. document on the Reagan administration’s position going into the 1984 U.S.-Israel Free Trade Area Negotiations.
Acting on a complaint that the document was circulating on Capitol Hill, the FBI discovered that an Israeli diplomat had acquired the paper and given it to officials at AIPAC, the lobbying group whose annual convention drew both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week.
Although the document was classified only “confidential” (as opposed to Secret, Top Secret and higher), the FBI concluded that President Reagan’s “negotiating position concerning a trade agreement between the United States and the State of Israel is compromised because this report divulges those products and industries that have been identified by the International Trade Commission as being the most sensitive to imports from Israel."
U.S. trade officials were furious at the discovery, “most angered by the fact that the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had apparently attempted to influence members of Congress with the use of a purloined copy of the ITC report and had usurped their authority,” the FBI reported at the time.
Its investigation quickly hit a brick wall, however, when the Israeli embassy official who handled the stolen goods, identified as then-Minister of Economics Dan Halpern by Grant Smith in his 2009 book “Spy Trade,” claimed diplomatic immunity. “He indicated that he received this information in his official capacity as a diplomat, and that it would be against the principals of diplomatic work to divulge any information pertaining to the identity of the individual who provided him the report," the FBI reported.
Because the man claimed diplomatic immunity,"active investigation into this matter will be discontinued at WFO [Washington Field Office],” the FBI said. “Washington Field will be contacted by the USTR or the ITC if pertinent information is developed regarding this or similar incidents."
In his March 13, 1986 interview with the FBI, Halpern said "he received this information in his official capacity as a diplomat and that it would be against the principles of diplomatic work to divulge any information on the identity of the individual who gave him the report."
In any event, he told the agents, the report was all over town, and that "the Government of Israel did not ask to receive the report and stated that when the individual provided him with the report, the transaction was not conducted in a discreet or secretive manner."
Halpern is now on the executive committee of the America-Israel Chamber of Commerce in New York and the co-CEO of Iftic, a private business consultancy, according to his listing there.
But the trade-spy flap was small potatoes compared the arrest 18 months later of Jonathan Pollard, the naval intelligence analyst who passed upwards of a million pages of classified documents to his Israeli handlers, according to court documents. Under a 1987 plea agreement, Pollard is serving a life sentence.



Since then, Israeli intelligence operations here have hardly slowed. In 2005, U.S. counterspies overheard Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., agreeing to help a suspected Israeli agent lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two former AIPAC officials. Harman denied my account in Congressional Quarterly, which was subsequently corroborated by major news organizations.


Back in London, meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Miliband asserted Tuesday that “trust between [Israel and the U.K.] had been badly dented” by the Dubai passport caper and “demanded formal assurances it never happen again.”
Former Mossad agent Gad Shimron, interviewed in London by The Washington Post’s Karla Adam, said Israel would never officially admit any involvement in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
But Shimron added: "the British are hypocrites, because when they operate against al-Qaeda, they do not do it with genuine passports."
They don’t call it the “spy game” for nothing.
Posted by G, Z, or B at 10:11 AM
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

RABBINICALLY PLANNED ‘MIRACLE’ UNVEILED AT MUSLIM HOLY SITE

Via DesertPeace

March 25, 2010 at 19:37

Israel’s Provocation at al-Aqsa: Rabbi Plans ‘Miracle’

By Jonathan Cook



67aqsa_mosque_soldiers_cook.jpg





The Israeli government has indicated that it will press ahead with a plan to enlarge the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, despite warnings that the move risks triggering a third intifada.

