Total racism, total war. By Saleh Al-Naami

Via: Al-Ahram Weekly.

A Palestinian woman walks past buildings destroyed during Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza which was launched on 27 December. On the anniversary of the tragic slaughter of Palestinians by Israelis, the world remembers that no less than 30,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed during the Israeli onslaught, which killed more than 1,400 people

Mahmoud Hussein tries to hold back his tears as he looks at his 30-year-old brother Ahmed who suffers from colon cancer. The family is impatiently waiting for the Gaza border to open so Ahmed can travel abroad for treatment, since in light of the Israeli imposed siege, medical facilities in Gaza cannot treat his condition. Ahmed, who lives in Gabalya, north of Gaza, is not the only Palestinian who developed cancer at a relatively young age.

According to Palestinian medical sources, the number of patients with cancerous tumours residing in areas that the Israeli army targeted during its war on Gaza is on the rise. As the first anniversary of the war on Gaza approaches, the Palestinians are shocked to discover more of its damaging effects. A Palestinian woman whose house in the district of Al-Shaaf, east of Gaza City was targeted with white phosphorous missiles gave birth to a baby with a deformed heart. Doctors reported another pregnant woman in north Gaza, whose home was attacked with the same chemical agent, gave birth to a baby with the same deformity.

The infant’s chances of survival are very low because under siege medical services in Gaza are not equipped to treat such cases. The mother told doctors that during the war she inhaled excessive amounts of white phosphorous smoke because of repeated attacks on her area. White phosphorous is a chemical incendiary agent that is highly combustible when mixed with oxygen. It burns through skin, body tissue and bones; the corpses of white phosphorous victims are usually heavily charred.

Canadian Government warns Canadians not to join the Gaza Freedom March. By Kim Elliott

Via: Rabble.
Today I received an email from Canadian government representatives in Cairo (copied at the bottom of this blog), indicating that Canadians could be arrested, detained and/or deported should they join the Gaza Freedom March.

Things are clearly heating up in Cairo, despite the winter weather forecasts. More than 1000 people from around the world will be traveling from Cairo to Rafah Border in a few days to demand that the border be opened. The Egyptian government has informed Code Pink organizers that they will not open the border for them – the border is open every day for diplomatic purposes, but can remain closed for weeks and longer – or not at all – for those wishing to traverse for personal or humanitarian purposes.

Despite this, Code Pink has successfully organized more than 6 humanitarian delegations to Gaza since Israel ceased its attacks on the densely populated territory last January, leaving behind devastation and what people ranging from Jimmy Carter to Desmond Tutu have called a humanitarian emergency. A major factor contributing to the humanitarian situation is that the borders to Gaza, controlled primarily by Israel, and Rafah controlled by Egypt, have remain largely closed, and humanitarian aid, including medical aid and material needed to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure, including Gaza’s water sanitation facility, are not permitted in.

Haidar Eid – A Call From Gaza

Via: Palestine Think Tank.

This week marks one year since Israel began its attack on the Gaza Strip: a year since phosphorus bombs, dime bombs and other weapons of death and destruction were unleashed on a defenseless civilian population. A year since the people of the world demanded that Israel end its attack on Gaza.

In this Israeli war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, many of our civilians were massacred by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, condemned by UN experts and leading human rights organizations as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This assault left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children. Another 5380 Palestinians were injured. We, the 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from our homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling, deadly hermetic Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment described by John Dugard,the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights as “a prelude to genocide.”

The war on Gaza was predicated and advocated for by Israeli generals and politicians. Matan Vilnai, ex-Deputy Defense Minister of Israel, told Army Radio during “Operation Hot Winter” (29 February 2008): “They will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

The (Fading) Call of Obama. By Paul Street

Via: ZNet.
Now that Barack Obama is being exposed like never before as a tool and agent of concentrated wealth, business class rule, and militarism, 2009 is ending on a distinct note of liberal disenchantment. His “progressive base” is restive over his actions to an unprecedented (to use Obama’s favorite word [1]) degree as the president of “Yes we can” has morphed (as widely predicted on “hard left”) into the pallid symbol of “No We can’t – as the clarion of “change” has emerged as another Democratic office-holder whose outwardly progressive campaign pledges translate into corrupt, corporate and imperial nothingness in the real world of power.

