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ISRAEL CANNOT HANDLE ITS PAST
GILAD ATZMON
Israel cannot handle its past. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu decided this week to extend from 50 to 70 years the time state archives remain classified. Israel realizes that it has too much to hide.
Haaretz reported this week (in its Hebrew edition only), that the first documents will be released to the public only in 2018 (1948+70). Many of the documents that are stored in the archive are relevant to the history of the first 20 years of the Jewish state: the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people, the massacres in Deir Yassin, Tantura and many others, the 1956 Suez conflict, the Israeli nuclear project and so on. Disclosing such documents may bring to light some facts that could “shatter myths and cause embarrassment to many entities and individuals” said the Israeli paper. I guess that president Shimon Peres is one of those ‘many individuals’.
America's "Dog in the Fight" Will Hezbollah leash ‘Nabi’?
Franklin Lamb, Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut
Part IX of a Series on Securing Palestinian Civil Rights in Lebanon
For months as Lebanon’s historic debate over basic civil rights for Palestinian refugees has unfolded, the Obama administration has watched idly along the sidelines. As hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees cough and slow-bake while inhaling rancid camp air in Lebanon’s sweltering breezeless heat, the White House has now sent Lebanon’s Parliament a message. The United States will not support meaningful civil, social or economic rights for the World’s largest and oldest refugee population and it wants them naturalized anywhere except anyplace in Palestine.
Many had been hoping that President Obama would honor in Lebanon his calls for “American style civil rights” for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where daily US military actions betray American founding principles. Or that his administration would act to give some credence to Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech or at least the pledges of Presidential envoy George Mitchell to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah that “the United States will work without rest until the inhuman conditions of Palestinians in all the refugee camps are ended.”
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and Conspiracy Theories
"I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." Julian Asange, Wikileaks, July 19 (Image left)
John Young was one of the co-founders of Wikileaks. He quickly left the organization in disagreement with some of its policies (CNET). Young was a natural choice for Wikileaks since he has operated a leak website, CRYPTOME, since 1996. His site just released two articles on July 31 attributed to Wikileaks' Julian Assange (me@i.1.org). The announcement read:
"These essays on conspiracies by Julian Assange (me@iq.org) were retrieved today from his website iq.org. The first from the currently active site, dated November 10, 2006, and the second at archive.org, dated December 3, 2006." CRYPTOME - 31 July 2010 (author's emphasis)
Is the Republican Victory Plan Another Great Depression?
by Stephen Crockett
It seems like the Republicans in Congress have decided that sabotaging economic recovery and employment growth is their best tactic for electoral gains in the November elections. Indications of this plan have been around since the Democratic victories in 2008. It seems that all doubt about facilitating the economic downturn as a path to political power for Republicans have been removed by recent legislative votes.
Economic recessions and depressions almost always result from insufficient “effective” consumer demand for goods and services produced domestically. In economic terms, wanting something is not “effective demand” . For a want to become a demand for goods or services, it must accompany the desire to buy with the ability to actually purchase. Money is required.
Palestinian Detainee Abuse during Operation Cast Lead
by Stephen Lendman
On July 6, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI) and Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel released a report titled, "Exposed: The Treatment of Palestinian Detainees During Operation Cast Lead," detailing their horrific treatment.
Transferred to Israel for interrogation, detainees related grim details of their ordeal - grave human rights violations, showing Israel's "contempt for the rule of law."
Their "fundamental due process rights were trampled on and the rule of law brutally disregarded during and after the fighting," providing compelling evidence of collective punishment since Israel's 2005 "disengagement," followed by an embargo, a medieval siege, regular incursions, Cast Lead, and continued oppression of 1.5 million people - isolated, surrounded, attacked, brutalized, and slowly suffocated into submission, what hasn't happened and won't, but it doesn't deter Israel from trying, or America from providing weapons and funding its lawlessness.
A Note on the Mighty Wurlitzer
Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
What is the 'Mighty Wurlitzer'?
It used to be the honorific of Frank Wisner, the first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the C.I.A.’s plethora of front organizations and newsmedia stooges that he was capable of playing (like a great organ with many keyboards) for synthesizing any propaganda tune that was needed for the day. See Operation Mockingbird ( spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk ).
The fact that such an omnipresent Message-Machine is not ancient history but very much current affairs, is underscored by this NYT headline “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand”, Sunday, April 20, 2008 ( http://tinyurl.com/6qhgfg ).
Trends to Barbarism and Prospects for Socialism
James Petras
Introduction
Western societies and states are moving inexorably toward conditions resembling barbarism; structural changes are reversing decades of social welfare and subjecting labor, natural resources and the wealth of nations to raw exploitation, pillage and plunder, driving living standards downward and provoking unprecedented levels of discontent.
We will proceed by outlining the economic political and military processes driving this process of decay and decomposition and follow with an account of the mass popular responses to their own deteriorating conditions. The deep structural changes accompanying the rise of barbarism become the basis for considering the prospects for socialism in the 21st century.
The Rising Tide of Barbarism
From Braveheart To Big Fan
By Keith Johnson
”I see a whole army of my countrymen, here, in defiance of tyranny. What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?” ~ William Wallace ~ from the motion picture “Braveheart”
Talk like that could get you branded a right-wing extremist these days.
We are now taught that feelings of hatred and anger are things that should be criminalized, and if you raise your voice anywhere outside of a sports stadium, you could very well be forced to take some anger management classes. Do it within earshot of a police officer and you just might get yourself a beat down, a tasering— or even worse—you just might get shot.
Middle East history buff Hague whitewashes Israel’s villainy on the high seas
Stuart Littlewood
"We have to be steeped in the Middle East, way back to historical matters. Because you can't understand it without the history.”
My MP, a Foreign Office minister in the shiny new coalition government, has written to me saying he believes the Foreign Secretary was "extremely fair, tough and statesmanlike" in his reaction to Israel's murderous assault on the vessel Mavi Marmara and the rest of the Free Gaza flotilla.
So I re-read William Hague's statement to the House of Commons on 2 June, and it struck me as something the Israeli government spin doctor Mark Regev might have penned. Here are some extracts:
ELLSBERG SUPPORTS WIKILEAKS AFGHAN OCCUPATION DAIRIES
Allen L Roland
Daniel Ellsberg. (Photo: jdlasica)
Daniel Ellsberg agrees that The Wikileaks Afghan Occupation Diaries will join the Vietnam Pentagon Papers as a turning point of moral truth in the current Afghanistan stalemate ~ which also cannot answer the two key questions as to why are we there and why are we continuing this expensive exercise in futility.
The Wikileaks Afghan Occupation Diaries are a shot across the bow of the Obama Administration. On Wednesday, Democratic Sens. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) and Jim Webb (D-Virginia) sent a letter to the White House asking President Obama to refrain from making any major commitments to Afghanistan without the consent of the Senate "We do not believe that a long-term, open-ended presence of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan serves our national interest," the senators wrote.
As a senator, Obama supported a similar request sent to President Bush in 2007 regarding Iraq ~ but the publication of the Wikileak Dairies appears to be having the same effect as the pentagon papers had with the Vietnam conflict.
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