Israeli officials rejected this week a Jerusalem court’s proposal to shelve the plan after the judge accepted that the plaza’s expansion would violate the “status quo” arrangement covering the Old City’s holy places. Islamic authorities agreed to the arrangement after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.
The site eyed by Israeli officials is located at the Mughrabi Gate, an entrance to the mosque compound known as the Haram al Sharif, the most sensitive site in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Inside are Al Aqsa Mosque and the golden-topped Dome of the Rock.
Earlier encroachments by Israel on Islamic authority at the site have triggered clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians. A heavily armed visit to the compound by Ariel Sharon in 2000, shortly before he became prime minister, to declare Israeli rights there sparked the second intifada.
In recent weeks, analysts have grown increasingly concerned that a third intifada is imminent as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has advanced settlement building in East Jerusalem and declared several places deep in the occupied West Bank as Jewish heritage sites.
Another assault on Muslim control so close to Al Aqsa Mosque risked “pouring fuel on the fire”, said Hanna Sweid, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament who filed the original planning objections to the Israeli scheme.
According to evidence presented to the Jerusalem court, Israeli officials used minor storm damage to a stone ramp leading to the Mughrabi Gate as a pretext to tear it down six years ago. The intention is to replace the ramp with a permanent metal bridge and then extend the Jewish prayer plaza into the area where the ramp was.
The scheme is the brainchild of Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, who declared the damage to the ramp in 2004 a “miracle” that had offered Israel the chance to take control of more land from Islamic authorities in the Old City.
The rabbi’s plan was approved in late 2007 by a special ministerial committee headed by Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister. The project has also won backing from Mr Netanyahu, though he froze construction work in July under orders from the Jerusalem court.
The judge, Moussia Arad, proposed in January that the ramp be reinstated, or at the very least that the bridge follow the exact route of the ramp, and that all prayer at the site be banned. That position won the backing of United Nations officials monitoring Israel’s work at the Mughrabi Gate.
The Jordanian, Turkish and Palestinian Islamic authorities have all expressed deep concern at Israeli excavations at the Mughrabi Gate that are seen as a prelude to the plaza’s expansion.
Observers had hoped that, faced with the danger of another row with the United States so soon after the diplomatic crisis sparked by Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem, Mr Netanyahu might agree to the court’s compromise.
They have been proved wrong.
“Netanyahu has a history of trampling on Palestinian rights in the Old City,” Mr Sweid said. “There is every reason to be worried about what he plans to get up to this time.”
In 1996, during his previous stint as prime minister, Mr Netanyahu opened the Western Wall tunnel, another excavation close to the mosque compound, resulting in clashes in which 75 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed.
Israel, which says the mosques sit on the ruins of two ancient Jewish temples, built by Solomon and Herod, refers to the site as Temple Mount and has staked a claim to a degree of sovereignty over the area in recent peace negotiations.
Last week, in a sign of the explosive consequences of tampering with the status quo concerning Jerusalem’s holy places, riots broke out in a “day of rage” in East Jerusalem following Israel’s announcement that it had rebuilt an old synagogue, the Hurva, close to the mosques.
“The Haram al Sharif is a site of unrivalled Muslim sensitivity and the Israeli government is playing with fire here,” said Mohammed Masalha, a lecturer who heads a coalition of Islamic groups inside Israel that brought the court case.
In evidence presented to the court, Meir Ben Dov, an Israeli archaeologist and the excavations director at the Western Wall for nearly four decades, produced photographic evidence showing that the storm had caused only a minor landslide.
“I was asked by the government to inspect the damage two days after it occurred and I found maybe a dozen stones had been dislodged,” he said. “The ramp could have been repaired in less than a week but instead they decided to demolish it.”
Judge Arad, Mr Ben Dov said, had been “shocked” when she saw the photographs.
Mr Ben Dov said his recommendation that the walkway be repaired for $14,000 was ignored by Israeli officials, including the then-tourism minister, Benny Elon, a settler rabbi who heads a far-right party. Instead the government tore down the ramp and built a temporary wooden bridge to the Mughrabi Gate while excavations were carried out in the area exposed by the ramp’s destruction.
The Jerusalem comptroller, Shulamit Rubin, the city’s watchdog official, criticised the excavations at the time, saying they were illegal because the necessary authorisations had not been sought.
The secretive nature of the excavations was widely assumed by Islamic groups to be evidence of an Israeli intention to search for parts of the destroyed temples. With such evidence, Israel would have a stronger claim to extend its control.
The unscientific approach to the excavations was highlighted in early 2007 when it emerged that three years earlier Israeli archaeologists had unearthed at the site a Muslim prayer room from the time of the Saladin, dating to the 11th century, but had kept the discovery quiet.
In February 2007, when Israel brought heavy machinery to the Mughrabi Gate excavations, hundreds of Palestinians clashed with police while the Islamic Movements within Israel staged large demonstrations. Islamic Jihad said it had fired two Qassam rockets from Gaza in response, and Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade threatened to carry out attacks if the work was not halted.
Islamic authorities also expressed fears that the compound of mosques might be damaged by the bulldozers, and that the heavy machinery might also destroy the as-yet-undiscovered Al Buraq mosque, believed to be located close to the Mughrabi Gate and marking the site where the Prophet Mohammed tethered his horse on his Night Journey between Mecca and Jerusalem.
To calm the situation, Israel allowed Turkish experts to examine the excavations a short time later. They reported that Israel was trying to sideline Jerusalem’s Islamic history so that its Jewish aspects could be emphasised.
Israel had another reason for pushing ahead with the illegal excavations, said Kais Nasser, the lawyer representing the Islamic groups. “They needed to unearth something, anything, that could be claimed as an antiquity to nullify Muslim demands for the ramp to be reinstated. Rebuilding the ramp would then be impossible because it would risk damaging an archaeological site.”
Mr Nasser said Israel hopes that if it can present the bridge as the only feasible option, then there will be no obstacles to expanding the prayer plaza.
Mr Ben Dov said he shared such suspicions about Israel’s activities at the site, adding that the goal of Israeli officials seemed to be to gain control over the whole 480-metre length of the Western Wall.
He and other observers have said this is just one more example of a long-standing policy to gradually encroach on Muslim control of the mosque compound.
Among the most significant has been the creation of the City of David, an Israeli archaeological park, directly south of Al Aqsa Mosque in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan. The site is run by Elad, an extremist settler group, that has taken over neighbouring Palestinian homes and, along with the Jerusalem municipality and government officials, is pushing for dozens more to be demolished. It eventually wants to link up the park with the Temple Mount.
Jewish settlers have also been concentrating their efforts on taking over Palestinian homes in the Muslim quarter, close to the Haram al Sharif, and have been supported by right-wing politicians, including in the past by Mr Netanyahu.
One settler organisation, Ateret Cohanim, has been especially active, and is known to be excavating under Palestinian homes around the compound in the hope of discovering traces of the temples.
“What we see here is an unholy alliance of government ministers, Jerusalem municipality officials and settler organisations trying to revive a supposed golden era of Jewish sovereignty from thousands of years ago,” Mr Sweid said.
In addition, he said, Israel believed that a more significant Israeli presence close to the mosques would strengthen its hand in any final peace talks over the division of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, with Israel able to stake a bigger claim to sovereignty over the site.
At the Camp David talks in 2000, Bill Clinton, then US president, proposed dividing sovereignty so that Israel would have control over both the “subterranean spaces” of the mosque compound and the Western Wall. During the talks Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister of the day, alarmed observers by calling the whole compound the Jewish “holy of holies”, a term previously used in referring only to the inner sanctum of the destroyed temples.
There are additional fears among Palestinians, and the wider Muslim world, of darker plots being hatched by even more extreme groups.
Although Jewish religious purity laws have traditionally forbidden Jews from entering the Temple Mount, a growing number of rabbis are demanding that Jews be allowed to pray in the compound. Even more fanatical groups are known to favour blowing up the mosques and building a third temple in their place.
The recent rebuilding of the Hurva synagogue has added to such concerns. The Israeli media reported that, according to a 300-year-old rabbinical prophecy, the synagogue’s rebuilding would herald the construction of the third temple.
A Sordid affair: The Mughrabi Quarter’s Ethnic Cleansing
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Mughrabi, or Moroccan, quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City after its capture in 1967 is one of the more sordid episodes of the 1967 war.
Until it was destroyed by Israel in 2004, the stone ramp that led to the Mughrabi Gate — one of the main entrances to the elevated compound of mosques known as the Haram al-Sharif — was the only visible reminder that the quarter, once home to 1,000 Palestinians, had ever existed.
At the end of the Six-Day war, as Israeli troops poured into the Old City, the Israeli government was presented with an opportunity not only to restore a Jewish presence to the walled city but to create a newly expanded Jewish quarter that would have the Western Wall at its centre.
Before 1948, prayer at the Wall had been possible only at several points along a narrow alley at the margins of the densely populated Moroccan quarter, an area bequeathed in the twelfth century to Saladin’s followers by his son Malik al-Afdal.
But in the immediate wake of the “miraculous” victory in 1967, the Israeli government saw the chance to create a wide prayer plaza in front of the Wall, making it the symbolic heart of an expanded Jewish state that could unite religious and secular Jews.
All that stood in their way were the quarter’s 135 homes.