“THIS IS A CON JOB”

The signs of liberal and progressive anger at Obama (“The Empire’s New Clothes,” as I described immediately him after his election to the presidency) are hard to miss. The former sixties radical and “Progressives for Obama” (PFO) co-founder Tom Hayden announced that he was “scraping the Obama sticker off my car” after the president gave his West Point Afghan War Speech three weeks ago. [2] Formed by such leading left-liberal lights as Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Cornwell West, and Barbara Ehrenreich, PFO has dropped its president’s name from the organization, re-christened “Progressive America Rising.” [3]

The editor of the liberal-left magazine The Progressive has noted that Obama’s West Point oration read as if had been penned by “Bush’s speechwriters”[4], connecting The One to the liberal-loathed image of Dubya – consistent with the left commentator Alexander Cockburn’s observation that “war [is] war, whether the battle standard is being waved by a white moron from Midland, Texas or an eloquent black man from Chicago.”[5]

The congressional Black Caucus has undertaken some criticism of, and confrontation with, the first black president for placing “Wall Street’s agenda” above the needs of black and other minority citizens. [6]

The ACLU recently issued a blistering indictment of Obama’s handling of Bush administration war crimes the ACLU said the Obama White House refused to prosecute and went to extraordinary lengths to cover up. [7]

Killing Activists in Honduras. By Joseph Shansky

Via: Upside Down World.

Walter Trochez

“As a revolutionary I will be today, tomorrow and forever on the front lines of my people, all the while knowing that I may lose my life.” – Walter Trochez, 25, murdered in Tegucigalpa on 12/13/09

The bodies of slain activists are piling up in Honduras. While it’s being kept quiet in most Honduran and international media, the rage is building among a dedicated network of friends spreading the word quickly with the tragic announcement of each compañero/a.

Now that the world heard from mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times of a “clean and fair” election on Nov. 29 (orchestrated by the US-supported junta currently in power), the violence has increased even faster than feared.

The specific targets of these killings have been those perceived as the biggest threats to the coup establishment. The bravest, and thus the most vulnerable: Members of the Popular Resistance against the coup. Their friends and family. People who provide the Resistance with food and shelter. Teachers, students, and ordinary citizens who simply recognize the fallacy of an un-elected regime taking over their country. All associated with the Resistance have faced constant and growing repercussions for their courage in protesting the coup. With the international community given the green light by the US that democratic order has returned via elections, it’s open season for violent forces in Honduras working to tear apart the political unity of the Resistance Front against the coup.

The killings are happening almost faster than they can be recorded.

On Sunday, Dec. 7, a group of six people were gunned down while walking down the street in the Villanueva neighborhood of Tegucigalpa. According to sources, a white van with no license plates stopped in front of the group. Four masked men jumped out of the van and forced the group to get on the ground, where they were shot. The five victims who were killed were:

· Marcos Vinicio Matute Acosta, 39

· Kennet Josué Ramírez Rosa, 23

· Gabriel Antonio Parrales Zelaya, 34

· Roger Andrés Reyes Aguilar, 22

· Isaac Enrique Soto Coello, 24

One woman, Wendy Molina, 32, was shot several times and played dead when one of the assassins pulled her hair, checking to see if anyone in the group was still alive. She was taken to the hospital and survived.

Military Metaphysics and the Native Informer. By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Via: PULSE.

During a talk in Dublin A few years back a respected left luminary postulated that one cause of rising extremism in Pakistan was the increasing number of young people turning to seminaries instead of scientific academies for their education. He attributed this insight—one that is sure to leave most Pakistanis bemused—to ‘a friend, a nuclear physicist in Pakistan’.

Anyone remotely familiar with Pakistan would of course know that the education system there is highly stratified: people with money send their children to private schools and those without to decrepit public institutions. Further down are the underclasses who are often forced to choose between educating their children or feeding and sheltering them. The dilemma is often resolved by sending children to seminaries, the much-maligned madaris (plural of madrassa) where they get food, shelter, and education. Few, if any, go to the madaris by choice (though almost all except the Westernized elite send their children to mosques at some point for basic religious education).

