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ISRAEL’S DAYS AS A JEWISH STATE ARE NUMBERED
Linda S. Heard
The future of Israel as a Jewish state is in jeopardy, according to a leaked CIA study destined for certain eyes only. According to author and lawyer Franklin Lamb, it predicts an inevitable shift away from a two-state solution to the pursuance of one state. Its estimations also include the emigration to the US of 2 million Israelis within the coming 15 years, along with another 1.5 million to Europe and Russia.
This may sound radical but it appears that the outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agrees. “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,” he said in January.
The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective
Uri Avnery
The most important sentence written in Israel this week was lost in the general tumult of exciting events.
Really exciting: In a final act of villainy, typical of his whole tenure as Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert abandoned the captive soldier, Gilad Shalit.
Ehud Barak decided that the Labor Party must join the ultra-right government, which includes outright fascists.
And this, too: the former President of Israel was officially indicted for rape.
In this cacophony, who would pay any attention to a sentence written by lawyers in a document submitted to the Supreme Court? The judicial debate concerns one of the most revolting laws ever enacted in Israel.
It says that the wife of an Israeli citizen is not allowed to join him in Israel if she is living in the occupied Palestinian territories or in a “hostile” Arab country.
The Arab citizens of Israel belong to Hamulas (clans) which extend beyond the borders of the state. Arabs generally marry within the Hamula. This is an ancient custom, deeply rooted in their culture, probably originating in the desire to keep the family property together. In the Bible, Isaac married his cousin, Rebecca. -The “Green Line”, which was fixed arbitrarily by the events of the 1948 war, divides families. One village found itself in Israel, the next remained outside the new state, the Hamula lives in both. The Nakba also created a large Palestinian Diaspora.
ISRAELI VETS DISCUSS BRUTALITY, EXECUTIONS OF GAZANS ON COMMAND
Charles E. Carlson
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Brian Williams', NBC Nightly News show, reported a groundbreaking account of Israeli soldiers openly discussing their deliberate execution and brutality toward women, children in Gaza, and deliberate home destruction.
Why now? What motivated NBC to break its silence after ignoring hundreds of such accounts over the years? Probably the creditable source and the fact that the Israeli mainstream published this story has influenced our normally Zionist media to come clean, at least this once. How could NBC ignore what Haaretz gives as fact? A cross section of IDF members confirming they were ordered to carry out war crimes, and acts of destruction and extermination.
The Nightly News account stated the IDF soldiers spoke freely of their acts because of the chilling fact they did not think they were doing anything other than what was expected of them by their commanders. They simply are not ashamed of murdering old, or young women and babies.
Water: Commodity or human right?
Mary Shaw
I am writing this on March 22, World Water Day. And I am thinking about how spoiled we Americans are. We use and abuse our natural resources without giving it a second thought.
But our recklessness could soon turn around to bite us -- and the rest of the world.
When people think of water shortages, they tend to think of the Third World. And, indeed, more than 5,000 children die every day as a result of unsafe drinking water, mostly in developing nations.
Larry Silverstein seeking BAILOUT cash
Facts-not-Fairies
NEW YORK, March 21 (Reuters) -The private developer redeveloping the World Trade Center site in New York City has asked the government for financial assistance, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
Quoting people familiar with the matter, the Journal said The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the government body that owns the site, is considering whether to help finance at least one of the three office towers planned in the project.
Sources said developer Larry Silverstein has sought financial help with at least two of the towers.
A spokesman for Silverstein blamed delays on the Port Authority but did not say whether it was seeking financial help.
Our ambassador to Poland
Khalid Amayreh
Many of our so-called ambassadors around the world are really unqualified for the job. They simply lack the required professionalism and experience to communicate the plight of our people and justice of our national cause to a world community that is heavily bombarded by Zionist lies around the clock.
I say “so-called” because we are not a state, or even a quasi-state, to have luxurious embassies which fruitlessly consume a significant chunk of our scant financial resources.
Added to that is the too-well-known fact that most of these “ambassadors” are chosen rather haphazardly irrespective of their abilities and qualifications. Some of these actually don’t speak English and their knowledge of international politics is minimal or nonexistent.
Hence, instead of being misrepresented by these flamboyant and often ineffective money-grabbing operatives, who spend much of their time throwing parties and visiting local bars, we should post in the capitals of the world professional spokespersons, fluent in foreign languages, who can effectively and eloquently communicate the truth about Israeli barbarianism. -Still there are more serious problems involving clearly improper behavior on the part of some of our diplomats.
Hopeful Change In El Salvador?
Stephen Lendman
Like other Latin American nations, El Salvador has had a long and troubled history, ruled from one decade to the next by successive military dictatorships, then since 1989 by the right wing National Republican Alliance or ARENA Party.
Long-suffering Salvadorans recall the 1980s struggles when the Farabudo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) failed to end what the civil-military Junta leader, Jose Napoleon Duarte, told New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner in 1980:
How to Destroy the Government in Three Easy Steps
Joe Brewer
In eight short years, conservatives have effectively bankrupted many state governments and left the fed in shambles. And now citizens have to "make tough decisions" and share the suffering equally across the land (unless of course, you're part of that lucky 1 percent who co-opted the functions of government to serve their own ends ... they'll be cozy with their offshore bank accounts, golden parachutes and permanent tax holidays).
Are you a teacher who educates our future citizens? Too bad. You've got to tighten your belt and let that job go. Manual laborer? Sorry, but that job can earn more money for our shareholders if it's done in Micronesia. Need a college degree? Prepare for indentured servitude because you'll be working to pay us off for most of your adult life. Health care? Ha! That's just a Ponzi scheme dreamed up by a bunch of socialists.
Ever wonder how conservatives did all this? -Well, here's your very own how-to manual for getting Big Government out of the way so you and your buddies can horde all the wealth to yourselves and build your empire.
Our South Africa Moment Has Arrived
Omar Barghouti
Introduction
As Israel shifts steadily to the fanatic, racist right, as the latest parliamentary election results have shown, Palestinians under its control are increasingly being brutalized by its escalating colonial and apartheid policies, designed to push them out of their homeland to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the old Zionist canard of “a land without a people.” In parallel, international civil society, according to numerous indicators, is reaching a turning point in its view of Israel as a pariah state acting above the law of nations and in its effective action, accordingly, to penalize and ostracize it as it did to apartheid South Africa.
Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev), among others, have been recently subjected to some of the worst, ongoing Israeli campaigns of gradual ethnic cleansing intended to “Judaize” their space. Qalqilya is suffocated by the colonial apartheid Wall that surrounds it from all sides, while Nablus is under constant siege. A few months ago, the Palestinian community in Acre was brutally attacked by Jewish-Israeli fundamentalists and xenophobes in one of the worst pogroms witnessed by Palestinians inside Israel. Still, Gaza today stands out as the test of our common humanity and our indispensable morality. A thorough analysis of the role played by Western and some Arab governments in regards to Israel’s criminal war of aggression against Gaza will demonstrate a resounding failure on both accounts. Throughout the atrocious assault, the official West, along with the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and the UN leadership,[1] were willing accomplices in Israel’s grave violations of international law and basic human rights.
SOME TRUTHS ABOUT GUANTANAMO BAY
Lawrence Wilkerson
& a comment by Stephen Soldz
There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.
The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.
This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get the bastards to the interrogators".
It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).
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