On the night of 10 June, Uzi Narkiss, head of the army’s central command, authorised 15 private demolition crews to raze the quarter under cover of dark. He, like the politicians, knew that neither the international community nor the Israeli courts would consent to such a brazen violation of international law.
When Teddy Kollek, the mayor of West Jerusalem, had consulted the justice minister, he had been told: “I don’t know what the legal status is. Do it quickly and may the God of Israel be with you.”
Uzi Benziman, an Israeli journalist, described the “near-mystic” compulsion that drove those behind the act of ethnic cleansing: “The officers and the contractors considered themselves emissaries, come to renew Jewish statehood as it had been 1,897 years earlier.”
An officer went from house to house ordering the residents to evacuate. According to observers, those who refused finally fled when the walls of their homes came down. One old woman, found amid the rubble, died a short time later.
As the ruins were cleared and the ground levelled to create an expansive plaza in front of the Western Wall, the contractors were told to use the rubble from the homes to build a ramp up to the Mughrabi Gate. The gate is the only entrance to the compound for which Israel kept the key. Today it is the access point for all non-Muslim visitors, including the Israeli police.
The Western Wall and the plaza, on land that had previously fallen under the control of the Islamic authorities, was placed under the jurisdiction of the Israeli religious affairs ministry. A few days later, on the Jewish holy day of Shavuot, an estimated 200,000 Israeli Jews — one in 10 of the population — came to visit the Wall.
Although Israel had effectively annexed East Jerusalem, its leaders were still troubled by the possible international repercussions of being seen to seize control of the Old City’s holy places, especially the compound of mosques. Under a so-called “status quo” agreement, Muslim officials were supposed to continue controlling the mosque compound, with Israeli oversight.
But that did not stop the rapid emergence of a movement in Israel seeking control of the compound too. Many Jews believe the ruins of the temples of Solomon and Herod can be found under the mosques.
From the early 1970s, extremist rabbis — led by the Shlomo Goren, then the chief rabbi of Israel — began lobbying for Jews to be allowed into the compound to pray, despite traditional rabbinical rulings against such a practice.
Jewish groups soon sprang up demanding more: that the mosques be blown up to make way for a third temple that would bring nearer the arrival of the Messiah.
Since the outbreak of the second intifada, little of the status quo agreement remains. Israeli movement restrictions affecting both Gaza and the West Bank mean that today only a tiny number of Palestinians can reach the mosques. Palestinian institutions are also barred from operating inside Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, settlers and Israeli officials have encroached on more and more land around the mosque compound. At the Camp David talks with the Palestinians in 2000, Israel proposed for the first time that Jews be allowed to pray in the compound and that Israel have a degree of sovereignty over the site.
In recent years Jews have started to be escorted by Israeli police inside the compound through the Mughrabi Gate, though praying so far has not been sanctioned.
Source