So the speaker’s comment was odd, Mary Antoinette-ish. It was not hard therefore to guess who its source, the nuclear physicist in question, might be. After reading Pervez Hoodbhoy in Counterpunch on December 14, 2009, one would have to be a fool to question his familiarity with Riverside Drive. However, Hoodbhoy would sound less fatuous if he were equally familiar with Peshawar Road.

In the title and conclusion of his article Hoodbhoy sardonically asks where, if he is the tool of Western embassies—as he says his critic M. Shahid Alam alleges—is his cheque. All one can say in reply is that if he hasn’t received one, then that is a shame since he has certainly earned it at least from Her Majesty’s Government.

In April-May of 2009 the self-styled ‘ex-extremist’ co-director of the Quilliam Foundation (QF) Maajid Nawaz went on a British government-funded tour of Pakistan as part of what the BBC described as the ‘ideas’ arm of the ‘war on terror’. The thinktank, whose operations are underwritten by the UK government to the tune of £1 million, has links to the neoconservative Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC). Together their members run The Spittoon, a blog where under various pseudonyms they smear opponents, mainly antiwar, pro-Palestinian voices (one frequent contributor is Alexander Hitchens, son of Christopher, who is trying to forge a career in the lucrative ‘terrorism expert’ industry). Its members also publish on Harry’s Place, a notorious Zionist weblog that has been described as ‘a hard right wing hate site…the UK equivalent of the US’s Little Green Footballs’. The thinktank also maintains good relations across the Atlantic where Nawaz was earlier hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a spinoff of AIPAC, the leading Israel lobby institution.

Israel Admitted to Illegally Taking Organs From Dead People, Including Palestinians.

Via: The Public Record.

Israel has admitted to unlawfully taking organs from dead people, including Palestinians, in the 1990s without the prior permission of the families of the donors.

Native People Take First Steps Towards Self-Government. By Franz Chávez

Via: IPS News.

Indigenous people, who make up more than 60 percent of the population in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, are taking their first steps towards self-government under their own cultural traditions that date back to pre-colonial times.

Alongside the Dec. 6 presidential and legislative elections, 12 of Bolivia’s 327 municipalities voted in favour of indigenous self-government, which will give them control over the natural resources on their land and a greater say in how to use funds transferred from the central state, as well as redefining how government funds are disbursed.

In addition, legal disputes and crimes in those municipalities will be tried in traditional local courts, and elections will be organised and community leaders appointed according to native customs, which are based on a tradition of consensus-building.

But because the concept of indigenous autonomy is brand new, the details on how it will function must still be legislated by Congress after it reconvenes in 2010.

In the elections, leftist Evo Morales, the country’s first-ever indigenous president, was reelected in a landslide victory with 63 percent of the vote, and his Movement to Socialism (MAS) party won a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, which will allow it to move forward with important legislation such as the question of the indigenous right to self-rule.

Bended Knees: Zionist Power in American Politics. By James Petras

Via: Global Research.

“Obama wants to see a stop to settlements:  Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions”. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, May 2009

“What the prime minister has offered in specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements…..is unprecedented, there has never been a precondition, it’s always been an issue within negotiations.” Hillary Clinton, BBC, November 1, 2009 (my emphasis)

“The US administration understands what we have always said … that the real obstacle to negotiations is the Palestinians (calling for a freeze on settlements)”. Israeli Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz, November 1, 2009 (my addition).

“America, stop sucking up to Israel!” Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist, Haaretz, November 1, 2009.

“US Zionists are sticking it to America, 24/7” , Anonymous Staff Official, Washington D. C., October 31, 2009.

Introduction:

The discussion of Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the US political system revolves around several essential issues, including:

1) The claims by the ZPC that it represents Jewish opinion and values as well as its authority to speak for the interests of the American people.

2) Measuring the power of the ZPC and determining its influence over policy, appointments and political institutions.

3) The question of whether the ZPC is a legitimate part of the US political system, another lobby, or something very different, an unregistered agent of a foreign power (Israel).

4) The scope and depth of the ZPC influence in US politics beyond the focus on its “lobbying” in Washington on a “single issue”.

5) The organizational weapons and techniques utilized by the ZPC to maximize influence and deny voice and influence to critics of Israel and itself.

6) The similarities of the organizational linkages of the Israel-Zionist relationship to the Russian – Stalinist Communist Parties of the 1930’s.

Method:  Public Records, Ethnic Neutral Sources and Citations

The case against the Zionist Power Configuration is based on the open record of publications, speeches, articles, interviews and sources available to the general public (and any interested reader).  Many facts and data are drawn from Zionist and Israeli sources as well as mainstream publications and writings by critical journalists and analysts.[1] We do not privilege the statements by Jews, whether they are critics or supporters of the State of Israel, as most “progressive” writers do.  The pursuit of truth is not an “ethnic science”, an approach that smacks of Nazi and Zionist racial theories.  Indeed, nothing reveals the extreme Zionist power or cultural hegemony over the debate on Israel and American Zionism so much as the constant reliance, reference and citation of the “Jewish” authorship of critical articles, even when publications by non-Jews are better documented, of earlier publication, and better argued.

Agent of Change. By Ralph Nader

Via: Nader.org.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (535-475 BC) said that “character is destiny.” He might have added that “personality is decisive.” Where is Barack Obama in this framework?

The venerable historian, James MacGregor Burns, in his book “Transforming Leadership,” drew an important distinction between “transforming and transactional leadership,” and calling Franklin Delano Roosevelt a reflection of the former genre.

Given all the burgeoning crises in the United States and the world, the only global military and economic superpower (albeit in serious deficit straits) needs a transforming leader, when, at best, it has a transactional leader in the White House.

I say “at best,” because President Obama displays an uncanny inability to deal. He is not even anywhere near Lyndon Baines Johnson in that regard. This lack is due more to his personality than to his character.

His is a concessionary demeanor, an aversion to conflict and to taking on entrenched power, a devotee of harmony ideology not because he doesn’t believe in necessary re-directions, but because he does not project the strength of his beliefs and willingness to draw the line—here and no further—as did Ronald Reagan or FDR.

Legacy of epic lies of Lawrence. By George Galloway

Via: Daily Record.

I’m on the road to Damascus where the Viva Palestina convoy, now some 200 vehicles long, has paused, like Lawrence of Arabia before us, making for Aqaba.

Just along the road on the wall of a small hotel, is a framed thank-you letter from Lawrence (surely indissolubly linked to the persona of Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s epic Lawrence Of Arabia) and a framed copy of his laundry list.

Partly through not wishing to wash our dirty laundry in public, I seldom point out to Arab admirers of the crazed sado-masochistic imperial liar and fantasist that Lawrence, like most of perfidious Albion abroad in that era, was one of the most duplicitous betrayers ever to set forth to lie abroad for his country.

And that’s saying something.

The Ottoman Empire, whose “sublime porte” in Istanbul opened on to the “centre of the world”, had ruled a sleepy Arab world for 400 years.

It was a Muslim empire, the remains of the ancient day when the streets of Andalucia in Spain were lit and science culture and religious pluralism flourished.

Turkey chose the Kaiser’s side in the cataclysm of World War I and the rest is history.

Insanity Offense: Even the Mad Must Not Speak the Truth. By Chris Floyd

Via: Empire Burlesque.
This sounds like something Mikhail Bulgakov might have written, deep in the sinister phantasmagoria of the Stalinist night. From the Israeli service ynetnews.com:

One of the large mental health hospitals in Israel was recently surprised to receive a young, good-looking patient in a psychotic state who was accompanied by a personal security guard, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday.

The doctors, who asked why the woman was accompanied by a guard, were shocked to learn that she was a Mossad agent and that the security guard was not assigned to her in order assure her safety or protect her life, but to ensure that she not reveal any state secrets in her shaky mental state.

The Mossad guard’s orders were clear: “It is forbidden that the organization’s secrets be passed on to those unauthorized to hear them.” The doctors, who are unaccustomed to the presence of a third party during their treatment sessions, were left with no choice but to acquiesce to their demands. In addition, the staff had to receive a security clearance before being allowed to work on her exceptional case.

To their complete amazement, another young woman, also accompanied by a secret agent charged with ensuring that the she not leak any state secrets, arrived at the institution just a short time later. The doctors learned that she, too, is a Mossad agent.

It seems evident that the young women were driven mad by acts they have witnessed — or carried out. These act were literally unspeakable crimes of state — hence the presence of the state’s goons to prevent the slightest whisper of the dark deeds from escaping.

This story’s efficacy as both paradigm and prophecy for our modern world could hardly be bettered.