River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Friday 26 March 2010

Israel and Aid



Nader.org

On July 10, 1996, at a Joint Session of the United States Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a standing ovation for these words: “With America’s help, Israel has grown to be a powerful, modern state. …But I believe there can be no greater tribute to America’s long-standing economic aid to Israel than for us to be able to say: we are going to achieve economic independence. We are going to do it. In the next four years, we will begin the long-term process of gradually reducing the level of your generous economic assistance to Israel.”

Since 1996, the American taxpayers are still sending Israel $3 billion a year and providing assorted loan guarantees, waivers, rich technology transfers and other indirect assistance. Before George W. Bush left office a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Israel stipulated an assistance package of $30 billion over the next ten years to be transferred in a lump sum at the beginning of every fiscal year. Israel’s wars and colonies still receive U.S. taxpayer monies.


What happened to Mr. Netanyahu’s solemn pledge to the Congress? The short answer is that Congress never called in the pledge.


In the intervening years, Israel has become an economic, technological and military juggernaut. Its GDP is larger than Egypt’s even though Israel’s population is less than one tenth that of the Arab world’s most populous nation. The second largest number of listings on America’s NASDAQ Exchange after U.S. companies are from Israel, exceeding listings of Japan, Korea, China and India combined. Its venture capital investments exceed those in the U.S., Europe and China on a per capita basis.


Israel is arguably the fifth most powerful military force in the world, and Israel’s claims on the U.S.’s latest weapon systems and research/development breakthroughs are unsurpassed. This combination has helped to make Israel a major arms exporter.


The Israeli “economic miracle” and technological innovations have spawned articles and a best-selling book in recent months. The country’s average GDP growth rate has exceeded the average rate of most western countries over the past five years. Israel provides universal health insurance, unlike the situation in the U.S., which raises the question of who should be aiding whom?


Keep in mind, the U.S. economy is mired in a recession, with large rates of growing poverty, unemployment, consumer debt and state and federal deficits. In some states, public schools are shutting, public health services are being slashed, and universities are increasing tuition while also cutting programs. Even state government buildings are being sold off.


Under U.S. law, military sales to Israel cannot be used for offensive purposes, only for “legitimate self-defense.” Nonetheless, there have been numerous violations of the Arms Export Control Act by Israel. Even the indifferent State Department has found, from time to time, that munitions such as cluster bombs were “likely violations.”


Violations would lead to a cut-off in aid but with the completely pro-Israel climate in Washington, the White House has never allowed such findings to be definitive.


The same indifference applies to violations of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act that prohibits aid to countries engaging in consistent international human rights violations. These include the occupation, colonization, blockades and military assaults on civilians in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, regularly documented by the highly regarded Israeli human rights group B’Tselem as well as by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.


This week, Prime Minister Netanyahu visits President Barack Obama after the recent Israeli announcement of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem made while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting that country.


The affront infuriated New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, who wrote that Mr. Biden should have packed his bags and flown away leaving behind a scribbled note saying “You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality.”


Friedman, a former Times Middle East correspondent, concluded his rebuke by writing: “Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad are as genuine and serious about working toward a solution as any Israel can hope to find.”


But until a few days ago, the U.S. government had no levers over the Israeli government. Cutting off aid isn’t even whispered in the halls of Congress. Raising the issue would further galvanize Israel’s allies, including AIPAC.


The only lever left for the U.S. suddenly erupted into the public media a few days ago. General David Petraeus told the Senate that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has foreign policy and national security ramifications for the United States.


He said that “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the Area of Responsibility…Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and other military groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”


A few days earlier, Vice President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel that “what you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”


What Obama’s people are publically starting to say is that regional peace is about U.S. vital interests in that large part of the Middle East and, ultimately, the safety of American soldiers and personnel.


As one retired diplomat commented “This could be a game-changer.”
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Israel's inclusion in economic organization a threat to democracy

Shir Hever, The Electronic Intifada, 25 March 2010
Membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes 30 of the world's most developed countries, does not provide money or any special economic benefits. Yet it is easy to see why the Israeli government attributes great importance to Israel becoming one of its members. For Israel, membership in the OECD would mean a victory of legitimacy, and a major setback for the worldwide movement calling on Israel to be held accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people. Only democratic countries are allowed to join the OECD. With 35 percent of the population under Israel's control and sovereignty disenfranchised, denied their basic human and civil rights and repeatedly attacked by the Israeli army, Israel is finding it increasingly difficult to portray itself as a democracy.

What appears less obvious is why the member countries would want to include Israel in the OECD. Israel's membership would be a confirmation of Israeli policies, thus eroding the organization's prestige while undermining the efforts of these very same countries to achieve peace in the Middle East. The OECD would be inviting the world to see how it prefers to ignore the crimes committed by Israel, and reward it instead. This would do no less than feed into the argument of extremists who claim that only violence can safeguard the rights of occupied Palestinians.

Ironically, however, the OECD seems to be working harder than Israel to facilitate the latter's acceptance, which is expected to occur in May. Israel has refused to comply with the OECD demand to provide statistical data which applies only to the internationally-recognized parts of Israel, excluding the illegal settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Yet despite Israel's refusal, the OECD's Committee on Statistics is acting to find ways to accept Israel anyway.

According to a leaked report, "Ascension of Israel to the Organization: Draft Formal Opinions of the Committee on Statistics" (
download the PDF), the committee proposes to accept Israel based on the statistics currently available, which includes Israeli citizens in the OPT. However, it requests that Israel provide more detailed statistical data which will allow the OECD to conduct its own calculation in order to separate the OPT data from that of Israel. However, Israel will only commit to provide this data after it becomes a member of the organization. Yet as soon as Israel becomes a member, it will have the right to veto this decision, rendering the commitment an empty statement.

It should be noted that in this way the OECD is adopting the Israeli approach -- an approach that eliminates the Palestinians and Israel's effective sovereignty over the OPT, and focuses solely on Israeli citizens. This approach is tantamount to recognizing Israel's illegal occupation, which stands in direct contradiction to international law and the foreign policies of virtually all OECD countries.

It should also be noted that the OECD takes decisions by consensus. It only takes one OECD country to oppose the integration of Israel into the organization in order to block the process. So far, not a single OECD country has voiced its intention to vote against including Israel in the organization.

The reason for that is twofold. First, there is the usual fear that any country (especially a European country), that voices its objection to Israel's joining the OECD will be accused of anti-Semitism. Israel enjoys the unflinching support of the United States, and few European politicians have the courage to take a moral stand against either Washington or Israel.

Second, right-wing parties around the world see Israel as the Mecca of anti-immigration policies, Islamophobia and the "war on terror." With every new line that Israel crosses in abusing the human and national rights of Palestinians, right-wing parties are emboldened to deepen their own politics of hatred toward immigrants. If Israel conducts extra-judicial assassinations, why won't other countries be allowed to do the same? If Israel installs surveillance mechanisms that invade the privacy of its citizens, what would stop other countries from doing so also? Legitimizing Israel by inviting and facilitating its ascension to the OECD is thus a tool to legitimize the extreme measures promoted by far-right parties in Europe, which are eager to do away with democratic mechanisms and human rights of minorities in the name of nationalism and "security."

European law clearly forbids European countries from recognizing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, as has been
affirmed by the Russell Tribunal. Yet by granting Israel membership in the OECD, they will be doing exactly that. OECD members will knowingly accept Israel to the organization based on deceptive statistics provided by the latter, statistics which conceal the occupation while simultaneously treating it as a permanent fact.

Israel's acceptance into the OECD would be a grave mistake. It will reward violations of international law, feed the extreme right wing which is growing in developed countries and render all OECD countries as accomplices in Israel's illegal occupation.

Shir Hever is an economist at the Alternative Information Center.
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

Covering up American War Crimes, From Baghdad to New York

Did You Know

By Charles Glass
March 25, 2010

BBC correspondent John Simpson reported on March 4 that the number of defects in newborn babies in the Iraqi town of Fallujah had risen dramatically since the American assault there at the end of 2004. Some people in the town blame the abnormalities in their children on whatever chemicals the US Marines may have used in their conquest of the Sunni Muslim redoubt. Dr. Samira al-Ani, a paediatrician at Fallujah’s General Hospital, told Simpson that two or three children were born each day with serious cardiac problems. Before the first American attack on Fallujah in two years earlier, she noticed similar ailments in one baby every two months. “I have nothing documented,” she admitted, “but I can tell you that year by year the number [is] increasing.”
The Iraqi government, which supported the American attack with troops of its own, denies there has been any increase. “The US military authorities,” Simpson said, “are absolutely correct when they say they are not aware of any official reports indicating an increase in birth defects in Fallujah—no official reports exist.” Nor are any likely to. By any standard, though, this was a big story. John Simpson is a serious journalist and a friend, and I listened carefully to his report that morning on the BBC World Service. I waited in vain for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other serious American journals to take up the story. All I read was a brief item on the CBS News website quoting Simpson.
“The US government does not want it known that it was using chemicals on human beings in a country whose leader it overthrew ostensibly because he retained the capacity to do the same thing.”

The US denied it anyway, perhaps out of habit. Military spokesman Michael Fitzpatrick responded predictably, “No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues.” But, as Simpson said, there have not been any studies. American spokesmen were reluctantly forced to admit the use of White Phosphorous—or Willie Pete, as the troops call it—in Fallujah when someone noticed that Field Artillery Magazine, a U. S. Army publication, had already documented its deployment in its March/April 2005 edition. The magazine wrote, “We fired ‘shake and bake’ missions at the insurgents, using WP [White Phosphorous] to flush them out and HE [High Explosives] to take them out.” After Dahr Jamail, a brilliant freelance journalist, reported during the battle in 2004 that American forces were using WP on Iraqis, Project Censored gave him an award for the second most under-reported story of the year. It is still under-reported, but it is not difficult to understand why. The US government does not want it known that it was using chemicals on human beings in a country whose leader it overthrew ostensibly because he retained the capacity to do the same thing. And the US Treasury does not want to compensate foreigners for any harm its troops might have done. Let us turn now to New York and what has become the secular-sacred site of the former World Trade Center.
The government this month finally settled claims by 10,000 workers on the Ground Zero clean-up by agreeing to pay $657.5 million for the debilitating effects of the asbestos and other poisons they were exposed to. That’s an average of $65,750 a head, less the lawyers’ share. It doesn’t sound like much, but they’re doing better than anyone in Fallujah. There are precedents for government resistance to admitting responsibility. American Vietnam veterans crippled by the dioxin they dropped all over Vietnam waited many years for the government to acknowledge their plight. At first, the government resisted the connection between dioxin and the veterans’ cancer, Parkinson’s, and other fatal illnesses. By the time the government paid anything, the vets were observing that their children were being born with severe birth defects from dioxin in Agent Orange and other herbicides unleashed on the South Vietnamese countryside. Their children’s congenital deformities included spina bifida and other horrors that may go for generations to come. The Department of Veterans Affairs didn’t send them any money until 2003—thirty years after the last barrel of poison was dropped on Vietnam. Even that was restricted to 7,520 of the 99,226 veterans who claimed to have been affected.
While dioxin disabled thousands of American service personnel who merely handled it, as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese endured twenty-eight million gallons of toxic rain that drenched their skins, soaked their soil, and polluted their rivers and groundwater for ten years. As with the American war vets, then-unborn children were also affected. Vietnam has one of the world’s highest levels of birth defects, concentrated in the south where the American forced deployed most of the chemicals. Five children out of one hundred are born with serious abnormalities, including missing limbs, spina bifida, twisted or missing internal organs and grotesque malformations that have made their survival impossible. While reluctantly accepting a link between dioxin and birth defects in American service personnel’s children, the US denies any connection when it comes to Vietnamese. I guess it’s just one of those strange anomalies that nature throws up every so often, like Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates’ observation that the disproportion in African-American deaths from the police choking was due to the fact that “blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do on ‘normal people’.” Perhaps Vietnamese born after 1961, when Operation Ranch Hand to defoliate South Vietnam began, were just not normal anyway.
The abnormal people of Iraq remember that the US denied Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons on its Kurdish citizens. In those days, Saddam was an American ally. When freelance journalist Gwynne Roberts brought back the soil samples from Hallabja that proved Saddam has gassed the Kurds, the US blamed the Iranians. That assessment became inoperative when condemning Saddam was politically useful. Now that the US has been caught using chemicals in the same country that the monster Saddam did, it admits using them on “insurgents” but not on civilians. It is hard in a city to blast chemicals at the people with guns and miss those who don’t have any. No matter. The US and Iraqi governments are blocking an investigation that would prove one way or another that White Phosphorous did any harm to Iraqi mothers and their children. It’s unlikely they’ll receive a cent for the next fifty years, if ever. But why the hell isn’t this a big story?
Source
There are a number of links to stories about the US and toxic poisoning of countries they have been in including Iraq.  One link has pictures of victims of White Phosphorous.  Not very pretty.

War “Pollution” Equals Millions of Deaths

A few more War Crimes. Many teachers were murdered as well.

Destroying Educational Institutions or Using Them For Military Purposes Is A War Crime

Have a Nice World War, Folks

March 25 2010
The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace.
I guess they really like war,  torturing and murdering innocent people.
They just recently had people in 150 cities across the US protesting against War. Maybe they should listen to the people instead of the war machine.
The US Government must stop creating more needless wars and end the ones they are in.
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/antiwar_0401/
http://www.thecorsaironline.com/opinion/anit-war-protestors-urge-soldiers-to-resist-deployment-1.1277316
Not only do they cover up their own war crimes they attempt to  cover up
Israels war crimes as well. They help
Israel commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, with money and weapons of mass destruction.

Birds of a feather.
More than 250 Congress Members Declare Commitment to ‘Unbreakable’ U.S.-Israel Bond
By Natasha Mozgavaya,
More than 250 members of Congress have signed on to a declaration reaffirming their commitment to “the unbreakable bond that exists between [U.S.] and the State of Israel”, in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Source
Obama Squeezed Between Israel and Iran
By Pepe Escobar
The AIPAC 2010 show predictably was yet one more “bomb Iran” special; but it was also a call to arms against the Barack Obama administration, as far as the turbo-charging of the illegal colonization of East Jerusalem is concerned.
Source





Judea Declares War On Obama
By Gilad Atzmon
Jewish lobbies certainly do not hold back when it comes to pressuring states, world leaders and even super powers. AIPAC’s behavior last week reminded me of the Jewish declaration of war against Nazi Germany in 1933.
Source
Israeli Intelligence, Our Constant Companion
By Jeff Stein
Acting on a complaint that the document was circulating on Capitol Hill, the FBI discovered that an Israeli diplomat had acquired the paper and given it to officials at AIPAC, the lobbying group whose annual convention drew both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week.
Source



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 on March 26, 2010 at 6:43 am Leave a Comment
River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian